That means we won't need to use the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove for most of the week.
That's just fine by me.
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By way of GraniteGrok comes this excellent way to start your morning: Five minutes of Lieutenant Colonel Allan West.**********
Apparently there are a number of Dems who really don't like Lieutenant Colonel Allan West and are working hard to paint him as the anti-woman Congressional candidate.The question is, is going after Allen West a smart strategy or a sign of Democrat desperation?
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Bogie keeps us up to date on the renovations taking place at the Bogie Estates. This week: new siding and new windows.**********
This doesn't fill me with confidence in the federal government.It appears our benevolent and ever expanding government didn't have any idea how many data centers it really has, underestimating the total by over a thousand.
If a thousand were ten percent of the total, that's one thing. But in this case their estimate was off by almost 50 percent (47.7%), with a July 2010 count revealing there are actually 2094 federal data centers.
This doesn't bode well for anyone claiming the government is capable or competent to handle anything, including running our lives.
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I have to agree with fellow New Hampshire resident P.J. O'Rourke on this one:They hate our guts. And they're drunk on power.
P.J. Also goes on to say this: “This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order.”
They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.
Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.
And then some.....
(H/T Instapundit)
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Here's yet another example of Democrats telling us “Do as we say, not as we do.”While the President has been decrying the ability of corporations to donate money to political campaigns or pay for campaign ads through proxies, he's kept quiet about labor unions doing exactly the same thing.
Never mind that labor unions are, to all intents and purposes, no different from the very groups the President has been bashing. They are a business, despite what they may claim. The only difference? Labor unions unanimously support the Democrats. (Or at least the union leadership does. That's not necessarily true of the rank-and-file.) Therefore, they get a pass from the President, Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the DNC. If the unions supported Republicans, you know darned well the union sponsored ads and campaign contributions would be condemned just as other corporate donations have been.
It's the double standard applied out in the open and publicly.
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Dr. Joy Bliss covers how the poor are different from both the non-poor and the poor of other countries. Some of it deals with the reasons for poverty:America's poor are significantly better off than the poor of other nations. In fact, many of our poor would be considered quite wealthy in other nations.
Those without socialist ideologies know that poverty in America is often temporary, often by life-style choice, sometimes by bad luck, and often because of dysfunctional life choices and/or character flaws and mental disability and illness.
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Anthony Watts hosts guest blogger Thomas Fuller on what Fuller calls The League of 2.5.Fuller makes one error that puts his entire post into question: using only 52 years of CO2 and temperature data to make his case.
As one of those engineering types who deals with data and data analysis on a regular basis, I can safely say that if I based any kind of 'trend' on such a tiny data set I'd quickly find myself called on the carpet, if not fired outright. When it comes to climate a 52 year, 100 year, or 200 year data set is far too small and should be considered a 'snapshot' at best. To get a better idea of an actual long term trend, the data set needs to span 1,000 or more years. (Even 400-some years of data would be far more indicative, something that is available via British Royal Navy logbooks dating back to the late 1500's.)
(H/T Maggie's Farm)
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To add some fuel to the fire, so to speak, here's a speech by Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus addressing climate change and how science is no longer driving the debate, but politics.Klaus is an economist by trade, considered by many to be absolutely first-rate. He understands modeling and the limitations of modeling. With economics you have large data sets covering hundreds of years and still the computer models used to predict economic activity get it wrong (though usually by a matter of degree, not magnitude). By comparison, climate modeling is crude, with questionable data sets and far too much political influence affecting the outcomes.
One thing I must agree with Klaus upon is this:
Or as one of my favorite nuclear physicists – Dr. Gregory Greenman – put it, “Correlation does not imply causality.”
To reduce the interpretation of the causality of all kinds of climate changes and of global warming to one variable, CO2, or to a small proportion of one variable – human-induced CO2– is impossible to accept. Elementary rationality and my decades-long experience with econometric modeling and statistical testing of scientific hypotheses tell me that it is impossible to make strong conclusions based on mere correlation of two (or more) time series. In addition to this, it is relevant that in this case such a simple correlation does not exist. The rise of global temperature started approximately 150 years ago but man-made CO2 emissions did not start to grow visibly before the 1940s. Temperature changes also repeatedly moved in the opposite direction than the CO2 emissions trend suggests.
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OK, I can understand this considering where it came from, but this person has got to get a grip.If a judge faced impeachment every time they rendered an unpopular ruling we'd be so tied up with impeachment proceedings that nothing would get done, or judges would be so intimidated they wouldn't rule on anything at any time. Call it yet another version of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
So this Oregon Democrat Congressional bozo doesn't like the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizen's United case? Too bad. I'm not aware of any SCOTUS decision that's made everybody happy. It just doesn't happen. And to base his impeachment upon perjury about how Chief Justice Roberts would rule shows the level of asininity to which this Democrat has fallen.
I think this guy would have far better use for his time and our tax dollars than to pursue this doomed effort.
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There's nothing quite so powerful as the confessions of a former Leftist. Kathy Shaidle is one such Leftist convert to the Tea party, enlightening us with the 8 things she wishes she'd known (or remembered) when she was a Leftist.Here's a peak at a couple:
As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing. She covers a lot of territory and her journey to enlightenment is eye-opening.
#8: Ronald Reagan wasn't a total jerk.
#6: Michael Moore is a liar.
#2: A lot of progressive heroes were jerks.
(H/T Vermont Tiger)