The Camel's Back

Even though fewer people are paying taxes, the tax burden is increasing. Obviously, that means less people are paying more taxes. At some point, this will break the camel's back and those remaining taxpayers are going to "opt out" or, as depicted in 'Atlas Shrugged', they'll go on strike and refuse to keep subsidizing the "looters".

Mark Steyn lays it out for us:

Income tax payer an endangered species
By MARK STEYN
2010-04-09 10:09:50

We are nearing the climax of "tax season." That's the problem right there, by the way: Summer should have a season, and baseball should have a season, but not tax. Happily, like candy canes and Christmas tree lights on Dec. 26, the TurboTax boxes will soon be disappearing from the display racks until the nights start drawing in, and the leaves fall from the trees and tax season begins anew in seven or eight months' time.

And yet, for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It's a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes – state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it's national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don't ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it's just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from "No taxation without representation" to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn't redistribution – a "leveling" to address the "mal-distribution" of income, as Sen. Max Baucus, D-Kleptocristan, put it the other day. It isn't even "spreading the wealth around," as then Sen. Barack Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it's an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense of the term can half the country be considered "poor." United States income tax is becoming the 21st century equivalent of the "jizya" – the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the nonbelievers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it's harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That's partly what drove Islamic expansion. Once Araby was all-Muslim, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe – in search of new infidels to mug. Don't worry, I'm not so invested in my analogy that I'm suggesting the Obama-Reid-Pelosi shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia. For one thing, pretty much everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and long ago figured out all the angles: Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole. In the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late 40s collect disability benefits. In the United Kingdom, 5 million people – a 10th of the adult population – have not done a day's work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.

America has a ways to go to catch up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it's on its way. Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out recently that, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don't pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch?

And what's to stop this trend? Democracy decays easily into the tyranny of the majority, in which 51 percent of voters can empty the pockets of the other 49 percent. That's why a country on the fast track to a $20 trillion national debt exempts half the population from making an even modest contribution to reducing it. And it's also why the remorseless shriveling of the tax rolls is a cancer at the heart of republican citizenship.

Pace Max Baucus, this isn't about correcting the "mal-distribution" of income. What Mal Max is up to is increasing dependency. In the newspeak of Big Government, "tax cuts" now invariably mean not reductions in the rate of income seizure but a "tax credit" reimbursed from the seizure in return for living your life the way the government wants you to. With Obamacare, we've now advanced to the next stage – "tax debits," or additional punitive confiscation if you decline to live your life in accordance with government fiat. Obamacare requires you, upon penalty of law, to make provisions for your health care that meet the approval of the state commissars. Unfortunately, as they discovered after passing it, the bill didn't provide for any enforcement mechanisms. But not to worry. The other day Douglas Shulman, commissioner for the Internal Revenue Service, announced that, if you fail to purchase the mandated health insurance, he'll simply confiscate any tax refund due to you in from your previous 12 months' employment withholding.

We are now not merely disincentivizing economic energy but actively waging war on it. If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon, 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go? When you think about it, that 53 percent of American households prop up not just this country but half the planet: They effectively pick up the defense tab for our wealthiest allies, so that Germany, Japan and others can maintain minimal militaries and lavish the savings on cradle-to-grave entitlements. A relatively tiny group of people is writing the check for the entire global order. What proportion of them would need to figure out the game's no longer worth it to bring the whole system crashing down?

©MARK STEYN

Odumbo One Liners

The liberals are asking us to give Obama time. We agree . . . and think 25 to life would be appropriate.

Q: Have you heard about McDonald's' new Obama Value Meal?
A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it.

Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?
A: A fund raiser.

Q: What's the difference between Obama's cabinet and a penitentiary?
A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers and threats to society. The other is for housing prisoners.

Q: If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it started to sink, who would be saved?
A: America!

Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?
A: Bo has papers.

Q: What was the most positive result of the "Cash for clunkers" program?
A: It took 95% of the Obama bumper stickers off the road.

Bring on the Tea Party

Great op-ed by Kevin O'Brien of the Cleveland Plain Dealer

Kevin O'Brien: Who's afraid of a little Tea Party? Everyone, fortunately
By Kevin OBrien, The Plain Dealer
April 08, 2010, 6:01AM

Democratic officeholders should be afraid.

Republican officeholders, too.

For many a year now, officeholders of both major parties have worked hard to earn the distrust of ordinary Americans. It appears that they finally have succeeded.

If only ordinary Americans hadn't been so inattentive. If only ordinary Americans hadn't been so trusting. If only ordinary Americans hadn't been so damnably nice, the country would be in a better position to manage its finances today.

But when have Americans not tried to look for the good in every situation? When have we not been slow to recognize the need to deal with forces, foreign or domestic, aligning against our best interests?

Better late than never, a lot of ordinary Americans are waking up to the sobering reality that there really is no one they can trust. Not Democrats. Not Republicans. Not government. Not corporations. And certainly not corporations in league with government.

Hallelujah.

The people who are angry today are more in tune with this nation's founders than ordinary Americans have been in decades.

The United States has an intricate system of checks and balances, and a government structure based on a separation of powers, and a Bill of Rights that safeguards the rights of states and the rights of the people precisely because the greatest collection of political talent and philosophical insight ever assembled on this continent -- and maybe anywhere on this planet -- looked at the concept of government and said, "We need to make a really small cage for this thing, then be careful not to overfeed it."

We seem to have lost the care-and- feeding instructions about a century ago. We let government out of its little cage and it has been consuming everything it can lay its paws on ever since. In the last 45 years, it has been on a real binge, and in the last year and a half, it has taken bigger bites than a lot of people thought possible.

Ordinary Americans who care about freedom are finally getting a clue and -- horrors! -- they're hollering at members of Congress. That's right: Nice, trusting, formerly inattentive Americans are getting in the faces of the political class and calling them names.

Big (Joe Biden expletive deleted) deal. If members of the political class are too tender to endure a little well-earned rudeness from the people whose hard-earned money they like to "spread around," then they ought to get out of politics. Maybe their successors will find the voice of the people less irritating.

A very, very few ordinary Americans are going so far as to threaten members of the ruling class with physical harm or property damage. That's not fine.

All that does is damage the cause of the people who are loudly but peaceably petitioning their government for the redress of a growing list of very real grievances.

It also allows politicians on the left, including a president who now taunts opponents of his new health care law every time he speaks, to cast themselves simultaneously as victors and victims.

Finally, threats from the right allow the left to lump every proponent of individual liberty, self-reliance, limited government and limited government spending -- the Tea Party movement, in general -- in with nuts who might actually do some harm.

Don't doubt for a second that the left is hoping desperately for someone to step all the way out of line. They thought they had their man -- and early news reports said they did -- when Joseph Stack crashed his Piper Dakota into an IRS building in Texas.

As it turned out, Stack proved to be a Marx-quoting lefty -- the wrong flavor of nut.

So the left has to settle for a little name-calling of its own: "ignorant," "racist," "homophobes," "hooligans," "extremists." The list, as you know, goes on and on.

It's bunk, but it's the script.

Tea Party folks are just patriots worried, with good reason, about the future of the country they love. They're vocal and they're inspiringly unaffiliated.

They scare the hell out of both political parties, because they've embraced distrust.

The Democrats fear them because they see through the left's empty promise of utopia in exchange for freedom. The Republicans fear them because they're pushy and because they're loyal to their principles rather than to a party.

They make everyone uncomfortable. That's healthy.

Some liberal Catholics are thinking: It's payback time, Ratzinger!

This is the best article I've read on these latest attacks on the Pope. The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is the main impediment to the spread of the culture of death. So, the Church must be attacked and the media is all too willing to assist in the attack.

ObamaCare Making You Sick?

Here's the antidote.

First it was the Prius ...

"This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II -- and that's change you can believe in."

Mark Steyn: Dark dawn of deemocracy
By MARK STEYN

2010-03-19

On Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to set up a committee to examine whether condoms should be required on all pornographic film shoots within the Golden State.

California has run out of money, but it hasn't yet run out of things to regulate.

For a government regulatory hearing, the testimony was livelier than usual. The porn star Madelyne Hernandez recalled an especially grueling scene in which she had been obliged to have sex with 75 men. The bureaucrats nodded thoughtfully, no doubt contemplating another languorous 18-month committee assignment looking into capping the number of group-sex participants at 60 per scene. In future, if a porn actress finds 75 men waiting for her on the set, they'll be bureaucrats from Sacramento's Condom Enforcement Squad.

The committee will also make recommendations on whether the "adult" movie industry should be subject to the same regulatory regime and hygiene procedures as hospitals and doctors' surgeries. You mean with everyone in surgical masks? Kinky. If you've ever been in the filthy Clostridium difficile- and MRSA-infected wards of Britain's National Health Service, it may make more sense after the passage of Obamacare to require hospitals to bring themselves up to the same hygiene standards as the average Bangkok porn shoot.

One can make arguments for permitting porn and banning porn, but there isn't a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who'll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for "Debbie Does The Fresno OSHA Office."

Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That's 16,500 new IRS agents, who'll be needed to check whether you – yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens – are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to "deem" into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II – and that's change you can believe in. This is what "health" "care" "reform" boils down to: Fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. And, when you walk into the Health Care Enforcement Division of the IRS, the staffing levels will make Madelyne Hernandez's group-sex scene look like an Equity-minimum one-man play off-off-off-Broadway.

Barack Obama, a man who not so long ago had time to jet across the world to make dreary Olympics-losing speeches about how his kind of town Chicago is, has now postponed his presidential visits to Indonesia and Australia in order to make sure "health care" passes this week – or, at any rate, is "deemed" to have passed, which is apparently the way a quarter-millennium-old constitutional republic does things.

The president, his press secretary informs us, regrets having to postpone his trip for three months, but "passage of the health insurance reform is of paramount importance." Whereas Australia isn't.

The visit had already been pared back to the bare minimum – a quick refueling stop in Canberra, with a speech to Parliament and a grip'n'greet with the Governor-General and the Prime Minister. Maybe the administration could simply "deem" the visit to have occurred, Photoshop a souvenir snapshot and stick it in the mail to their eminences. In much the same way, the Deemocrats are deeming their health bill to control costs rather than actually controlling them. Medicare doesn't reimburse doctors the cost of treating the patient; it reimburses what the bureaucracy "deems" it to have cost. In a deemocracy, this works. In real life, it's more problematic.

Investor's Business Daily argues that the "health" debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has "too much power."

Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they're now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That's all he knows and all he's ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who's never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who've demonized (demonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama's Cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the past century. What it knows is government, and government's default mode is to grow, and grow.

California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation – or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.

Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they'll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don't have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you're entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion. Try typing that onto your pocket calculator. You can't. There isn't enough room for all the zeroes, and, even if they made a pocket calculator large enough, and a pocket large enough, you'd be walking with a limp. To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.

Whatever is "deemed" to have passed in the next few days doesn't end the debate but begins it. If you're sick of talking about health care, move to Tahiti, because in the U.S. we're going to be talking about it until the end of time, or at least until the Iranians nuke Cleveland.

It isn't difficult. We need less government, with smaller budgets, fewer agencies and vastly reduced numbers of public-sector union employees on less-lavish remuneration. I'm confident the California Bureau of Condom Regulators can be retrained as porn-movie bit-players and once again make a useful contribution to society. But, if you're not in favor of shrinking government, you're voting for national decline, remorseless and ever accelerating.

Obama and Pelosi are strong-arming swing-state congressmen into taking one for the deem. It's appropriate that it should take banana republic maneuvers to ram this through, because it's about government so powerful it can make up the rules as it goes along. Maybe regulators should roll a giant condom over the Capitol before it fatally infects the rest of us.

©MARK STEYN

(Pseudo)Intellectuals and Society

Here is a great interview of Thomas Sowell on his latest book, 'Intellectuals and Society'. It's more than thirty minutes long, so make sure you allow yourself adequate time to watch it -- twice!

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More Hubris in Action

Great editorial from yesterday's Investor's Business Daily

Dems Double Down

Posted 01/20/2010 06:53 PM ET

Health Care: Will the administration seize the moment of Scott Brown's victory to work out real solutions, or will it follow Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over the cliff? Or is it just about government control?

Before Sen.-elect Brown became the Scott heard 'round the world, House Speaker Pelosi was asked what his victory in the bluest of blue states would mean. "Certainly the dynamic will change depending on what happens in Massachusetts," she replied in a bit of an understatement.

The dynamic has changed, yet the Democrats, as the country song goes, apparently don't know when to hold them and when to fold them.

"I heard the candidate in Massachusetts, the Republican candidate, say 'Let's go back to the drawing board,'" Pelosi told reporters in California on Monday. "There is no back to the drawing board. . .. We will have health care one way or another."

After the 1994 GOP tsunami, largely due to the failed attempt at HillaryCare, President Clinton wisely chose to work with the people's representatives. Rather than fight ideas that weren't his, he co-opted them, such as welfare reform.

He went on to a second term and, in cooperation with a GOP Congress, had budget surpluses on his watch.

Somehow we doubt this administration will choose the course of cooperation and go back to the drawing board, as it should, and open the closed door. There should be no Cornhusker Kickbacks to the Ben Nelsons or reprises of Mary Landrieu's Louisiana Purchase. Those lawmakers sold their political souls to be the 60th vote to close debate and now there are only 59. They lost Tuesday along with Martha Coakley.

Polls show that Americans have seen the future of the medical overhaul and know it won't work. Government-run, single-payer health insurance hasn't succeeded anywhere on this planet. They ask why their government is pushing solutions it must know can't work, slicing and dicing monster bills just to get something that will pass.

Perhaps it's because it's never been about health care. It's been about nationalizing one-sixth of the economy and making as many people as possible dependent on government. After all, the idea of a health care overhaul began with a lament about the uninsured, whose numbers changed with the political wind, and ended with a 2,000-page, $2.5 trillion hash that would leave millions uninsured.

We were never told why exactly the finest health care delivery system in the world had to be destroyed to insure those who choose not to buy coverage or can't afford it. What about lowering insurance costs by letting people buy plans across state lines? University of Minnesota economists showed that interstate insurance sales could cover an additional 12 million Americans.

Mandates on insurance plans also increase costs, and the average state imposes 38 mandates, according to the Cato Institute's Michael Cannon . These mandates have made private insurance too expensive for many. The Congressional Budget Office says state regulations boost premium costs by 15%.

There are simpler ways to deal with health care issues than through the Democrats' proposals. We could use health savings accounts to provide portability between jobs and create a financial incentive to stay healthy. We could enact real tort reform as some states have done, in the knowledge that lawsuits cure no one.

Pelosi et al. might try to ram the Senate bill through the House, but it's doubtful many wavering congressmen will fall on their swords. Let's address the doable, one issue at a time, such as the uninsured. Let's go back, as Scott Brown says, to the drawing board.

Hubris in Action

One of the most useful characteristics of liberals is their hubris and capacity for self-delusion. After the “Miracle in Massachusetts” on Tuesday, which saw the Democrat – in one of the bluest of blue states, who was up by more than 30 points, who had Obama fly out to campaign for her – get convincingly trounced by a virtually unknown Republican, you’d think most Democrats would realize the electorate wasn’t buying what they’re selling.

You’d think so – but you’d be wrong. Incredibly, there are a lot of liberals running around saying that the voters in Massachusetts rejected Croakley because Obama and the Democrats weren’t liberal enough. They can’t comprehend that the electorate is rejecting Obamacare and have convinced themselves that these electoral reversals reflect voter anger that it’s taking to long to pass Obamacare. I am not making this up; you can’t make this stuff up!

Here are a couple of examples:

• Obama Needs to Come Out Fighting
  By E.J. Dionne
  
  Brown's victory is also a rebuke to a United States Senate that acted as if it had unlimited time to pass health care legislation and ignored how foolish its listless ways appear to normal human beings. … In the short term, Democrats have to make a quick decision on health care. The obvious path is for the House to pass the Senate's bill and send it to Obama's desk, while reaching agreement on certain changes that, under existing practices, can get through the Senate with fewer than 60 votes. It would be the equivalent of a political crime for Democrats to have invested so much in health reform only to let it die because of one election in one state.
• Pass Universal Coverage Now, Fix It Later
  By Froma Harrop
  
  Pass universal coverage now, fix it later. … Even though their reforms are superior, Democrats in Washington could have done better still by not trying to please everyone (including Republicans who were just playing with them). But despite their control of the White House and majorities in Congress, Democrats seemed capable only of reacting to critics, of cringing with fear under even the most ludicrous attacks.
  
  If you don't have the courage of your convictions, it doesn't matter whether your party has 59 or 60 or 65 seats in the Senate. Under President Bush, Republicans got whatever they wanted with 50 senators.
• The Massachusetts Election
  New York Times Editorial
  
  There are many theories about the import of Scott Brown’s upset victory in the race for Edward Kennedy’s former Senate seat. To our minds, it is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform — even though it has upended the effort to pass a reform bill, which Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his first year.
  
  Mr. Obama was right to press for health care reform. But he spent too much time talking to reluctant Democrats and Republicans who never had the slightest intention of supporting him. He sat on the sidelines while the Republicans bombarded Americans with false but effective talk of death panels and a government takeover of their doctors’ offices. And he did not make the case strongly enough that the health care system and the economy are deeply interconnected or explain why Americans should care about this huge issue in the midst of a recession: If they lose their jobs, they lose their health insurance.

Dear liberals, please, please, PLEASE keep up this kind of thinking. It will make victories in the 2010 mid-term elections so much easier!

EPIC FAIL

Mass. voters 'Tea' off on turncoat O
By MICHAEL GOODWIN
Last Updated: 9:20 AM, January 20, 2010
Posted: 3:53 AM, January 20, 2010
http://www.nypost.com/

A friend who toiled in the magazine business tells a story. In the mid-1970s, the publisher of their national news weekly took him to lunch to celebrate how well things were going. Circulation and ads were both roaring, making for happy campers all around.

As he clinked Martini glasses with my friend, the publisher declared, "The dogs like the dog food!"

The story's glib disdain for the customers comes as a well-timed metaphor. Unfortunately for President Obama, American voters don't like the crap he is plopping in their food dishes.

Now they are doing something about it. His health-care monstrosity has turned simmering discontent into a battle cry of resistance and cost him iron-clad control of the US Senate.

That Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts was the scene of the smack-down spells out the dimensions of the anger. Obama went to Harvard Law School, but apparently never learned the lessons of the first Boston Tea Party.

And so his arrogance and the heavy hand of big government sparked the second. A year to the day after he made history by taking the oath, he stands on the wrong side of a new American revolution.

It's hard to believe how quickly the nation has turned against Obama and the Democratic Party. Then again, it feels like an eternity since he swept into office on a tide of good will and hope.

Remember how he would unite the country? And boost the economy? As his faith in government grows, the public's faith in him declines. Even the stock market rose yesterday on expectations that the Obama agenda would be stalled.

It is a remarkable fall from grace for a man who squandered a mandate and basic trust. Even he cannot govern without the consent of the governed.

The victory by little-known Republican Scott Brown marks the third time where a state Obama won in 2008 has turned thumbs down on him in the last three months. Starting with Virginia and New Jersey, each GOP victory has sharpened the sense that he wildly overreached in forcing the country to take a sharp left turn.

While it is true he inherited an economic mess and two wars, the electorate is concluding his policies have made things worse. That fully half the country views his first year as a failure marks a record decline in presidential score keeping.

Obama has only himself to blame. While the far-left barons of Congress played their predictable part, the president has played their eager accomplice.

Historians will judge whether he led or followed them. For now, it's sufficient to say they are in the soup together.

Yet still they show only defiance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed the health-care package would become law "one way or the other." With only about 35 percent of the public supporting it, she has picked a fight with an angry public. Does she not believe in democracy?

Most disheartening, the White House has boarded her ship of fools. Politico.com reports Obama will respond to the defeat with a "combative turn."

Apparently his hostility and contempt for dissent was his Mr. Nice Guy routine. The article quotes an aide saying the president has no doubts about his course and growing opposition "reinforces the conviction to fight hard."

This madness was echoed by White House flack Robert Gibbs, who chalked up the anger over the health bills to public ignorance of the benefits.

Yes, that must be it. It isn't possible the dogs don't really like the dog food!

It must be the packaging and the selling job. And so in coming days, watch as the best and brightest reach for shinier labels and loftier adjectives.

They should beware. These American dogs bite.

“Everything that follows is a bonus.”

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Survivor of 2 Atomic Blasts, Dies at 93
By MARK McDONALD

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only official survivor of both atomic blasts to hit Japan in World War II, died Monday in Nagasaki, Japan. He was 93.

The cause was stomach cancer, his family said.

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the so-called Little Boy device detonated above the city.

Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than two miles away from ground zero that day. His eardrums were ruptured, and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to Nagasaki, his hometown, the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with the British newspaper The Independent.

“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.

Japan surrendered six days after the Nagasaki attack.

Mr. Yamaguchi recovered from his wounds, went to work for the American occupation forces, became a teacher and eventually returned to work at Mitsubishi.

There were believed to have been about 165 twice-bombed people, known as nijyuu hibakusha, although municipal officials in both cities have said that Mr. Yamaguchi was the only person to be officially acknowledged as such.

One of his daughters, Toshiko Yamasaki, who was born in 1948, said her mother had also been “soaked in black rain and was poisoned” by the fallout from the Nagasaki blast. Her mother died in 2008 from kidney and liver cancer. She was 88.

“We think she passed the poison on to us,” Ms. Yamasaki said, noting that her brother died of cancer at 59 and that her sister has been chronically ill throughout her life.

In his later years Mr. Yamaguchi spoke out against atomic weapons, though he had earlier avoided joining antinuclear protests because of the attention he might have attracted, Ms. Yamasaki told The Independent. “He was so healthy, he thought it would have been unfair to people who were really sick,” she added.

Mr. Yamaguchi rarely gave interviews, but he wrote a memoir and was part of a 2006 documentary about the double bombing survivors. He called for the abolition of nuclear weapons at a showing of the documentary, “Niju Hibaku” (“Twice Bombed”), at the United Nations that year.

At a lecture he gave in Nagasaki last June, Mr. Yamaguchi said he had written to President Obama about banning nuclear arms. And he was recently visited by the American film director James Cameron to discuss a film project on atomic bombs, Ms. Yamasaki said.

Mr. Yamaguchi was philosophical about his surviving the blasts. “I could have died on either of those days,” he told The Mainichi Daily News of Japan in August. “Everything that follows is a bonus.”

The First Step Is Admitting You Have A Problem
From the Heritage Foundation's "Morning Bell"
Posted January 8th, 2010 at 9.50am in Protect America.

It may have taken President Barack Obama two weeks to deliver a speech on the failed Flight 253 bomb attack without blaming President Bush, but he should still be commended for finally owning up for the massive intelligence failure. President Obama told the American people yesterday: “The U.S. government had the information . . . to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack. Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had. … Ultimately, the buck stops with me . . . and when the system fails, it is my responsibility.”

But while the President is right to admit the system failed and that it is his fault that it did, he is still clueless about why. The President promised he would direct “our intelligence community immediately begin assigning specific responsibility for investigating all leads on high-priority threats so that these leads are pursued and acted upon aggressively — not just most of the time, but all of the time.” And he added: “In addition to the corrective efforts that I’ve ordered, I’ve directed agency heads to establish internal accountability reviews, and directed my national security staff to monitor their efforts.”

But this failure of our intelligence system was not just about lack of accountability. It was about empowerment - or more specifically the lack thereof. The system simply moved too slowly because there was a lack of urgency about the war on terror. Intelligence personnel were not empowered to employ their ingenuity and resourcefulness to connect the dots. Adding layers of “internal accountability reviews” will only make the bureaucratic stupor worse. It is people’s resourcefulness and initiative that will stop the next terrorist attack, not a bureaucratic process.

And from the day he stepped into office, President Obama’s actions have done nothing but kill the initiative and morale of our intelligence employees. From day one, he made it clear that he believes the war on terror is a civilian criminal justice problem to be managed, and not a war to be won. That is why he took the responsibility for interrogating detainees from the CIA and gave it to the FBI. That is why he has failed to seek the renewal of key investigatory authorities authorized under the USA Patriot Act, instead settling for a six-month extension tacked on to the Defense appropriations bill. It is why instead of promising victory in Afghanistan, he sent fewer troops than were required and gave al Qaeda a set date for our withdrawal. It is why he has failed to approach Congress with legislation establishing a legal framework for handling terrorism detainees. It is why he is pushing for Khalid Sheik Mohammed to be prosecuted in civilian court despite his previous guilty plea in a military tribunal. And most demoralizing of all, President Obama has allowed Attorney General Eric Holder to re-investigate nearly a dozen CIA interrogators and contractors for their past efforts in the war on terror.

This is an issue of leadership. The President of the United States sets the tone and then the message filters down. Our intelligence personnel failed to follow-up on the leads that could have prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from even boarding the plane because their leader had sent the message that fighting the war on terror was not a high priority. Finally, it now seems that the President is ready to start acting like protecting the American people is not just a duty: it is his first duty.

Oops, Wrong Door

These guys want to rule the world and think they can change the weather -- but they can't find their way to the conference room and walk into a supply closet instead.

"Has there ever been a more pitiful example of misguided nonsense, aggressive idiocy and functional stupidity than last week's climate change conference in Copenhagen?" Dec. 21, 2009 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal EDITORIAL: Climate folly Copenhagen conference a sham Has there ever been a more pitiful example of misguided nonsense, aggressive idiocy and functional stupidity than last week's climate change conference in Copenhagen? The weeklong orgy of excess -- to which most participants arrived in plush, carbon-emitting private jets and were shuttled around in limos -- was nothing more than another leftist shakedown of wealthy nations on behalf of "developing" countries. This time in the name of saving the planet. Promoting panic in the name of global warming is the Trojan horse for those who seek to overhaul the world economy by subverting capitalism and advancing collectivism. There is absolutely no evidence that mandating strict carbon emission standards will do anything at all to solve the perceived problem. Instead, we were treated to another U.N. gathering at which Third World hacks such as Hugo Chavez are applauded while Western ideals are dismissed and derided. Unless, of course, those Western nations agree to cough up cash to dictatorial kleptocrats. The most significant part of the bogus and nonbinding "deal" brokered by President Barack Obama, for instance, is a $30 billion, three-year program intended to help poor countries address environmental degradation and develop alternative energy. That figure is supposed to rise to $100 billion a year by 2020. Suffice it to say that none of that money will go toward providing the citizens of "poor" countries with the means to become freer and more prosperous -- and thus more likely to be good environmental stewards. Instead of offering more and more handouts, President Obama should have stood tall and explained that wealthy nations are wealthy for a reason: They stand atop political and cultural institutions that respect private property, contract law, individual liberty and capitalism. Instead of sending cash to Chad, Laos, Guyana and Niger under the guise of mitigating global warming, we should send the works of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, John Locke and the founding fathers. Then toss in tomes by Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. "Want to know the best way to heal the planet?" asked sydicated columnist Jonah Goldberg. "Create more rich countries. Want to know the best way to hurt the planet? Throw a wet blanket on economic growth." Guess which option most of the Copenhagen "activists" prefer.

September 23, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?
By Patrick J. Michaels

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.

"The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce."

Copenhagen climate summit: 'most important paper in the world' is a glorified UN press release

By Gerald Warner World Last updated: December 18th, 2009

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.

After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers. The danger of this ploy, of course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled anyway, what is the point of handing over billions – better to get some serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into saunas.”

This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes, presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of course. It’s from the – er – UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is – er – running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a “leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell under the Tories.

This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen

Amid rumbling discontent, Democrats head for the exits | Washington Examiner

Amid rumbling discontent, Democrats head for the exits | Washington Examiner