From Gateway Pundit

Unreal. The radical Obama Justice Department sued Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona today.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

The Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit Thursday against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County, accusing him and his agency of stonewalling a probe into policing practices that some call discriminatory against Hispanics.

The suit is the latest move in months of legal sniping between the two sides. They are also fighting over whether federal prosecutors improperly contacted employees of the sheriff’s office directly to seek testimony, instead of going through lawyers.

Robert Driscoll, a lawyer representing Mr. Arpaio and the Maricopa Sheriff’s Office, didn’t have an immediate response to the suit.

Mr. Arpaio is the elected sheriff for Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. He has become a vocal critic of illegal immigration and has carried out operations aimed at detaining immigrants and turning them over to federal law enforcement for deportation.

Civil-rights groups have long called Mr. Arpaio’s policies discriminatory. Soon after Attorney General Eric Holder took office last year, the Justice Department said it was investigating those complaints and looking into possible violations of Hispanics’ civil rights.

The Justice Department suit, filed in federal court in Phoenix, said the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office receives millions of dollars in federal funding and is required to cooperate with federal investigations as a condition of receiving those funds.

This should surprise no one. After all, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was trying to uphold the law in Arizona.

also:

Awful– Harry Reid Now Denies Saying “This War Is Lost”

What’s worse…
The fact that Harry Reid said, “This war is lost,” while our troops were fighting terrorists in Iraq…
Or, the fact that he now denies that he said it?

In 2008 radio talk show host Casey Hendrickson interviewed Harry Reid. During this forgotten interview Harry Reid denied saying, “This war is lost.”

By Charles Krauthammer

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

– Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

– Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

– Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

– Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
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From Red Maryland

Have you taken a look yet at Governor Ehrlich’s Entrepreneur Agenda? You should, because it’s the first time any statewide leaders have seriously come forth to address job creation to combat the O’Malley Recession:

Bob Ehrlich actually wants to do something to create an economic environment that will employ more Marylanders and improve the economic situation for Maryland’s middle class families. Nothing sums up the current plight of small business owners than this:

Turning the economic tide requires a new approach to small business owners, who currently employ 1.2 million Marylanders. Since announcing his candidacy for Governor, Bob Ehrlich has met with more than 100 local entrepreneurs to discuss the hardships they face in Maryland. Nearly all of them believe they are an afterthought in the eyes of state government, and relay tales of being ignored, harassed, or given conflicting guidance from their state government.

And we are going to be able to do this through:

* Creating an attitude more conducive to small business development throughout State Government;
* Reversing the 20-percent sales tax, both as an incentive to bring small business back to Maryland, but to also provide a greater stimulus to spending an a better economic picture for Maryland families;
* Review current policies that bring irreparable harm to small businesses;
* Actually meeting with and discussing small business policies with small business owners.

In a nutshell, the next Ehrlich Administration will make owning a small business and creating jobs in Maryland easier. That is a far cry from what the O’Malleynomic antics of the current regime.

Why is this important? Because this is what the people want to talk about. The only thing that people around the state want to talk about right now is jobs, jobs, and jobs. The people of Maryland are fed up with Martin O’Malley and his inability to create a strong economic climate, and the people are fed up with Martin O’Malley and his administration continuing to adopt policies that harm the plight of Maryland’s middle and working class families. And they are tired of Martin O’Malley trying to say that he’s a jobs governor when so many Marylanders are unemployed due to his fiscal irresponsibility.

In the meantime, O’Malley flack Rick Abbruzzese has the unfortunate task of responding on behalf of the O’Malley-Brown campaign and hoping that his nose didn’t grow:

“This is not a plan. Bob Ehrlich’s so-called plan is all talk and no action – he is proposing a commission, a summit, a task force, three reviews and two explorations, but nothing to actually create jobs or help small businesses struggling because of the global recession.”

Here’s the pot calling the kettle block; because it was just last week that Martin O’Malley, after three years of destroying jobs, finally realized that jobs would be an issues in the campaign and responded by…..proposing a commission.

“This lip service is insulting because Maryland’s small businesses and families expect and deserve more from a former governor. As governor, Bob Ehrlich actually proposed the largest-ever increase in state spending and increased taxes and fees that hurt Maryland’s small businesses and families, while benefiting special interests. Now as a lobbyist, Bob Ehrlich has spent the last four years helping his clients export American jobs, bail out Wall Street banks, and defend giant oil companies.

Well, give the O’Malley/Democrat coordinated campaign one thing; they are coordinated. Never mind the fact that O’Malley and the Democrats are kings of special interests, the kings and queens of lobbying, and of course the drainers of oil recovery funds. But hey…Team O’Malley never let the facts get in the way of their goals, right?

“In stark contrast, Governor O’Malley has delivered results, including the Job Creation and Recovery Tax Credit to put unemployed Marylanders back to work and a rapid response small business loan guaranty program to get credit flowing again to our small businesses.”

Martin O’Malley did in fact deliver results, if your idea of “results” is thousands of closed businesses, forcing Marylanders out of state, record unemployment, unconscionable and immoral tax increases, reduced tax revenues, and record budget shortfalls . To put it bluntly, the only result Martin O’Malley has delivered has proof that he is unprepared to lead Maryland out of the fiscal mess he has created.

Voters have a choice in this election. A choice between sticking with Martin O’Malley and his recession, or choosing Bob Ehrlich and change that will benefit all Marylanders. Click here to help Governor Ehrlich make that change.

also:

From Powerline

Where’s John Edwards when you need him?

The left has become disillusioned with President Obama, according to this report by Politico’s Glenn Thrush. This news, which I’ve been looking forward to reading since it became apparent that Obama would be elected, was delivered at the annual meeting of the left-wng Campaign for America’s Future.
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From Gateway Pundit

Raging leftists and Islamists screaming “Allahu Akbar” swarm on a lone high school student carrying the Israeli flag at a pro-Gaza Flotilla rally in LA:

What a beautiful flag.

Israel National News reported:

A loud and angry mob of pro-Arab demonstrators outside the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles on Tuesday became even more enraged when one, lone Jewish high school student with a yarmulke and a large Israeli flag marched fearlessly alongside them.

The young man seemed to be unmoved by the angry curses hurled at him by the American-Arab crowd. Though protected by a line of policemen, it appeared he could be attacked at any moment.

Reporters asked him afterwards about his unusual presence, and he explained, “I came out because I want to defend Israel… They [the soldiers attempting to divert the flotilla ships - ed.] were attacked, and they had the right to defend [themselves]. These people [on the boats] were not humanitarians; their ship was armed with knives, batons, and all kinds of things to attack the Israelis with. There is a naval blockade on Gaza, and they [the soldiers] were just doing their job of enforcing it… Hamas is a terrorist organization trying to kill Israelis.”

Asked if he is affiliated with any group, he said, “Just Judaism and Israel, that’s it.”

From Redstate

Arlen Specter is no more. This makes the fourth person in a statewide race to lose after Barack Obama campaigned for him.

Trey Grayson went down in flames to Rand Paul, who openly embraced the tea party label.

Tim Burns lost the special election in PA-12, but will now run in the general election for November against the Democrat. It is important to note that the Democrat, Critz, to get the win had to run to the right, repudiating large portions of Barack Obama’s agenda.

In Arkansas, it looks like Blanche Lincoln will make it into a runoff, but her margin of victory is so close to Lt. Gov. Halter, she could lose the run off. She too ran against Barack Obama.

The only Democrat to survive out and out the night running to the left was Joe Sestak. And Pat Toomey is going to beat him in November.

Oh, and on Saturday, Charles Djou, a Republican, is going to win in a heavily Democrat district in Hawaii.

also:

Newt Gingrich: Obama-Pelosi Regime Is as Great a Threat to America as Nazi Germany and USSR

Finally:

Alan Colmes: There Is Not Such a Thing as Radical Islam

from Flopping Aces

And those reporters paid the price for their ignorance.

What unbelievable knuckleheads the left and the MSM are.

Making the rounds over the last few days is this video in which Wikileaks says there were unarmed civilian reporters who were killed for no other reason than they had cameras.

Complete and utter bulls&%t.

This was 2007 people. There was still a war going on. And it sucks that the reporters deemed it necessary to embed themselves with the enemy, but they knew full well what the results might be.

Rusty at The Jawa Report has screen shots of the video clearly showing that the men they were milling about with were armed, that there was in fact RPG’s amongst them and that they appeared about to engage American troops. If you’re a civilian and you stick around with that crowd you will pay the price, and that’s what happened here.
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I think this five minute clip from the Glenn Beck show encapsulated the whole Obama/Democrat performance today at the health care summit:

The World Must Know – The Stoning of Soraya M.

from Flopping Aces

While at CPAC, I had the opportunity to interview the director of “The Stoning of Soraya M.” , Cyrus Nowrasteh:

This is story that must be told, as it is a story of hope that must not be extinguished. It is the account of an ‘inconvenient wife’ accused of adultery in a rural town in Iran. The punishment for such a crime under islamic law is death by stoning. The movie was filmed near Petra, Jordan and many in the cast are of Iranian descent.

An Iranian journalist living in Paris, Freidoune Sahebjam, stumbled upon the story while on assignment in Iran, when his car broke down in this town and the aunt of Soraya shared her story with him.

In 1986, Soraya M. was stoned to death upon the accusation of adultery. This happened in the 20th century, not the dark ages. This movie takes an unflinching look at heinous human behavior driven by islamic law.

Learn more HERE

PS: You might want to turn your volume up when viewing this video.

also:

Daniel Freedman Debates Marc Thiessen

Much better, substantive debate than Thiessen’s previous appearance where Lawrence O’Donnell frothed and foamed at the mouth and had to be tranquilized and put back in his kennel.

Even good questions from the MSNBC Morning Joe hosts (all points addressed in Thiessen’s book, Courting Disaster). Thiessen comes very well armed for debate.

Ali Soufan wouldn’t come on to defend and debate (Ali Soufan is the FBI agent- not evil, just wrong and a hero in my book- who has been lionized by the left for his opposition to the CIA interrogation program) so he is represented by Daniel Freedman, the Director of Policy Analysis and Communications of the Soufan Group (also served on Giuliani’s campaign as a foreign policy analyst).

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by Tony Blankley

Anti-anti-Islamic radical -ism is growing among Western elites. In the aftermath of the Fort Hood Islamist terror attack on our troops by United States Army Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan and the Christmas Day airline Islamist terror attack attempt, it is becoming ever more obvious that there is a widening gap between public common sense and governing class idiocy when it comes to spottingIslamist danger in our midst – and doing something about it.

Against all evidence, it has become an idee fixe in the collective mind of European and American governments, academe, journalism and foreign policy establishments that radical Muslims in the West are the victims of Western bigotry and cultural hostility – rather than, primarily, the other way round. Dangerously, these attitudes continue to shape both the premises and procedures of government policies even after nine years of post-September 11 evidence to the contrary. The slaughtered American troops at Fort Hood are just among the early few in what will surely become whole legions of the dead victims of political correctness – if the public does not soon succeed at overruling the Western governing elite’s unconscionablemoral blindness to the malign danger in our midst.

This willful refusal to look Islamist/Western reality straight on is epitomized by a series of recent articles that mostly sneer at even a discussion of the threat. As one of the constantly named authors of recent books (along with Mark Steyn, Oriana Fallaci, Bernard Lewis, Bruce Bawer, Bat Ye’or and Christopher Caldwell)that are alleged to be guilty of seeing evidence ofan Islamist cultural(as well asterrorist) threat to the West, I thought it might be time to respond.
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from Flopping Aces

There have been a couple of posts here at FA regarding US Senate Candidate Scott Brown…..

The race is narrowing toward it’s final conclusion on Tuesday.

Today, the Boston Herald endorsed Brown.

Also today, Scott Brown’s campaign is conducting a “Money Bomb”.

What’s that you ask?

Well, they set their goal at $500,000 for the day. When they surpassed that, they moved it to $750,000. When they surpassed that, yes they did, the new goal was set at $1,000,000.

As of the time of this post, the Scott Brown for US Senate campaign had raised

As of 9:47pm EST…

This is an incredible showing for the Republican candidate who is running to fill spot that Ted “the Swimmer” Kennedy formerly held.

Click here for updates and you can donate there too if you like.

UPDATE:

It appears that the server is overloaded.

You can go here or here to donate as well.

UPDATE x 2:

A juicy snippet from tonight’s debate.

Roll the tape:

also:

“It’s Bush’s Fault” Statistically Dies As An Effective Excuse

Can’t oppose Iraq anymore ’cause Obama and Dems are responsible for winning or losing it now.

Can’t blame Bush anymore.

Can’t boast about a single accomplishment other than bankrupting the nation for generations

Gosh…what will Dems do for the next 9.75 months?

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.

Finally:

Lookin’ for jobs in all the wrong places…

It was only in the past week that the less than “stimulating” news from the Dec 2009 unemployment report hit the news. Economists are warning those numbers, when revised by the benchmark revision this month, will be even more startling.

From CEPR’s Dean Baker:

“The economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December, driven by continued job losses in construction and manufacturing. While the current data still show a 378,000 job gain for the decade, these numbers will be lowered by approximately 824,000 when the benchmark revision is incorporated into the data with the release of the January employment report. The data show a decline in private sector jobs of 1,549,000 for the decade. The benchmark revision will increase the private sector job loss for the decade to more than 2.4 million….. The employment to population (EPOP) ratio fell by 0.3 percent to 58.2 percent, the lowest level in more than a quarter century.

Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz says the unemployment would have risen to 10.4% if the 661,000 workers were counted instead of being considered a labor force decline. 40% of all are unemployed for more than six months, and the average re’employment time… for those that don’t just give up… is over 20 months.

The Feb 17th passage of the ARRA was designed specifically to “stimulate” the job growth and funnel them to “shovel ready” projects. According to the 12/31/09 update on Recovery.gov, $68.5 billion ( a quarter of the allocated $275 billion) has been funded for grants, contracts and loans. Additionally 42% of the $224 billion for entitlements had been funded.

I think we can safely conclude that 10 months and 24 days after enactment, and after disbursement of 1/3 of all ARRA funds, the “stimulus” is considerably less stimulating than advertised. After this most recent BLS report, apparently the POTUS and one of his spending cohorts in chief, Speaker Pelosi, concur.

Knowing the numbers, projected to be 10 times lower, were not going to play well with the American public, they hit the airwaves within days calling for a “jobs bill”.

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–or, How A Golden State Became A Failed State

submitted by Laryn

Now that I have moved to the Golden State, I have been reading about how it came to be in its current economic and political decline. One very interesting article from The Claremont Institute summarizes the history of the decline over the last century and discusses the role that Progressivism has played:

Rome wasn’t sacked in a day, and California didn’t become Argentina overnight. Its acquired incapacity to manage its own affairs has been a long, complicated story, with many contributing factors rather than a single villain or tragic flaw. No analysis of California’s political demise, however, would be complete without discussing how the Progressive legacy has undermined the state’s ability to govern itself.

Hyperdemocracy

According to historian Alonzo Hamby, the framework for Progressive politics was the conviction that the political conflict was between “the people” and “the interests.” It followed that the highest political duty was to help the people resist and ultimately triumph over the interests. One problem with this framework is that it lends itself better to the disdain than to the practice of politics. “The Progressives did not like politics,” writes political scientist Jerome Mileur, because “the politics they saw was not about the public purpose of the nation, but was instead consumed by local interests and private greed, indifferent alike to the idea of a great community and the idealism of grand purpose.”

As a result, Progressivism’s anti-politics was designed for the people as they ought to be, not as they really are. Positing that the fundamental choice is between the people and the interests presupposes that the people are authentic only when they are disinterested. The Progressives’ goal was to equip the people with the means to advance encompassing, lofty ambitions by thwarting the interests’ narrow, selfish ones. The means to this end was to collapse the constitutional space between the people and the government, dismantling the political mechanisms that conferred unfair advantages on connected insiders. As the New Republic editorialized in 1914:
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from Flopping Aces

Toldjah So:

“They said it would be transparent. Why isn’t it? At times, I find the caucus is a real disappointment. We aren’t transparent, not just to the public but at times to the members.” – Democrat Rep. Joe Sestak

Is this the ‘change’ you voted for in 2008?

Had enough of this change?

Vote conservative in 2010 and 2012

also:

December Job Losses Worse Then Expected; Unemployment Rate @ 10%

What has Obama done for you lately?……or ever?

Nonfarm payroll employment edged down (-85,000) in December, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 10.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment fell in construction, manufacturing, and wholesale trade, while temporary help services and health care added jobs.

In December, both the number of unemployed persons, at 15.3 million, and the unemployment rate, at 10.0 percent, were unchanged. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons was 7.7 million, and the unemployment rate was 5.0 percent. …

Total nonfarm payroll employment edged down in December (-85,000). Job losses continued in construction, manufacturing, and wholesale trade, while temporary help services and health care continued to add jobs. During 2009, monthly job losses moderated substantially. Employment losses in the first quarter of 2009 averaged 691,000 per month, compared with an average loss of 69,000 per month in the fourth quarter.

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from Sister Toldjah

City Journal’s indispensable contributing editor Heather Mac Donald has an interesting piece published in the WSJ today in which she debunks the 60s-era rush to blame crime on poverty and “social injustice” by analyzing crime data from last year. Snippets:

The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.

The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.

[...]

And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.
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By Jake

Have you seen the coexist bumper stickers?

You’ve seen these, right? They make me mad. Why? Because they don’t really mean what they say.

Let’s break it down. We’ll call each worldview by the letter it’s supposed to represent. So:

* C = Islam
* O = Pacifism
* E = “Gender equality” (=the LGBT agenda)
* X = Judaism
* I = Wicca / Pagan / Bah’ai
* S =Taoism / Confucianism
* T = Christianity

And let’s assume a very broad definition of “coexist”: living together without calling for the destruction of each other. Here are the problems with that:

* C wants to kill E, X, T, and (by implication) O. If they achieved the world they wanted, I and S would also no longer exist.
* O doesn’t allow for effective resistance or defeat of C.
* E stands in direct opposition to C, X, and T, and accuses those who speak against them of hate speech. Also, they’re trying to edge X and T out of public schools in favor of their own agenda. (They’re afraid C will be offended, so they get less trouble.) E is actually very, very intolerant.
* X’s existence is threatened not only by C but also by O, who invariably supports C over X.
* I and S are statistically insignificant and are mainly on there to complete the bumper sticker.
* T is who the bumper sticker is really arguing against, but poses no physical threat to any of the others. (more…)

so says this a-hole.

He seems unhappy. So let’s help him find a new line of work soon.

From Big Government

The other day I made the assertion that Barbara Boxer (D – Tiny Town) was the stupidest member of the United States Senate. I may have spoken too soon. Here’s a serious challenger:

Yesterday, in his desperate attempt to win friends, influence people and reach across the aisle as he tries to bring the senate’s version of a “health care” bill to a vote, Sen. Harry Reid (D – Las Vegas) decided to go for broke. Speaking in his trademark tremulous, reedy voice that makes that of his predecessor, the homunculus from South Dakota, Sen. Tom Daschle (D – IRS), sound like Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” the punch-drunk former boxer compared Republican opposition to the proponents of slavery and segregation. “When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today… History is repeating itself before our eyes.”

No words of mine can possibly do justice to the magisterial presentation of the Sage of Searchlight, so please have a look and listen before we continue:

Where to begin? With a straight face (okay, an undertaker’s face) Reid asserts three outrageous falsehoods:

1) Republicans supported slavery.
2) Republicans opposed women’s suffrage.
3) Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Act.

The first is too idiotic to refute. Perhaps Sen. Reid (D-Hinky Land Deals) has forgotten that Abolition was the cause upon which the Republican Party was founded, and that the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, is known today as the Great Emancipator. Clearly, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” has a moron for a majority leader. But wait – there’s more!
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From the Gateway Pundit

“We continue to work with all members of the caucus and with the Administration to build on the recovery package and other initiatives to help create jobs and grow our economy after years of mismanagement by the Bush administration.”

Nancy Pelosi
On the Failing Pelosi-Obama Economic Policies
December 2, 2009

That’s odd.
Barack Obama and the Pelosi Democrats have nearly doubled the US unemployment rate in less than one year.

obama unemployment:

Not even after 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the Clinton Recession, the Iraq War, etc. did Bush come close to what the democrats managed to do in one year.

And, President George Bush never did this either…

obama deficit:
Obama tripled the national deficit his first year in office and he’s off to a record-setting start in fiscal year 2010.
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from Flopping Aces

As another pundit said: this isn’t just the smoking gun pointing to the fraud of global warming, it’s a mushroom cloud!

As researchers around the world report on their findings in the hacked emails from the Climactic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain you often hear references to the infamous “Harry Read Me” file. The entire file, 247 pages long, is an encyclopedia chronicling the absolute mess that temperature records, upon which much global warming theory is based, are in.

Thanks to Monica for directing me to the following story in the Toronto Sun:

‘Botch after botch after botch’
Leaked ‘climategate’ documents show huge flaws in the backbone of climate change science
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
Toronto Sun
29th November 2009

…The file — 274 pages long — describes the efforts of a climatologist/programmer at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia to update a huge statistical database (11,000 files) of important climate data between 2006 and 2009.

The computer coding, along with the programmer’s apparently unsuccessful efforts to complete the project, involve data that are the foundation of the study of climate change — recordings from hundreds of weather stations around the world of temperature and precipitation measurements from 1901 to 2006, sun/cloud computer simulations, and the like.
…
The CRU at East Anglia University is considered by many as the world’s leading climate research agency. Here’s how CBSNews.com’s Declan McCullagh describes its enormous impact on policymakers:

“In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: It claims the world’s largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report. The report … is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it ‘relies on most heavily’ when concluding carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.”

As you read the programmer’s comments below, remember, this is only a fraction of what he says.

- “But what are all those monthly files? DON’T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that’s useless …” (Page 17)

- “It’s botch after botch after botch.” (18)

- “The biggest immediate problem was the loss of an hour’s edits to the program, when the network died … no explanation from anyone, I hope it’s not a return to last year’s troubles … This surely is the worst project I’ve ever attempted. Eeeek.” (31)

- “Oh, GOD, if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite.” (37)

- “… this should all have been rewritten from scratch a year ago!” (45)

- “Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!” (47)

- “As far as I can see, this renders the (weather) station counts totally meaningless.” (57)

- “COBAR AIRPORT AWS (data from an Australian weather station) cannot start in 1962, it didn’t open until 1993!” (71)

- “What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah — there is no ‘supposed,’ I can make it up. So I have : – )” (98)

- “You can’t imagine what this has cost me — to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO (World Meteorological Organization) codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a ‘Master’ database of dubious provenance …” (98)

- “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …” (98-9)

- “OH F— THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases.” (241).

- “This whole project is SUCH A MESS …” (266)

The Devil’s Kitchen calls this “data horribilia” and rightly so. Lorrie Goldstein concludes her piece by saying what many of us have over the years: “And based on stuff like this, politicians are going to blow up our economy and lower our standard of living to “fix” the climate? Are they insane?”

Canadian blogger Small Dead Animals has also been covering the story in detail with a number of excellent resources.

UN Digs In

Meanwhile, over at the United Nations, an organization which stands to rake in billions if the Warmers agenda for global warming is enacted, they are digging in for a fight:

Leaked emails won’t harm UN climate body, says chairman Rajendra Pachauri says there is ‘virtually no possibility’ of a few scientists biasing IPCC’s advice, after UAE hacking breach
By James Randerson
Guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 29 November 2009

[Mike's note: Would YOU trust this guy?]

There is “virtually no possibility” of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN’s top global warming body, its chair said today.

Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel’s fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007.

The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university.

Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered.

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

What absolute bunk! From the very beginning of the global warming story we’ve seen example after example which confirms how the UN climate panel process has been corrupted. The hacked emails simply confirm what we have known all along. This isn’t about science, it’s about money and power.

What we are likely to find is that the mess at CRU-East Anglia is also replicated at the other big Warmer data factories since their conclusions are all very similar. The only way to be sure is to have an open and transparent investigation of ALL the major data centers doing this work in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere.

There is absolutely no reason to proceed with any further world plans to address global warming with this kind of doubt, corruption and incompetence on such full display!

also:

There Are Liberals, and There Are Nutjobs

We’ve all seen it, heard it, and had our brains wracked by them. I’m talking about people who are not “liberal”; are not “open-minded.” Personally, I try very hard to understand their arguments, and why they’re making them. Are they interested in facts, or partisan electioneering? Are they interested in discussion or cramming an ideology down my throat?

A “liberal” is someone who is open-minded, understanding, comes with open-arms, and seeks discussion and compromise. Then…there are these people:

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From Red Maryland

If the hacked emails and data from the Hadley Climate Research Unit in the UK turn out to be genuine—and the director, Phil Jones says they appear to be—then the global warming alarmist movement has some serious explaining to do.

The emails appear to reveal a pattern by prominent alarmist scientists of concealing evidence contradictory to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, manipulating scientific data, preventing conflicting reports from being published in the IPCC assessment report, and possibly deleting government data subject to public information laws.

Here are some of the emails:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement Date:
Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc:k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers Phil

Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit
Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX University of East Anglia Norwich

“Mike’s Nature trick” refers to the now discredited Hockey Stick fraud.

From: Tom Wigley [...]
To: Phil Jones [...]
Subject: 1940s
Date:Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer [...]

Phil,Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that theland also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by,say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean – but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips—higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this.
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From Powerline

Even congressional Democrats are disgusted with the Obama administration’s phony accounting of what the stimulus plan supposedly is accomplishing. Earlier this week, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey lambasted the government’s flawed data purporting to show that $160 billion in stimulus spending has created or saved at least 640,000 jobs. In response to reports that the administration has been forced to delete 60,000 jobs from its list and that it claimed to have created 30 jobs in a non-existent congressional district, Obey had this to say:

The inaccuracies are outrageous and the administration owes itself, the Congress and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes. We designed the Recovery Act to be open and transparent. Whether the numbers are good news or bad news, I want the honest numbers and I want them now.

At the Washington Post, however, Alec MacGillis sees the problem not as a combination of dishonesty and incompetence by the Obama administration, but rather as the administration’s “decision to provide numbers in the first place.” This seems like an odd position for a newspaper man to take. Isn’t lack of transparency a bad thing? That was always the Post’s view during the Bush administration.

MacGillis points out that it is “exceedingly difficult for even the most conscientious government agency to calculate the jobs impact of a stimulus grant.” But if that’s true, and I’m pretty sure it is, then it must be even more difficult (and probably impossible) to calculate the jobs impact of stimulus legislation before it has been adopted. Yet, Obama didn’t hesitiate to make this “calculation,” promising that the stimulus proposal would save or create 3.5 million jobs in two years.

The essence of the problem, then, is Obama’s bogus projection. But MacGillis apparently is willing to give the president a pass on that.
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