National Debt Passes $13,000,000,000,000!

The following comes from Alice Gomstyn, of ABC News, an article titled, “National Debt Soars Past 13 Trillion.

“On Tuesday, the national debt stood at $12,995,779,490,444.52, according to the Treasury Department’s national debt-tracking website TreasuryDirect.gov.

The Treasury Department did not immediately return a request from ABC News for comment.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., wasted no time in sounding an alarm about the new debt milestone. In a statement released today, McConnell cited the debt in his criticism of what’s called the tax extenders bill, which would extend unemployment benefits and the amount of time unemployed workers could stay on their group health plan through COBRA, as well as certain tax cuts. McConnell said the bill would cost $130 billion.

“As early as today, we’ll reach a dubious milestone in America: a $13 trillion national debt — the first time in history we’ve crossed this frightening threshold. This extenders bill would add another $130 billion on top of that. …This is fiscal recklessness.”

Comment:  How’s graduate student Obama doing, folks……spending your money like a college kid.

Governor Christie….At Last, A Man of Courage Who Speaks Big Truth

It’s the video, folks, not the commentary here that is important. 

I think of the dozens of  public school teachers I had from 1939 through1952.  I think of how grateful I am to these elegant, well educated, learned, gifted adult human beings…..nearly all of them old maids ages 40 to nearly 70.  

Thirty six or more students per class room.  No police walking the halls.  No disciplinarians, psychologists, sex orientation prowlers, no drugs, no black studies  ”this” and footbath “fountains” or hidden faces “that” or 15 year olds celebrating stretching their feet up on an empty desk expressing their freedom.   No belly buttons and buttocks parts showing, no jeans.  No one looked like a bum.   No one spoke like a bum. 

No one swore.

Unlike the spoiled, forever adolescent, narcissistic modern American female occupying space in today’s American citadels of public school “education”, where  few including the teachers can write, read, add or draw or explain, …..where  sex fevers run high and are tended to as profoundly as learning knowledge used to be tended, these spinsters were at the top of their society. 

They had reached the heights of the most sacred halls of the human experience….the classroom where knowledge and requirements to recognize knowledge and use knowledge were taught.   Where the student child and adolescent were expected to learn about the human struggle and to demonstrate proof that they would be able to carry on into the future better able to solve their problems, known and unknown. 

For the single, learned American female interested in amassing knowledge or commanding a skill, teaching “school” was the highest intellectual station she could achieve in those days. 

In my public school life time they became a dying breed.    Teaching learning was no longer valued at the university education departments.

The American public school of my experience was a MALE institution whose major stars in the show were FEMALE….females, themselves devoted students for life, devoted to share their knowledge and discipline in a professional manner to the next generation to face problems, personal, professional with dignity and learnings to become a better person  and a more  responsible voting citizen in America’s democracy. 

In contrast we have the American public school of today.  Failures void of knowledge, teaching failures;  the blind leading the blind, adolescents tethered to adolescents.   

In the video below a teacher upset with Governor Christie for New Jersey’s bankruptcy, thought herself underpaid:  “You’re not compensating me for my education!  You’re not compensating me for my experience!” she screamed with modern form.  Not a breath about the likelihood she is overpaid for what she accomplishes.

Yet,  the pay of those teachers at Horace Mann elementary, and Central High School public schools in St. Paul  in the era of my learning, had considerable less purchasing power then than New Jersey or Minnesota public school teachers’ dollars of  today’s  Obama world.

Governor Christie was confronted by the spoiled, the  self-centered, adolescent modern poverty stricken female  teacher “victim” of  American “tyranny”.

Mr. Christie was robust and direct in his response.  The first MALE response from a government official in a long time.  Click on for your own assessment”.

http://www.allamericanblogger.com/10802/gov-christie-tells-teacher-to-quit-if-shes-unhappy/

Income Down, Bonuses and Benefits Up in the New York “Culture Vulture” World

CULTURE VULTURES

“New York City’s taxpayer-funded museums and cultural attractions suffered their worst economic crisis in decades, but still paid executives fat salaries and bonuses — and doled out perks like housing allowances and club memberships, says the New York Post. 

Hammered by the recession, with donations down and endowments shrinking, the institutions saw revenue drop by 50 percent in some cases, according to tax filings for the year ending June 30, 2009. The groups cut hundreds of jobs and slashed programs.   Yet bosses at many of the 33 museums, zoos and other attractions hardly felt the hit.  They continued to rake in six- and seven-figures in salaries and benefits, says the Post. 

For example: 

• Suzanne Brenner, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chief investment officer, got a $354,923 bonus, bringing her total compensation to $1.2 million in 2008; yet the income from investments she supervised plummeted from $270 million to $112 million.
• Carnegie Hall, meanwhile, paid its executive director, Sir Clive Gillinson, $965,538 in salary and benefits in 2008; he also got a membership in an undisclosed dining club “for business use only.”
• At Lincoln Center, President Reynold Levy’s compensation came to $1.18 million in 2008; the arts group also pays some travel expenses for companions who accompany executives on trips.
• While budget crunchers were threatening to fire the Bronx Zoo’s porcupine, Society Director Steven Sanderson’s salary and benefits were $1 million in 2008, including an Upper East Side apartment.  

At the American Museum of Natural History, director Ellen Futter and others got a 5 percent pay cut in early 2009.  But Futter’s 2008 pay package of $967,038 included $702,009 in base salary, a $50,000 bonus and an Upper East Side home.  Futter’s $1 million compensation in 2007 put her among the highest-paid art museum directors in the country, says the Post.” 

Source: Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein, “Culture vulture$,” New York Post, May 24, 2010. 

Comment:  The Left calls Big Business moguls “Fat Cats”…..even  the cats at Goldman Sacks who fattened Obama kitty by nearly one billion dollars in the graduate student’s successful run for the presidency in 2008. 

I wonder how many millions these Culture Vultures donate to Obama’s Marxist cause?

Ed Koch Wonders About Obama Standing Up for America

Ed Koch wrote the following article at realclearpolitics:

“We are at war with radical Islam, and that war will go on for many years.

For me, the question is this: will the secular Western civilization shared by America and Europe, which allows us to enjoy life and its creature comforts, still be standing at the end of that war? Or will radical Islam, with an aggressive culture that treasures martyrdom and death over life, prevail?

The vast majority of Muslims, of course, are peace-loving. The fanaticism found among the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia is not found in many of the countries where a billion, 400 million Muslims live. Nevertheless, we know that radical Islamists want to convert us to their faith, either voluntarily or, if necessary, by force. Among the Islamist radicals there is a special hatred of Jews and Hindus and, to a lesser extent, of Christians. The hatred of Jews is such that some of the leaders of radical groups have called for the killing of Jewish civilians all over the world. For some, the Muslim rule is to permit Jews and Christians – as monotheists – to practice their religions, provided that they accept the supremacy of Islam and pay a poll tax – so described by Bernard Lewis, America’s foremost scholar on Islam.

Mr. Lewis states “This tolerance is limited to monotheists and recipients of what Islam recognizes as a revelation. It does not apply in any circumstance to those who are seen as polytheists and idolaters. For them the rule was indeed conversion or death, though the latter was rarely enforced and in the past was often commuted to enslavement. The Wahhabi demand, as far as I know, is not that Christians and Jews convert to Islam, but that they accept the supremacy of Islam and the rule of the Muslim state. On that condition, they may continue in the practice of their religion.”

All this is by way of preface to a current controversy here in New York City concerning the construction of a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero at the World Trade Center site where near 3,000 people lost their lives in acts of terror perpetrated by 19 Muslim hijackers, 15 of whom were from Saudi Arabia, who deliberately flew two planes into the twin towers.

Understandably, but nevertheless wrong, there are those who object to the construction of this mosque, believing its presence would insult the memory of the victims of the terror. In my opinion, and I believe the opinion of many others, including the local community planning board and the local elected political leaders, it would sully the good name of the United States and New York City were the members of the mosque which is permissible under existing zoning laws, prohibited from constructing it. While no one can be sure what activities will take place there, that is true of any religious institution. It also follows that none may violate the law with impunity.

What distinguishes the United States is our pluralism and tolerance for minority groups, religions of every persuasion and acceptance of the rights of those with policies and philosophies different than the prevailing views of the majority, provided they are non-violent and observe the law.

Having said that, and believing in our tolerance for others, I believe we must be willing to defend our people and country against all attacks that are violent – tantamount to war – as well as those attacks that are unfair and intended to humble and denigrate our nation. It is infuriating to see Turkey, an actual NATO ally, and Brazil, a neighbor and trade partner here in the Western hemisphere, collude with Iran which has said through its president that it wants the U.S. to disappear and makes clear every day its enmity and threats directed at us and our ally, Israel. It is infuriating that North Korea threatens the world with its nuclear and missile arsenal and sinks a South Korean destroyer with a torpedo that an examining commission found to have North Korean markings, and no immediate military retaliatory action is taken, out of fear of consequences. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress had failed to assist in the defense of Great Britain in its war with Germany, and Great Britain had gone down to defeat because early on we refused to become Great Britain’s supplier of naval ships and other war materials out of fear of the consequences, we here in the U.S. might be speaking German today instead of English. We would certainly no longer be the great and sovereign nation we are.

Have we lost the will to stand up to the bullies of the world? The administration points with pride to the fact that it is proceeding with sanctions against Iran at the Security Council and that it succeeded in bringing Russia and China to the point where they too have agreed to vote for sanctions. To do that, the U.S. had to agree to Russia’s delivering arms to Iran, e.g., an anti-aircraft system that would be used to shoot down U.S. and Israeli planes that might in the future seek to eliminate Iran’s nuclear facilities. With respect to China and getting its consent to vote with us, we dropped sanction measures that would have crippled Iran’s banking and financial institutions and prohibited the sale of gasoline to Iran which has no conversion facilities, which would have devastated its economy.

Some will say that pointing out these failures of will is jingoistic. I believe these failures to stand up for allies and most importantly to stand up for ourselves is why we are taken less seriously by nations throughout the world than should be the case. When others fully respected us, we were able to keep the world at peace. We are losing that ability with each passing day, as we demonstrate our unwillingness to teach the bullies of the world the lessons they deserve.

Speak softly and carry a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt said. President Obama speaks apologetically and carries no stick at all. No wonder North Korea torpedoed that South Korean warship, something they would not have done in all probability if China had not quietly approved. No wonder Brazil and Turkey thumb their noses at us. We have become a laughingstock.

Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City.

Comment:  I have much less faith in Barack Husein Obama than does former New York City Mayor, Ed Koch.  I think the president is a cronic misspeaker of the truth.  He is a graduate of Princeton and Columbia but remains in graduate school influenced by his twenty two year membership in the “God Damn America” church of Jeremiah Wright, the president’s father figure. 

Mr. Obama has made his country become a laughingstock. 

Moral Dead in Connecticut Back Moral Dead Blumenthal

Blumenthal Camp: Vietnam Issue Behind Us

Richard Blumenthal went from Senate shoe-in to political punch line after the New York Times reported on his past misstatements of his Vietnam-era service. But in the span of the week, his campaign now argues that he has successfully navigated through the immediate crisis to the point where Democrats can feel confident again that the party will hold his seat come November.

To bolster that argument, the Connecticut attorney general’s campaign released results of an internal poll showing that he maintained a substantial advantage over one of his potential general election foes, WWE executive Linda McMahon. The Greenberg Quinlan Rosner survey, conducted May 19-20, found Blumenthal leading 55-40. A Rasmussen poll released last week found the same matchup much tighter.

“His deep roots and connection with people in Connecticut make him a very tough guy to knock down,” a polling memo argues.

In the latest effort to counter the story, Blumenthal today penned a personal apology in the Hartford Courant. “I have made mistakes and I am sorry. I truly regret offending anyone,” he wrote.

When the Times story first broke, it was clear that the immediate 48 hours would be critical to the survival of his campaign. Within hours, the campaign issued a strong statement on the matter and advised a press conference the next day. Blumenthal, surrounded by veterans, explained that he misspoke but defended his record. By Friday, the Connecticut Democratic Party nominated him by acclamation at its convention; statements of support — some stronger than others — also came from national party officials and the White House.

“This ended up being a textbook case in crisis management,” said a Democratic strategist who was involved in the effort.

The McMahon campaign called the latest apology too little too late.

“The statement Dick Blumenthal released in the dead of night yesterday cannot be construed as an apology because it ignores what is at the heart of the controversy surrounding him: false and misleading statements designed to deceive,” campaign spokesman Ed Patru said. “He is sorry for not being ‘clear or precise’ in his word choice and he is sorry for ‘offending anyone,’ but until Dick Blumenthal is sorry for purposely embellishing his military record and deceiving the people of Connecticut, his apology is a hollow one.”

The Democratic strategist acknowledged that the issue can never entirely be put to bed, but that the degree to which they have navigated out of a potential disaster bodes well.

“He’s got to be careful that he doesn’t make any new misstatements going forward,” the strategist said. “But at the end of the day, even people who are nervous or who may not like what happened with him are going to rally behind him, because he’s a guy who’s been fighting from Connecticut for 20 years versus a woman who’s been making money off of whatever you want to call the WWE.”

And if the opponent is not McMahon, who won support at her party’s convention this weekend, but instead Rob Simmons — would it be a bigger issue then?

“Maybe, if the whole election was about Vietnam service maybe,” he said. “But if the election is about a guy who’s been fighting for Connecticut for 20 years versus a guy who was in Congress fighting for the Bush agenda, I think the Blumenthal people would take that.”

The above article was written by Kyle Trygstad and Mike Memoli at Politics Nation.

Comment:  We in Minnesota can’t be too smug about the morally dead….   We have Al Franken as U. S.Senator who sits at the very top the trees with  these morbids.  But at least Fibber Al never, to my knowledge, lied about his Vietnam heroism.  No one would have believed him anyway.   The Minnesota public never questioned his silence on the matter.   The people instinctively knew Al could never  amass the courage to serve his country anywhere honorably. 

Al is good at pretending about God.  Al is good at pretending about Israel.  Al is good at pretending.

But he never yet has misplaced words about serving bravely in Vietnam or any other war.  Al has yet even to  misplace words about “serving” in the United States Senate.   No one would believe him anyway had he made such a claim.   Perhaps he knows himself and his public better than is imagined.

Connecticut’s Al Franken is much worse that our Al Franken.  But, no matter.  The modern Democrat Party has an exceptionally wide and all encompasing unbrella as long as one is a victim. 

Mr. Blumenthan is, indeed, a victim.  He is Richard Blumenthal, noted  liar par excellence who will be representing the eastern state called Connecticut in the U. S. Senate soon.  He should be booed whereever he appears.

Posted by Mike Memoli at 03:50 PM | Send to a Friend | Email Author | Print | Permalink |

Questions at the New York Times Regarding Global Warming Myth

LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

“Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.

“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”

Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.

And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them.

Politicians and activists say such attitudes will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.”

The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.

Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.

Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data. Then there was the unusually cold winter in Northern Europe and the United States, which may have reinforced a perception that the Earth was not warming. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history.)

Asked about his views on global warming on a recent evening, Brian George, a 30-year-old builder from southeast London, mused, “It was extremely cold in January, wasn’t it?”

In a telephone interview, Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert, said that the shift in opinion “hadn’t helped” efforts to come up with strong policy in a number of countries. But he predicted that it would be overcome, not least because the science was so clear on the warming trend.

“I don’t think it will be problematic in the long run,” he said, adding that in Britain, at least, politicians “are ahead of the public anyway.” Indeed, once Mr. Cameron became prime minister, he vowed to run “the greenest government in our history” and proposed projects like a more efficient national electricity grid.

Scientists have meanwhile awakened to the public’s misgivings and are increasingly fighting back. An editorial in the prestigious journal Nature said climate deniers were using “every means at their disposal to undermine science and scientists” and urged scientists to counterattack. Scientists in France, the Netherlands and the United States have signed open letters affirming their trust in climate change evidence, including one published on May 7 in the journal Science.

In March, Simon L. Lewis, an expert on rain forests at the University of Leeds in Britain, filed a 30-page complaint with the nation’s Press Complaints Commission against The Times of London, accusing it of publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” about climate change, his own research and remarks he had made to a reporter.

“I was most annoyed that there seemed to be a pattern of pushing the idea that there were a number of serious mistakes in the I.P.C.C. report, when most were fairly innocuous, or not mistakes at all,” said Dr. Lewis, referring to the report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Meanwhile, groups like the wildlife organization WWF have posted articles like “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” providing stock answers to doubting friends and relatives, on their Web sites.

It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world.

In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007.

Then came articles contending that the 2007 report was inaccurate on a host of other issues, including African drought, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level, and the economic impact of severe storms. Officials from the climate panel said the articles’ claims either were false or reflected minor errors like faulty citations that in no way diluted the evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, successfully demanded in February that some German newspapers remove misleading articles from their Web sites. But such reports have become so common that he “wouldn’t bother” to pursue most cases now, he added.

The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides. “I’m still concerned about climate change, but it’s become very confusing,” said Sandra Lawson, 32, as she ran errands near Hyde Park.

The above article was written by Elisabeth Rosenthal for the New York Times.  This paper has been politically moved to avoid news challenging the Leftwing tenet that the Earth is in dire danger of  being destroyed  by white man’s reckless exhaling of carbon dioxide, which is causing an outrageous increase in earthly temperatures due to doom glaciers and other Minnesotans unless we invest in windmills.

Obama’s Expanding Government Shrinks Private Paychecks

Dennis Cauchon of USA Today wrote the following article on the shrinking publica sector pay check…….the public sector is the part of society that creates wealth…..the government sector is the part of society that spends whatever wealth the private sector has created…..don’t forget.

Fromt USA Today:  “Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds. At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. “This is really important,” Grimes says.

START YOUR OWN: Older workers become entrepreneursSALARY WIZARD: What are you worth?JOBS OUTLOOK: Latest data for all states, 384 metrosRECOVERY WATCH: Tracking the economy

The recession has erased 8 million private jobs. Even before the downturn, private wages were eroding because of the substitution of health and pension benefits for taxable salaries.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that individuals received income from all sources — wages, investments, food stamps, etc. — at a $12.2 trillion annual rate in the first quarter.

Key shifts in income this year:

• Private wages. A record-low 41.9% of the nation’s personal income came from private wages and salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession began in December 2007.

•Government benefits. Individuals got 17.9% of their income from government programs in the first quarter, up from 14.2% when the recession started. Programs for the elderly, the poor and the unemployed all grew in cost and importance. An additional 9.8% of personal income was paid as wages to government employees.

The shift in income shows that the federal government’s stimulus efforts have been effective, says Paul Van de Water, an economist at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“It’s the system working as it should,” Van de Water says. Government is stimulating growth and helping people in need, he says. As the economy recovers, private wages will rebound, he says.

Economist Veronique de Rugy of the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University says the riots in Greece over cutting benefits to close a huge budget deficit are a warning about unsustainable income programs.

Economist David Henderson of the conservative Hoover Institution says a shift from private wages to government benefits saps the economy of dynamism. “People are paid for being rather than for producing,” he says.”

Comments:  Obama still assures his public he is not a Marxist.   He lies.

McClintock strikes a blow for representative government

After Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon sounded off on his views regarding Arizona’s new immigration law in front of a joint session of congress he was shamefully given a standing ovation by the democrats.  Representative Tom McClintock of California offered the following much more appropriate response which demonstrates that he, unlike president Obama and so many members of congress does still believe in and have respect for the American people and representative government:

If President Calderon wishes to participate in that debate, I invite him to obey our immigration laws, apply for citizenship, do what 600,000 LEGAL immigrants to our nation are doing right now, learn our history and our customs, and become an American.  And then he will have every right to participate in that debate.

Until then, I would politely invite him to have the courtesy while a guest of this Congress to abide by the fundamental rules of diplomacy between civilized nations not to meddle in each other’s domestic debates.

Blumenthal’s Own “A Few Misplaced Words” Tell America Who He Is

Paul Mirengoff raises a great question about the Richard Blumenthal scandal in his PowerLine revelation below. 

“What kind of a man would lie about serving in Vietnam?” 

John F. Kerry served, but embellished and lied to bloat  his service.  This elitist was planning big things for himself to which, I believe it obvious, his ego  thought he deserved……An elitist….One who deserves to rise above others because he is who he is.  His lies never really hurt him.

How could this Richard Blumenthal think he could get away with it…..that no one would expose this disgusting cowardly side of himself?

Because he lives in Connecticut and he will get away with it.  He will become the next U.S. Senator from the state of Connecticut just as certain as elitist Elena Kagen will rise to the post she is certain she deserves.  She went to the elitist  schools and met other elitists who believe something special happens to folks who share the same powerful bigotries learned at the same bigotted institutions, protected by thought, word, and deed from mixing in the real world. 

This is what makes them do dangerous to the general public.

I don’t think I have ever met a person I have come to know well enough to remember who would so boldly and often repeat such a grossly foul description of who he really believes he is…..a serving hero of a war he never served.  I do believe one of our own Minnesota  U.S. Senator is capable of it.

After he was netted, Blumenthal continued to lie.    “I will not allow anyone to take a few misplaced words and impugn my record of service to our country!”  he angrily charged the open world obviously infatuated with his achievements. 

“A few misplaced words”, indeed.  So goes his moral compass. 

Paul Mirengoff  suggests who Bloomenthal really is in the example he offers in the article:

“It doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that Richard Blumenthal, who attempted to aggrandize himself by lying about his Vietnam-era military service, has also used his power as Connecticut’s attorney general to promote himself. According to Fergus Cullen, he has done this through high-profile lawsuits against businesses, most of which accomplished nothing other than to bring him publicity.

In one particularly egregious case, Blumenthal went after a relatively small business, Computers Plus Center, for $1.75 million in damages for allegedly selling state government machines without specified parts. Blumenthal also had the owner of the company, Gina Malapanis, arrested in her home on seven first-degree larceny charges.

The criminal charges, brought by Blumenthal with such fanfare, were ultimately dropped. In the civil action, Malapanis counter-sued. The jury awarded her $18 million. In a handwritten note, the jury foreman said the state had engaged in a “pattern of conduct” that harmed Ms. Malapanis’s reputation. He cited the state’s press releases impugning her integrity, some of which came from Blumenthal’s office.

Cullen cites other examples of Blumenthal’s high-handedness, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.”

Global Warming to Global Cooling!

ARE YOU READY FOR GLOBAL COOLING?

It’s not exactly Copenhagen or Kyoto, but the 700 scientists attending the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, had some chilling news of their own, says Investor’s Business Daily (IBD). 

“Global warming is over — at least for a few decades,” Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the gathering.  “However, the bad news is that global cooling is even more harmful to humans than global warming, and a cause for greater concern.” 

According to Easterbrook: 

• Rather than global warming at a rate of about 1 (degree) Fahrenheit per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030.
• These natural cycles have been occurring since the discovery of fire and mankind’s first carbon emissions, long before the invention of the wheel and the SUV. 

Easterbrook and the other scientists reported on sudden and natural climate fluctuations documented in the geologic record, all before 1945.  Two big climate changes occurred in the past 15,000 years, and another 60 smaller changes in the last 5,000 years.

Another presenter, James M. Taylor, an environmental policy expert and a fellow at the Heartland Institute, said that global cooling is happening now.  He pointed to data provided by the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab showing snow records from the last 10 years exceeding the records set in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Based on new analysis of ice cores from Greenland to Antarctica, global temperatures rose and fell from 9 to 15 degrees in a single century or less, a natural phenomenon Easterbrook called “astonishing.” 

Source: Editorial, “Are You Ready For Global Cooling?” Investor’s Business Daily, May 21, 2010. 

Comment: I found the above article at National Center for Policy Analysis.   

Before I entered high school in 1948, I already could identify a wide number of Minnesota songbirds.  No one had birdfeeders in those days.  They were on the horizon, however.

I particularly liked cardinals, not so much because of the beautiful red of the male bird, but because my favorite uncle lived in St. Lous and he had tickets to most Cardinal baseball games.

If it weren’t for the polio epidemics of 1946 I would have watched the Cardinals beat the Red Sox in the World Series with my uncle. 

Cardinals were not generally seen in Minnesota until the late 1950s.  They came with a touch of warming  here over the years  abetted by the growing popularity of bird feeders to carry these redbirds through the winter with reliable feed. 

There are countless shrubs and perennials which now are at home in the Twin City area as well, because of this little boost in the local ambient temperatures upping the climate zone from 4 to 4.5 and even 5 in certain locations in our metropolitan area. 

Personally, I am all for a zone 5 climate for the Twin Cities and have many of that zones plants in my grounds.   I have even planted some deciduous magnolias in the St. Cloud area that have thrived for more than a decade.

Usually the weather  killer for us, and it is a real killer, is a twenty below zero temperature before Thanksgiving Day with no snow on the ground with a bit of wind to go with the scene.

Let us pray that the politics stirred up by Al Gore forcasting gloom and doom is dead and buried.  The fraud occurred because the United Nations floated money around to hook anyone who would prove,  fairly or not, that the globe is soon going to boil over, and this catastrophe is caused by white man’s inventions.