1. "Obama criticized pork barrel spending in the form of 'earmarks,' urging changes in the way that Congress adopts the spending proposals. Then he signed a spending bill that contains nearly 9,000 of them, some that members of his own staff shoved in last year when they were still members of Congress. 'Let there be no doubt, this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability,' Obama said." -- McClatchy, 3/11
2. "There is no doubt that we've been living beyond our means and we're going to have to make some adjustments." -- Obama during the campaign.
3. This year's budget deficit: $1.5 trillion.
4. Asks his Cabinet to cut costs in their departments by $100 million -- a whopping .0027%!
5. "The White House says the president is unaware of the tea parties." -- ABC News, 4/15

Some arguments in the law fail because when they are thought through, they become not only absurd but dangerous. So it is with the public airways argument. Today, the vast majority of all communications by all 300 million private citizens in the United States utilize the public airways.

The same is true with AIG.... It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.

Here's a great article in the National Review about how the Obama Cabinet is using Fear as a tactic to push it's agenda.  It's a good read and points out the obvious about why Obama really isn't doing anything to fix the current financial situation.

“Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times right after the election. “They are opportunities to do big things.” Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told an audience at the European Parliament, “Never waste a good crisis.” Then President Obama explained in his Saturday radio and Internet address that there is “great opportunity in the midst of” the “great crisis” befalling America.

Numerous commentators, including me, have pointed to this never-waste-a-crisis mantra as evidence that Obama’s budget priorities are a great ideological bait-and-switch. He says he wants to fix the financial crisis, but he’s focusing on selling his longstanding liberal agenda on health care, energy, and education as the way to do it, even though his proposals have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the housing and toxic-debt problems that are the direct causes of our predicament. Indeed, some — particularly on Wall Street — would argue that his policies are making the crisis worse.

But those policies aren’t the real scandal, even though they’re bad enough. The real scandal is that this administration thinks crises are opportunities for governmental power grabs. (It seems writer Randolph Bourne was wrong. It is not war, but crisis, that is the health of the state.)

Michael Kinsley famously said that a gaffe in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. As they say, it’s funny because it’s true.

Obama’s Fear Mongering by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online

Gore is nothing but a two-bit liar and an opportunist money grubber.  How do I know?  Well, take this article in the National Post.  Lorne Garner does a good job at taking recent ideas and evidence that completely refutes the infantile idea that human produced green-house gasses impact the climate more than other factors like the Sun.

"So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded -- none -- and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, [Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart] was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. 'This is no coincidence,' he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate."

Dr Hackbart isn't the only one who's come to this realization.  There's more and more people who are really looking into the emerging science of global climate.  And it seems that the more honest they are with their research, the more we'll see that we are on this roller coaster with no way to impact it.

"Also in September, American Craig Loehle, a scientist who conducts computer modelling on global climate change, confirmed his earlier findings that the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago did in fact exist and was even warmer than 20th-century temperatures.

Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather -- even harvest totals and censuses --confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.

But in order to prove the climate scaremongers' claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented -- a result of human, not natural factors -- the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann's 'hockey stick,' in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies.

Dr. Loehle's work helps end this deception."

The main point that I want to make is that the study of climate change is new.  It's an emerging science.  Conclusions from many of the recent studies that point to human affect of climate change are based off of this emerging and inaccurate science.  Any decision based on those studies will invariantly be a very costly wrong decision. 

"Our findings basically are that fingerprints - that is to say the pattern of warming - that's predicted by greenhouse models does not match the fingerprints of observations, so there is a disconnect between greenhouse models and the actual reality of observations,"

But Singer said, "We have to remember that the climate has always been changing ever since we have records, and we have geologic records going back millions and millions of years. We know that there have been huge climate changes on the earth long before human beings actually came into existence.

 

"We are fairly sure that what's causing the warming are changes in the sun," he said. "These are very subtle changes that are very difficult to observe. The sun is really a quite variable star."

"Clearly, a majority of Americans believe the current set of outdated fallacies passed around mainstream media like watered down drinks at happy hour. Why wouldn’t they? The cloned copy they get comes from the same sources that list the specials at the local grocery store, and the hours and locations of polling places for town elections. These same news sources print obituaries and birth announcements, give play-by-play for local high school sports, and chronicle all the painful details of the latest celebrity to fall from grace."

While riding into work on the bus I had the pleasure of sitting near (at least within hearing distance) of two really lame people.  I'm not sure how their conversation started, but one person was a little too overjoyed that Al Franken was running for congress in Minnesota.  Yeah, that's JUST what this country needs, more partisan hacks that are so far away from reality that even the entertainment industry won't touch them.  I don't care what party they are with, nobody who represents such a large number of people should be that far from center.  And the fact that these people were so happy about it makes me realize that what would be considered a moderate in the rest of the country really is conservative up here.  Sad.

"We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance."
— Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. president (1872-1933)

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said.(AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)

Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that "the science is settled." ... The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn't seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don't question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of "stopping global climate change."

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder.