Can We Trade Obama to Chile for Sebastian Pinera?

and maybe Joe Biden thrown in?  Oh, only if we tape his mouth?

Tim Daniel at Pajamas Media compares the two Presidents, one consumed with redistributive anger and envy, and the other Sebastian Pinera.

“Millions watched across the globe.  As breath bated and eyes waited, emotional synapses fired and the much-too-often unnoticed nobility of the human struggle became evident.

Luis Urzúa, the last of the 33 miners trapped over 2,000 feet below the Chilean earth’s surface, was lifted to his freedom earlier this week. He was the last to join a reluctantly merry band of 33, meeting a new-found lease on life and potential untold wealth, fame, fortune, and adulation.

Not to mention goodies too.

Beyond the now ubiquitous protective sunglasses donned by each man, the group received Apple iPod Touches, Playstation 3s, Greek vacations, Elvis products, and $10,000 from a Chilean mining executive named Leonardo Farkas. Westernized lifestyles await the bunch as rumors of big-dollar book and movie deal arrangements hang in the balance.

The amazing outcome of the mine crisis was not always assured. On August 5, as the news of the trapped miners reached his desk, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera faced two choices. First, to orchestrate a rescue plan in earnest but in private, out of the public and international eye. Second, to take the tragedy head-on and enlist the best and brightest, and to do so for the world to see. To take a chance in leadership, or to take the road often traveled and not.

Piñera turned to his worldview and belief in the ability of any market — even in crisis — to meet a demand. He turned to his illustrious career in business. He drew together international minds on mining, geology, and science. He consulted America’s own NASA, which devised the “Phoenix” capsule that retrieved the men and a rocket-science, space-age diet to inhibit claustrophobic nausea during their nearly half-mile ascent to the earth’s surface.

Even more, Piñera consulted drillers at Chile’s state copper giant Codelco who found the 33 miners to still be alive 17 days after the cave-in. He garnered aid from internationally owned Collahuasi, whose rig successfully drilled the shaft that the men were lifted from.

Proving his character, it wasn’t until the dust had settled from the amazing international effort that the Chilean president struck a more combative note. “This must never happen again,” he said to the 33 miners gathered around him as they were leaving San Jose. He continued, promising stricter standards and safer work conditions for the nation’s mining industry. He thanked private companies and governments worldwide for their help. It is notable that he did not attack the Chilean mining industry or offer up the 33 as fixtures of the industry’s “greed.”

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera is known as the most democratically liberal and capitalistic of all leaders in South America. Flanked by a continent with more than its fair share of despots and tyrants, the contrast to Piñera could not be more evident. Juxtaposed to the abject poverty, misery, and prison-states that despots and tyrants create, the contrast to Chile’s vibrant free market economy could not be greater.

Beyond this, Piñera and our own President Barack Obama could not be more polar opposite. Obama is a man motivated by something mostly unfamiliar to Americans — redistributive anger and envy. Watching the Chilean president these last few days brought me to this.

In President Sebastián Piñera’s shoes, Barack Obama would have undeniably acted much differently. He would have turned to his “community organizing” background and been hamstrung by his naive and far-left, us-versus-them philosophical roots. He would have been paralyzed by a toxic combination of arrogant professorial theory and lack of real-world executive experience. He would have attacked the mining company for the entire 69-day affair. He would have done so right off the bat. He would have copped out and stuck to a rigid, defeatist, backwards ideology. And in his failing, he would have put responsibility on everyone around him, except himself.

Look to Obama’s attack on BP as his administration, amidst crisis, floundered and flopped like an oil-soaked pelican. Or look to the ludicrous banana republic-esque saber rattling against the Chamber of Commerce as November 2 approaches. Or even the “public enemy number one” fixation on Fox News. Or worse and most damaging to us all, the slavish hostility directed at income earners and entrepreneurs across this nation.

In crisis and challenge, Piñera lifted up his entire nation as an example.

Obama has petulantly, willingly, and unflinchingly brought his down.

Character counts and so do ideas.

What a world we live in to have to look to a Chilean president amidst a human emergency as an example of what America can, and will once again, stand for.”

Warren Meyer Writes: Global Warming: What Skeptics Deny Is The Catastrophe

“It is important to begin by emphasizing that few skeptics doubt or deny that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas or that it and other greenhouse gasses (water vapor being the most important) help to warm the surface of the Earth. Further, few skeptics deny that man is probably contributing to higher CO2 levels through his burning of fossil fuels, though remember we are talking about a maximum total change in atmospheric CO2 concentration due to man of about 0.01% over the last 100 years.

What skeptics deny is the catastrophe, the notion that man’s incremental contributions to CO2 levels will create catastrophic warming and wildly adverse climate changes. To understand the skeptic’s position requires understanding something about the alarmists’ case that is seldom discussed in the press: the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming is actually comprised of two separate, linked theories, of which only the first is frequently discussed in the media.

The first theory is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels (approximately what we might see under the more extreme emission assumptions for the next century) will lead to about a degree Celsius of warming. Though some quibble over the number – it might be a half degree, it might be a degree and a half – most skeptics, alarmists and even the UN’s IPCC are roughly in agreement on this fact.

But one degree due to the all the CO2 emissions we might see over the next century is hardly a catastrophe. The catastrophe, then, comes from the second theory, that the climate is dominated by positive feedbacks (basically acceleration factors) that multiply the warming from CO2 many fold. Thus one degree of warming from the greenhouse gas effect of CO2 might be multiplied to five or eight or even more degrees.

This second theory is the source of most of the predicted warming – not greenhouse gas theory per se but the notion that the Earth’s climate (unlike nearly every other natural system) is dominated by positive feedbacks. This is the main proposition that skeptics doubt, and it is by far the weakest part of the alarmist case. One can argue whether the one degree of warming from CO2 is “settled science” (I think that is a crazy term to apply to any science this young), but the three, five, eight degrees from feedback are not at all settled. In fact, they are not even very well supported.

Of course, in the scientific method, even an incorrect hypothesis is useful, as it gives the scientific community a starting point in organizing observational data to confirm or disprove the hypothesis. This, however, turns out to be wickedly difficult in climate science, given the outrageously complex nature of the Earth’s weather systems.

Our global temperature measurements over the last one hundred years show about 0.7C of warming since the early 1900s, though this increase has been anything but linear. Skeptics argue that, like a police department that locks on a single suspect early in a crime investigation and fails to adequately investigate any other suspects, many climate scientists locked in early on to CO2 as the primary culprit for this warming, to the exclusion of many other possible causes.

When the UN IPCC published its fourth climate report several years ago, it focused its main attention on the Earth’s warming after 1950 and in particular on the 20-year period between 1978 and 1998. The UN IPCC concluded that the warming in this 20-year period was too rapid to be due to natural causes, and almost certainly had to be due to man’s CO2. They reached this conclusion by running computer models that seemed to show that the warming in this period would have been far less without increased CO2 levels.

Skeptics, however, point out that the computer models were built by scientists who have only a fragmented, immature understanding of complex climate systems. Moreover, these scientists approached the models with the pre-conceived notion that CO2 is the main driver of temperatures, and so it is unsurprising that their models would show CO2 as the dominant factor.

In fact, the period 1978 to 1998 featured a number of other suspects that should have been considered as potentially contributing to warming. For example, the warm phase of several critical ocean cycles that have a big effect on surface temperatures, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, coincided with this period. Further, the second half of the 20th century saw far greater solar activity, as measured by sunspot numbers, than the first half of the century. Neither ocean cycles nor solar effects, nor a myriad of other factors we probably don’t even know enough to name, were built into the models. Even man’s changing land use has an effect on measured temperatures, as survey efforts have shown urban areas, which have higher temperatures than surrounding rural locations, expanding around our temperature measurement points and biasing measured temperatures upwards.

If CO2 is but one of several causes of warming over the past decades, then current climate models almost certainly have to be exaggerating future warming. Only by attributing all of the past warming to CO2 can catastrophic future warming forecasts be justified. In fact, even the 0.7C of measured historic warming is well under what the climate models should have predicted for warming based on past CO2 increases and their assumed high sensitivity of temperature to CO2 levels. In other words, to believe a forecast of, say, 5C of warming over the next 100 years, we should have seen 2C or more of warming over the past century.

This is why the IPCC actually had to make the assumption that global temperatures would have fallen naturally and due to other manmade pollutants over the past several decades. By arguing that without man’s CO2 the climate would have cooled by, for example, 0.5C, then they can claim past warming from CO2 as 1.2C (the measured 0.7C plus the imaginary 0.5C).  Anyone familiar with how the Obama administration has claimed large stimulus-related jobs creation despite falling employment levels will recognize this approach immediately.

Despite these heroic efforts to try to find observational validation for their catastrophic warming forecasts, the evidence continues to accumulate that these forecasts are wildly overstated. The most famous forecast of all is perhaps NASA’s James Hansen’s forecast to Congress in 1988, a landmark in the history of global warming alarmism in this country. Despite the fact that 2010 may well turn out to be one of the couple warmest years in the past century (along with 1998, both of which are strong El Nino years), the overall trend in global temperatures has been generally flat for the last 10-15 years, and have remained well below Hansen’s forecasts. In fact, Hansen’s forecasts continue to diverge from reality more and more with each passing year.

Of course, as we all know, global warming has been rebranded by alarmist groups as “climate change” and then more recently as “climate disruption.” This is in some sense inherently disingenuous, implying to lay people that somehow climate change can result directly from CO2. In fact, no mechanism has ever been suggested wherein CO2 can cause climate change in any way except through the intermediate step of warming. CO2 causes warming, and then warming causes climate changes. So the question of warming and its degree still matters, no matter what branding is applied.

In fact, it is in the area of the knock-on effects of warming, from sea level increases to hurricanes, that some of the worst science is being pursued. Nowhere can we better see the effect of money on science than in climate change studies, as academics studying whatever natural phenomenon that interests them increasingly have the incentive to link that phenomenon to climate change to improve their chances at getting funding.

The craziness of climate scare stories is too broad and deep to deal with adequately here, as nearly every 3-sigma weather anomaly suddenly gets attributed to climate change. But let’s look at a couple of the more well-worn examples. In an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warned of the world being battered by more and more Katrina style category 5 storms; in fact, 2009 and 2010 have seen record low levels of global cyclonic activity, despite relatively elevated temperatures. Or take the melting ice cap: on the same exact day in 2007 when newspapers screamed that the Arctic had hit a 30-year low in sea ice extent, the Antarctic hit a 30-year high. The truth of the matter is that ice is indeed melting and sea levels are rising today – as they were in 1950, and 1900, and even 1850 (long before much man-made CO2). The world has warmed continuously since the end of the little ice age around 1820 (a worldwide cold spell generally linked to a very inactive period in the sun) and sea levels can be seen to follow an almost unbroken linear trend since that time.

Alarmists like to call climate skeptics “deniers,” usually in an attempt to equate climate skeptics with holocaust deniers. But skeptics do not deny that temperatures have warmed over the last century, or even that man (through CO2 as well as land use and other factors) has played some part in that warming. What skeptics deny, though, is the catastrophe. And even more, what skeptics deny is the need to drastically reduce fossil fuel use – a step that will likely be an expensive exercise in the developed west but an unmitigated disaster for the poor of Asia and Africa. These developing nations, who are just recently emerging from millennia of poverty, need to burn every hydrocarbon they can find to develop their economies.

Postscript: You will notice that I wrote this entire article without once mentioning either the words “hockey stick” or “Climategate.” I have never thought Michael Mann’s hockey stick to be a particularly compelling piece of evidence, even if it were correct. The analysis purports to show a rapid increase in world temperatures after centuries of stability, implying that man is likely the cause of current warming because, on Mann’s chart, recent temperature trends look so unusual. In the world of scientific proof, this is the weakest of circumstantial evidence.

As it turns out, however, there are a myriad of problems great and small with the hockey stick, from cherry-picking data to highly questionable statistical methods, which probably make the results incorrect. Studies that have avoided Mann’s mistakes have all tended to find the same thing – whether looking over a scale of a century, or millennia, or millions of years, climate changes absolutely naturally. Nothing about our current temperatures or CO2 levels is either unusual or unprecedented.

The best evidence that the problems identified with Mann’s analysis are probably real is how hard Mann and a small climate community fought to avoid releasing data and computer code that would allow outsiders to check and replicate their work. The “Climategate” emails include no smoking gun about the science, but do show how far the climate community has strayed from what is considered normal and open scientific process. No science should have to rely on an in-group saying “just trust us,” particularly one with trillions of dollars of public policy decisions on the line.”

Comment:  I am rooting for about a two degree increase.  I think we in Minnesota deserve a Zone V plant growth environment, don’t you?  Then I won’t have to struggle trying to keep Japanese maples alive and well outdoors.

We have warmed up in the Twin City area in my lifetime.  I live in suburban Minneapolis just outside of the isortherm dancing around the metropolitan area……My grounds mostly are a Zone IV and a half. 

The Landscape garden is my professional art expression.   This very summer is the first year I have ever had Japanese beeltes feasting on anything anywhere on my grounds.  Disgusting pest, indeed, but I know we have become very close to Zone V, at last.

Professors and bureacrats who are maneuvering a drop in the Northern Hemisphere Earth temperature should be rounded up immediately and sent to Nome, Alaska for ten years.  There are limits to where my tolerance for democracy ends.  

Down with those  Cooling the Globe!!!

Hiding the Cost of Government Is, Well……Costly!

Hiding the Cost of Government Leads to Bigger Government

Congress hides from voters a huge part of the cost of government: the hidden costs of taxes, which include lost income and jobs.  Failing to account for these costs creates a bias in favor of bigger government and a less efficient tax code, says Christopher J. Conover, a research scholar with the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University.

Everyone from President Reagan’s economic advisor Martin Feldstein to President Obama’s economic advisor Jonathan Gruber agree that this hidden cost of taxation is very real and very large.

• When the federal government takes an additional dollar from taxpayers, the actual cost to society is generally $1.44.
• That extra $0.44 represents the deadweight loss of taxation.
• Every time Congress shifts another dollar from Peter to Paul, it leaves society $0.44 poorer.

Yet Congress never tells voters about these hidden costs before raising our taxes.  It doesn’t even measure them, says Conover.

In a new study, Conover uses the recently passed health care legislation as a striking example of hidden costs.

• ObamaCare includes roughly $500 billion in new taxes over the next 10 years, but also includes provisions that could result in further tax increases (such as the so-called “doc fix”).
• If all those additional taxes materialize (which some argue is the most likely scenario), then ObamaCare will impose an additional cost of roughly $550 billion in foregone economic output.
• If Congress ends up borrowing money to finance ObamaCare’s new spending or the “doc fix,” the deadweight losses could climb higher still.
• University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig estimates that federal borrowing carries a much higher deadweight loss, such that every $1 of deficit spending ultimately costs society $4.40.

Politicians are defrauding the American people by not accounting for this hidden cost of government, says Conover.

Source: Christopher J. Conover, “Hiding the Cost of Government Leads to Bigger Government,” Daily Caller, October 13, 2010.

For text:

http://dailycaller.com/2010/10/13/hiding-the-cost-of-government-leads-to-bigger-government/  

The above is from the National Center for Policy Analysis.

“God, Liberals, and Liberty”, article by Dennis Prager

“In a recent column, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote: “It’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous our (America’s) religiosity is in the world. A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are.”

Given Blow’s leftwing politics and his point was that all rich countries except for the United States are secular and that all poor countries are religious, he was obviously not making this point in order to celebrate America’s “anomalous” religiosity.

He should have. America’s anomalous religiosity is very much worth celebrating — not because it leads to affluence, but because it is indispensible to liberty. Had Blow made a liberty chart rather than an affluence chart, he might have noted that the freest country in the world — for 234 years — the United States of America, has also been the most God-centered.

Yes, I know that the Islamic world has also been God-based and that it has not been free. But that is because Allah is not regarded as the source of liberty, as the America’s Judeo-Christian God has been, but as the object of submission (“Islam” means “submission”).

Since the inception of the United States (and, indeed, before it in colonial America), liberty, i.e., personal freedom, has been linked to God.

America was founded on the belief that God is the source of liberty. That is why the inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 25): (SET ITAL) “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”(END ITAL)

The Declaration of Independence also asserts this link: All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Because the Creator of the world is the source of our freedom, no state, no human being, no government may take it away. If the state were the source of liberty, then obviously the state could take it away.

Both reason and American values therefore make these claims:

1. The more important the state is, the less the liberty.

2. The more important God is, the smaller the state.

3. Therefore, the more important God is, the more liberty there is.

A proof of the validity of these assertions is that as this country — the country, not the government — becomes more secular, it becomes less free, just as has happened in other Western countries. We have far more laws governing human conduct than ever before in America’s history. And Western Europe has even more, including limitations on as basic a liberty as free speech.

So, too, every totalitarian state except Muslim ones (because a religious government is the Muslim ideal) seeks to abolish religion. Stalin, for example, murdered virtually every member of the clergy, and came close to destroying all religion, in the Soviet Union. He understood that a totalitarian state cannot allow a competing allegiance.

And in democratic Western Europe, the ever-expanding state is inevitably accompanied by an ever shrinking God and religion.

This is largely what the current culture war — actually a non-violent civil war — is about. The left seeks an ever-expanding state with, by definition, ever-expanding powers. And a fundamental aspect of that program is the removal of God and religion from as much of American life as possible. This is pursued under the noble-sounding goal of ensuring “separation of church and state.” But whatever the avowed aim, the result is the same: secularize as much of society as possible, its institutions and, most importantly, its values.

Over time, much of America has belatedly awakened to the realization that two counter-revolutionary (as in American Revolution) trends were occurring at a breakneck pace: God was being replaced by the state as the source of liberty, and liberty was eroding.

To use a Civil War simile, the secular Fort Sumter took place in 1962, when the United States Supreme Court (Engel v. Vitale) overthrew the decision of the highest court of New York State, and ruled that the following prayer, said in New York State schools, violated the Constitution:

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”

Few rational, let alone religious, Americans believed that this non-denominational prayer, which no school child had to recite, violated the American Constitution. The purpose of the ruling was to impose secularism on America.

Since then, the leftwing attack on religion in America has proceeded at a rapid clip:

– Though Los Angeles (“the Angels”) was founded by Christians, the tiny cross on the seal of Los Angeles County was removed by the three liberal members of the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

– Wishing a fellow American “Merry Christmas” has been widely rendered unacceptable.

– A speaker at public high school graduations may not say “God bless you” to the graduating class.

– The Bible, the basis of American values instruction for most of American history, is not taught at virtually any non-religious school in America.

Examples are too numerous to list.

And now, commensurate with the removal of God from American society, the most leftwing government in American history is expanding state powers to an unprecedented degree.

Our leftwing party has passed — more accurately imposed, since it did so without a single vote from the opposition party — legislation that will massively expand state powers. And it is preparing to govern more and more of Americans’ lives without passing any legislation. As reported by the Los Angeles Times last week: “White House staff changes are being made with an eye toward achieving goals through executive actions rather than by trying to push plans through the next Congress.”

It was inevitable.

From its inception, the left has regarded God and religion (especially the Judeo-Christian varieties) as impediments to its goals: “Trust in Us (Leftwing intellectuals)” has supplanted “In God We Trust.” And so, God-based liberty gives way to state-based controls.

Whichever side you are on, at least you can now better understand why the non-left is fighting. For liberty’s sake, not just for God’s.”

Dennis’ Columns can be found at Townhall.com and at the site:  The Dennis Prager Show.

At the Townhall,com site Dennis had a number of comments  as responses to this article.  I shall pick the first one, Jerome, who writes:

“Prager is wrong. The freer a nation is the less religious. The fact is, the more repressive a nation it, more likely it is repressive. This does not just go for the Islamic world. Sub Saharan Africa is maybe the most religious part of the world but enjoys little freedom. Western Europe is secular and free and when it comes to social issues, freer than the U.S. After all, Europe does have a war on consensual sex among adults, as the U.S.engages in. It does not have draconian drug penalities. Why? Simply, lack of the Puritian ideology that punishes any action that is deemed to enjoyable.

The fact is, the god of the bible in practice does not lead to more liberty but less liberty. Those who believe in this deity are much more likely to believe that not only gay men should not marry, but that the government should imprison them. They are more likely to believe that Muslims should not be able to build a mosque, two blocks or two thousand miles from the WTC. They are more likely to even bad sex toys (as in Alabama). So Dennis, once again as usual, you are wrong. Too bad there is not a liberal co-host to challenge Dennis when he is wrong. When there is a liberal caller, they are usually cut off very quickly.”

I would guess Jerome is gay and fairly young.  Three of the most primitively religious in American culture in my view is the American black community, its gay community, and its feminist community.  All three have their paranoias soothed by  disciples of the various deparments of these ‘religious’ studies, Gay and Lesbian, Women’s and Black, at American universities. 

I’d also guess that Jerome has never lived for a period of time outside of the good old USA.  Perhaps he could give examples of where our freedoms are in want compared to the troubled nations across the Atlantic.

Less religious peoples, perhaps like Jerome, aren’t usually tolerant of those who are religious. Many prefer their religion, atheism, to be the national norm. 

 Not all religions are equal in what they value and in order of importance of what is valued.  Some groups value sacrifice others crashing airliners into skyscrapers. 

The more repressed a nation is usually results in some groups simply enduring and other groups of these very repressed peope bravely pursuing paths to open doors  to freer expression, often paying with their own lives as in China, Cuba, and the good old Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, East Germany, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Viet Nam, and the many more in the last century.

If Jerome were more savvy about the not-so-subtle symbol of Islamic politics  erecting a major Mosque called the Cordoba center at the site of a great Islamic event, he might not have made his accusing statement.  

Many Europeans believe themselves freer because so many of them are free of children, having  like so many gays, fallen in love with themselves and cite freedom as preferring to  bounce around on the beaches instead of being sincerely concerned about freedom’s future.

All Americans should be concerned about the disappearance of the American adult.

“Crashing the Tea Party Joy Ride” with Lefty Lorelei Kelly

Who describes herself at Huffington Post as “Director, New Strategic Security Initiatives.”

“The Tea Party has done us all a favor. It has pointed out how absent we’ve been in building a common narrative about modern American citizenship. Their candidates are fascinating — like watching campaign season through beer goggles. But every time I hear one of them speak in public, I realize what an advantage the rest of us have — real stories, real characters, real democracy.

The Tea Party is taking a joyride through the world of American ideals. Along the way, it has grabbed the best revolutionary symbols, the cinematic frustration of the masses, and an irreproachable sounding plan (Fiscal responsibility! Constitutionally limited government! Free markets! Yay!)

But it’s all emotions and fantasy. Despite the symbolic appeal, Tea Partiers don’t really speak to tradition. They speak to nostalgia. These signals resurrected from the past are not representative. They are kitsch.

Their problem is that they actually prefer Bill O’Reilly to the Bill of Rights. Judging from the demographics, the Tea Party is the last act of the cynical Boomers, hence, a vision of government that doesn’t go beyond shouting and a soundtrack. Their story has no characters or plot. It ends with the Winnebago driving off the cliff. How romantic and awesome! And then what?

Its time to take what they have started — a participatory impetus for change — re-brand it, and run away with it.

The argument is basic, and drawn in stark relief. Is there an US in the USA? Do we have a common purpose? Will we be able to evolve our collective identity to meet the needs of the modern era?

They have the “what” but we have the “how”. Last week, I attended the Reinventing Governance conference in Colorado. Everyone there had an example of citizens taking the initiative, solving problems at the local level.

The Tea Party is the crowning achievement of the conservative rise in American politics. Who needs evidence when you have good optics? The right is not required to meet the challenge that the rest of us face — that of governing ourselves. They are in eternal opposition, even when in office.

Conservatives have achieved this public relations coup because, on the right, the intellectuals and the propagandists are the same people (Gingrich, Rove). In contrast, those who defend the public sector — public intellectuals — have gone missing for years. We do have more civic firepower. Its just that our academics and operatives disdain each other. One group is polishing their footnotes and the other group is dialing for dollars. They rarely meet each other.

Moreover, conservatives prioritize communication as much as subject matter — the right’s mother ship Heritage Foundation spends nearly half its money on marketing. Meanwhile, those who believe in the common good work under a myth of omniscience. We believe that because an idea is right it will be obvious and because it is obvious it will be implemented.

These connections are fallacies. They don’t exist. To be influential, ideas need a long-term infrastructure behind them. For example, “Islamophobia” is not an accident, it is an outcome. “Ground Zero Mosque” “Jihad Jane” etc. Conservative operatives have in place a network of relationships and one-liners that can surge to meet the needs of the day’s headlines. If it is politically useful for them to marginalize Muslim Americans, they do it.

I worked on Capitol Hill in a progressive office during Republican reign. It was like fighting a well trained army with a pickup team. My side was always in the library and in the streets, but never in the room. This is not the same for conservatives today.

The Obama administration certainly could have communicated more consistently and forcefully over the past two years. But our president lacks the philosophical audience to back him up. Where are the people who can explain governing? Who empathize with institutions? Lots of us do, but we are not intentional about it.

Hope and Change still remain to be translated into a story about the rest of us. The path forward is staring us right in the face. Our greatest strength is our immense ability to connect with others, including those in power. Over the next decade, we will create new norms of democratic participation in which — by definition — corporations cannot preempt citizens. DC will be the last stop in this movement for change. You act on behalf of the common good dozens of times a day and don’t even think about it.

I would argue that we have not even begun to assess our own power. Speaking as a former Hill staffer, the relationships forged on behalf of ideals are viewed differently than the purchased relationships beholden to private commercial lobbies. As Craig Newmark says, “Trust is the new black”. We have that in our corner.

Government is changing rapidly. There are dozens of new transparency requirements and rules for openness. But information without interpreters is just more noise. To be politically useful, it requires a civic filter. Every Member of Congress went to High School. You long-time friends, make an appointment with the local office and ask. What are some basic public interest issues that you vote on? What do you need information about? How can we support you? You will be amazed at how many topics have no constituent input.

This kind of individual initiative — citizens putting a stake in the ground on behalf of the collective — is powerful. Telling your leaders what you’re doing in your community will provide the characters and plot for our narrative.

The American people long for a novel, not a sitcom. We want a good story about who we are and where we’re going in the world. Most of all, we want the happy ending, the one where nobody gets left out. Whoever tells this story best will win.

The Tea Party wants a knife fight and we’ve been showing up with chop sticks. This has to change.”

So says Director Kelly.  I wonder if her directorship includes receiving government funds, that is, money from your and my taxes.”

Comment:  Perhaps I have been to negative about Republican successes in protecting American democracy from Huffington style Marxists.

George Will Writes of Obama, the Poison Mouth Campaigner

With Barack Obama restoring solar panels to the White House roof — the first were put there by Jimmy Carter — will Carter’s cardigan sweater be reprised? The panels — environmentalism as a didactic gesture — are evidence of a ’70s revival.

“Energy we have to deal with today,” said Obama during a debate with John McCain. “Health care is priority No. 2.” Instead, Obama decided that having priorities — doing this but not that — is for people less Promethean than he. The cap-and-trade centerpiece of his agenda for turning down the planet’s thermostat (as Carter turned down the White House’s) has foundered.

But at least when Democrats got control of Congress in 2007 they acted to save the planet from the incandescent light bulb, banning it come 2014. For sheer annoyingness, that matches Congress’s 1973 imposition of a 55 mph speed limit, which was abolished in 1995.

Nothing did more to energize conservatism in the 1970s than judges and legislators collaborating in the forced busing of (other people’s) children to achieve racial balance in (other people’s) schools. This policy expressed liberalism’s principled refusal to be deterred by the public’s misunderstanding of what is good for it. Obamacare is today’s expression of liberalism’s kamikaze devotion to unwanted help for Americans, the ingrates.

Another ’70s project, in the wake of Watergate, was campaign finance reform — government regulating the quantity, timing and content of speech about government. But political purity has been elusive, and today, as usual, there is, from the usual people, high anxiety about “too much” money being spent on politics. That is, what the improvers consider too much political speech, the dissemination of which is what most campaign contributions finance.

Total spending, by all parties, campaigns and issue-advocacy groups, concerning every office from county clerks to U.S. senators, may reach a record $4.2 billion in this two-year cycle. That is about what Americans spend in one year on yogurt but less than they spend on candy in two Halloween seasons. Procter & Gamble spent $8.6 billion on advertising in its most recent fiscal year.

Those who are determined to reduce the quantity of political speech to what they consider the proper amount are the sort of people who know exactly how much water should come through our shower heads (no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, as stipulated by a 1992 law). Is it, however, really worrisome that Americans spend on political advocacy — on determining who should make and administer the laws — much less than they spend on potato chips ($7.1 billion a year)?

Desperation drives politicians to talk about process rather than policy. Obama, who is understandably reluctant to talk about what people are concerned about, the economy, is instead talking about the political process. He is in a terrific lather of insinuation, suggesting that torrents of foreign money are pouring into U.S. campaigns.

He recently said: “Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations. So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.” It takes a perverse craftsmanship to write something that slippery. Consider:

“Just this week, we learned. . . .” That is a fib. The fact that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — this is what he is talking about but for some reason is reluctant to say so — receives membership dues from multinational corporations, some of them foreign-owned, is not something Obama suddenly “learned.” It is about as secret as the location of the chamber’s headquarters, a leisurely three-minute walk from the White House.

“Regularly takes in money from foreign corporations.” Obama cites no evidence to refute the chamber’s contention that it sequesters such funds — less than one-twentieth of 1 percent of its budget — from the money it devotes to political advocacy. The AFL-CIO, which spends heavily in support of Democratic candidates, also receives money from associated labor entities abroad, but Obama has not expressed angst about this.

“So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.” The “so” is a Nixonian touch. It dishonestly implies what Obama prudently flinches from charging — that the “huge sums” are foreign money.

In the ’70s, Richard Nixon begat the supposed corrective of the high-minded Carter. His failure begat Ronald Reagan. American politics often is a dialectic of disappointments. Nov. 2 may remind the apostle of change that (as a 2008 Republican bumper sticker warned) “Every Disaster is a Change.”

The title of the article is, “Democrat Vision of Big Brother”

Comment:  Name an American president who so cheapened his off ice and America as Barack Hussein Obama, by  instead of  backing is composite of his achievements during his first 20 months as president as Barack Obama,    instead turns to verbal Poison, tossing around words which have no merit of truth whatsoever…..words from which this lowly president cannot hide from pretending he didn’t quite understand what he was saying……

Yet, we should not forget that Barack Hussein Obama spent 22 years closely attatched to Reverend Jeremiah “Goddamn America” Wright’s church in Chicago.  Obama called him his “father figure”.

Like Father Like ‘Son’.

Walter Russell Mead: “Kyoto Fraud Revealed”

  Walter Russell Mead writes at American Interest Online:

“Kyoto Fraud Revealed”

When the idiotic Kyoto Protocol was put before the US Senate, 95 senators voted against this confused and destructive initiative on the grounds that, as designed, the measure would simply ship American jobs to China and other countries without reducing greenhouse gasses.

For years, green activists have mourned and bemoaned the shortsightedness of the US.  How could we sit out from something so noble, so planet saving, so wise as the sacred Kyoto Protocol?  We have been listening to the green moral scolds for twenty years: those fat, dumb and ignorant Americans are simply too stupid and too selfish to save Planet Earth.

The EU, where disingenuous politicians are forced to demagogue green issues because addlepated proportional representation rules empower the lunatic eco-fringe in key countries, ratified Kyoto, and Americans were then treated to years of vainglorious Euro-puffery about the nobility, the wisdom and the self-sacrificial idealism of the cutting edge eco-warriors of the Green Continent.

Over the years, some of the Kyoto fairy dust had begun to wear off.  Global greenhouse emissions did not in fact appear to be declining very much.  Many of the EU cuts were accounting tricks; counting the closure of inefficient, money-losing industrial dinosaurs in East Germany that were doomed to close anyway towards Germany’s greenhouse targets was a fairly typical example.

But a couple of recent studies now seem to show that Kyoto was as big a fraud as the most militant enviro-skeptics ever suspected.  And it looks as if the 95 American senators were 100 percent right: the much heralded Protocol was a singularly stupid piece of counterproductive social engineering that encouraged the migration of good jobs to China and other low wage countries — without helping the environment at all.

The left leaning Guardian newspaper in Britain let the cat out of the bag yesterday, reporting that while the EU’s emission of CO2 declined by 17% between 1990 and 2010, this apparent progress was bogus.  If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU was responsible for 40% more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990. The EU, as the Guardian puts it, has been outsourcing pollution — and jobs — rather than cutting back on greenhouse gasses.

EU “progress” on greenhouse gasses in the last twenty years was a mirage.  And the only reason that the EU can pretend to look green is that it was outsourcing economic growth to countries like China.  Those 95 US senators were totally right; twenty years of the Kyoto Protocol have brought the world twenty years of rising greenhouse gas emissions and twenty years of job migration to low wage, low regulation havens in the Third World.

It is extremely rare for 95 US senators to be right about anything; it is not, unfortunately, rare for environmentalists to come up with grotesquely bad policy ideas.  Worse, it is routine for the media to give those grotesquely dumb ideas uncritical support.  For twenty years, the mainstream media has (with a few noble exceptions like the New York Times‘ Andrew Revkin) largely repeated green propaganda as straight news.  How many irreplaceable acres (or, for our European friends, hectares) of vital, carbon fixing forest have been destroyed to print editorials and columns hailing the intellectual and moral grandeur of the Kyoto Protocol and denouncing the know-nothingism and short-sightedness of the Neanderthals who dared to oppose it?

Almost any bad idea from a ‘respectable’ green source — like the monumentally foolish drive for a Grand Global Treaty that derailed so spectacularly at Copenhagen last year — gets a free ride from most of the mainstream media and also the mainstream intellectual establishment.  The syllogism seems to be this:  the environment is good, X says that Y is good for the environment, therefore Y must be good.  The fallacy is painfully obvious when put in this form, but painfully obvious doesn’t seem to be obvious enough for most of the world’s pundits and editorial writers.

People who care about the environment, who worry about the potential harm that our increasingly technological civilization can do to the natural systems on which we all depend, are making a literally planet-threatening mistake when they fail to subject policy proposals to serious analysis and critique because those proposals are labeled ‘green’. I don’t know what it will take to get this simple lesson through the surprisingly thick heads of the chattering classes.  How many times do widely hailed, ritualistically praised and endorsed green policy initiatives have to go down in flames before the press realizes that the way to help the environment is to subject such proposals to critical scrutiny before they flop?

How long will it be before serious people who seriously care about the environment realize that the clowns, poseurs and hotheads currently shaping the movement’s public agenda constitute a grave and urgent threat to the health of the only planet we’ve got?

How high a price must the world pay for green folly?  How many years will be lost, how much credibility forfeited, how much money wasted before we have an environmental movement that has the intellectual rigor, political wisdom and mature, sober judgment needed to address the great issues we face?

Fulfilling our duty as good stewards of the bountiful garden in which the good Lord has placed us is hard.  The science is hard.  The politics, the economics, the diplomacy: they are all hard.  Even the morals are hard.  The relationship between natural systems and human activity is complex and, despite all the scientific progress that has been made, important aspects of the relationship remain poorly understood.  The forces — economic, political, cultural — that shape human industrial and economic activity are also very complex, and important dimensions of their interactions remain extremely poorly understood.  The international political system is not very flexible and not very powerful, and the political forces that define the limits of the possible in the world’s different countries are difficult to understand and virtually impossible to predict as circumstances and extraneous variables constantly intrude into the already turbulent mix.

There are irreducible unknowns in the mix.  Should we allocate scarce economic and political resources toward climate change or toward nuclear disarmament?  Should we allocate those resources toward raising the living standards of the poor, perhaps reducing the threat of terrorism and war — or toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thereby perhaps creating more favorable conditions for solving these other problems down the road?  What new knowledge and new possibilities — and new dangers — will come on line as new and unpredictable technological innovations appear?

Environmentalists, motivated no doubt in many cases by a genuine sense of urgency, have fallen into a pattern of overlooking and assuming away complexities and difficulties to build public support for catchy, headline grabbing Big Ideas.  But those complexities and difficulties are real and in the end they emerge and wreak a horrid revenge.  The Kyoto Protocol failed; the Copenhagen Summit failed; the entire global treaty movement continues to plumb new depths of failure from week to week; cap and trade went down to ignominious and even toxic defeat.

Environmentalists will only be able to help the world when they grow up.  And they will only grow up when the rest of the world — and especially the mainstream press and serious writers and thinkers — start holding them to serious, grown up standards.  Screwy but superficially appealing ideas like the Kyoto Protocol should be mercilessly criticized and all their flawed assumptions and wishful thinking be held up for the whole world to see — when they are first proposed and debated, not after twenty years of uncritical praise ending in failure.  The green agenda and the environmental movement are victims of ‘social promotion’; their self esteem has been stoked and their grades inflated — and nobody has ever explained the hard facts of life, or equipped them with the skills needed for actual, as opposed to virtual, success.

Tough love is now the only way to help the greens:  we must challenge the greens, mock their uncritical embrace of dumb ideas, point out their failures, their pretensions, their wishful thinking, their political blindness, their clueless arrogance and all the other shortcomings that lead them, time and time again, down the Good Intentions Highway to the same old Great Abyss.  The way to hurt them is to tell them it isn’t their fault, to ignore the movement’s stunning record of serial failure, to blame the oil companies for all that is wrong with the world — and to do all the other comforting, enabling things that help keep people and political movements infantilized and ineffective.

Fortunately, the Guardian newspaper and a handful of writers like Rivkin seem to understand the need for serious reporting.  The cascade of green failure is going to waken a critical spirit more widely; failure this flagrant becomes progressively harder to ignore.  One suspects (indeed one hopes) that the money spigots will turn off for a while; even foundations sometimes weary of throwing good money after bad.  That will also lead to some badly needed soul searching among the incompetent green pooh-bahs who have done so little with so much.

New York Times Op Man: Obama’s Strategy for November Win, Is To Go Racial

Charles Blow, New York Times opinion man writes about the Obama strategy to recover Dem votes in November.  He suggests that Republicans suggested the plot.

“The president and fellow Democrats have taken a page from the Republican playbook. They’re unabashedly using racial-solidarity politics to animate voters. In this case, the Democrats’ appeal is to black voters, the most unwavering portion of President Obama’s base, and the message is simple: The president is under attack, and black voters must mobilize to protect him.

The Democratic National Committee is spending an unprecedented $3 million on advertising aimed at African-Americans for the midterms this year. As part of that effort, the committee has cut a new radio ad featuring the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the civil rights leader, that outlines the threat and the call to action: “When young people took to the streets, we elected our first African-American president. Right now, there are those doing everything in their power to block the president’s agenda. And that’s why we’re counting on you to vote. In 2008, we changed the guard. This year, we must guard the change.”

Other ads, on black radio and in black newspapers, simply extol their audiences to “stand with President Obama.”

These ads aren’t about policy. They’re personal appeals on behalf of the president. You don’t have to be engaged to get it. This November you’re voting for Obama, again.

As Politico noted this week, “the White House has hesitated to cast the midterm elections as a referendum on President Barack Obama, except when it comes to one key constituency: African-American voters.”

This strategy could prove extremely effective.

A report issued Thursday by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies outlines the fact that black voters are “strategically situated in 2010 to have a major impact” because (1) there is “a significant number of black voters in the states and districts where many of the most competitive elections will be held” and (2) “there is a president who is very popular with African-Americans and who is under attack from Congressional Republicans.”

And Friday, The Washington Post reported that a poll by that newspaper, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University found that “80 percent of black Democrats are as interested or more interested in the midterms than they were in the 2008 presidential election.”

A large black turnout next month could prove decisive and upset the predictions of most pundits. If blacks do turn out in record numbers, it would almost certainly be because they are drawn out by their devotion to Obama, a devotion he’s counting on.

As the president told an audience last week at Bowie State University, a historically black college, in Maryland: “I think the pundits are wrong. But it’s up to you to prove them wrong. Don’t make me look bad, now.”

Comment:  Black racism, now and forever!   Do any among its so-called leadership understand the damage such racism does to a peoples and a nation?

The Ku Klux Klanners used to go racial as a LAST  resort. Could America be so lucky with the Obama racists?   Obama, the “racial uniter”, as he advertised himself in his 2008 campaign rhetoric, seems to be the uniter of  the dividers.