A new dinosaur, dubbed “thunder-thighs” because of its powerful leg muscles, has been discovered in Utah.
Why the Democrats might be making the wrong assumptions about a government shutdown. Key quote:
In many ways, 1995 was the last year of the old media world. It was the year before the launch of FOX News and the year before the Internet exploded into American life. The three broadcast television networks and the major newspapers still had a stranglehold on political news in 1995. Shaping the public narrative would be much harder for Democrats in today’s more diffuse and more balanced media world.
Wisconsin has begun reviewing complaints over doctors who were issuing fake sick notes to union protesters.
Why have I been highlighting recent examples of liberal “incivility” and calls to violence? Ed Morrissey at hotair explains it all in this piece about a Democratic Congressman who yesterday told union supporters that they “need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody.”
It isn’t that these vicious statements are only being made by the left. I have never said that. It’s that the press is only willing to condemn the right for it, while leftwing violent rhetoric is either ignored or made light of.
Vicious and violent statements by anyone are wrong, and should never be defended or excused. Ever.
A Clinton-appointed DC judge, in ruling that Obamacare is constitutional, also declared that the commerce clause allows the federal government to regulate “mental activity”.
The uncertainty of science: New evidence suggests that rather than postulate the existence of dark energy and dark matter, scientists need simply to revise their theories of gravity.
Is there a crack in the monolith? A play about the persecution of a scientist who expresses skepticism about global warming is running in London, with favorable reviews!
The Christians whom Dearborn officials and police had falsely arrested for preaching to Muslims have now sued. You can see the video of the arrests here.
An evening pause: Thirty-one years ago, February 22, 1980, Lake Placid, New York, the winter Olympics: The USA hockey team beats the Soviet Union 4 to 3 to set up their gold medal victory.
Madness: Police arrest an 11-year-old over an “inappropriate” stick figure drawing.
The death toll from the earthquake yesterday in New Zealand may top 200.
And the TSA exists for what reason again? In a test, a TSA agent with a handgun slipped past TSA security at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, despite being scanned by the enhanced-image body scanner.
The high priests of science and how they bar the door to skeptics. A paper is published in Nature claiming that Antarctica is warming as predicted by global warming advocates.
The indefatigable Steve McIntyre started to scrutinize [this paper] along with Nicholas Lewis. They found several flaws: Steig et al had used too few data sequences to speak for an entire continent, and had processed the data in a very questionable way. But when they wanted to correct him, in another journal, they quickly ran into an inconvenient truth about global warming: the high priests do not like refutation. To have their critique (initial submission here [pdf], final version here [pdf]) of Steig’s work published, they needed to assuage the many demands of an anonymous ‘Reviewer A’ – whom they later found out to be Steig himself. [emphasis mine]
It is unconscionable for any science journal to have allowed Steig, the author of the paper under attack, to act one of the anonymous reviewers. But hey, what do I know? I’m only a simple science writer.
An evening pause: On February 15, 2011, the Sun emitted its strongest flare in four years. Though the Sun continues to act relatively wimpy as it ramps up towards solar maximum, this flare was spectacular, mostly because we now have some amazing instruments in space to image and study it. This video does an excellent job explaining what was happening, as it happened. Watch, and enjoy.
And note, as powerful as this flare was, and despite the fact that it was pointed right at the Earth, it represented a relatively minor threat to our technological society, despite what some doomsayers might be claiming. A very active Sun can cause us problems, especially with power systems and electrical grids, but based on past experience during previous solar maximums, most power companies have taken careful steps to protect themselves from this risk. And with the Sun as weakly active as it is, the risks are further reduced. The doomsayers are simply shilling for more government research dollars.
Oink! The Washington editor for Bloomberg today demonstrated to all the dishonest way liberal journalists like to cover the budget debates in Congress.
In an opinion piece for Bloomberg, editor Albert Hunt says that the Republican cuts to the budget threaten the American lead in science. According to him, “House Republicans want to cut NIH funding for the current year by more than $1 billion, to $29.5 billion.” Because of this cut would “future advances in areas like brain science are especially threatened.”
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Did Obama and the Democrats blunder in Wisconsin? This man thinks so:
The Wisconsin political blitzkrieg on Gov. Walker was not a spontaneous eruption. It is now clear that it was a highly organized operation planned in Washington, D.C., to unleash a national counterattack on the gains made by Republicans and Tea Party activists. Getting [Organizing for America] and the president to act in close coordination was itself no small feat. The plan included busing in thousands of government employees, arranging for Democratic lawmakers to flee to an adjoining state, flying speakers and political organizers into Madison, organizing thousands to leave their jobs in public safety and in classrooms, and staging rallies inside and outside the statehouse. They even enticed sympathetic doctors to draft bogus doctor excuses for government workers.
It all worked like a charm. Except that it struck all the wrong notes and portrayed all the wrong images. There is nothing more unseemly that to see a president serve as healer in Tucson and a political hack in Madison.
The worst generation’s war in Wisconsin.
In the past 10 years, says the Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds, taxpayers paid more than $8 billion for state workers’ health care coverage, while the workers put in only $398 million. And from 2000 to 2009, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, taxpayers spent about $12.6 billion on public employee pensions while the employees contributed only $8 million. [emphasis in original]
Thousands flee as Philippine volcano erupts.
The consequences for those protesting doctors who issued fake doctors’ notes at the union protests in Wisconsin.
Chaos in Libya: It appears Gaddafi has fled Tripoli as protesters have set the parliament building alight.
Want to go to space? Come to the Isle of Man.
The new colonial movement: China’s first probe to Mars is now set for a November launch.
The second X-37B has arrived in Florida in preparation for a March 4th launch.
Hell has frozen over! Today, from both the Washington Times and the Washington Post: No pet projects are safe! Key quote from the Post:
Yet in last week’s feverish scramble to shrink government, House Republicans also ran the budgetary buzz saw through costly defense and homeland security programs that their party had historically protected. They left no sacred cows. “We held no program harmless from our spending cuts, and virtually no area of government escaped this process unscathed,” Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee said in a statement.
And from the Times:
House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, watched lawmakers vote to defund a military project that pumps millions of dollars into his district, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, saw her colleagues vote to end federal funding for a park in her San Francisco congressional district.
Read the Times article especially, as it lays out in great detail many of the pet projects that got cut. I especially like the elimination of the project to fix the sewers in Tijuana, Mexico.
The Wisconsin protests, both for and against, as seen by a self-described “independent,” with video. Key quote:
That experience has led to these two independent voters, who have been fiscally conservative but socially divided on many issues, to a new understanding of how politics, unions, and the media work. I’m glad I didn’t rely on the descriptions and information from others about this issue. I saw the reality for myself, and we have both decided to stay actively involved. We will not trust or rely on any media to deliver primary information or facts. It really is true: there is biased reporting and organized, liberal oppression and hostility for all other viewpoints. I’m just little nobody wife, mom, and teacher in small town Wisconsin, and I experienced it.
The video clip shows the Tea Party rally begin its demonstration with the Pledge of Allegience, even as teacher union protesters blow whistles to try to drown it out. Is this how they perform the pledge in school?
Another reason to cut the federal budget: The U.S. government estimates it wastes about $125 billion per year.
More civility from the left: Watch this video of Twitter death threats against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.
