POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

The Hate Crime That’s Not In the National News

The Christian/Newsom rape-murder trial continues, with evidence so vile and graphic that I'm including a content warning.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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CopenChangen

Must-read piece at The Telegraph:

We have “less than 50 days” to save the planet, declared Gordon Brown last week, in yet another desperate bid to save the successor to the Kyoto treaty, which is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in six weeks’ time. But no one has put the reality of the situation more succinctly than Prof Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most distinguished climatologists in the world, who has done as much as anyone in the past 20 years to expose the emptiness of the IPCC’s claim that its reports represent a “consensus” of the views of “the world’s top climate scientists”.

In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”

Such is the truly extraordinary position in which we find ourselves.

Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.

How long will it be before sanity and sound science break in on what begins to look like one of the most bizarre collective delusions ever to grip the human race?

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Meet Robert Gibbs’ Replacement . . .

. . . to accept a position in the newly created Department of Snark. So, without further ado, let me introduce my successor, Robot from "Lost in Space."

GREETINGS! We acknowledge Jake Tapper of ABC News.

Mr. Robot, when I asked your predecessor about the administration's characterization of FOX as not a news organization, he stated . . .

WARNING Jake Tapper of ABC News! DANGER! DANGER! We acknowledge Helen Thomas of Hearst News Service.

The CDC says that the numbers of Swine Flu cases have already peaked, but the President has declared a National Emergency. Can you . . .

WARNING Helen Thomas of Hearst News Services! DANGER! DANGER! The Old Grey Lady ain't what she used to be, Haaaa, ha-ha, ha-ha! We acknowledge Chip Reid of CBS News.

Mr. Robot, it's my understanding that the President went golfing for the 24th time since he took office yesterday. How did he fare?

We are going to give you a mulligan on that question. Ha ha ha!

Okay. Um . . . well a couple of days ago the President stated that climate change skeptics were being marginalized, despite polling data showing that . . .

WARNING Chip Reid of CBS News! DANGER! DANGER!

Mr. Robot, information has recently emerged that Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was once involved with the radical ACT UP organization, and . . .

We are pleased to let Kevin Jennings speak for himself.

My dear, dear boy . . .

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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CDC Guesstimated Number of Swine Flu Cases, Refused CBS FOIA Request

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients.

The declaration, signed Friday night and announced Saturday, comes with the disease more prevalent than ever in the U.S. and production delays undercutting the government's initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine could be available by mid-October.

Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the flu, known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity. So far only 11 million vaccine doses have gone out to health departments, doctor's offices and other providers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials.

Administration officials said the declaration was a pre-emptive move designed to make decisions easier when they need to be made. Officials said the move was not in response to any single development.

*******

The government now hopes to have about 50 million doses of swine flu vaccine out by mid-November and 150 million in December. The flu virus has to be grown in chicken eggs, and the yield hasn't been as high as was initially hoped, officials have said.

"Many millions" of Americans have had swine flu so far, according to an estimate that CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden gave Friday. The government doesn't test everyone to confirm swine flu so it doesn't have an exact count. He also said there have been more than 20,000 hospitalizations.

Strangely, though, the CDC estimates that ManBirdPig cases have peaked and are on the decline:

According to the CDC, swine flu infections have already peaked, and the pandemic is on its way out. Peak infection time was the middle of October, where one in five U.S. children experienced the flu, says the CDC. Out of nearly 14,000 suspected flu cases tested during the week ending on October 10, 2009, 99.6% of those were influenza A, and the vast majority of those were confirmed as H1N1 swine flu infections. (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/)

Even though the H1N1 pandemic appears to have peaked out, U.S. President Barack Obama has now declared a national emergency over swine flu infections. The reasoning behind such a declaration? According to the White House, it's designed to "allow hospitals to better handle the surge in patients" by allowing them to bypass certain federal laws.

Back in 2004, there were problems with flu vaccine rollout that John Kerry turned into a campaign indictment of the Bush Administration. Back then, the media was all over the shortage and the incompetence it exposed.

Once again, the vast majority of the vaccine will have been made available too late to have any significant impact on the spread of the disease. Whether it will have any impact on the public's perception of the government's competency to control health care is a matter of speculation, entirely, but it seems liable not to help. And that is perhaps why Obama determined that this is the moment in which it was most propitious to declare an emergency, so that when the epidemic ends he can recycle his rhetoric regarding jobs created or saved.

Whether the administration will use the declared state of emergency to stifle the babblings of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan remains to be seen. Likely the decision will be made by CDC poobah Eric Holder.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Vanderleun’s Tumblr Feed

If you don't subscribe, yet, you should.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Mo’ Drama Obama

Flu national emergency.

Anthropogenic global warming.

Fox News.*

Health care. Cap-and-Trade.

Well, pretty much everything but Afghanistan.

* See more below the fold on this truly awesome US News and World Report article.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Chicago Style Politician/Peddler of False HopenChange

and stealth unelected World Government supporter accuses climate change skeptics of cynicism:

US President Barack Obama on Friday hit out at naysayers he blamed for peddling "cynical" claims that global warming is a myth to derail a landmark climate change bill in Congress.

Obama warned that the closer the Senate came to passing legislation which has already cleared the House of Representatives, the more opponents would resort to underhand tactics.

"The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized," Obama warned in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Meanwhile, with no recorded global warming having occurred in the past 15 years, fewer and fewer Americans believe it is happening, and even fewer believe--a la Lomborg--that it's one of the most important issues facing our nation. In fact, it is people such as Al Gore, James Hansen (whose ridiculous speculations helped kick this nonsense off twenty years ago when he was predicting that much of Manhattan would be underwater by now), Lindsay Graham and The One who are increasingly marginalized. Why is BHO so angry about it? Because his agenda depends on the massive redistribution of wealth that cap-and-trade and its world equivalents, for which the Nobel Peace Prize was a down payment, depend on this enormous hoax.

Talking out of his ass, Mr. President continues:

"But I think it's important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we'll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we're engaged in.

"There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy," Obama said, a day after the release of a poll showing fewer Americans see solid evidence of global warming.

Whose interest or ideology? There is absolutely no evidence for anthropogenic climate change. Who stands to gain from the destruction of the American economy to reconstruct it as a "green" economy? Who's vending carbon credits? How have they been authorized so to do? To whom are they beholden? How is it, if this really is the President's view, that the US has backed a huge new Soros-invested offshore drilling project in Brazil?

He continues:

"There are going to be those who... make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary."

The overwhelming scientific evidence is that AGW is a titanic fraud. It is all about the redistribution; it is about nothing else.

Yesterday, Lord Monckton of Brenchley---who, despite being a British peer is a much greater American than such Medal of Honor recipients as Ted Kennedy---gave a wonderful and very generous interview on The B-Cast, worth listening to in its entirety, in which he brings to bear reams of evidence, rather than accusation and snark, the stock in trade of this administration.

Obama's scorn for democracy is registered by his proliferation of unaccountable and unconfirmed czars:

[From Washington Post via Hot Air]

Ed Morrissey:

Bush created five new czar positions in five years. Obama created 17 new czar positions in 8 months, only one of which needed Senate confirmation and has Congressional oversight. These are essentially end runs around Congressional oversight. The Obama administration denied this earlier this year, but their response to both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill [that the WH won't ask most czars to testify before Congress, in part because that's what Fox wants them to do] leaves little doubt on the matter. Obama wants to create and implement policy in secret, and doesn’t want his czars having to testify before Congress on what they do.

Is this “transparency”? No, but it is a transparent power grab, and Congress has only belatedly noticed it. In fact, as the Washington Times reports this morning, White House counsel Greg Craig denied this — but spent half of his time rebutting Glenn Beck rather than explaining why Congress should not have oversight over administration officials who set and implement policy.

That’s also pretty transparent. Obama wants to play the Fox card to get Congress to retreat on oversight. If Fox calls for Congress to perform its constitutional duties, apparently that makes it extreeeeeeeeeme. That’s an interesting take on transparency, and an interesting position on the Constitution from the nation’s most, er, celebrated constitutional scholar.

With hope like this, who needs cynicism?

So there you have it: Treasury officials lied to Congress and the public, and refused to demand even a basic level of accountability from TARP recipients while borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars that taxpayers will eventually have to pay back, plus billions in interest. Incredibly, just Wednesday, President Obama announced a new TARP-like program for small businesses and community banks. The madness in Washington won't stop until the people completely clean house at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And just as incredibly, Democrats have voted to give outfits such as ACORN a say in regulation over financial institutions. Unelected, anti-democratic, unaccountable, stupid and greedy is no way to go through life, son.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Beyond Ingratitude

Hey, remember when Obama got all huffy with the Unelected One-Eyed Scottish Dwarf when the latter spilled the beans about the Obama Administration's having been in the loop the whole time about the release of the Lockerbie mass murderer (who just died, btw)? If you do, this will not come as any particular surprise:

In short [. . .] the Obama administration falsely claimed that the Bush administration had done no planning or analysis regarding the worsening situation in Afghanistan, even though it (1) knew this was false, (2) had asked the Bush administration not to disclose its work, and (3) relied in part on the same work it claimed the Bush administration had not performed. Paul [Mirengoff] judged that what Cheney described went beyond lack of class to demonstrate bad character on the part of the Obama administration.

Now comes the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes to examine the issues of fact raised by Cheney's account. In "Obama's minions are ingrates," Hayes documents the formal review conducted by the Bush administration that was turned over to the Obama team and inquires whether (as Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs has charged) the Bush team sat on a request for increased troops. Hayes confirms Cheney's assertions as a matter of fact.

Steve adds this pungent quote from a Bush administration insider: "If it's true that the Bush administration sat on these troop requests for eight months, is the White House suggesting that the Pentagon was incompetent or negligent or both? That would be a good question to put to the defense secretary--and President Obama is in a position to make him talk."

I wonder what the So-Called Founding Fathers would think. Here, by the way, is what you get when you Google up the phrase "so-called founding fathers," just to provide a little context on the kinds of intellect Obama finds congenial.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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