Lois Lerner, who is at the center of the IRS scandal, is now retiring from the IRS.
It is good she is out of the IRS, but she better not think this will get her off the hook.
The global warming scientists at the IPCC struggle to explain the lack of warming.
Though scientists don’t have any firm answers, they do have multiple theories. Xie has argued that the hiatus is the result of heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean — a little-understood, naturally occurring process that repeats itself every few decades. Xie and his colleagues presented the idea in a study published last month in the prestigious journal Nature.
The theory, which is gaining adherents, remains unproved by actual observation. Surface temperature records date to the late 1800s, but measurements of deep water temperature began only in the 1960s, so there just isn’t enough data to chart the long-term patterns, Xie said. [emphasis mine]
This theory, that the oceans are absorbing all the heat, is one of the new favorite explanations for the lack of warming by advocates of global warming. However, as this article correctly notes, we have no good data to support it, and even fewer theories to explain it.
The truth is really summed up by the article’s last paragraph:
“This unpredicted hiatus just reflects the fact that we don’t understand things as well as we thought,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and vocal critic of the climate change establishment. “Now the IPCC finds itself in a position that a science group never wants to be in. It’s in spin management mode.”
Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare will increase health costs by an average of $7,450 per year for a typical family of four.
But don’t worry. President Obama and the Democratic Party are quite willing to shut down the federal government in order to guarantee that this law is funded and goes into effect!
Leftwing civility: A medical school official urges denial of all medical care for all “Obamacare nonbelievers”.
The article also describes the growing list of other recent and vicious rants by leftists, including the communications director of the Democratic Party in Sacramento, all wishing harm on those who disagree with them. As the author rightly notes, now that the incivility is aimed at conservatives, Obama’s “pious talk about civility in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords is down the memory hole.”
Some good advice for the Republican Party: “In life and as in the game of football, you can never win the victory if you choose to punt every time you touch the ball.”
More good advice here: 2013 is not 1995.
Not finding out what’s in it: Only two weeks before Obamacare goes into effect, the law’s health exchanges can’t figure out what people will have to pay for coverage.
It appears the software for determining premiums doesn’t work. But don’t worry, the Democrats voted to fund this turkey today!
The Republican battle plan for defunding Obamacare while keeping the government operating.
What makes me skeptical is their fear of having the government shut down, a fear that somehow does not worry the Democrats. While Obama and the Democrats are quite willing to shut everything down to save Obamacare, the Republicans don’t seem to have the same courage. Under these circumstances, they will likely lose the battle.
And why is it that everyone assumes the Republicans will be blamed for the shutdown when they seem to be the ones most interested in avoiding it?
Update: The House has now voted to defund Obamacare but fund the goverment.
Note that the Democrats in the House have once again voted in support of Obamacare, a law that is very clearly destroying the health insurance business.
Another leak from the IPCC shows that politicians in Belgium, Hungary, Germany, and the United States attempted to pressure the scientists writing the report to cover up the lack in global temperature rise since 1998.
[L]eaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years. Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change. Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat – and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve. The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter.
Two points: First, for this article to refer to any legitimate scientist who questions the theory of human-caused global warming to be called a “denier” offends me beyond words, as regular readers of this website know.
Second, this leak proves once again the foolishness of allowing politicians to get involved in the scientific process. They should be kept as far away as possible, at all times.
Leftwing open-mindedness: All but two Democrats walk out of Benghazi hearing to avoid hearing testimony from victims’ families.
Finding out what’s in it: Home Depot joins Walgreens in dumping tens of thousands of employees from their employer heath insurance plan, because of Obamacare. Key quote:
The accelerating shift of workers to Obama’s taxpayer-funded network will likely drive up costs to taxpayers, disadvantage companies that try to pay for their employees’ health-care and make more voters dependent on health-care decisions made by Democratic officials and legislators. The switch is also making a mockery of Obama’s promise that Americans would be able to keep their pre-Obamacare insurance if they prefer. “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” he said in June 2009. [emphasis mine]
Obama’s statement in 2009 was an obvious lie and an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Unfortunately, it appears he estimated the intelligence of too many Americans quite rightly.
Free speech in modern America: A cop stops a student from handing out copies of the Constitution, on Constitution Day. Video here.
The video is so egregious that I have embedded it below the fold. Watch the college bureaucrat tell the student he has to schedule his speech, and that the next date is weeks away.
» Read more
The House vote to fund the government but not Obamacare will force vulnerable Senate Democrats to either endorse the unpopular law again or shut it down.
Exactly. Force these Democrats to once again endorse this turkey of a law, just as it is about to go into effect. Even if the Republicans eventually back down, they will have successfully put these senators on record, only a year before the next election.
The media guide for identifying firearms.
I think they actually use this guide at mainstream outlets like CNN.
Republicans in the House move to fund the government, excluding Obamacare.
If the government shuts down because of this budget proposal it will be because the Democrats refused to sign it. It will be because the Democrats would rather keep Obamacare then keep the government operating.
Working for the Democratic Party: IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted, according to an interim House report.
In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives. But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters. “As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently,” the staff report concludes. “Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.”
It was about this time that both Obama and Democrats in Congress were demanding the IRS go after conservative organizations.
Working for the Democratic Party: New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.
A handful of liberal organizations were definitely targeted for close inspection, but it appears to me that these were merely picked to give the IRS some cover while it mainly focused at harassing as many conservatives organizations as possible.
Another look at the leaked IPCC draft report. Key quote:
To those of us who have been following the climate debate for decades, the next few years will be electrifying. There is a high probability we will witness the crackup of one of the most influential scientific paradigms of the 20th century, and the implications for policy and global politics could be staggering.
The article also takes a close look at the contradiction between the data and the IPCC models and says this:
[W]hat is commonly called the “mainstream” view of climate science is contained in the spread of results from computer models. What is commonly dismissed as the “skeptical” or “denier” view coincides with the real-world observations. Now you know how to interpret those terms when you hear them.
Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration has decided to actually follow the law and not give its Democratic union buddies a waiver on Obamacare.
It shows us how far we have fallen that we are surprised that the Obama administration is going to follow the law, as written and passed by Congress, rather than arbitrarily rewrite that law illegally into order to help its political allies. Nowadays we are increasingly expecting this administration to treat the law as a plaything that it can ignore willy-nilly, without any opposition from anyone.
This story also illustrates the danger of blindly supporting the actions of one political party. Union leaders have for decades allied themselves with the Democratic Party, without ever really questioning the wisdom of anything those Democrats were doing. Obamacare was only one example of this foolishness. Now they are going to suffer badly for their blind partisanship.
It would have been much smarter for those unions to have done what conservatives and tea party advocates demanded back in 2009 and 2010: Read the damn law before you pass it!
Gotta have your KGB: The increasing harassment of their members by Homeland Security has caused the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) to begin a political campaign against the agency.
The link above takes you what looks like a fundraising letter sent about by the AOPA to its membership. The significance is that they are centering their campaign around the harassment by Homeland Security, which suggests that this harassment has become a very big issue within this community.
Finding out what’s in it: Indiana University is laying off 50 maintenance workers to avoid Obamacare costs.
The employees will now work for an independent company, which I am sure will either make sure its total staffing is under 50 or those employees work less than 30 hours per week in order to also avoid Obamacare.
The numbers here aren’t gigantic, but the story is notable in that these employees and the university that had employed them almost certainly supported Obamacare and Obama blindly this last five years. The sad thing is I doubt they will finally face reality and link their troubles with his policies.
And then there’s this: Trader Joe’s to drop health insurance for part-time workers because of Obamacare.
Pushback: The two Colorado Democrats who were key instigators of that state’s new gun control laws were both decisively voted out of office yesterday in recall elections.
The election, which came five months after the United States Senate defeated several gun restrictions, handed another loss to gun-control supporters. It also gave moderate lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.
The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.
The article says almost nothing about Angela Giron’s defeat, which I find intriguing. She was not expected to lose, considering her district was so Democratic, but her margin of defeat was actually larger than Morse’s. See also this article for a very good election analysis which suggests that any effort by Democrats to impose oppressive gun control laws is going to backfire for them very badly.
An evening pause: I think this video captures the thoughtfulness and objectivity of the Obama voter and today’s progressive left better than anything else I have seen or read.
Modern America: A tea party leader in Oklahoma has been charged with a felony because he sent an email to an state senator demanding he do his job or face the political consequences.
The college teacher who went on an anti-Republican tirade in class and even threatened a student who disagreed has been suspended for the rest of the semester.
“The [US Justice Department] just stuffed a rag in Barrett Brown’s mouth, as well as his lawyers.”
The case might be complicated, and Brown might have even broken a reasonable privacy law, justifying his imprisonment. Nonetheless, it disturbs me greatly that the government’s response is to silence the man. Something about this stinks.
A family whose dog was shot by police is now suing for half a million dollars.
The thugs win: Militant gays force an Oregon bakery out of business.
The background:
On January 17, a mother and daughter arrived at Sweet Cakes By Melissa, an Oregon bakery owned by the Kleins. When the pair explained they wanted a wedding cake for a lesbian wedding, the shop owners politely refused informing the would-be customers that their religious beliefs don’t condone gay weddings and that, because of this, they did not want the women’s business. Before the week was up the bakery was beset by attacks in person, on the phone, and in email. The gay mafia from across the country had sprung into action to threaten the lives of the religious couple. [emphasis mine]
The threats and loss of business have now forced them to shut their bakery. And the reason: Their religious beliefs forbid them from catering to a gay wedding, an act which would be the equivalent of endorsing that event. Note also that they had not been refusing to serve gays, only refusing to cater a gay wedding.
A businessman fights a federal regulatory effort that destroyed his business. The government responds by trying to destroy him.
Read the article. It will send chills down your spine. The business was legal, did no harm, and was very successful. The government shut it down, killed it. Now they are going after the creator because he had tried to stop them.
