Bow! Bow! The “DIRECTOR OF THE EARTH INSTITUTE” Speaks!!!

or rather “writes”…”Making Sense of the Climate Impasse”.  He is Jeffrey Sachs, more that DIRECTOR OF THE EARTH INSTITUTE, but Economist AND Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University…….the make believe institution of ‘higher learning’ Dennis attended and has enjoyed describing.

“All signs suggest that the planet is still hurtling headlong toward climatic disaster. The United States’ National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has issued its “State of the Climate Report” covering January-May. The first five months of this year were the warmest on record going back to 1880. May was the warmest month ever. Intense heat waves are currently hitting many parts of the world. Yet still we fail to act.

There are several reasons for this, and we should understand them in order to break today’s deadlock. First, the economic challenge of controlling human-induced climate change is truly complex. Human-induced climate change stems from two principal sources of emissions of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide): fossil-fuel use for energy and agriculture (including deforestation to create new farmland and pastureland).

Changing the world’s energy and agricultural systems is no small matter. It is not enough to just wave our hands and declare that climate change is an emergency. We need a practical strategy for overhauling two economic sectors that stand at the center of the global economy and involve the entire world’s population.

The second major challenge in addressing climate change is the complexity of the science itself. Today’s understanding of Earth’s climate and the human-induced component of climate change is the result of extremely difficult scientific work involving many thousands of scientists in all parts of the world. This scientific understanding is incomplete, and there remain significant uncertainties about the precise magnitudes, timing and dangers of climate change.

The general public naturally has a hard time grappling with this complexity and uncertainty, especially since the changes in climate are occurring over a timetable of decades and centuries, rather than months and years. Moreover, year-to-year and even decade-to-decade natural variations in climate are intermixed with human-induced climate change, making it even more difficult to target damaging behavior.

This has given rise to a third problem in addressing climate change, which stems from a combination of the economic implications of the issue and the uncertainty that surrounds it. This is reflected in the brutal, destructive campaign against climate science by powerful vested interests and ideologues, apparently aimed at creating an atmosphere of ignorance and confusion.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, America’s leading business newspaper, has run an aggressive editorial campaign against climate science for decades. The individuals involved in this campaign are not only scientifically uninformed, but show absolutely no interest in becoming better informed. They have turned down repeated offers by climate scientists to meet and conduct serious discussions about the issues.”

(Comment:  Wall Street Journal has run an anti climate science campaign for decades? the director of Earth Institute attests?  Now this is before Gore!  Was there an Earth before Gore?  What does one write about who runs “an aggressive editorial campaign against  climate science  for decades”? 

Does one encourage protests at the White House?  I don’t recall that happening.  Al Gore was only a U.S. Senator then and had not yet found a way to con the public and private out of $300,000,000 yet with his charm and tongue.)

“Major oil companies and other big corporate interests also are playing this game, and have financed disreputable public-relations campaigns against climate science. Their general approach is to exaggerate the uncertainties of climate science and to leave the impression that climate scientists are engaged in some kind of conspiracy to frighten the public. It is an absurd charge, but absurd charges can curry public support if presented in a slick, well-funded format.

If we add up these three factors — the enormous economic challenge of reducing greenhouse gases, the complexity of climate science, and deliberate campaigns to confuse the public and discredit the science — we arrive at the fourth and overarching problem: U.S. politicians’ unwillingness or inability to formulate a sensible climate-change policy.

The U.S. bears disproportionate responsibility for inaction on climate change, because it was long the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, until last year, when China overtook it. Even today, per capita U.S. emissions are more than four times higher than China’s. Yet, despite America’s central role in global emissions, the U.S. Senate has done nothing about climate change since ratifying the United Nations climate-change treaty 16 years ago.

When Barack Obama was elected U.S. president, there was hope for progress. Yet, while it is clear that Obama would like to move forward on the issue, so far he has pursued a failed strategy of negotiating with senators and key industries to try to forge an agreement. Yet the special-interest groups have dominated the process, and Obama has failed to make any headway.

The Obama administration should have tried — and should still try — an alternative approach. Instead of negotiating with vested interests in the backrooms of the White House and Congress, Obama should present a coherent plan to the American people. He should propose a sound strategy over the next 20 years for reducing America’s dependence on fossil fuels, converting to electric vehicles, and expanding non-carbon energy sources such as solar and wind power. He could then present an estimated price tag for phasing in these changes over time, and demonstrate that the costs would be modest compared with the enormous benefits.

Strangely, despite being a candidate of change, Obama has not taken the approach of presenting real plans of action for change. His administration is trapped more and more in the paralyzing grip of special-interest groups. Whether this is an intended outcome, so that Obama and his party can continue to mobilize large campaign contributions, or the result of poor decision-making is difficult to determine — and may reflect a bit of both.

What is clear is that we are courting disaster as a result. Nature doesn’t care about our political machinations. And nature is telling us that our current economic model is dangerous and self-defeating. Unless we find some real global leadership in the next few years, we will learn that lesson in the hardest ways possible.”

Comment:  This entire shark fear piece is based on climate change as being too complex for citizens (and countless actual climate scientists who dispute Economist and Director of Earth Institute at Columbia University’s  claims that the Earth is going to explode from too much CO2…..I was waiting for more infomation…more discoveries other than financial and political why Mr. Director Sachs was making his claims. 

As with Mr. Obama, Mr. Jeffrey Sachs speechifies.  “WHERE’S THE MEAT?”

Michael Steele Must Go….Repeat “Must Go!”

Paul Mirengoff reports the following at PowerLine:

With the elections three short months away, RNC Chairman Michael Steele is focused. Unfortunately, he is focused, as always, on Michael Steele. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from his bizarre decision to try and set up meetings with foreign ambassadors to the United States.

Politico has obtained a message sent by an RNC intern last month to one such ambassador. It states, in part:

As you know, the November election is just 103 days away and the Chairman would like to extend to you an invitation to sit down either at the RNC or at your embassy to discuss the upcoming 2010 midterm elections. With literally hundreds of congressional seats up for grabs in just under four months, Chairman Steel [sic] would love to have the opportunity to discuss the Party’s outlook with you.

Apparently, it’s not unheard for a national party chairman to meet with foreign diplomats. But some Republican leaders say they are baffled as to why Steele would be working the diplomatic corps this close to the election, when there is so much else to be done. As former RNC chairman James Nicholson put it: “They can’t give any money and they can’t vote; I don’t know why you’d take time to [meet them].”

The answer probably lies not in what contact with diplomats can do for the party, but rather in what such contact can do for Steele. Politico explans:

Steele has long sought to cultivate foreign officials. As Maryland’s lieutenant governor he spent more than $60,000 of state money for at least seven trips overseas, heading to such places as France, Austria, South Africa and Israel for what his staff at the time said were trade missions.

After he left office in 2007, Steele was hired onto a global law firm, then called LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, in part because of the relationships he had developed abroad.

“Based in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office, he will focus on corporate securities, government relations and international affairs with an emphasis on Africa,” the firm announced when Steele joined, noting that as lieutenant governor he had been “deeply engaged in the state’s business and economic development activities, forging key international relationships to expand Maryland’s global economic interests.”

Steele, in short, appears to be working on his resume by trying to “forge” more “key international relationships.” He is looking forward to life after his time at the RNC, and so is nearly every Repubican I know.

Comment:  I was glad when Steele became Republican Party National Chairman.  He cut a good figure, articulate, sharp, clean cut, good carriage….seemed charming and intelligent.

But, what a flub.   He obviously stepped into a scene for which he was completely unqualified.   In a debate  he demonstrated he had no clue why in the American stereotype, Justice Is Blind.

The left will be quick to label my writings racist and this next one in particular,  but I am an American and believe them to be true and nothing but true in the main…..There is something dreadfully wrong with the education of the American Black to have caused such people of ability as Barack Obama and Michael Steele and Charlie Rangel, the so-called Reverends Jesse Jackson and “Goddamn America” Jeremiah Wright…and countless thousands and tens of thousands and millions to become so crippled intellectually and politically……and so often morally, as well.

The Party and the nation needs a conservative leader not a spender or self aggrandizer.

Blame Bush Is Alive and Well in Obamaland

The real reason Dems are tying GOP to Bush

UPDATE, 1:45 p.m.: A Democratic aide points out that the polling memo also contains empirical evidence that if the public is persuaded that voting Republican would be a return to Bush policies, it has a dramatic impact on voter attitudes:

If Americans believe that conservatives are espousing a return to the same economic ideas as those of the former President, the dynamic of the debate turns on its head. In two separate split sample questions, we tested President Obama’s economic plan against a generic conservative economic plan. When the conservative plan failed to mention President Bush, it handily out-polled the President’s agenda. When President Bush was inserted in the question, the Obama agenda easily won. In one split-sample, the difference was 49-points, in the other it was 23-points.

This is particularly pronounced among independents, the memo shows. It’s more proof that Bush remains a potent issue, and explains the current Dem strategy.
ORIGINAL POST:

As you know, Democrats have lately been banging away harder than ever at the message that a vote for Republicans this fall is a vote for none other than George W. Bush. In recent days Dems have shouted this argument in every venue available.

There’s a reason for this sudden aggressiveness, and it’s one that Dems won’t own up to publicly: The public may not yet be persuaded that a vote for Republicans is a vote to return to Bush’s policies.

Dems have been circulating a polling memo, by the centrist group Third Way, arguing that Bush’s economic policies remain deeply unpopular and that the public thinks those policies are to blame for the current mess. And, to be sure, multiple other polls show this. But the question is this: Does the public believe that electing Republicans now would represent a return to Bush policies?

There’s a finding buried in that same memo that hasn’t gotten attention, but it’s key. It suggests that the public doesn’t yet buy this:

Less than two years after leaving office, only 25% of Americans believe that if Republicans return to power in Congress their economic agenda will mean a return to former President Bush’s economic policies. 65% say that a Republican Congress will promote a “new economic agenda that is different from George W. Bush’s policies.” Even Democrats and liberals are unconvinced that a Republican Congress means a return to Bushanomics. And moderates and Independents, the key swing blocs in all major policy debates, have completely divorced congressional Republicans from the economic philosophy and failed policies of President Bush.

This has some Dems worrying that the central Dem message has yet to sink in with voters. Dems fear the current crop of Congressional Republicans may have achieved separation from Bush in the public mind, at least for now.

According to one very plugged in Dem strategist, Democrats are privately asking themselves whether they are partly to blame for that separation.

After the 2008 elections, which were all about Bush, Dems turned to governing and largely dialed down the argument that the current crop of Republicans is indistinguishable in policy terms from Bush. They worry that this lull has allowed Republicans to rebrand themselves as different from Bush, even if that brand remains unpopular.

And that’s why Dems are turning up the volume on the point that today’s Republican policies — the support for continuing Bush’s tax cuts, the embrace of deregulation, Paul Ryan’s push to do away with Social Security — show that voting GOP is voting for a return to Bush.

“Why in the world would we want to go back to the same economic agenda that lost jobs for eight years?” DCCC chief Chris Van Hollen asked on Meet the Press recently. “What are you going to get that’s different?”

The rub is that the public may not accept this yet. But Dems have a great deal at stake in making sure voters believe it.

By Greg Sargent  

Comment:  This leftwing offering by this Washington Post writer is a good example of what Dennis Prager has so often exposed regarding the Democrat Left, America’s Marxists.

For eight years the leaders of the Left in the Democrat Party had smeared or had encouraged  smearing  of a president had the support of nearly every American bureaucracy and institution to the point that this “Bush” became a hate figure.  So much so that for entertainment, a film was produced and circulated celebrating the 43rd American president’s assassination.

“Bush lied, People Died!” was the slogan pumped into that tiny morsel in the American brain which had room for truthful knowledge.   The American press pushed the propaganda.  The vast majority were trained to be leftwingers at J schools and thought as a unit about Bush, the Iraq enterprise, that the economic collapse of the housing industry was perpetrated by G. W. and have done nothing to expose the vile lie, spread by these Democrat Party Marxists, the this president was in on the attack on 9-11.

Dennis reminds his followers that the contemporary American left cannot defend its Marxist policies and therefore has to smear and destroy individuals and groups of people.

Does anyone know from the above opinion article what the G.W. economic policies were which were so hated by the American public?    The conservatives opposed Medicaid, not the “progressives”.  The tax cuts did stimulate business, so much so, leading Democrats are beginning to support the extension of the tax cuts. 

If the Democrats are trying to blame Mr. Bush for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae corruption and bankruptcy, it is an example of a bold, fat and complete LIE.   The befouling of the economy due to Freddie and Fannie is in the laps of Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd and the Dem Party going back to the Jimmy Carter adminsitration.   The financial industry was threatened by the left’s political establishment  to provide home loans to blacks (primarily) whether or not they could make payments, OR ELSE , the lefties threatened, these institutions would be sued for Civil Rights violations……

The  Marxists on the American Left  have  a number of paid  smear organizations to twist words and facts to distort history and attack conservatives.   For fifty years they have censored and twisted language as well as records and facts  to elevate  and sanctify  blacks, gays, feminists and now Latino and Latina illegal immigrants to the point nothing could be printed or uttered which didn’t have the Democrat Party Marxist seal of approval stamped on it.   This poison effected teaching, reporting, legislating, adjudicating, invading  nearly every aspect of American life.

No ‘elevated and sanctified’ community has paid a bigger price for these heights than the American inner city black population.

Thomas Sowell: “The Bleak Picture of Government Debt”

This most recent of Thomas Sowell’s writings was found at RealClearPolitics:

“Rumors of Congressional Democrats privately expressing disapproval of the Obama administration’s actions and policies have been given more credence by such things as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s public criticism of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But when two long-time Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, called President Obama “cynical” and “racially divisive,” that was a dramatic statement. It was like saying that the emperor has no clothes.

A much more rhetorically subdued but nevertheless devastating implicit criticism of current government spending policies came from an even more unlikely source: the Congressional Budget Office, whose director is a Democrat.

Without naming names or making political charges, the Congressional Budget Office last week issued a report titled “Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis.” The report’s dry, measured words paint a painfully bleak picture of the long-run dangers from the current runaway government deficits.

The CBO report points out that the national debt, which was 36 percent of the Gross Domestic Product three years ago, is now projected to be 62 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2010– and rising in future years.

Tracing the history of the national debt back to the beginning of the country, the CBO finds that the national debt did not exceed 50 percent of GDP, even when the country was fighting the Civil War, the First World War or any other war except World War II. Moreover, a graph in the CBO report shows the national debt going down sharply after World War II, as the nation began paying off its wartime when the war was over.

By contrast, our current national debt is still going up and may end up in “unfamiliar territory,” according to the CBO, reaching “unsustainable levels.” They spell out the economic consequences– and it is not a pretty picture.

Although Barack Obama and members of his administration constantly talk about the so-called “stimulus” spending as creating a demand for goods that is in turn “creating jobs,” every dime they spend comes from somewhere else, which means that there is less money to create jobs somewhere else.

There is no reason to believe that all this runaway spending is creating jobs– on net balance. The fact that the unemployment rate remains stuck at nearly 10 percent belies the idea that great numbers of jobs are being created– again, on net balance.

White House press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ recent rant against Rush Limbaugh for criticizing the bailout of General Motors went on and on about how this bailout had saved “a million jobs.” But where does Gibbs think the bailout money came from? The Tooth Fairy?

When you take money from the taxpayers and spend it to rescue the jobs of one set of workers– your union political supporters, in this case– what does that do to the demand for the jobs of other workers, whose products taxpayers would have bought with the money you took away from them? There is no net economic gain to the country from this, though there may well be political gains for the administration from having rescued their UAW supporters.

The same principle applies to money that came from selling government bonds, thus adding to the national debt. People who bought those government bonds had other things they could have invested in, if those government bonds had not been issued.

As the Congressional Budget Office puts it, if the national debt continues to grow out of control, a “growing portion of people’s savings would go to purchase government debt rather than toward investments in productive capital goods such as factories and computers; that ‘crowding out’ of investment would lead to lower output and incomes than would otherwise occur.”

Just paying the interest on a growing national debt can require higher tax rates, which “would discourage work and saving and further reduce output,” according to the CBO.

It would probably do no good to send Robert Gibbs– or Barack Obama, for that matter– a copy of the government’s own Congressional Budget Office report. Spending vast sums of money in politically strategic places helps the Obama administration politically, and that is obviously their bottom line.”

Obamacare and Illegal Immigrants

 The following article  was found at National Center for Policy Analysis under the title, “How do Illegal Immigrants Fare Under Obamacare?”

“Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) office recently issued a policy paper titled, “Bad Medicine,” on the new federal health care law that’s worth reading.  Among the gems is a finding that immigrants in some ways get a better deal than U.S. citizens and legal residents under the new health reform law, says health economist Devon Herrick. 

For example: 

• If you are a legal resident alien you will be required to obtain the same government mandated health coverage that U.S. citizens must obtain.
• However, if you have been here for less than five years, and if your income falls below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, you will not be allowed to enroll in Medicaid — as U.S. citizens will be required to do.
• Instead, you will be able to obtain highly subsidized insurance (paying a premium, say, of 10 cents on the dollar) in a health insurance exchange.
• If Medicaid insurance is lower-quality insurance, you will have access to better insurance than a U.S. citizen with the same income! 

If you are an undocumented immigrant you will not be subject to the individual insurance mandate and you will not be fined if you fail to purchase health insurance, nor will you be allowed to enroll in Medicaid or buy insurance in the health insurance exchange, says Herrick. 

However, hospital emergency rooms will not be able to deny you health care if you are in need.  What makes this surprising is that the most common argument for an individual mandate is that the uninsured should have to contribute to their own health care instead of getting it for free in the emergency room.  This is why U.S. citizens will be required to pay hefty fines if they do not obtain insurance.  If you are here illegally, however, you get to escape that penalty, says Herrick. 

Source: Devon Herrick, “How Do Illegal Immigrants Fare Under Obamacare?”