Tag: politics

Angara launch scrubbed.

8:41 am

Only moments prior to launch computers aborted the first flight of Angara, Russia’s first new rocket since the Soviet-era.

More information here. According to a Russian web forum, the problem is probably a leaky valve or the loss of pressure in the propulsion system and that it might take a week to be fixed.

The quote below from the first story above is interesting in that it once again illustrates how Putin is trying to exert his authority over the space industry to re-establish the Soviet-era top down way of doing things:

Putin, who had been poised to watch the rocket’s inaugural flight from the northern military Plesetsk cosmodrome via video link from the Kremlin, ordered his generals to report on the cause of the delay within an hour.

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$4.4 billion for 2,000 IRS hard drive crashes.

5:40 pm

After spending $4.4 billion on its computers during the Obama administration, the IRS still had over 2,000 hard drive crashes in 2014.

IRS commissioner John Koskinen used the 2,000 crashes as an argument that the crash of Lois Lerner’s hard drive was not that unusual, and that their aging equipment made backup difficult. To me, it suggests that the people at this agency are either gross incompetents, or even more corrupt than I thought.

Because you see, with that many crashes, the IRS made the one obvious decision anyone with any brains would immediately make in that situation: They canceled the contract with their email backup service.

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More evidence of data tampering at NOAA

2:47 pm

A close analysis of NOAA climate data from just one randomly picked Texas rural location reveals significant data tampering to make the climate appear to be growing warming.

In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming. ,,,

So what possible justification can USHCN [the climate data center at NOAA] have for making such large adjustments? Their usual answer is TOBS, or Time of Observation Bias, which arises because temperatures are now monitored in the early morning rather than the late afternoon, which tended to be the practice before. But by their own admittance, TOBS adjustments should only account for about 0.2C.

What about station location? Has this changed? Well, not since 1949 according to the official Station Metadata. Luling is a small town of about 5000 people, and the station is situated at the Foundation Farm, 0.7 miles outside town. In other words, a fairly rural site, that should not need adjusting for urban influences.

It is plain that these adjustments made are not justifiable in any way. It is also clear that the number of “Estimated” measurements made are not justified either, as the real data is there, present and correct.

In doing this analysis, the author, Paul Homewood, does something that Steven Goddard of the Real Science website, the man who broke this story, doesn’t do very often: He carefully illustrates the full raw dataset and shows us how he isolates the raw data from the estimated and adjusted numbers. Goddard generally only shows his results, which means we have to trust his analysis. Homewood therefore approaches Goddard’s results skeptically, and thus acts to check his work to see if it is accurate and correct. He finds that it is.

This is science at its best.

I should also note that I found Homewood’s analysis because Steven Goddard posted a link on his own webpage. As a true scientist, Goddard does not fear a close look at his work. He welcomes it.

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Blacklisting “disruptive” vets from medical care.

10:18 am

We’re here to help you! The Veterans administration keeps a database administrated by secret committees that lists vets as “disruptive” and “disgruntled,” which it then uses to restrict their treatment.

Among examples of patients’ behavior referred to the VA’s “Disruptive Behavior Committees” (yes, that’s what they’re called): venting “frustration about VA services and/or wait times, threatening lawsuits or to have people fired, and frequent unwarranted visits to the emergency department or telephone calls to facility staff.”

As Krause explains, the Disruptive Behavior Committees are secret panels “that decide whether or not to flag veterans without providing due process first. The veteran then has his or her right of access to care restricted without prior notice.”

Obviously, the VA demonstrates once again why we must put the entire healthcare industry under government control. If they can do it to vets, why shouldn’t the rest of the government not have the power to do it to us all!

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Another global warming computer model bites the dust.

9:59 am

The uncertainty of science: Despite predicting ten years ago that the global temperature would rise significantly, actual temperatures have dropped in the ensuing decade.

But don’t worry, these climate scientists really do know what’s going to happen. Just give them lots of money, silence their critics, and they guarantee they will fake the data to make sure their predictions are right!

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Supreme Court rejects abortion clinic free speech buffer zone.

9:47 am

In another victory against government overreach, the Supreme Court today ruled that a buffer zone protecting abortion clincs from protests violates the first amendment.

While the court was unanimous in the outcome, Roberts joined with the four liberal justices to strike down the buffer zone on narrow grounds. In a separate opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia criticized Roberts’ opinion for carrying forward “this court’s practice of giving abortion-rights advocates a pass when it comes to suppressing the free-speech rights of their opponents.”

I am once again gratified that the entire court recognized the unconstitutionality of this buffer zone. However, Scalia is right. That a majority of the court rejected the buffer on narrow grounds is unfortunate.

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Supreme Court rejects Obama’s recess appointments

9:41 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: In a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court has decided that Barack Obama’s fake recess appointments were unconstitutional.

Two and one-half years ago in 2012, Obama tried to slip-in appointments to the National Labor Relations Board without the constitutionally required Senate approval, claiming he had the right to do so because the Senate was in recess. There’s only one problem. The Senate was not in formal recess when Obama made the dictatorial appointments.

Now the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in a unanimous 9-0 decision that Obama doesn’t get to define when the U.S. Senate is in recess, the Senate does.

I am gratified that all the Democratic appointees to the court ruled against Obama, refusing to allow their partisan tendencies to overrule the plain language of the Constitution. More information about the ruling and its history here.

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China heads for the Moon and Mars.

8:43 am

The competition heats up: In several different news stories today China touted its future plans in space.

The landing test described in the first story above will also be the first test flight of China’s new heavy lift rocket, Long March 5.

That China is both politically and culturally serious about this effort can be seen by the nationalistic enthusiasm for this space effort that permeates these stories. They also can’t help comparing their plans to U.S. efforts.
» Read more

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My Space Show appearance June 14, 2014.

10:10 pm

For those who wish to listen to the podcast of my two hour appearance on the Space Show yesterday, you can get the podcast here. You can also comment on my discussion with David Livingston and his callers at the Space Show blog, or here.

The two major topics we discussed were first, Russia’s future in space in the context of that government’s effort to retake control of its entire aerospace industry, and second, the evidence that there is fraud and data manipulation going on in the climate research units of both NOAA and NASA. I also discussed some recent space science stories, such as Yutu on the Moon, Curiosity on Mars, and Cassini’s recent imagery of the lakes of Titan.

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Report finds 6.9 million people registered to vote in multiple states.

2:46 pm

A cross-check of the voter rolls from 28 states has found almost 7 million duplicate registrations.

Note that the head of the organization that issued this report was one of the conservative individuals harassed by the IRS as well as three other government agencies. I guess the Democrats consider it voter suppression (and maybe racist!) to prevent these 7 million people from voting twice.

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EPA “loses” emails like the IRS.

1:24 pm

Transparency! Subpoenaed emails at the EPA have been lost because of a hard drive crash.

The hearing also included a bit of deja vu for the committee when members grilled [EPA Administrator Gina] McCarthy on lost emails from a hard-drive crash (the same issue that wiped out emails from IRS employee Lois Lerner). In this case, the emails in question were from retired EPA employee Philip North, who was involved in the agency’s decision to begin the process of preemptively vetoing the Pebble Mine project in Alaska.

North, who declined an interview request by the committee, is retired, and committee staff say they have been unable to track him down. According to a committee aide, North’s hard drive crashed in 2010—which was around the same time that the committee is investigating the agency’s discussions of a potential veto—and the emails were not backed up.

This is all crap. The only way these emails get lost is if the people involved intentionally “lost” them.

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Supreme Court forbids warrantless police searches of cell phones.

8:52 am

A victory for civil rights: The Supreme Court ruled today that police do not have the right to rummage through your cell phone data without a warrant.

As welcome as this decision is, I must point out the threat posed by this last sentence in the article:

The court did carve out exceptions for “exigencies” that arise, such as major security threats.

Since the Obama administration wanted the right to do warrantless searches, don’t be surprised if this exception grows so that everything possible can be made to fit it.

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The VA scandal expands with new report

4:42 pm

Coming to a hospital near you! A new report indicates that as many as 1,000 veterans might have died because of corruption and incompetence at the VA.

The report also alleges that the VA routinely performs unnecessary preventative care, cannot process claims in a timely fashion, employs health care providers who have lost their medical licenses, and – as has been widely reported – maintains secret waiting lists in order to create the impression that the department is meeting performance goals set in Washington.

The report further alleges that some VA staff have been implicated in criminal activities, including drug dealing, sexual abuse, attempted kidnapping, theft, and conspiracy. “Earlier this year, one former staffer at the Tampa, Florida, VA was sentenced to six years in federal prison for trading veterans’ personal information for crack cocaine,” CNN reported on Tuesday.

In spite of these failures, VA senior managers are still receiving bonuses.

I want to emphasize again that this is exactly the kind of mess we can expect to occur with our private healthcare system as Obamacare forces the government to interfere with it more and more.

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IRS admits it leaked confidential tax information

2:08 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS has agreed to pay $50K to a political organization for leaking confidential tax information to its political enemies.

The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival. ,,,

In February 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its web site NOM’s 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of the marriage group’s major donors, including soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. That information then was published by the Huffington Post and other liberal-leaning news sites.

HRC’s president at the time, Joe Solmonese, was tapped that same month as a national co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

The information had been fed from the IRS to a gay rights activist who to this day refuses to reveal who his contact at the IRS was.

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“They did not follow the law.”

10:48 am

“They did not follow the law.”

Guess who. Its initials are I-R-S, and the person making the accusation is the head of the National Archives. said during House hearings Tuesday on the IRS scandal.

Archivist of the U.S. David Ferriero, speaking before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made clear that federal agencies are supposed to report whenever their records are destroyed or even accidentally deleted. But he said that after emails from embattled IRS official Lois Lerner vanished after a computer failure in 2011, nobody told the National Archives.

“They did not follow the law,” Ferriero said.

But hey, just try playing this game if the IRS calls you in for a tax audit.

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India’s new prime minister to watch rocket launch.

9:22 am

The competition heats up: The new prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, will watch the next commercial launch of his country’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV)

Modi would be called a tea party candidate in the U.S. He is very pro-capitalism and business. And though he has said he is very pro-space, I do wonder what he thinks of the commercial efforts of India’s space agency ISRO. ISRO is developing its rockets in an effort to capture international market share. It is as if NASA built the Falcon 9 and was trying to make money selling its use to private satellite companies.

I would not be surprised if Modi decides eventually to privatize this operation, taking the rocket development and commercial launches out of the hands of the government.

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Tonight’s testimony and questioning of IRS commissioner John Koskinen concerning the destruction of Lois Lerner’s emails in connection with the IRS’s harassment of opponents of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party..

7:30 pm

Cover-up: Tonight’s testimony and questioning of IRS commissioner John Koskinen concerning the destruction of Lois Lerner’s emails in connection with the IRS’s harassment of opponents of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party..

An outraged Issa insisted that Americans should be able to know “they’re being honestly treated by your employees, especially somebody at such a high level. Isn’t that in fact a priority that should have allowed for full retention?”

“If we had the right resources, there would be a lot of priorities,” Koskinen shot back.

“So the American people should believe that if they don’t have the resources to pay their taxes, they shouldn’t pay their taxes,” Issa jabbed, “because if the IRS doesn’t have the resources, it won’t keep records? That’s pretty much what you’re telling us here tonight, is that resources are a question of whether or not you retain key documents.”

When Tennessee Republican Rep Scott DesJarlais asked Koskinen how much money it would take to replace the IRS’s computer systems in order to prevent another major data loss, he answered that it would cost between $10 and $30 million. In a tense moment, DesJarlais then reminded him that the IRS paid $89 million in bonuses last year, including $1 million to agency employees who owed back taxes.

Be sure the watch all the videos at the link. If you do and you still believe John Koskinen is telling the truth and is not a political thug who is doing the bidding of the White House to cover-up its use of the IRS to harass its political opponents, then you are probably so naive you believe Nigerian emails.

More information about tonight’s hearing here.

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The scandal of fiddled global warming data.

10:28 am

The mainstream press finally notices: The scandal of fiddled global warming data.

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

I reported on Steve Goddard’s work back in January. Though these mainstream journalists are very slow in getting the story, it is good that some of them are finally waking up.

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In searching for three kidnapped teenagers, Israel has uncovered dozens of tunnels, weapons caches, and explosive labs hidden throughout the Palestinian-controlled Hebron region of the West Bank.

10:17 am

In searching for three kidnapped teenagers, Israel has uncovered dozens of tunnels, weapons caches, and explosive labs hidden throughout the Palestinian-controlled Hebron region of the West Bank.

Some of the tunnels were found by soldiers inside the homes of Palestinians, under large pieces of furniture and laundry machines. Using their specialized equipment, Yahalom (diamond in Hebrew) forces participated in dozens of raids on the homes of Palestinian activists across the West Bank, confiscating caches of weapons and explosives. The unit’s forces discovered some 20 laboratories for manufacturing improvised explosives devices (IEDs) hidden in homes they searched. “We would arrive at a suspicious home and find a family living on the first floor and a laboratory with explosives on the third floor,” said a senior officer in the unit. We also discovered underground spaces in the Hebron area which we had not known about previously,” he added.

The important take-away from this is that Hebron has been under Palestinian control since the early 1990s as per the Oslo accords. Instead of using that control to build a prosperous and independent state that would be a peaceful neighbor to Israel, the evidence once again shows that — like Gaza — the Palestinian leadership and population used the opportunity to instead wage war and to kill and kidnap Israelis.

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The IRS cancelled its emailing archive service only weeks after Lois Lerner’s computer crashed.

10:02 am

Cover-up: The IRS cancelled its emailing archive service only weeks after Lois Lerner’s computer crashed.

Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups. Two months later, Sonasoft’s contract ended and the IRS gave its email-archiving contractor the boot.

IRS official and frequent White House visitor Nikole Flax allegedly suffered her own computer crash in December 2011, three months after the IRS ended its relationship with Sonasoft.

The timing is too perfect for anything but a cover-up. They were blatantly working for Obama’s campaign and the Democratic Party, and realized they needed to destroy the documents that proved that fact.

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Left wing activists demand but fail to prevent someone from videotaping an open public event they had scheduled at a college.

9:55 am

Fascists: Left wing activists demand but fail to prevent someone from videotaping an open public event they had scheduled at a college.

Watch the video below the fold. You will be amused when the leftists try to block the videographer’s camera and somehow think this prevents him from recording their actions. If anything, it allows him to document forcefully their lack of respect for free speech.
» Read more

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To be fair, let’s watch a montage of the Democratic representatives and their statements during today’s House hearing of IRS commissioner John Koskinen.

6:20 pm

To be fair, let’s watch a montage of the Democratic representatives and their statements during today’s House hearing of IRS commissioner John Koskinen.

Watch it, please. For those who are old enough to remember the Watergate hearings, you will be strongly reminded of the Republicans then defending Nixon. It was pitiful when the Republicans did it then, and it is pitiful when the Democrats do it now.

The IRS has admitted it wrongly harassed conservatives. It is also clearly participating in a cover-up. To make-believe these things didn’t happen and that the victim here is the IRS is beyond shameful.

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The superintendent at a Connecticut school that blocked access to conservative websites while allowing access to comparable liberal sites has finally issued a response to the charge.

6:04 pm

The superintendent at a Connecticut school that blocked access to conservative websites while allowing access to comparable liberal sites has finally issued a response to the charge.

Superintendent Jody Goeler posted a response this morning to the school’s website, blaming the Dell SonicWall service they use. Goeler wrote, “As interest in this topic has expanded, the district has pressed Dell SonicWall for more information about how websites are assigned to categories and why there are apparent inconsistencies, as discovered by the student, in classifications particularly along conservative and liberal lines.” Goeler added, “The district is trying to determine the reason for the inconsistency and if the bias is pervasive enough to justify switching to another content filtering provider.”

Goeler concluded her letter saying, “Once we receive a statement from Dell SonicWall clarifying its process for assigning websites to categories, I will post it on our website for your review at www.ctreg14.org.

Blaming the filtering company is interesting. It is possible they are the source of the bias. I remain skeptical and wonder if the school knew and went along with it without comment — until they got caught.

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Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed ten days after the chairman of the House Ways & Means committee sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency was engaged in targeting.

2:16 pm

Here’s another tidbit about Lois Lerner’s lost emails: Her hard drive crashed ten days after the chairman of the House Ways & Means committee sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency if it was engaged in targeting.

What a coincidence! She discovers that Congress is interested in what she has been doing and suddenly her hard drive crashes, destroying all the emails she has written about this very subject. Do you smell a rat?

In addition, Congress last week discovered through other subpoenaed emails that Lerner was having conversations at that time with Department of Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. The evidence thus continues to suggest strongly that the White House was intimately involved in the decision use the IRS to harass its conservative opponents.

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More revelations from today’s IRS hearings, this time indicating evidence of White House involvement.

10:35 am

More revelations from today’s IRS hearings, this time indicating evidence of White House involvement.

The evidence remains circumstantial, but very damning nonetheless. The White House needs to explain exactly what happened in a meeting between the IRS chief counsel and President Obama exactly two days before that chief counsel changed IRS criteria for approving tax exempt status in a manner that increased the harassment of conservatives.

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More video from IRS commissioner John Koskinen testimony today during House hearings.

10:21 am

More video from IRS commissioner John Koskinen’s testimony today during House hearings.

Koskinen is so full of crap I think I could fertilize half the farm fields in the state of Iowa with it. This response from Kevin Brady (R-Texas) sums it up quite cogently.

“The IRS denied for two years targeting of Americans based on their political beliefs. That wasn’t the truth. They said it was a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. That wasn’t the truth. You said you were targeting liberal organizations. That wasn’t the truth. Then you assured us you would provide us all the emails in May and that wasn’t the truth. And today, you are telling us out of thousands of IRS computers, the one that lost the emails was a person of interest in an ongoing congressional investigation. And that is not the truth either. This is the most corrupt and deceitful IRS in history.”

» Read more

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