I’ve written a lot about being a global warming “skeptic” and how hard it has been to try and convince people of the scam that was being pulled on them.

In my last post here I referenced “climategate” where some scientists were caught having omitted data which is the same as changing it. They were also shown to have specific tactics to try and silence the naysayers.

It seems like the tides are turning and the global warming movement has been frozen in its tracks. Get it? FROZEN! It now coming out that data used in the IPCC’s last report has come from less than reputable sources. Many countries are backing out of the Copenhagen accord and in a recent poll I read (I can’t find the source to quote) Americans ranked Climate Change dead last in a list of 25 topics of concern.

Here is a good article with some info on how the climate change movement is going cold…

Vindication feels good. Climate change discussion has largely fallen off the radar of most Americans. With Americans worried about the economy, dealing with a new president (who is trying to change the fundamentals of our great nation), and disastrous health care legislation being rushed through congress, the idea of costly climate reform has been put on the back burner.

Some clever hackers decided it would be fun to hack into the files of the University of East Anglia, a climate research center that works with the IPCC. Many of the documents and emails obtained by the hackers show the lengths these organizations will go to emphasize mans impact on the climate.

Their sins include data manipulation and massaging and scheming to shut down and discredit dissenters. Now, leading politicians in both the US and the UK has called for an investigation into “Climate Gate”.

The timing could not be any better either considering that the industrial nations are planning to meet in Copenhagen to discuss climate change goals.

Here are some links about the stories:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/6634282/Lord-Lawson-calls-for-public-inquiry-into-UEA-global-warming-data-manipulation.html

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2188feb3-802a-23ad-4de4-3fbc0a92e126&Issue_id

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html

As people, we are only as good as those we surround ourselves with. It’s hard to hang with druggies without eventually taking drugs yourself. It’s human nature. Does it give anybody else pause to realize that a large number of the people Barry selected to his cabinet have had difficulties with their confirmations? Many withdrew on their own. What does that tell you? Do you really want a tax fraud running the Treasury? That’s like putting a counterfeiter in charge of the Mint. You just don’t do it! Have you read about some of the things Rahm Emanuel has done to those who oppose him? This is our President’s Chief of Staff, perhaps his most trusted adviser!

Now we have our new SecState Hillary Clinton. Did you see that stunt she pulled in Russia with the “reset” button that actually translated to “Overcharge”? Did nobody on her staff bother to check a Russian/English Dictionary? Not to mention that the whole symbolism was so cliche to begin with. These are the people the President has entrusted to run the government!

Then there is the Obamanomics. I do not know A SINGLE PERSON at work, at home, at church, or on the street, or any economic adviser (televised or quoted in print), trader or anybody else in the industry who has given an ounce of support for the stimulus (spending) package that Congress just steamrolled through. Aren’t these guys supposed to represent us and not their own interests? Did any of them actually read the over 1000 page bill? I think they all (Republicans and Democrats alike) saw this as an opportunity to slide in their pet projects without a lot of scrutiny.

Obama promised us the world during his campaign. I’ll let Rush and Hannity go through and pick apart the details of what campaign promises have already been broken but I have a feeling that those tax cuts for 95% of us are about to go bye bye. Jobs are being lost. It sucks. Who provides jobs? Businesses. Who does Big O want to tax? Businesses! This is counter-productive!

Most insulting to me is that the current news reports say that BarryO is preparing to go onto Leno this week to convince America to support his unprecedented $3.6 trillion dollar budget! Talk about a deficit! Barry, you already have the job! You don’t need to campaign to me. You know America does not support your asinine and outrageous spending plan! Get off Leno and figure out a different way to tackle this issue that doesn’t leave my kids with a 75% tax rate.! If all the rest of us need to tighten our belts then so should the government. Obama’s poll numbers are falling and congress’ numbers are still dangerously low! What will it take for our government to see that we are not happy with their performance?

America has the opportunity to vote with their wallets every day. Its called the stock market. Is it me or is there a correlation between the events of November 5th and the performance of the market to date. I wonder if many are now saying “I’ve made a huge mistake” with my election vote. Probably not too many…they’re all too concerned about what JCrew outfit the first lady is wearing. I’m not saying McCain would have been better but ‘m fairly certain that he wouldn’t have been worse!

We are in a dangerous place where the democrat controlled government can push their own agendas without any opposition. Just watch out for a “civilian security force”. When you hear that, it’s time to go get your guns…

Does anybody else wonder why congressmen and senators do not have term limits? I think that this is something that needs to change. Lets limit the terms to 2 for senators. That gives them 12 years to serve their country in a high office. Instead we have these stodgy old people who have grown comfortable in their lifestyle and have become corrupt by the lobbyists and special interest groups that feed their sense of importance.

I think that our elected officials have largely lost the idea that being in government is about service to your country, not the other way around. It has become a place where it is all about who is in charge. This is perhaps best exhibited by the second in line to the president one Nancy Pelosi who defiantly proclaimed “I am the most powerful woman in the world!”

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect congress to enact term limits on themselves. They would basically be putting themselves out of work. No, that would make too much sense…

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

OBAMATRONS UNITE!!

- Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev, 1959

Daily, I read Scott Adams blog. He is the genius behind the Dilbert comics. I will post his blog from today and the response from one of his readers. The response I feel does an incredible job of putting to words my uneasy feeling. What do you think?

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The Blog Post
by Scott Adams
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http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/vague_feelings_of_discomfort/

Yesterday I was talking to some McCain supporters about how they arrived at their preference. We don’t see many McCain supporters in my neighborhood, so I always take time to hear their views. Admittedly my sample is not large, but of the dozen or so McCain supporters I have spoken with, there is a common thread: Obama gives them a vague feeling of discomfort that they can’t quite identify.

When I ask about this vague feeling of discomfort, the answer has something to do with how his views got formed, his past associations, how quickly he rose to prominence, and how charismatic (slick) he is.

The risk, as I understand it, is that once in office Obama would start sporting a turban and begin each speech with WAHLALALALALALAL!!!! He would appoint Supreme Court justices who favor a redistribution of wealth to unborn gay babies, and he’d legalize crack. It would all be part of his master plan to destroy America. I might have the details wrong, but it goes something like that.

It’s hard to argue against someone’s vague feeling of discomfort. After all, studies have shown that people are actually quite good at determining character and intelligence from nothing more than photographs. I just found it interesting that the people I spoke with described a vague feeling of discomfort in forming their preference. That is not something I ever heard in other elections.

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The Response
by User Phantom II
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Scott, I don’t think you actually understood what the McCain supporters were telling you. The problem with Obama is that nobody (or only his closest associates) knows what he really thinks. I heard a PBS recording of some fairly well-known news folks saying, just yesterday, that they didn’t know what Obama was really like – that they didn’t know how he’d handle foreign policy, they didn’t know how he really felt about capitalism versus socialism, and so on. They were saying that the only things they know about him come from the books he’s written and the speeches he’s given.

Now, these are members of the same press that was supposed to be finding out for us what he’s really about. They have had almost twenty months, and they didn’t do their job, for whatever reason. Only just now do they seem to be admitting it.

My problems with Obama are many, but I’ll try to boil them down here. The reason for that vague unease your neighborhood McCain supporters have is that his current words don’t fit his past actions. He has associated with an unsavory, by most standards, group of people, including Tony Rezko, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres, Bernadine Dohrn, Rashid Khaladi, and more. Yet he says, in effect, he really didn’t know any of them very well. I don’t believe him. He’s either being disingenuous, or he’s too oblivious to be president (which would seem to fly in the face of that great intellect he supposedly has).

He says that he’s a big believer that we are our brothers’ keepers. Yet his half-brother George, whom he has met, lives in a hut in Africa on $12 per year. His paternal aunt is currently living in the slums in Boston (it took a UK newspaper to find that out, again showing what a poor job our press corps have done), and says she can’t really talk about him (Obama) until after November 4th. Does that kind of thing concern anyone else?

There’s a big blank in everyone’s knowledge of what he did in one important part of his past: his time at Columbia University. It’s as though that time didn’t exist – no one knows what he did during those four years.

He also has, in the past, supported socialism through the redistribution of wealth. He now says that that really isn’t what he’s going to do, but again, I don’t believe him. His work with Bill Ayers in Chicago, particularly his work with the Annenberg Challenge, seems to have been pointed, at least in part, to building curricula to teach teachers how to indoctrinate children in how to become radicals. I don’t think this is appropriate for children. I would rather have the schools teach them how to think, and then present them with both sides and let them talk it out. Obama does not seem to support that kind of free exchange of ideas.

Obama is running on a feel-good platform of “change.” Yet his ideas pretty much mirror those of Franklin Roosevelt. Take Obama’s desire for a “new Bill of Rights,” for example. That was proposed by Roosevelt back in 1944. Liberals always accuse conservatives of somehow wanting to take us back in time. When you peel away the onion of what Obama is saying, it leads right back to the New Deal and the Great Society. I’m not for that.

The bottom line, for me, is that he lacks experience and has had a somewhat radical past. I don’t feel it makes sense to hand the most powerful job in the world over to someone who not only lacks experience but also is largely an unknown.

At the same time, look at what his supporters say about him. Charismatic. A great orator. Gives them hope. OK, that’s a bunch of great feelings, but where is the substance to back them up? If I tell you what you want to hear, you’ll feel good – for a while. But then what happens when the words turn out to be just that: words? To whom will you complain then?

If you’d like an interesting intellectual exercise, then take a look at the major cities that are most out of control in the US. Those that have the highest crime rates, the highest poverty rates, the lowest high school graduation rates, the worst schools; and then ask yourselves how long it’s been since they’ve had a Republican mayor.

My point is that rhetoric, by itself, is meaningless. Take a look at the results. Are the candidates you are supporting proposing solutions, or short-term, feel-good actions that put band-aids on the problems? If you are intellectually honest, the very least you can do is demand of your legislators that they show results. If they don’t, then you should seriously consider evaluating, on an intellectual rather than emotional basis, what it’s going to take to get those problems solved, and who is proposing those solutions, regardless of their party.

As long as you let politicians keep getting elected because they make you feel good, rather than because they prove they can solve problems, the politicians are going to continue to do make you feel good. I believe, for a lot of people who look to feelings rather than realities, it’s time to grow up.

I read an article a while ago (If I can dig it up I will cite it here) that posed a question basically the opposite of mine. It attempted to answer the following (paraphrasing): “Why do the Republicans and conservative Christians continually elect people into office who go against their best financial interests?” It is a valid question; the majority of the Republican base are hard working middle class people, who would directly benefit from Barack Obama’s proposed tax law changes. If a candidate is basically offering to save us thousands in our taxes every year why aren’t we jumping at the chance to vote for him? The answer is easy; I believe that the Republicans vote more on principle than their financial interests. We fundamentally believe that an imposed redistribution of wealth is wrong, and should be avoided at all costs. We put aside our selfishness and realize that it is immoral to take someone’s hard earned money and give it to someone else, who did nothing to earn it. Of course another principle that most Republicans hold is that a smaller and less imposing Government is optimal, which means that both spending and taxes should be cut.

I often hear the argument that the rich should “pay their fair share,” and that Obama’s plan wouldn’t hurt any of the rich because “they can afford it.” First of all, the rich already pay more than their “fair share.” The United States tax system is progressive, meaning that the tax rate increases with income. Additionally, secondary taxes, such as the death tax are basically only applied to the wealthy, because that incredibly high rate is only applied to wealth beyond the first $2 Million. We have all seen or heard the figures, where the top 5% of income earners pay some much larger percentage of taxes into the system. I will not repeat them, as to not sound like a talking point spewing robot, but it bears mentioning just to show that there is no question that the rich already pay their fair share. But what about that other point? The one regarding their ability to afford increases in taxes? I simply don’t think that is a valid question. If Target began requesting a copy of my W-2, and progressively adjusted prices higher for all of the junk merchandise that I buy there based on my income, the consumer reporter from the local news would have the story on air that night. There would be protests and boycotts. With a concrete example like that it is easy for everyone to see the unfairness of the system, but that is exactly how our tax code is designed, and Barack wants to push it even further in that direction. Based on Democrat lectures I have heard on the subject of taxes they make it seem like a large majority of rich people are chomping at the bit to pay additional taxes. The way Barack spoke of Warren Buffet I assume that he already has next year’s inflated tax checks written, and is gleefully having his assistant drive them to the post office as I type this. If I were a congressman I would put forward a bill at my very first session that would require the IRS to create a donation system. That way all of those rich Democrats would be able to easily pay whatever additional amount they want to the Government each year. I would even make that donation eligible as a deduction on the next year’s taxes!

I am not going to say how much money my wife and I make per year, though we do pretty well. Still, we are nowhere near that magical $250K mark set by Barack Obama. That means that if he is elected, and if he actually pushes for his proposed tax changes, and if congress actually buys off on those changes I would directly financially benefit from his presidency. In fact, almost everyone I know would benefit, yet the majority of them are not voting for Obama. We value virtue over personal gain at the detriment of another; even that other is a member of the “evil rich.” I feel that if John McCain would stand up, and say that he believes that the American people have enough principle to disagree with socialistic, wealth redistribution propositions he would gain traction with some of those still “undecided.” I believe that a majority of the middle class is better than what Barack Obama has assumed, though we won’t know for sure for three weeks.

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Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.” Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,”declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!”

“That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

Most people are in the dark about what actually has caused the financial meltdown we’ve been seeing in the last few months. I too do not fully understand all that has occurred to bring us to where we are today. I have done some research into the topic and I have done my best to be non-partisan in that research.

That said, I was sent a video that gives a good summary of many of the things I found in my research. Both sides of our government are trying to blame each other for the events going on and in this election cycle the stakes are critical. At the core of what you will watch are some policies that were made with good intentions but the full consequences were not quite understood or anticipated.

Our government wanted all Americans to have a chance at owning a home. To create this opportunity legislation was passed that in essence forced banks into giving our risky loans (call it a financial affirmative action)…and so it begins.

Try to ignore the fact that the author of this is a McCain support and just look at the facts that are presented. As always, check sources, confirm facts, and be smart. Don’t believe at all that your hear.

American artist Paul McCarthy’s latest exhibit is a turd of epic proportions. Yes, he created a giant inflatable dog turd. It is claimed that this turd is the size of a house (which rivals some of the ones I’ve found in my daughter’s diaper). Rather unexpectedly the turd took on a life of its own when it decided to break free of the earthly bonds that were holding it at bay.

The turd terrorized the local town and left a path if destruction in its wake knocking down a powerline and destroying windows at a children’s home where it decided to end it’s journey.

Lets hope that the Oscar Wilde aphorism, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life” doesn’t ring true here, because I certainly don’t EVER want to see a turd the size of a house.

Good Day.

UPDATE: I found a picture!