Tag: politics

Traffic and more roads

8:12 am

Puncturing the myth that more roads mean more congestion Key quote:

Read enough of these studies and you get a sense that much of the induced-demand hubbub is really a sub rosa extension of the war on the suburbs: Stop highway expansion and you can make life miserable enough for the minivan-driving masses that they’ll move out of their gauche “urban-fringe developments” and back to high-density metropolitan cores, where they belong.

In reading the full essay, I was struck by how much the scientific campaign against road construction reminded me of climategate.

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Senate Democrats express support for the most recent House Republican proposal

8:55 pm

Have the Democrats blinked? Senate Democrats have expressed support for the most recent House Republican proposal, a short-term continuing resolution that cuts $4 billion for its two week span and terminates 8 programs outright. A lot more details here, including a program-by-program breakdown of the cuts. Key quote:

Republicans have made abundantly clear that they wish to avoid a government shutdown, as have Democrats to a degree, though for the most part they [the Democrats] have spent the last few weeks preemptively blaming Republicans for a shutdown, while at the same time failing to produce a single piece of legislation that would prevent one.

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Another climategate whitewash

4:12 pm

The inspector general of the Department of Commerce has just issued a review of NOAA’s response to the climategate emails and has essentially given the agency a clean bill of health. You can download the full report here [pdf].

It’s. just. another. whitewash. Let me quote just one part of the report’s summary, referring to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to NOAA in June 2007 in which the agency responded by saying they had no such documents:
» Read more

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The squealing of a former Bush science administrator

11:23 pm

The cries and squeals are now coming from all sides: A former undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department during the Bush administration, Raymond L. Orbach, has joined the chorus of scientists whining about the House’s proposed cuts. [His full editorial, available here as a pdf, can only be downloaded if you subscribe to Science.]

Like all the other squealers, he admits that “the budget deficit is serious.” Nonetheless, the idea of cutting his pet science programs remains unacceptable.

It is when I read stuff like this that feel the situation is most hopeless. Is there no one willing to accept the reality that if we don’t start gaining some control over the federal budget the country will go bankrupt and we will not be able to afford anything?

Instead, all I hear are cries of “Cut! Cut! But don’t cut my program!”

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Why the Democrats might be making the wrong assumptions about a government shutdown

1:52 pm

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.

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Dem Congressman tells unions that they “need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody”

12:03 pm

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.

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The high priests of science and how they bar the door to skeptics

9:54 pm

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.

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How leftwing journalists lie

6:28 pm

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.”
» Read more

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The blunder in Wisconsin

5:33 pm

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.

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The Worst Generation’s war in Wisconsin

4:52 pm

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]

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