Glenn Beck on the Global Warming Scam!

Hmmm…healthcare reform or more payoffs for liberal supporters?

Here is an egregious example of government corruption and special interest payoffs tucked in a so-called healthcare reform bill.

Have you gotten your stimulus/payoff yet? 

When will we rise up and truly reform our government?  When will we elect people with real integrity and not simply petty crooks?

It was no surprise that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Andy Stern, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU), cheered the results of the House vote. After spending almost $80 million during the last election cycle, unions are on the brink of reaping a significant return on their investment. Despite representing only about 7.6% of private sector employees, unions are poised to gain significant privileges, authority and financial windfalls from health care reform. Coming at the expense of tax-paying patients and businesses, these specific benefits would do little or nothing to improve our health care system. The unions’ path to this point has been interesting. When the public recognized that the Employee Free Choice Act (the card check bill) was not a good idea, labor leaders turned to some old-fashioned misdirection tactics. While higher-profile aspects of health care reform drew attention, pro-union legislators slipped a variety of big benefits for labor into the proposed legislation. Quietly tucked among the proposals’ thousands of pages, these provisions have avoided much scrutiny. One provision epitomizes the nature of this ploy. According to research firms, unions are woefully short of funds to pay their retirees’ anticipated insurance claims. Thus, under the House resolution, union leaders who have mismanaged these plans for their members could receive up to $10 billion in taxpayer-funded bailout money, innocuously referred to as a “reinsurance program.”

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Under the proposed public option, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius would wield tremendous discretionary authority to regulate participating health care workers. She and various federal panels, where the unions would have guaranteed seats, would take the lead in recommending health care policy. Thus, labor would have considerable influence over decisions affecting most doctors, nurses and patients. The House resolution establishes a scenario that would effectively exclude non-union employers from eligibility to work on program-funded contracts. It also requires participating health care providers to pay wages and benefits that have been collectively bargained or that union-friendly appointees determine are competitive. This is plainly a move toward coerced unionization. With guaranteed seats at the table, unions are poised to control many newly formed oversight posts and/or committees, formed in connection with new employer mandates and cooperative health care associations. Yet another provision would establish lucrative state training partnerships that contain little or no opportunities for non-union employee organizations. Provisions in Senate proposals would exempt union-negotiated health care plans from taxes on “Cadillac” health plans.

If they wish to propose these changes create separate bills and let’s have separate debates on the merits.  Instead they are hidden in massive bills that few can understand.  I for one am tired of this charade and deceptive nonsense.  How about you?

Or consider this payoff to AARP:

Even as AARP advocates for cutting Medicare Advantage plans by more than $150 billion, an analysis of the organization’s operations reveals that it stands to receive tens of millions of dollars at the expense of seniors’ medical care-with Democrats’ full approval:

• The Congressional Budget Office has previously estimated that the cuts to Medicare Advantage plans proposed in Democrats’ government takeover of health care (H.R. 3200) would cause millions of seniors to lose their current plan and enroll in government-run Medicare.

• Because the government-run Medicare benefit is less generous than most private health plans, the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found in June that more than nine in ten seniors not in nursing home settings utilize some form of Medicare supplemental insurance.  While many of these individuals currently rely on Medicare Advantage plans for the extra benefits they provide to seniors, many would be forced to purchase supplemental Medigap policies should their existing Medicare Advantage plans be taken away from them due to Democrats’ government takeover of health care.

• A review of its financial statements finds that in 2008, AARP received more than half a billion dollars in revenue from selling products like Medigap supplemental insurance policies-$652.7 million in direct "royalties and fees," and an increase of more than 31 percent from the $497.6 million in similar revenue AARP generated in 2007.

• Royalty revenues now comprise more than half-60.3 percent-of all AARP revenues; a Bloomberg news analysis published in December found that in 1999, royalties comprised only 11 percent of the organization’s total revenues.

• The Bloomberg article-which highlighted what one observer called AARP’s "dirty little secret"-profiled seniors who felt betrayed after paying hundreds of dollars above market price for AARP-branded coverage.  One noted that "AARP has great buying power, and people should be able to get the best deal….This is unconscionable, what AARP has allowed to happen."  Another disillusioned senior wrote to the organization’s leadership asking whether AARP had a "‘special relationship’ with [insurance carriers] by which it receives commissions, incentives, rebates, or dare I say ‘kickbacks?’"-and when he arrived at AARP headquarters for a tour, was promptly escorted out of the marble-covered atrium.

• While H.R. 3200 would place strict price controls on Medicare Advantage plans-requiring them to pay out 85 percent of premium revenues in medical claims-Medigap policies face a far less strict 65 percent requirement.  In other words, under the Democrat bill, seniors could pay as much as 20 cents more out of every premium dollar to fund "kickbacks" to AARP-sponsored Medigap plans than Medicare Advantage plans.

The higher prices charged by AARP plans, and the organization’s increasing dependence upon revenue from "royalties," provide tangible evidence why AARP would support cuts to Medicare Advantage that would likely increase their "kickbacks" from Medigap plans.  However, it does not answer several key questions:

The Climate Change Deception house of cards is collapsing…Updated!

While my own denomination (PCUSA) works with the WCC to continue pushing draconian actions on “climate change” that will only serve to distract from real needs, it turns out that the entire house of cards is collapsing.  Yet they ignore this news and continue to push this ideological nonsense. 

The Global Warming criminal fraud and deception is starting to come into the light.  This very well could be the scandal of the century.  I wonder if we’ll be getting any indictments out of all this nonsense?  Will the great false prophet of Global Warming be recanting and will he be indicted?

I am sure the hackers will be prosecuted (and they should be), but what about the now uncovered collusion and deception?  Will all these people be indicted?  How about all the governments that tried to push cap and trade down our throats?  I wonder.

This from the BBC

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday. A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission. An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added. "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," the spokesman stated."Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine."This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. "We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry." Researchers at CRU, one of the world’s leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind.

There we have affirmation that these communications are accurate and not fraudulent.  But what about the content of these communications? Here is where the fraud is exposed:

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting 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. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

Here is a sample of one of the e-mails with comments:

One of the most damning e-mails published comes from Dr. Jones himself.  In an e-mail from almost exactly ten years ago, Jones appears to discuss a method of overlaying data of temperature declines with repetitive, false data of higher temperatures:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@
[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped]
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 [sic] from1961 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

Jones told Investigate that he couldn’t remember the context of “hide the decline,” and that the process was a way to fill data gaps rather than mislead.  But when scientists talk about “tricks” in the context of hiding data, it certainly seems suspicious.

And this from James Delingpole of the Telegraph in the UK.

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That) When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. 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.

Update!

This reminder from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air…

This follows on a more mundane controversy over competence at Hadley that erupted in September:

A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC’s assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

Are most government entitlements just Ponzi schemes?

Are most government entitlement programs just ponzi schemes and if so who will be joining Mr. Madoff? 

From Milton Friedman on Social Security:

To preserve the fiction that Social Security is insurance, however, federal government interest-bearing bonds of a corresponding amount have been deposited in a so-called trust fund. That is, one branch of the government, the Treasury, has given an interest-bearing IOU to another branch, the Social Security Administration. Each year thereafter, the Treasury gives the Social Security Administration additional IOUs to cover the interest due. The only way that the Treasury can redeem its debt to the Social Security Administration is to borrow the money from the public, run a surplus in its other activities, or have the Federal Reserve print the money—the same alternatives that would be open to it to pay Social Security benefits if there were no trust fund. But the accounting sleight of hand of a bogus trust fund is counted on to conceal this fact from a gullible public.

And now the Senate will be voting on another “health reform” bill, which will add another “entitlement” program/ponzi scheme.  It is being sold as reducing the deficit…when in fact, they are merely cooking the books again.  How did they get numbers that say it will reduce the deficit for 10 years?  Well, they have simply front-loaded the program for 4+ years of taxes with no benefits and then the following 6 years have the taxes plus the benefits.  The program fully implemented for 10 years actually adds over a trillion dollars to the deficit.  This will continue to be hidden from the “gullible public” until implemented and the ponzi scheme/government debt will continue to grow.  There has never been a social security lockbox as Mr. Gore during debates often liked to put it.  And these liberal congressional bills are in no way “deficit neutral” and they know it.  Is it time for us to fill the cells next to Mr. Madoff?  Where are the indictments?

Cartoon of the day

Quote of the day

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Cartoon of the day

Investors.com – Stimulus Fraud

If the stimulus money distribution was being handled by a private corporation making these kinds of claims and reports, people would be going to prison for fraud.  Why are we not all outraged?  Why are heads not rolling?  Why are elected officials not being impeached?

Investors.com – Stimulus Fraud.

“The official Web site vows that stimulus spending will “be subject to unprecedented transparency and accountability,” and that inspectors general of 28 federal agencies will “continually review” their spending.

To our knowledge, however, none of the errors was found by an inspector general. All were discovered by private individuals curious about what their tax dollars were being spent on.

Imagine for a moment a CEO standing before the public and claiming similar bookkeeping errors. He’d be arrested for fraud, frog-marched from his office, tried, convicted and left to rot in jail.”

Bernie Madoff is working for Obama at Recovery.gov?

When I read this article I had to conclude that Obama asked Bernie Madoff to work/cook the books for him on the “stimulus package” reporting.  How else could we have ended up with this kind of nonsense:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.

According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

The stimulus revived 8 recently retired congressional districts. Pennsylvania’s 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds. Mississippi’s 5th District and Oklahoma’s 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively. All three were eliminated by the 2000 census.

Many other recipients carried the banner for congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina’s 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia’s 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion–it received more than $2 million, according to recovery.gov.

The stimulus helped to create 35 congressional districts in Washington D.C. and the four American territories, all of which have no congressional districts. These areas received $5 of the $6.4 billion distributed to the non-existent districts.

New Mexico Watchdog broke the story on Monday morning after finding that $26 million in stimulus money had been distributed to 13 congressional districts–ten more than the state actually has. Similar reports soon followed from New Hampshire, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia.

Are these people liars or merely incompetent?  Even when you consider some of the real numbers, the amount of money it costs the government to create one temporary government or government related job is absolutely insane.  This is some of the worst waste and graft that has ever been created and any elected official that supported this insane nonsense should be voted out, and many should be indicted.  All of this in the name of boosting our economy?  This is doing the absolute opposite. 

Take 2 and call Pelosi in the Morning

EPA whistleblowers on Cap and Trade

EPA lawyers Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel have stepped forward — two more whistleblowers calling out the EPA on their flawed agenda of Cap and Trade. 

“she would have aborted me if it was legal”

Let me see if I understand the more “moderate” view of abortion, setting aside for the time being the extremely rare case where the mother’s life truly hangs in the balance.  I would like to consider the shibboleth of abortion should be illegal “except in cases of rape and incest.”  I would like to analyze this from both the perspective of the moderate/centrist liberal and from the moderate/centrist leaning conservative and see if it makes sense from either direction.

Let me first see if I understand this from the more liberal position.

1. Liberals tend to want to protect the rights of the living even in cases of murderers (anti-death penalty).

2. Yet, they want to protect the so-called libertarian (pro-choice) right of a woman to choose to have an abortion.

3.  So more moderates will give in on elective abortions, but still staunchly defend the woman’s right to choose in cases of rape and incest, believing that it is the “compassionate” way of minimizing those horrendous acts.

4.  So the net effect is that the rapist and/or incest perpetrator gets a shortened more lenient sentence, while the innocent product of that rape/incest receives the death penalty.

5.  The positive is viewed as minimizing the negative impact on the victims, yet many studies have indicated just the opposite, due to health and emotional damage compounded by the abortion.

Conclusion:

From the perspective of the left this is absolute nonsense.  Do they not want to “care” for the “least of these” in these cases?  Yet, ultimately they are causing damage to both the unborn…who receives the ultimate penalty (DEATH), though they are the most innocent, and the mother…who suffers with emotional and physical trauma compounded by the death of her unborn child. 

If they refuse to see the unborn child as a human being (which is often the justification from the Left) then there is still the issue that the mother continues to bear the marks of both the violent act of the incest and/or rape and the subsequent act of the abortion.

 

From the perspective of the Conservative leaning moderate:

1. Conservatives want to protect the life of the unborn child (sometimes without caring about the situation of the mother).

2. The “moderates” view this as a satisfactory compromise, thinking they will reduce the numbers of abortions.

3.  Yet they effectively have affirmed the view that the unborn child conceived in a violent and/or immoral act is of “no value” and therefore does not need protecting, by agreeing to such legislation.  They are therefore sacrificing and compromising on the truth that all human life is of immeasurable value and allowing this most innocent victim to receive the death penalty.

4.  They also view this as “compassionate” to the plight of the woman victim, “easing her pain” in the short-term but causing greater distress in the long-term.

Conclusion:  The compromise makes no sense from the more conservative perspective, for to minimize the value of the life of a human being in the case of rape/incest completely undermines the rationale for the pro-life position in the first place and opens wide the door complete unrestricted abortion on demand.

Here is a sobering story that truly addresses where this logic leads:

“She told me that she would have aborted me if it was legal”

Rebecca Kiessling

 

The children of evolution

Dennis Sewell has written an interesting and incisive article that presents the argument that Darwin’s ideas have lead to great atrocities and violence.  Here is the article on Times online in the UK. 

Here is an important section:

In America, where Darwin’s writings on morality and race have come under particularly intense critical scrutiny because of the enduring creationist debate, he has been accused of fostering moral nihilism and scientific racism, and even of promoting an ethic that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. Most startling of all, a connection has now been drawn between Darwin’s theories and a rash of school shootings. In April, 1,000 people gathered at sunset in Littleton, Colorado, to commemorate the victims of the Columbine high school massacre, 10 years on. Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was the first of the 13 children to be murdered, and whose son Craig narrowly escaped being shot, cannot understand why so little attention has been paid to the motivation of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their interest in Charles Darwin’s ideas. “Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

Much of the evidence remains sealed under a court order issued to minimise the risk of copycat killings, but from those documents that are in the public domain, it is clear that Eric Harris fantasised about putting everyone into a violent computer game that only the fittest could survive. And, like Darwin himself, he noted how vaccination might be interfering with nature’s weeding process. In his rantings Harris said he wished there were no vaccines, or even warning labels on dangerous goods, “and let natural selection take its course. All the fat, ugly, retarded, crippled dumbass, stupid f***heads in the world would die… Maybe then the human race can actually be proud of itself”.

As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes… It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

In 2007, detectives following up a tip-off about a planned school shooting in Pennsylvania discovered that their suspect often logged on to a social networking site called Natural Selection’s Army and a number of related chatrooms that were later tagged by the media as the “cyber school for killers”. These sites were quickly shut down by their service providers, but today “Natural Selection” is the name of a popular computer game in which competing teams attempt to annihilate one another — a sign that Darwin’s term is still associated by many teenagers with sudden and extreme violence.

“Natural Selection” T-shirts have proved a popular line through web-based outlets, and it seems that the Columbine killers have spawned a gruesome personality cult — there is even a computer game in which players adopt the roles of Harris and Klebold, which features original CCTV footage of the killings.

Among those reported to have frequented the original Natural Selection’s Army website was an 18-year-old Finnish student, Pekka-Eric Auvinen. On November 7, 2007, in Tuusula, Finland, Auvinen forced his head teacher to kneel down in front of him before he shot her with his pistol. He slaughtered a further seven victims before turning the gun on himself. Some of the Jokela high school students afterwards described the way Auvinen prowled through the building pointing his gun at people’s heads. Sometimes he would squeeze the trigger and kill them; sometimes, after looking long and hard through the sights, he would suddenly turn away and let his terrified target go free. One witness said he seemed to be choosing his victims at random, but in fact he was making a very deliberate selection. He was trying to weed out the “unfit”.

Before he embarked on his shooting spree, Auvinen posted a lengthy apologia on the internet. Styling himself a “social Darwinist”, he said that natural selection appeared not to be working any more — had maybe even gone into reverse. He had noticed that “stupid, weak-minded people reproduce faster than intelligent, strong-minded ones”. The gene pool was sure to deteriorate if society continued to guarantee the survival of the second-rate. He had pondered what to do about this problem. He understood that life was just a meaningless coincidence, the outcome of a long series of random mutations, so there might not be much point in doing anything at all. But eventually he had decided he would do his bit by becoming a natural selector, aping the pitiless indifference of nature.

Auvinen left a special plea for his motivation to be taken seriously and for the world not merely to write him off as a psychopath, or to blame cult movies, computer games, television or heavy metal music, before concluding: “No mercy for the scum of the Earth! Humanity is overrated. It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”

Darwin is often held up as a hero of the modern age, who releases us from many aspects of ethics and morality and in a postmodern way firmly establishes individual/community/cultural relativism.  The freedom from authoritative ethics given by a divine creator also inevitably leads to a nihilistic lack of purpose and reason.   Eugenics and Nazi Germany are the direct descendants of Darwin, yet little of the ethical implications of Darwinian evolution (one’s that Darwin himself reached) are taught to our students, but they are simply allowed to reach those conclusions on their own.  Yet many churches in mainline denominations celebrate Darwin on an annual basis during evolution weekend.  They think themselves enlightened, educated and progressive, yet the reality is that they are teaching a philosophy whose implications are eugenics, violence, and death.  Thinking themselves wise, they have become foolish and exchanged the life-giving objectively true message of the gospel for a morally bankrupt, ethically depraved false philosophy leading their disciples down the wide road of destruction.  

A remarkable friendship!

A buried solution to Global Warming

By accident I ran across this fascinating Newsweek article about one of my favorite hypocritical politicians Mr. Al Gore.  Much of the article is about his courageous fight to save our planet, but buried in the article was a fascinating discussion about soils.

The potential for soils to absorb more of the CO2 that our utilities, factories, and vehicles spew poses a dilemma for Gore, one of two where his scientific and political instincts collide. With better management, soils could sequester much more carbon than they do now. The question is how much more. Soils scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University was surprised to get a call last summer ("Vice President Gore would like to talk to you") that began, "I have 15 or 20 questions about soils and climate for you." Lal calculates that if more farmers adopted mulching, no-till farming, and the use of cover crops and manure, 3,700 million acres worldwide could sequester 1 gigaton per year of CO2, roughly 12 percent of annual global emissions. Other experts are even more sanguine. "If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit," says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. The political clash is this: if you tell people soils can be managed to suck up lots of our carbon emissions, it sounds like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and could decrease what little enthusiasm there is for reducing those emissions—as one of Gore’s assistants told LaSalle in asking him to dial down his estimate. (He didn’t.)

So let me see if I understand this scientist and this article.  Mr. Gore contacts this soils scientist and asks him to “dial down his estimate” that particular methods of farming can actually cause the soils to absorb all the CO2 emissions that humans are creating, because it might not be politically expedient for his position?  Why are we not hearing about this solution from the mainstream press?  Maybe they too would not find it acceptable within their “progressive” circles?  It probably would not help in facilitating the agenda of more and more government?  So I guess we won’t be reading much more about this possible affordable solution.