Saturday, May 4, 2013

op ed review 5/5



THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Poll: Obamacare Support Slumps to 35 Percent
The most destructive Obamacare tax increases are just around the bend
Sen. Reid: “More funding needed to prevent ObamaCare from becoming 'train wreck'”
Anxious Democrats fear a botched implementation of ObamaCare could dash their hopes of controlling the House and Senate for President Obama’s last two years in office.

9.5 Million People Have Left the Workforce Under Obama, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Go figure….:Wealthy, not middle class, support Obama.  According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, it's the rich -- not the poor or middle class -- who back Obama more despite his 2012 campaign attacking the rich.

According to a new report President Obama has spent twice as many hours on vacation and golf (976 hours) as he has in economic meetings of any kind (474.4 hours).

“Pentagon May Court Martial Soldiers Who Share Christian Faith”
After the story broke, the Pentagon scrambled to clarify its position:  “It's OK to evangelize. But it's not OK to proselytize.” Retired Lt Gen Jerry Boykin: “It’s a matter of what do they mean by "proselytizing."

President Obama is scheduled to visit Mexico and Costa Rica later this week. The last time he visited Mexico, taxpayers paid nearly $2.5 million for hotel and “vehicle rental.”

Miami’s Catholic archbishop said establishing “gay marriage” would corrupt the natural setting for rearing children by a mother and a father, and further spread “moral relativism,” one of the signs that democracy is “on its way to totalitarianism.”

Terrorists on the dole:  The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was apparently too dangerous to be allowed to go to Mecca, but not Boston. Saudi Arabia unofficially says that if Janet Napolitano read her mail, the Boston bombing might have been prevented.

On May 23, 1,400 delegates to the annual BSA meeting will be asked to vote on a resolution that will allow openly homosexual and transgender teenage boys to join the ranks of scouting. The resolution doesn't allow a gay adult to go camping with boys, but may put an "experienced" gay 17-year-old inside a tent with a 12-year-old boy on his first campout. An open letter to the BSA delegates: “Ten Reasons to Vote "NO"”
A new threat to the organization is being raised by the proposed rule change: It could go broke. Critics say the rule change could financially starve the 103-year-old group in two ways: Church-based troops, which comprise the majority of Boy Scout units, are threatening to leave, and the potential for sexual harassment and bullying could lead to massive legal fees.
More political correctness in scouting:  In the future all Eagle Scout candidates will be required to earn a merit badge in climate change junk science. The Sustainability merit badge debuted at the 2013 National Scout Jamboree.

For decades the U.S. government has knowingly given illegal immigrants food stamps, according to a former certification case worker who denounced the costly practice back in the 1980s but was essentially ordered to keep a lid on it
USDA flyer assures applicants: “We Don't Check Immigration Status for Food Stamps”

Victoria Toensing, Republican Counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, says her client, a State Department official now considered a whistle-blower in the investigation of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, has been "threatened" by Obama administration officials. Toensing claimed the threats relate to ending the careers of those with information about the attacks who cooperate with investigators and testify.

“Immigration Bill Gives Amnestied Residents 'Immediate' Access to Welfare”   (Gives new meaning to Leno’s joke about “undocumented democrats”.)
The immigration bill would instantly gut the popular E-Verify system that is widely used to exclude illegal immigrants from jobs, and then create an enforcement gap for several years before the arrival of a replacement system.
The Senate’s “Gang of Eight” has released a new version of the immigration bill that contains 999 references to waivers, exemptions and political discretion.

Abortion doctor’s lawyer plays race card, accusing prosecutors of “manipulating” the case to engage in an essentially “racist” prosecution of the man charged with four counts of first-degree murder, killing babies born alive during abortions by snipping their spinal cords with surgical scissors.
DC abortion doctor: “Pro-lifers with video cameras are ‘terrorists’”

Duke Univ. Raises Student Fees to Pay for Sex Change Surgery
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Rich Lowry
The new climate deniers

There are few things sadder than the “climate denier.” He ignores the data and neglects the latest science. His rhetoric and policy proposals are dangerously disconnected from reality. He can’t recalibrate to take account of the latest evidence because, well, he’s a denier.

The new climate deniers are the liberals who, despite their obsession with climate change, have managed to miss the biggest story in climate science, which is that there hasn’t been any global warming for about a decade and a half.

“Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,” The Economist writes. “The world added roughly 100 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, no more warming.

The Economist has been decidedly alarmist on global warming through the years, so it deserves credit for pausing to consider why the warming trend it expected to continue has mysteriously stalled out.

The deniers feel no such compunction. They speak as if it is still the late 1990s, when measurements of global temperature had been rising for two decades. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.” In a passage devoted to global warming, though, he didn’t mention the latest trend in global warming.

A denier feels the same righteous sense of certitude now, when warming has stopped, as he did a decade ago. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently opined that “sensible people accept the fact of warming” — but apparently not the fact of no-warming. He scorned those “who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course.” Does he include James Hansen, the famous NASA scientist, among these dastardly manipulators? No one this side of Al Gore has warned as persistently about global warming as Hansen. He nonetheless admits that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

None of this means that the Earth didn’t get hotter in the 20th century, or that carbon emissions don’t tend to create a warmer planet, or that warming won’t necessarily begin again. It does mean that we know less about the fantastically complex global climate system than global-warming alarmists have been willing to admit. The Economist notes the work of Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Britain. He has found that if global temperatures stay the same for a few more years, they will fall below the range of 20 climate models. In other words, the scientific “consensus” will have been proven wrong.

Why the stall in warming? According to The Economist, maybe we’ve overestimated the warming impact of clouds. Or maybe some clouds cool instead of warm the planet. Or maybe the oceans are absorbing heat from the atmosphere. Although the surface temperature of the oceans hasn’t been rising, perhaps the warming is happening deep down. James Hansen thinks new coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the stasis in temperatures.

Hansen writes that knowing more about the effect of aerosols on the climate “requires accurate knowledge of changes in aerosol amount, size distribution, absorption and vertical distribution on a global basis — as well as simultaneous data on changes in cloud properties to allow inference of the indirect aerosol forcing via induced cloud changes.” Is that all? He ruefully notes that the launch of a satellite with a sensor to measure all of this failed, with no follow-up mission planned.

Hey, but don’t worry. The science is all “settled.”

What is beginning to seem more likely is that the “sensitivity” of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated. If so, the deniers will be the last to admit it.


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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“The immigration debate gives Congress a chance to re-evaluate the wisdom of sacrificing Americans for political correctness by sending invitations to prospective citizens in parts of the world where nearly everybody hates America and all it stands for. This phenomenon illustrates the need for vigilance, to make sure immigrants will become productive, prosperous Americans. Sadly, it seems the primary motivation of the president and his party on immigration reform is to create 11 million new Democratic voters with an amnesty, and hang the cost."
                                -The Washington Times

"Perhaps you noticed that President Obama became the first president to speak at a Planned Parenthood gala, without ever mentioning the word abortion. This new poll suggests why: 55 percent of Americans, including 38 percent of pro-lifers, do not know that Planned Parenthood provides any abortions. Just 6 percent of all Americans know Planned Parenthood clinics perform more than 300,000 abortions each year. Alongside the refusal of television and other media to cover the sensationally disturbing Gosnell trial, this fact alone exposes the extent of the Left's cultural domination of the media-infotainment landscape."
                               -Maggie Gallagher
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BOOKS
Walter Williams:  Professor Craig Frisby’s most recent book is "Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students."   “There's no way full justice can be given to this excellent work in the space of this column, so I'll highlight a few valuable insights he makes that would help educators do a better job with minority students…..Quack multiculturalism is the name Frisby gives to the vision of multiculturalism that promotes the falsehoods and distortions that dominate today's college agenda, sold under various names such as "valuing diversity," "being sensitive to cultural differences" and "cultural competence." He identifies different brands of multiculturalism such as boutique, Kumbayah, light-and-fluffy, and bean-counting multiculturalism. Insider language used to promote multiculturalism includes terms such as "practice tolerance," "celebrate diversity," "equity with excellence" and "differences are not deficits."
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GLOBALONEY
April has been a freakishly cold month across much of the northern USA, bringing misery to millions of sun-starved and winter-weary residents from the Rockies to the Midwest.
Second Coldest Start To Spring In US History
Amazing, Historic Snowstorm From Texas to Michigan
‘We Could Be In For A Cooling Period That Lasts 200-250 Years’ Russian Scientists Claim

Another electric-Car maker files for bankruptcy.

Democrats warn global warming could push women into prostitution.
“When apocalyptic religious cults like Warmism fail the reality test, their devotees get desperate and unintentionally start producing self-parodies. The mass slow-mo mental implosion can be hilarious. We have just such an instance involving a group of House Democrats. The victim mentality is leaping to the rescue for global warming….. Global warming can make you a whore!”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/the_most_bizarre_prediction_of_global_warming_doom_ever.html __________________________________________________________________________

LEFTIST WATCH
The Five Loopiest Guardian (UK newspaper of the left) Articles of All Time (paraphrasing)  #1 Take time out of your day to hug a pedophile. #2 Conservatives are morons. #3 Communism wasn’t all bad  #4 North Korea is the victim of press bias

“Disgraced former EPA Chief Used Fake Name to Coordinate with Liberal Groups”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a gathering in Cleveland that childcare for all should be the next “pillar” of American government, ie, the next entitlement.

“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.” Those words were recently written by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in a column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.

Your cable box is about to tilt a little further to the left this summer, thanks to the media company that brought you Al Gore´s "An Inconvenient Truth" and Matt Damon´s anti-fracking movie "Promised Land." Participant Media is set to launch Pivot beginning August 1. The new cable network is expected to have a 40+ million audience designed to lure young millennials, 18 - 34-year-olds, via a new tactic: social change.
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ISLAM
In Egypt, more than 70 percent of the public supports shariah law, and almost 90 percent also support executing those who leave Islam.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas again insisted at a two-day “Freedom and Dignity” conference in Ramallah last week that Palestinians who murder Israeli Jews cannot be punished.
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SECOND AMENDMENT
America’s most feared economist:  You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they start being automatically referred to as "discredited."….no one is called "discredited" by liberals more often than the inestimable economist John Lott, author of the groundbreaking book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws . Lott´s economic analysis of the effect of concealed-carry laws on violent crime is the most thoroughly vetted study in the history of economics, perhaps in the history of the world.

46,455 Background Checks per day For Gun Purchases Under Obama

Recall petition drives are well under way for four pro-gun control Democrats in the Colorado state legislature.
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CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY
When Republicans woke up to defeat on Election Day 2012, it was clear that they had been outfoxed and outmaneuvered by President Obama and his campaign. Now it´s clear why. Under the political radar, Team Obama made an unprecedented effort to understand the voters and speak their language, slicing and dicing the electorate with a sophistication and savvy that the Republicans couldn´t match and are still scrambling to replicate. The result was the rebuilding and in some cases expansion of Obama´s original coalition from 2008, and a remarkable comprehension of what really motivated voters in 2012.

“James O’Keefe’s New Gonzo Army”

How to respond to being called ´judgmental´

Tea Party Group Drafting Sarah Palin to Run for Alaska Senate
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ARTICLES
Among various unwanted truths that grown-ups of the Western world have to contend with these days, here’s one that doesn’t get nearly the traction it deserves: The days of the modern welfare state look to be numbered.

National Review unloads on Marco Rubio.  “Rubio’s Folly”

The murderer is the new celebrity. He emerges out of nowhere with a rags to mass murder story, and is swiftly accorded all the trappings of fame. Reporters track down anyone who knew him to learn about his childhood and his main influences. Relatives and friends both contribute fuzzy anecdotes, mostly indistinguishable from the ones they would present if he were competing on American Idol or running for president.

Krauthammer on border security:Ask Obama why he’s got a fence around the White House”

Pruden:  Political correctness is always petty, often infuriating, and sometimes does no permanent harm. But occasionally it’s a threat to the nation’s security. When a paperclip general at the Pentagon surrenders to the enemy at the first sound of the popguns, the harm can be permanent.

Star Parker:  “How abortion has changed America”   “Let’s be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is….. As our reverence for life has diminished, so has our reverence for the institutions that surround and support it…. Scholars at the Brookings Institution observed in 1996 that Roe v Wade contributed to the collapse of marriage and the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births. The idea that children were part of a sacred institution called marriage started disappearing…. Soon, as our resources diminish to care for our growing aging population, we will start dealing with our elderly as we do our unborn. But if everything is meaningless, who cares?”

“How did we get to the point where so many people in the media accept the murder of full term babies born alive as a woman's right which must be protected?”
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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Keep sex and politics out of scouting.

30 Reasons To Dislike Barack Obama “As a conservative, picking out things you don´t like about Barack Obama is kind of like pointing to the wettest part of the ocean. It also goes beyond politics. Not only is Barack Obama wrong politically, he´s not a good guy, "cool," or even moderately likable. To the contrary, he´s one of the nastiest, least admirable people in politics and he gets by based on a phony persona he created when he ran for President in 2008…”

Amazing dog story.  Warning:  disturbing photos; kleenex alert!!
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WISE WORDS
"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."
                       -Jean Baptiste Colbert

"While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian."
                      -George Washington
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LATE NITE
Leno:   President Obama is in Mexico. He'll be on hand to celebrate Mexico's economic successes over the last few years. See, that’s how it works now. If President Obama wants to celebrate an economic success, he actually has to leave the country....The U.S. government apparently spent millions of dollars in cash to fund various dubious government projects in Afghanistan — including solar panels and wind farms that never work. No, I'm sorry. That's what we did here. I had it backwards…..President Obama held a press conference today. He said he still wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, but he doesn't know how to do it. He should do what he always does. Declare it a small business and tax it out of existence.

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