My favorite Climategate email so far

Just spent a few minutes skimming through the emails and this one caught my eye.

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , "Philip D. Jones" , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate

In laymen terms Trenberth is saying that since an unverified, unvalidated computer model has predicted more warming than has been observed empirically, the empirical observations (i.e. weather stations) must be wrong. .

Title this one: who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.

Climategate – a new spin on Mann made global warming

By now news of the data theft at Britain’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has is widespered. Thousands of emials and messages between the world’s preminent climate scientists have been made available and it doesn look good.

When I woke up and sat down with my morning bowl of cereal and read about all of this I thought it was a hoax … it just seemed to good to be true. I though for years that global warming advocates were scaring the shit out of people using questioable climate models nut I could have never imagined that they were intentionaly and systematiclay misrepresenting their data.

Its like something out of Michael Criton’s “State of Fear”.

This must have taken them by surprise because the damage control has been weak and hastily put together. A blog titled Real Climate, where many of the individuals discussed in the database congregate, has posted their best attempot at a response to this:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of
any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate
research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global
warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching
orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid
will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

There’s not much else of any substance in the response except to repeat that they did nothing wrong.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. The emails detail many disturbing behaviors including:

- collusion between the researchers to destroy and/or hide information subject to FOIA requests
- organized efforts to block publication of contradictory scientific papers

- discussions on how to conceal data sharing with critics

- discussions on how to conceal and dilute inconvenient data points

Some of these will surely be investigated further and with regard to the destruction and concealment of FOIA requested data, criminal charges are a real possibility.

And the most wonderful thing is we have only scratched the surface of what’s been made available.

For anyone interested, a searchable database of the data can be found here.

Vote Today

The Columbia Journalism Review has a good wrap-up of theirs and the rest of the “Reality Based Community’s” non reaction to today’s election:

With the off-year Election Day now upon us, press outlets as diverse as Fox News and The New York Times are continuing to overemphasize the broader significance of today’s contests. (The lead headline at NYTimes.com all day has read, “3 Contests on Election Day Could Signal Political Winds”—with, of course, a caution deep in the text that it is “probably not wise to draw broad lessons from Tuesday’s results.”) But, encouragingly, there’s also been quite a bit of pushback against that narrative from some influential Web sites and, in at least one case, from a leading newspaper.

I would agree that today’s elections aren’t going to mean much come next November when the real Mau Mauing is going to take place, but there seems to be this reflex from some quarters in the media to write off the elections as meaningless because it does reflect the national mood and Obama’s declining numbers to some extent. How to quantify this “extent” is certainly open to interpretation but what’s coming out of the left right now seems to be a lot of truthie spin about how meaningless these are. To say that New Jersey is “meaningless” is a good indication of how hard some are trying to unspin what is going down today. Obama has been campaign both publicly and privately for Corzine and a loss for Corzine today, in bluer than blue New Jersey no less, is a fairly significant bell weather of the wider national mood.

Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

"Now watch this drive"

Paging Mike Allen and Michael Moore:

President Barack Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he's already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS' Mark Knoller — an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related — wrote on his Twitter feed that, "Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24.

Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months."

Brainwashing children, its not just for Boston, NY and LA any more.

An interesting, if not surprising twist on Revered Wrights "God damn Amerika" movement.

Jay and Laura Phillips were shocked to hear their 10-year-old talked back to a teacher at West Fork Middle school Thursday - but were less surprised when they found out why.

"Don't push him - four days of hassle, hassle, hassle and raise your voice," said Laura Phillips. "He's going to lose his temper."

Their son told them last weekend he had decided to no longer stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school because he didn't believe there is liberty and justice for all, especially when it comes to gay rights.

She chooses not to say the Pledge of Allegiance, but Jay does. They said that they respect each other's choices - and their son's - and they don't see it as an insult to the country

Mommy must be very proud.

Millionaire celeb whine-in

With the double digit unemployment, the dollar becoming a substitute for kindling, and no end in sight, what’s a good lefty to do but stage a multi-celebrity whine fest:

Like most cultural entities, the Gang, one of L.A.'s most accomplished theatrical institutions, has been scorched financially by the economic crisis. Earlier this summer, the ensemble's accountant even recommended that, to save money, the Gang should consider temporarily not producing theater and just focus on its extensive educational and community outreach programs.

"I'm not ignoring the economy," Robbins says. "We are flying in the face of it. We are saying, 'This is not going to stop us.' And so the best way we can figure out for it not to stop us is to do more than we ever have in the past."

Among the marquee names who'll lend their presence to the Gang's intimate 99-seat space at the Ivy Substation for the festival will be Jackson Browne, Tenacious D, John Doe of X, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie.

In collaboration with PEN Center USA, the festival also will present conversations with such authors as Gore Vidal, Naomi Klein and T.C. Boyle.

Because I am sure they all have had to make real sacrifices, unlike like fat and prosperous kulak's in flyover country. I hear that Gore Vidal is so destitute that he had to cut loose his swanky Italian pool boy for a younger less expensive Philippino model.

Maybe next time they could try a die in?

Just a suggestion.

Paging Tom Morello

and all the boys from RATM, a real life lesson on speaking truth to power:

Cuban dissident punk rocker Gorki Aguila is in the U.S. for 15 days to promote his new CD, but he's not sure if he'll be able to return home because of his sharp criticism of the Cuban government.

"I'm scared," said Aguila, who has repeatedly been arrested there.

"But I have to do this. This is the path I've chosen," Aguila told reporters in Miami on Friday as he began a tour to promote "The Faded Red Album" — a dig at the Cuban government's communist ideology.

Roman Polanski

I don’t get it. He drugs and rapes a 13 year old girl, flees the country and he still has defenders:

European cultural figures, political leaders and show-business personalities rose up in Polanski's defense, insisting that the film director be released because his original criminal charge dates from a 1977 incident. They portrayed the determination of Los Angeles judicial authorities to bring him to trial so many years later as vindictive and a stain on U.S. democracy.

Sarkozy's office made no comment but the spokesman for his governing coalition, Frederic Lefevre, said it was "shocking" to think how Los Angeles authorities seem to have waited so long before putting the international mandate in motion and then moving to make the arrest in such a "spectacular" way. Lefevre's deputy, Dominique Paille, added that it was also shocking to see a country regarded as an example of democracy fail to observe a statute of limitations for such crimes. *

Someone bring this piece of shit to justice.

* Just to clarify, there is not statue of limitation for a class-X felony, and raping a child is a class-X felonoy.

New Rule

New Rule

New Rule, if Bill Maher says something stupid again, Sarah Palin gets to shoot him from a helicopter.

It’s a pity, I used to like Maher when he was on ABC. Its almost as if the toxically liberal environment of HBO has pushed him so far to the left he looks like an undereducated Noam Chomsky.

When facts fail make them up

With the Dear Leader’s upcoming push for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the “reality based community” seems to be focusing on battlefield preparation to pave the way for our hobbling.

Case in point is self proclaimed “communitarian” and GWU professor Amitai Etzioni.

Writing in Time, Jonathan Tepperman lays out the case that Obama should embrace nuclear weapons because they have kept the work relatively peaceful the past 60 years citing the absence of direct armed conflict between nuclear powers. To which the distinguished professor Etzioni remarks:

Soon, it became clear that there is no research--let alone compelling research--to support this forehead-slapping claim, only Mr. Tepperman's simplistic conclusions ...... However, Mr. Tepperman fully reveals the depths of his "research" when he writes, "There's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that posses them." I guess he has never heard about India and Pakistan.

I hope Etzioni isn’t a history professor because Pakistan and India haven’t had a shooting war since 1971, three years before India tested its first bomb in 1974 and a decade before Pakistan had its first bomb*.

But what are silly little things like facts for the “reality based community”.

Brought to you by the NEA

Nothing says take me seriously more than a gaggle of liberal Hollywood millionaires telling me I am not doing my part to pay for the uninsured:



Truly fine comedy is the ability to subtly poke fun at a larger truth, not take a ham handed swipe at an easy target. But considering that Obama has bought off the pharmaceutical industry and all those greedy executives, perhaps Ferrell has struck comedic gold.

Who would have figured that this group would be capable of such nuanced political satire.

Daniel Ellsberg – another lefty who never has to say he’s sorry.

One of the reasons I love listening to my local NPR affiliate is because every so often they trot out some long forgotten iconic lefty dinosaur and serenade them with love and beatifications.

WNYC’s On the Media resurrected the decrepit anti-Vietnam hero Daniel Ellsberg this weekend to lecture us on the hopelessness of Afghanistan and why we have to surrender there as well .... just praying that some “courageous” DOD functionary will leak the goods to seal Afghanistan’s fate.

For those of who don’t know the whole story, Ellsberg’s claim to fame is that in 1971 he leaked a top secret Rand Corporation assessment of the war in Vietnam to the Washington Post and NY Times. He was later tried on charges relating to espionage but the case ended in a mistrial, due in part to revelations that his shrinks office had been broken into by Nixon’s plumbers.

Ellsberg has spend the past 35 years milking his 15 minutes of fame for all its worth. While a minor player in the Vietnam saga, he portrays himself as one of the vanguard members in the anti-war effort, without whom we’d still be fighting there today. That’s not unusual. Some people who get accustomed to the limelight are unwilling to go quietly into the night and do whatever they have to stay in front of the cameras. They become comfortable with the narrative they construct about themselves and repeat it so often they come to believe it. Think of Lauren Conrad. But the public grows tired of hearing the same story time after time so Ellsberg had to get creative with his message and his audience.

He befriended Jim Jones, and spent time preaching the gospel of why America sucks at the People’s Temple a few short years before the bloodletting in Guyana. Ellsberg claimed that UN Ambassador Andrew Young told him that Martin Luther King jr had actually been assassinated by the FBI. So willing to sacrifice his reputation to get back into the limelight, Ellsberg actually wrote and signed an affidavit to this effect and submitted it to lawyer and crackpot extraordinaire Mark Lane (bosom buddy and legal consul to Jim Jones). He, along with hundreds of other useful idiots, signed a declaration calling for a investigation into the Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines flight 007 after some shit head at The Nation Magazine alleged that the civilian airliner was actually a USAF reconnaissance flight and the passengers were sacrificed by Reagan to stoke anti-Soviet sentiment. Not to be out done, he also believes that “hardliners” within the Chairmen of the Joint Chief’s along with the CIA had JFK killed.

More recently Ellsberg has tried to maintain his relevance by hopping on board the 9/11 truth movement and by calling on “patriots” in the DOD to reveal any information about a potential military strike on Iran.

Ellsburg self righteous desperation to remain relevant has led him down a path that would assure, if he were a conservative, that no self respecting person would have anything to do with him … most definitely not one of the beautiful people over at NPR. The shameful allegations, relationships and outright lies, bordering on blood libel, should have guaranteed his relegation to the darker corners of American political life.

But like so many on the left who swim the waters of dark conspiracy, being a good left means never having to say you are sorry.

More on Pelosi

Evidently Pelosi's flashback referred to the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone by Dan White which just so happened to coincide with some anti-gay protests.

"I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco," Pelosi said, suddenly speaking quietly. "This kind of rhetoric was very frightening" and created a climate in which violence took place, she said.

Former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White was convicted of the 1978 murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist. Other gay rights activists and others at the time saw a link between the assassinations and the violent debate over gay rights that had preceded them for years.

Funny think is Dan White (a democrat) killed Moscone and Milk not over the issue of anyone’s sexuality or politics, he killed them because Moscone wouldn’t reappoint White to a commission he once headed and when White lobbied Moscone for it Milk chimed in and objected as well.

Kind of takes the wind of the sails of that bullshit comparison when you know the fuller story.

Ocean Acidification = More Junk Science

As part of the multi pronged deluge of the public, one of the less often repeated, but more dramatic prognostications from the global warming .... err I mean "climate change" crowd is that the oceans are becoming too acidic and that will kill all the pretty coral life in the oceans.

Example:

The bleaching of coral, higher temperatures as well as ocean acidification, triggered by industrial carbon dioxide dissolving in sea water, contribute to the destruction marine habitats globally.

The chemistry is simple enough: more CO2 in the atmosphere means more CO2 dissolved in the oceans turning into carbonic acid and making oceans acidic. However like most areas where science and politics cross histrionics tends to rule the day

According to Wikipedia the PH of the ocean in the 1700’s was 8.179. How they know this or can even estimate it to three fucking significant digits is beyond me, especial y when one considers that the concept of PH was only developed around 100 years ago. At any rate, they now say that the PH of the ocean is 8.104. So, in 300 years the PH of all the world’s oceans, on average, has dropped by .075 basis points and that this drop is responsible for the destruction of the oceans corals. I realize PH is a logarithmic function ..... but come on people! 75 thousandths of a basis point?

Are coral and other shelled critters so sensitive to PH, that a drop of 75 thousandths of a basis point responsible for the current distress of the worlds corals reefs?

Fertilizers runoff, industrial pollution, sewage, over fishing …. yes, but a of 75 thousandths drop in PH driven by higher CO2?

It should be laughable if so many “serious” people didn’t try and jam it down our throats.

It’s a sales job, clever marketing much like Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter, and has all the hallmarks of junk science: suspect models that cant be verified, apocalyptic conclusions, and suspect inferences from historic data.

Pelosi to America's Lumpen: UNCLE!

Botox Nancy has sown the wind, and she shall now reap the whirlwind:

A usually steely House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday began to tear up when, in responding to a question about the tone of the national debate, she recalled the politically charged violence that tore through her hometown of San Francisco in the late 1970s.

At her weekly news conference, Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked if she was concerned about whether the debate over healthcare and the role of the federal government — much of it wrapped in escalating anti-government rhetoric — could lead to acts of violence.

“I think we all have to take responsibility for our actions and our words. We are a free country and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we have to carefully balance,” Pelosi began.

Before anyone starts pissing and moaning along with Pelosi about this, lets all keep in mind that just a few weeks ago Pelosi was saying that my fellow town hall protesters were "carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare".

I guess all that botox has finally given her brain damage.

I am Jack’s persistent twitch.

he he!

Science Blogs

I have been spending a few months over at Scienceblogs and have been generally disappointed with the site and its content. After reading some truly first rate articles about … well, science and technology, I found that there exists a large portion of the website dedicated to political and philosophical discussions. It turns out that its not just “large” but appears to occupy a majority of the site’s content … at least based on my observations.

The philosophical topics tend to focus on the New Atheist’s attempt to argue a purely philosophical debate by interjecting “science”. That and by generally being pricks. No surprise there.

The political topics are the usual boilerplate statist/lefty arguments on nearly everything under the sun, but usually go something like this “OBAMA IS GOOD, OBAMA IS GREAT, WE SURRENDER OUR WILL TO HIM ON THIS DATE” and “FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BETTER”.

I think ever since Einstein (maybe Newton, who knows) used his celebrity to step from the scientific to the political realm (read Einstein’s asinine lectures on socialism for more on that), there has been a rush of mainly liberal and left wing scientists to follow suit. It is argued, by them at any rate, that since they are experts in X, Y and Z, that this expertise naturally lends itself to them being experts in policies impacted by X, Y and Z …. as well as every other letter in the alphabet. After all, they are flipping geniuses and who can argue with that?

It’s the notion that the celebrity scientist is an expert on anything the pontificate about and to question them is to reject the scientific method and rationality.

Take Carl Sagan for example.

Sagan was, by all accounts, an accomplished and intelligent man. He was a well respected authority on Astronomy but unfortunately he believed that his reputation on scientific issues should give him equal authority on scientific and moral matters and worse, he allowed his political biases to cloud his judgment of technical and scientific matters. Sagan’s work on “Nuclear Winter” is an example where he was willing to support a scientific theory because it supported his own political biases and not because it was good sound science.

Sagan didn’t actually develop the idea of Nuclear Winter”, it was initially hypothesized in the Soviet Union by Georgy Golitsyn in 1982 at a meeting of the Committee of Soviet Scientists in Defense of Peace, Against the Nuclear Threat. It should have been a flashing red light that a scientific conclusion like “a large nuclear exchange, even if completely one sided, would cause the earth’s climate to plummet 30 degrees C” would be coming out of the Soviet Union. Especially so given the committee’s Orwellian name. Couple this with recent relations that this was disinformation campaign run by the KGB and that one of Sagan’s team members, Soviet physicist Vladimir Alexandrov, disappeared in Madrid never to be seen again, and its painfully clear in retrospect that this was part of the larger Soviet influence campaign on the Nuclear Freeze movement.

Aside from the issue that there are indications that the KGB may have had a hand in shaping Sagan’s conclusions (unbeknownst to Sagan to be sure), “Nuclear Winter” was a sales job to further Sagan’s brand of politics and he hit the circuit to push it. Months before the release of any peer reviewed results Sagan lobbied the press and politicians very hard to sell this to the world.

As Michael Chriton said: “this is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold”

After quite a bit of back and forth over Nuclear Winter in the 80’s Sagan saw his chance to demonstrate to the world the truthiness of his ideas. Near the end of the first Gulf War, Sagan along with toady Richard Turco predicted that the oil fires in Kuwait were spewing so much soot into the air that agriculture in SE Asia would be severely effected by it, so much that there would be frost in spring and summer in SE Asia and the effects globally would lead to a year without a summer*. Sagan debated Fred Singer (noted climate change skeptic) on Nightline during which he made several more dire predictions while Singer said that Sagan was acting like a hysterical Nancy and the soot would quickly settle out.

Needless to say Fred Singer was right and Sagan was wrong.

All of which leads me to conclude the following: Science and politics don’t mix well, regardless of who is doing the mixing. Let relevant scientific fields speak with authority within their relevant fields, and leave it to that.

*given Sagan’s notoriety, the specific nature of the predictions as well as how spectacularly bad they were, its amazing that there isnt a copy of this (for free) anywhere in the internet, so I have cut and pasted it here

9-11

Never forget, never forgive.

Yes We Can!

Or Yes We Did?

A revolt is afoot in the nation. The media and the political class might not understand the appeal of the Ron Pauls and Glenn Becks of the world. But even many of those who disagree with Paul and Beck on the specifics understand the draw. Something is resurfacing. Americans are increasingly unafraid to say the word "liberty". Politicians who don't share that trait may want to start updating their résumés.

Obama and Energy

Our Dear Leader’s views on energy are, to be blunt, just a little fucked up. They show many of the hallmarks of anti-growth ideology mixed with incompetence. For example, his FERC (a little known but massively influential federal regulatory agency) nominee Jon Wellinghoff demonstrated this by not understanding a concept as simple as baseload power supply.

Our Dear Leader campaigned on creating "good jobs" especially for the beleaguered blue collar job markets. In order to win swingstate Ohio, Obama promised to secure loan guarantees for a retooling project at the Piketon enrichment plant. A loan guarantee would be a win-win on so many levels: provide good blue and white collar technical jobs, maintain the nation's nuclear capacity and not cost the government a dime if the project worked out (as it was most likely going to).

So what happened to Obama's promise:

The Obama administration's rejection is a turnaround from the stance of candidate Barack Obama, who pledged while campaigning in southern Ohio in August to "work with the Department of Energy to help make loan guarantees available for this (the Piketon enrichment plant) and other advanced-energy programs that reduce carbon emissions and break the tie to high-cost, foreign energy sources."

Overall, the project would have employed 5,700 directly or indirectly in eight states, the company says. In Piketon, more than 600 already are working. A fully operating plant, which USEC wanted to begin operating in 2011, would employ about 400 for years to come.

I know, $2billion is a lot of money but the administration rolled up it sleevs, sharpened its pencils and made an unexpected move to provide $2billion in loan guarantees for offshore oil production .. in fucking Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

After all, Petrobras has shown itself capability to pull off large scale offshore energy projects in the past haven’t they?

Compare and Contrast

Robert Novak’s recent passing has brought out the usual bile that is typical when someone like Novak dies. Nearly every obituary castigates Novak for his role making it publicly know that Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie was responsible for him going to Africa to investigate potential sales of uranium ore to Iraq.

After all, some people who out the identity of CIA agents are actually celebrated as heroes. Compare and contrast the Novak post mortem with The Nation Magazine's eulogy of Philip Agee, CIA turncoat and KGB agent:

We mourn the passing of Philip Agee, the courageous former CIA officer who, in his 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, exposed the agency's subversion of democracy and its practices of torture and murder, naming hundreds of officers, agents and companies involved with the crimes. Agee was motivated, he said, by the CIA's support for "the worst imaginable horrors" in Latin America. Agee paid a high price for his courage. Perhaps the best way to remember Agee is to support others who find the courage to expose criminal misconduct by their own governments

Agee's high price was spending the last 30 years of his life living in relative comfort in Cuba running a travel agency when he should have gotten a bullet in the back of his head.

But like most things with the left, its all about politics in the end.

Something that really caught my eye in John Nichol’s obituary was this line.

Some of us also recall--and have a hard time forgiving--Novak's role in what Saul Landau correctly described as the "organized right wing attack" on the memory of murdered Chilean diplomat and dissident Orlando Letelier.

Nichols is referring to a mostly forgotten incident where Novak used his contacts and his column to take the “meme of the day” and turn it completely on its head.

Orlando Letelier was former Chilean diplomat who spent his time lobbying against Pinochet’s government after the coup in 1973. He was a minor celebrity among the leftwing glitterati/literati activist community when he was working out of the Washington DC based Institute for Policy Studies in the mid 70’s until his car was blown up, an assassination that was most likely organized in Chile.

While Letelier’s liberal allies were busy crucifying the Chilean government and the CIA (they must have been involved after all) over this peaceful souls death, Robert Novak and Rowland Evans were leaked the contents of Letelier’s briefcase recovered by the FBI during the course of its investigation into the murder. The contents, not surprisingly, showed that Letelier was part of a coordinated effort to manipulate and coordinate liberals in the United States (where have we heard that before) to lobby against the Chilean government and return a more Soviet friendly government back to Santiago. This coordination, not surprisingly, was being spearheaded by East Block intelligence agencies and its proxies in Cuba, who also not surprisingly were subsidizing Letelier work with cash remittances from the Cuban government. He also had contact information for dozens of suspected and known East Block and Cuban intelligence agents.
Novak didn’t sit idly by with this, went to press with it and was stymied and attacked every step of the way. Only the Washington Post printed his articles, with other outlets (most notably the NY Times) either ignoring it completely or posting attack pieces on Novak.

And this was the sin that Nichols and his pals were referring to: using ones talent and access to sources to spoil a perfectly good narrative about a left wing icon.

We lost a good journalist.

Max the Heckler

Looks like someone on our side has been reading up on his Saul Alinsky:



If we could only do this at every bullshit photo op.

Mitchell Paige and why Hollywood Sucks

Mitchell Paige, the Real GI Joe

For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry in action above and beyond the call of duty while serving with a company of marines in combat against enemy Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands on 26 October 1942. When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machinegun section with fearless determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed, took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering fire against the advancing hordes until reinforcements finally arrived. Then, forming a new line, he dauntlessly and aggressively led a bayonet charge, driving the enemy back and preventing a breakthrough in our lines. His great personal valor and unyielding devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

With this in mind, I hope everyone will join me in not seeing the newest piece of shit out of Hollywood "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity" also known as GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Director Stephen Sommers, wary of international audiences, says that GI Joe will be in the mold of the Adventure Team 1970s. “This is not a George Bush movie,” Sommers explains. “[I]t’s an Obama world. Right from the writing stage we said to ourselves, this can’t be about beefy guys on steroids who all met each other in the Vietnam War, but an elite organization that’s made up of the best of the best from around the world.”

So GI Joe isn’t a Real American Hero - he’s a UN peacekeeper. This is reminiscent of the determinedly unpatriotic Superman Returns, which deliberately refused to state that Superman was fighting for “truth, justice and the American way.” Even GI Joe is now subject to the dictates of political correctness. We wouldn’t want Europeans thinking that we idolize the men and women of the American military. That would be uncouth.

What makes this even shittier is that Paige spent his retirement working on patriotic education.

Well at least the douchebags at Media Matters for America think its appropriate to piss on a dead hero's grave ... just so long as they can score some points on Glen Beck.

NPR's On the Media

NPR's on the Media is one of those cosmopolitan "smarter than thou" media watchdog shows on NPR. Its host, Bob Garfield, is a fairly reliable lefty .... sort of a walking stereotype of media bias and East Coast intelligencia.

This week Garfield was putting in work on another one of the administration’s obaminations (cute pun huh) debunking not only the birthers (more on that another day) but taking on some of those dastardly right wing radio hosts on the latest right wing lie concerning the health care debate.

BOB GARFIELD: Chief among those 10,000 issues is health care reform. But if Gibbs somehow believed the gravity of that matter guaranteed honest debate, he was sadly mistaken. It too was mired this week in a trumped up controversy over a nonexistent provision in the White House plan. Here on Fred Thompson’s radio show is supposed health care expert, Betsy McCaughey.

BETSY McCAUGHEY: One of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.

BOB GARFIELD: Whoa! The Feds culling the population of those burdensome elderly? That is shocking — also, utterly untrue. The bill would simply allow seniors who do wish for professional advice on end of life issues, from will writing to hospice care, to get the government to pick up the tab.Yet, the euthanasia canard was parroted by House Republican Leader John Boehner and at least referenced by FOX News, CNN, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Unfortunately for "Bob" he should have waited a week to run with this story ... it seems that those dastardly right wingers may have been onto something:

We knew it would come to this when Oregon insisted on passing its assisted-suicide laws. It doesn’t take much for assisted suicide to go from a humane option to a cost-saving device, especially when the state pays for the medical care. One patient in Oregon got a letter that made this all too clear, when in the same letter rejecting her request for life-extending chemotherapy, Oregon offered her “physician-aid-in-dying”. In other words, Oregon offered their customer a heapin’ helping of death:

NPR on Wishfull Thinking

With Obama’s poll numbers beginning to fall in line with the popularity of his specific policies and the continuing recession and high unemployment being hung around his administrations neck, the 2010 mid-terms may turn out to be less than kind.

Democrats giddy with possibilities only six months ago now confront a perilous 2010 landscape signaled by troublesome signs of President Barack Obama’s political mortality, the plunging popularity of many governors and rising disquiet among many vulnerable House Democrats.

The issue advantage has shifted as well, with Democrats facing the brunt of criticism about the pace of stimulus package spending, anxiety over rising unemployment rates and widespread uneasiness over the twin pillars of Obama’s legislative agenda: his cap-and-trade approach to climate change and the emerging health care bill.

Leave it NPR to ignore this and hope that the current advantage holds for another 18 months.

And while 15 months is a long way away, what CQ has to say is good news for the Democrats. The "in" party usually suffers losses in the midterm elections -- 2002 (GOP gains) and 1998 (Dem gains) being rare exceptions. Their verdict for 2010: Democrats "appear secure" in the House majority they won in 2006 and added to in '08.

But I suppose no one they know voted for Nixon.

Cognitive Dissonance in Action

Why is Obamacare going down in flames ...... you guessed it, its all the Republican's fault for fucking government up!

WASHINGTON — If President Barack Obama got anything indisputably right at his news conference this week, it was this: The American people don't trust the federal government.

That's a major reason he's having such a hard time selling his plan to overhaul the nation's health care. Even if they like Obama himself, people just don't think that the government can handle anything big, let alone something as personal to them as their health care.

From Vietnam through the Watergate scandal, the Iraq war and the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, Americans have soured on the very thought that the government can do things well. That makes it immensely difficult to convince them — or their members of Congress — to go along with anything that even looks like a government takeover of health care.

I guess it never occured to the author that perhaps people dont want the government taking control of another 18% of the economy.

Just a thought.

Health Care “Reform”: What’s at stake

A few anecdotes about what happens when a “free” health care system needs to be bailed out by its friends across the border.

Shona Holmes

Shona Holmes was in trouble: The list of her symptoms included headaches, sleeplessness, dizziness, low libido and, worst of all, rapidly deteriorating vision. Her family doctor in Canada ordered an MRI, and a brain tumor was detected. But it would take months for her to get on the appointment calendar of a neurologist or endocrinologist in Canada.

Ava Isabella Stinson

A critically ill Hamilton preemie turned away from McMaster Children's Hospital is all alone in a Buffalo intensive care unit because her parents don't have passports to get across the border.

Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph's Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.

So much for free health care. Its sounds lovely unless you are really sick.

This reminds me about a show my wife and I watched on TLC a few years back. It was about a little girl named Kenadie Jourdin-Bromley who suffers from primordial dwarfism. When playing the flashback to her birth, there were scenes where the doctors were speaking about how they thought Kenadie wasn’t going to make it more than a few days and how everyone, parents included were shocked by what was going on. They commented that she seemed very small on the ultrasound and how it was the first ultrasound that the mother had at 36 weeks into the pregnancy.

My wife and I wondered to ourselves, 36 weeks and no ultrasounds? Wasn’t the OBGYN concerned that the mother was as small as she was? Weren’t there some kind of markers in all the blood tests that expectant mothers get? I remember my wife having several ultrasounds and blood/urine tests with both of my girls and thought that something wasn’t quite right.

And then I realized that the parents were in Canada.

Sure, the “private” American health care system is expensive, but you get results. And yes the Canadian system and all government run health care systems are “free”, but you better pray to God you don’t need to use them.

Whats with the journalists at CNN?

You would figure that the shit canning of Susan Roesgen would have set an example of how not to conduct an interview

Hiatus

Back from my long lazy hiatus.

Upbeat Jobs Reports

539,000 jobs lost in April is "upbeat" .... or so says CNN:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Wall Street was poised for a strong open Wednesday as investors focused on two upbeat jobs reports, shrugging off anxiety about the bank stress test results due out Thursday.

A couple more of these "upbeat" months and unemployment will be at 15%.

Luckily for us, the trillion dollar stimulus package will create (or merely save, can't figure tha one out yey) 750,000 jobs by August!

I was really worried there for a minute.

Alexi Giannoulias: Union Enforcer in Chief

Illinois’ boy accountant in chief, and Obama but buddy Alexi Giannoulias has once again demonstrated his qualifications to be our next senator:

Angry over billions in bailout money for Wells Fargo & Co., workers at a suburban Chicago factory where suits for President Barack Obama are made decided Monday to stage a sit-in if the clothier's creditor liquidates the company.

Workers at Hartmarx Corp., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January, stopped production inside a Des Plaines, Ill., plant for 15 minutes Monday. They voted unanimously to take over the factory if Wells Fargo and its subsidiary Wachovia Bank shut down the factory and sell all its assets.

The workers' demands, similar to another high-profile worker takeover at a Chicago factory last year, have drawn the support of state officials including Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias. He has threatened to pull state business from Wells Fargo

A double win for lil Alexi; some back scratching for the SEIU (sure to act as loyal political muscle in his upcoming bid for the US Senate) and another chance for the government to flex its muscle over the private sector with this bullshit pandering.

Both of which are prime reason why Illinois’ unemployment rate is nearly 2 points over the national average.

Al Jazeera

Looks like Al Jazeera is making another attempt to break into the US cable market. It looks like a pity ploy from some left wing do gooders at what appears to be a PBS affiliate (go figure).

The Al Jazeera English news channel, broadcast in more than 100 countries, became available today to pay-TV subscribers in the Washington market thanks to a deal with nonprofit MHz. The Qatari news channel will join the lineup of international programming supplied by MHz to Comcast, Cox, RCN and Verizon FiOS. MHz will offer it over the air beginning July 1.

I remember a few years back when Comcast entertained the idea of syndicating Al Jazeera I called them and said I would cancel the second they went on the air. Luckily for them they backed down.

Battered Jounrnalist Syndrome

Truly saddening.

Asked in his Monday briefing if the White House would consider bailing out the newspaper business, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters the government may not have the power to reverse the industry’s decline.

But Gibbs wasn’t just sympathetic — he also twisted the knife a little, digging into reporters who questioned the Obama administration’s commitment to cutting spending.

“You guys didn’t think $100 million meant a lot a few weeks ago,” Gibbs said. “But looking at some of the balance sheets, $100 million seems to mean a lot.”

No mater how hard they try, it looks like the Dear Leader wont ride to their rescue after all.

And not only is there no delicious government cheese for those poor degenerate journalists, the Dear Leader repays their servitude with derision!

Its OK Barry, I'm sure they still love you.

Obama armtwising on Chrysler backfires?

Its one thing to treat the press like your bitch (when they so clearly deserve it) but when you try and muscle a pack of well lawyered investors out of billions of dollars, don’t expect them to lie down and just take it:

If the Obama administration expected the senior creditors of Chrysler to fold their tents under political pressure, they may have gotten a rude shock today. Thomas Lauria, who accused the White House of threatening the creditors withn humiliation at the hands of the White House press corps, has filed a motion to halt the administration’s machinations on behalf of the UAW in the Chrysler bankruptcy. Lauria and his allies claim that the Obama administration has violated the Constitution in their bid to devalue the senior creditors’ holdings on behalf of junior creditors, and have some precedent to support the allegation.

Make you wonder where the folks form the ACLU are?

Oh sure if this case involved a two men suing so they could corn hole each other in a catholic church wile using the flag as an after sex rag and emailing Osama Bin Laden while a kindergarten class is made to watch, the ACLU would be all over it but when the government invents a power to unilaterally break business contracts there really isnt much to see.

Illinois, meet your next junior senator

Its good to be king.

CHICAGO - Public records show Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias (juh-NOO'-lee-as) used money earned by a state college savings program to purchase a $26,000 government vehicle.

The Chicago Tribune reported Sunday that Giannoulias used the state's Bright Start fund to pay for the SUV. The treasurer's office offers the program to allow families to save money for college. The program's investments lost $85 million last year.

Looks like Obama’s hand picked successor for his senate seat, Alexi Giannoulias, has learned well the way of Illinois politics.

Beautiful People

All aboard the Dear Leader Express, complimentary Kool-Aid and peanuts will be served for all on board. Amazing.

Michelle Obama, who has achieved celebrity status and has wowed the world as a fashion icon, made the list for the first time.

"I had a father and a brother who thought I was beautiful, and they made me feel that way every single day," Obama told the magazine.

Also included in a "Barack's Beauties" section were White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others.

I dont want you and I dont need you
Dont bother to resist, Ill beat you
Its not your fault that youre always wrong
The weak ones are there to justify the strong

Have we ceded too much?

Old news, but Carrie Prejean, Miss California, lost the Miss USA pageant because some snotty little queer named Mario Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton) sandbagged her with a question on gay marriage and didn’t like her answer.

To further add insult to injury Lavandeira then went on to call her a “dumb bitch” for her answer.

So my question is have we ceded too much to these people in the name of “tolerance”?

Not so long ago if a man (which chromosomally Lavandeira qualifies as) called a woman a “dumb bitch” over something like this there would be hell to pay. He would be shunned by respectable people at the very least and at worst his pimple ridden face would be used as a concrete paintbrush.

So what the fuck has happened?

Why are people like Lavandeira allowed to disrespect anyone like this, let alone someone as genuine as Prejean?

Have we as a society collectively lost our spine?

Why is it so expensive to build a nuclear plant?

That’s not really a fair statement. It was expensive to build a nuclear plant and the costs thrown around are based on historical figures.

But its like those guys on TV say, past performance is no guarantee on future returns.

In order to understand what went wrong in the US nuclear industry, you really have to take a look at the past to see how some of the conditions that made them as expensive to build as they were no longer exist.

Back in the day, every utility in the country functioned as a regulated monopoly. The utility had every major decision ran past a regulatory body that would either approve or reject the decision as well as tell the utility how much more it could charge for its power. While this meant that reliable power was available to nearly everyone who needed it or wanted it, it removed any kinds of incentives for efficiency or risk management on the utilities end because every capital infrastructure request made by a utility was approved and the regulators gave the utility permission to increase their prices to cover the construction costs, including cost overruns. This increase also included the utilities predetermined profit rate. Even if they made a mistake, they still profited off of it.

Management did not have a good understanding of what they were getting themselves into when thy initially went seeking approval for the plants. They were basing their budgetary estimates off of a scope of work that was 20-25% defined because they were rushing themselves to get these projects up and running and did not fully appreciate the risks involved in this kind of heavily regulated work.

Think about that for a moment …. only 20-25% of the project could be categorized as a “known”. That means any contractor bidding on it knows with certainty only ¼ of his scope, and he is then expected to provide a fixed price bid for the entire project .. doesn’t work like that.

And since only 25% of the scope was defined that meant only 25% of the engineering was complete, so all permitting for the plant had to be done on an incomplete design, and regulators at the NRC didn’t care for that either.

On a project like this you perform detailed engineering, seek permits, take bids, procure, construct and operate. When the big nuclear projects of the 70’s were in full swing, utilities were half assing this creed of good project management, hoping that things would just work themselves out but also not caring too much if they didn’t because there was no real financial risk.

So when work began on the plants and engineering tried to catch up, the NRC would invariably reject part of the design (because naturally it would make too much God damn sense to have a standardized pre-approved design instead of reinventing the wheel every project). The design would then have to go back to engineering; subcontractors would have to stop what they were working on, idling hundreds of tradesmen or worse reworking what they had done. Delays would ensue, schedules would slip and the project’s margin sheet would begin to bleed like a stuck pig.

Do this 70 or 100 times during the course of a project and its no wonder why costs spiral out of control and 4 years projects turn into 20 year projects.

Sure, the ever changing NRC rules and the Ralph Nader’s and Jane Fonda’s of the world certainly didn’t help, but all the missteps the utilities were making made them more vulnerable in the courts and with the regulators.

So what is different now?

Well, for one, manufacturers (Westinghouse and GE-Hitachi for example) are pushing for standardized packages that once given NRC approval would take the permitting issue out of the equation.

Utilities now have to go onto the market and get funds the old fashioned way and private investors have to weigh the ability of the utilities to control costs, meaning you damn well have better know what you are doing before we lend you billions of dollars.

Material and labor costs are at the lowest they have been in over a decade. High material and labor costs was actually a reason that asshole extraordinaire Joe Romm said that nuclear was doomed for a comeback:

In fact, from 2000 through October 2007, nuclear power plant construction costs -- mainly materials, labor and engineering -- have gone up 185 percent! That means a nuclear power plant that would have cost $4 billion to build in 2000 would have cost more than $11 billion to build last October.

Looks like his ability to predict the future isn’t quite as good as he would like the rest of us to believe it is.

Most importantly though public sentiment is now behind nuclear power.

If the utilities and their subcontractors can demonstrate the ability to manage a project well, nuclear will see a revival.

Joe Romm is a fucking hack

Romm was on NPR a couple weeks ago commenting on a NY Magazine article on Freeman Dyson. The article, amongst other things, focused on Dyson’s contrarian views on man made global warming.

Romm seem to be most pissed that since Dyson wasn’t a climate scientist he shouldn’t have been given any room to air his views and that the media needs to act as a “filter” to make sure we Lilliputians cant have our thought polluted with heretical ideas like Dyson’s.

It got better though:

“If he were a Holocaust denier or if he said cigarettes were good for you, then
Dawidoff would not be writing this favorable extensive profile of his life and
times”

I find it truly disgusting that Romm has the nerve to compare one of the most distinguished scientist of his generation to a holocaust denier.

“Scientists” like Joe Romm remind me of those who threw charges of heresy at Galileo Galilei. Fact is Dyson is eminently more credible than Romm on what does and does not constitute good science and scientific method and the unreliable nature of scientific theories when they are still in their infancy.

I doubt Romm would last more than 30 minuets in a face to face debate with Dyson, but a coward like Romm wouldn’t take that challenge in the first place.

Joe Romm is a fucking coward

After reading another half assed posting from Joe Romm at ClimateProgress, I figured I would post a comment. It was quickly removed.

It's Romm's prerogative to be sure, but it really does speak volumes on what a complete and total fucking coward he is.

I have posted the comment below.

[JR]Everybody knows that wind and solar have a 30 to 40 percent capacity factor. It is no big secret as this paragraph seems to imply, assuming anyone can figure out what the authors actually meant. It has no impact on their carbon dioxide reduction.

Your hero Jon Wellinghoff, the new head of FERC hasn’t figured that out. He just said that the installed cost of a KW of solar and wind was less than nuclear. That would have been true if you didn’t include capacity factors into that number. When included into that figure, Nuclear is still cheaper than solar or wind when spinning reserve construction is taken into account.

[JR]The fact is that countries have integrated into their grids a fraction of wind that is 10 times what we have today.

Interesting that you neglected to mention that renewable heavy nations like Denmark and Spain rely on Nuclear heavy nations like France to provide all the spinning reserve they need when the wind slows down. Who are we supposed to rely on … Canada and Mexico?

[JR]And the fact is that this country is already reducing the fraction of all electricity produced by coal, thanks part to renewable.

Ehhh .. wrong again Joe. The fraction of all electricity produced by coal has dropped only in relative terms and only by a fraction of a %. And the part played by renewables is insignificant … the largest generation growth has come from natural gas. While the year to year % increase of wind is big, its still a pittance when compared to the actual year to year increases in gas, or even coal.

[JR]The authors and the Post also seem to be unaware that the fossil fuel power most often paired with renewables to firm up the power — natural gas power — has substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions per kiloWatt-hour than the gird as a whole. So a wind-gas or solar-gas hybrid still represents a very sharp reductions in carbon emissions.

And at only 5 times the cost and with 75% of the reliability .. that’s one hell of a tradeoff.

Welcome to the reality based community.

In short Joseph Romm is a fucking retard and a coward to boot. Oh, sure, he got his fancy PhD degree in physics, making him a self professed "physicist and climate expert", but he doesn’t have a fucking clue when it comes to channeling electrons in useful work and the technical and managerial challenges that go along with that let alone a thick enough hide to handle some dissenting views at his website.

Jimmy Carter

Look-e here ... more words of wisdom from the ex-president who just cant seem to keep his face out of the news.

But none of us wants to own an assault weapon, because we have no desire to kill policemen or go to a school or workplace to see how many victims we can accumulate before we are finally shot or take our own lives.

Naturally, that’s why I own them (groan).

Heavily influenced and supported by the firearms industry, N.R.A. leaders have misled many gullible people into believing that our weapons are going to be taken away from us, and that homeowners will be deprived of the right to protect ourselves and our families.

And where would the NRA get that idea from? They must have made it up considering how friendly to the Second Amendment both Eric Holder and Barack Obama are.

Here's one for Jimmy.

Earth Day

I don’t know what you all did for earth day but I hope you had fun. I spent the afternoon polishing my 1963 Cadillac Sedan Deville with harp seal skin interior and optional 28 barrel carburetor. I then sat my family down for some frittata made with endangered condor eggs and we capped the evening off with a redwood bonfire.

In light of the festivities I though I would post a reminder of all the preditcions made during th efrist earth day.

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” -Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” -Life Magazine, January 1970

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” - Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Read the rest here.

Its not to say that we shouldn’t be good stewards, I personally think it is a virtue to be a good steward … its just a gentile reminder that people have used their positions in the scientific elite to push their personal political agenda which was thinly wrapped in environmental gobbledygook.

How Pop Culture Indoctrinates Us to Hate America

Kyle Smith at PJM reviews “The Soloist” and this line really hit me.

The Soloist has more American flags than Rocky IV, and each is there to tell us that we, as a country, have failed our least fortunate citizens. Ayers sleeps on a filthy, ragged American-flag pillow. He wears an American-flag top hat. In several nightmare sequences set in a community center on Skid Row, American flags pop up everywhere — nasty, dirty ones.

It hit me because it made me think of American History X, especially the dinner scene.



Aside from the fact that I just cannot stand Ed Norton in general, this particular scene is a very not so subtle connect the dot allegory that anyone who questions the hard pressed left wing version of racial issues in this country is a skinhead neo-nazi or close kin. Couple this with the constant intermingling of Ed Norton’s Nazi character early in the movie and the American flag and the point is very clear, real racists and Nazi’s are the heart and soul of this country.

On Natural Living

I don’t remember who I stole this from .. so props to anonymous.

Jim Carrey, America's Scientitian

This is the definition of whooped, so under the thumb of ones partner that you begin to regurgitate the same inane rantings.

I've also heard it said that no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism has ever been found. That statement is only true for the CDC, the AAP and the vaccine makers who've been ignoring mountains of scientific information and testimony. There's no evidence of the Lincoln Memorial if you look the other way and refuse to turn around.

Here's an thought for you Jim, maybe its not the vaccines that caused your girlfriends’ sons autism but the 8 bazillion lines of coke she did in the bathroom of Reilly's Daughter back home in Chicago.

IF Stone = Treacherous Commie Rat Bastard

You may just think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive." – IF Stone

If you don’t know who I.F. (Isidor Feinstein) Stone is dotn be suprised. He’s a relatively obscure figure in American journalistic history, although he has quite a wide following in left wing circles.

Stone was one of those New Deal leftists who worked closely with the Communists during the 30’s and 40’s. After being caught up by the House Un-American Activity Committees in the 50’s he spent the next few decades writing for a weekly he started.

There had always been rumors and allegations, some fairly credible, that Stone had worked directly for the Soviet NKVD (precursor to the KGB) or at least seriously entertained the idea, but nothing truly concrete and bullet proof was ever presented demonstrating that he was actively groomed by and accepted a position working for a Soviet intelligence organization.

That is until now.

The preeminent scholars of WWII/early Cold War Soviet espionage in the United States John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have unearthed archival information from the former Soviet Union that would seem to confirm the worst suspicions about Stone.

Stone assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of such tasks: talent spotting, acting as a courier by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalistic tidbits and data the KGB found interesting. In May 1936, for example, the KGB New York station told Moscow:

Pancake (Stone) reported that Karl Von Wiegand works in Berlin as a correspondent for the Hearst agency “Universal Service.” He had been ordered to maintain friendly relations with Hitler, which was supposedly dictated by the fact that the German press was buying the agency’s information. Hearst is in a deal with German industry to supply the latter with a large consignment of copper. Wiegand does not agree with Hearst’s policy. He turned to Pancake’s boss for advice.

Commenting on Stone’s work as a KGB talent spotter and recruiter, the KGB New York station reported, “Pancake established contact with Dodd. We wanted to recruit him [Dodd] and put him to work on the State Dep. line. Pancake should tell Dodd that he has the means to connect him with an anti-Fascist organization in Berlin.” William A. Dodd, Jr., was the son of the U.S. ambassador to Germany and an aspiring Popular Front activist with political ambitions. The KGB did recruit him, and Stone briefly functioned as Dodd’s intermediary with the KGB, providing him with a contact in Berlin when he went to join his father at the embassy. Stone also passed on to the KGB some information Dodd picked up from the American military attaché in Berlin about possible German military moves against the USSR and the name of a suspected pro-Nazi embassy employee.

Naturally this information hasn’t gone over well with Stone’s accolades including Eric Alterman (and Alterman’s propaganda organ FAIR) who worked with stone and considers himself an understudy and acolyte.

So what do we have? I think the following: A man of avowed anti-Fascist sympathies, and to my mind, still-foolishly naïve about Stalin and the Soviet Union, agreed on a couple of occasions to help those whom he believed to be actually fighting fascism, while his own country, still mired in childish isolationism, preferred to look away.

Alterman is very careful to parse his words in his article; he never directly comes out and says that Stone didn’t work for the Soviets, only that he wasn’t a “spy” and did it for the best of intentions. See, Stone only did to help America and freedome, not to undermine it. He also continually mentions the fact that the documents Klehr and Haynes’ rely on are only copies and we haven’t seen the originals … not that Alterman would directly cast doubt on their accuracy, rather he just throws it out so a "discriminating reader" can connect the dots on their own. It’s a pretty common tactic, one that Klehr and Haynes wrote about in their book “In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage” about academia’s unwillingness to accept just how rampant Soviet espionage was in the US and just how involved the Communist Party was in it.

Unfortunately, even The New Republic’s Marty Perez seems convinced.

Something tells me Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t approve of an American journalist working for a hostile collectivist totalitarian foreign entity.

How’s this one going to end ....

Obama releases the “Torture memos” detailing the cruel and hideous pink belly and death by caterpillar and ladybug technique used on the individuals who planned 9/11, but throws the caveat in there that there will be no prosecutions even though these acts were despicable and didn’t accomplish anything.

Hayden and Gates call Obama a jackass for doing this and say that it will make his job much harder

Then Cheney comes out swinging and says why not release them all including all the actionable intelligence we got from them and the attacks they stopped.

Now Obama says “on second thought, I might just be open to prosecuting individuals from the former administration on this”

So, how does this one end? Does Obama back down or does Cheney? Cheney certainly has nothing to lose as Obama has upped the ante by reversing his prior decision, now being “open” to prosecution of former administration officials.

Cleary Obama wasnt prepared for a response like this, or perhaps he was ... after all with 100's of billions flowing out the door at the Treasury, this makes for a nice distraction.

The left is just dying for its pound of flesh but will Obama spend his energy here, especially if Cheney is correct. What does he have to gain aside from throwing some red meat to the left?

My prediction

Option A: there is no release of the documents Cheney wants made public, Obama quietly backs away from his threat, Cheney quiets down and the Left seethes.

Option B: Cheney doesn’t drop it, Obama still wont release them but they get leaked, Obama loks like a schmuck and the left accuses Cheney’s “stay behind army” of running a shadow government and leaking the material.

Ashton Kutcher – douchebag extraordinaire

Amazing, a docuhebag celebrity won a popularity contest against a cable news network! Amazing!

I used to like Kutcher back in the day. He seemed real, just a small town guy
(engineering major to boot) who got a lucky break and made it big.

But the past couple years his ego has just exploded .. and I just don’t go for that.

Take his attention grabbing rant about his “dickwad neighbor” who made to much noise with his home improvement project, waking him at the wee hour of 7:30am, and was gonna blast him with his paintball gun .... ohh .... tough guy.

I guess Ashton must have forgotten his Midwest roots and neigbors, because if he tried that shit back home, someone would put a .375 H&H Magnum through the engine block of his Prius.

Tea Party Protesters Hate Veterans ... or Something

Wife beating drunk and all around asshole extrodinare Neil Steinberg manages to jam his foot in his mouth twice in article.

What did you make of the big protest against the U.S. military and our veterans Wednesday?

Because after all, if you hate trillion fucking dollar deficits for the indefinite future, you must despise the armed forces.

It gets better though, because after his little straw man on the Tea Parties, he takes a ham handed swipe at critics of trust fund revolutionary Bill Ayers and his cop killing terrorist bitch wife Bernadine Dohrn … you know people who show their admiration and respect of our armed forces by packing pipes full of nails and explosives and planting them at officers clubs (oh yeah, and killing police too)

I observed to Madden that hosting a performance with Ayers and Dohrn, tweedy academics whose long-ago stint as radicals make them permanent fetish fear objects for the vengeful right, was sure to stir protest.

Ironic no? I suppose that Steinberg must not have put 2 + 2 together when he threw these two seemingly unrelated items in the same article.

Tea Part Parting Shots

Now that the media "elites" over at NPR and the Colombia Journalism review (whose director Victor Navasky I am currently writing an post on) are coming in to bayonet the wounded (or what they see as the wounded), I am reminded of something I read from Jonah Goldberg the other day. His whole post is worth the read, but this was the best.

3. These protests are unpatriotic astroturfing by plutocrats.

So much for "dissent is the highest form of patriotism"!

I find it sort of amazing that when groups like ANSWER, a Mos Eisley cantina of America-hating nut cases, take to the streets it's a full-flowering of democracy in action. When ACORN pays their ragamuffins to protest, or when Rainbow/PUSH shakes down businesses through racial extortion, it's the sort of direct democratic action Thomas Paine dreamed of. And when labor unions pay people to protest, it's populist. But when a bunch of independent Americans, talk-show hosts, and email campaigners organize hundreds of protests around the country, it's astroturfing.

Good stuff.

Inter-American arms treaty

The inter-American arms treaty looks like it is going to be offered up and pushed as a fig leaf to Latin America during the upcoming Organization of American States summit. It was initially drafted by the OAS in 1997 as a smaller scale UN Small Arms Treaty but never went anywhere in the Senate when Clinton submitted it.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Administration officials say President Barack Obama will push for Senate ratification of a Latin American arms trafficking treaty.

The regional treaty, adopted by the Organization of American States, was signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1997 but never ratified by the Senate.

Officials say the inter-American arms trafficking treaty would curb guns and ammunition trafficking that threatens regional security. Officials say the move is meant to show the United States is serious about confronting a security threat on its doorstep.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. As I noted a few weeks back, the amount of press coverage concerning the Mexican cartel violence and that 90% of the gun used by the cartel were supposedly coming from the US led me to believe something bigger was in the works and I suppose the resurrection of this “Inter-American arms treaty” was it .

There will be blood

I saw this over at the Jawa Report, and I just couldnt pass it up.

Evidently a poster at Daily Kos thinks that there will be a bloody civil war in America, all becasue fo the Tea Parties.

I am very afraid that the Coming "Rise Again" in our own land will not be so free of violence.

We are a nation of gun owners with more and more being sold every day amid the poor economic situation... and a denied undercurrent of racial hatred.

How did Governor Rick Perry of Texas help this already bad situation, with his pronouncement?

He didn't. Not at all.

This is NOT over, folks.

Write me nasty comments, that this could not happen here, that there couldn't possibly be another Civil War in the United States... and that I am crazy for thinking so. Do and say whatever you want.

Then keep your television turned on... to see the slow craziness suddenly snowball into right wing open rebellion.

And I can tell you of a certainty how the whole thing will end, or at least part of it.

There will be blood.

A lot of it.

More than you ever dreamed of.

The best part is this guy is named Beavis (yeah I know its pelled a bit differently but its still pretty God damned funny).

The comment section is just precious .... every left winger's wet dream fullfileld.

Speaking of Teabagging and Homosexuals

As sure as I am that a closeted homosexual like Anderson Cooper is an expert about what can and cant be done with another dude's balls in his mouth, I cant even begin to fathom how MSNBC's she-boy Rachel Maddow knows what its like.

Dana Milbank

You can always count on the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to carry the water for the DNC.

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign Milbank made several, later discredited attempts to characterize Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies as gussied up Klan rallies where reporters were routinely roughed up with the help of the Secret Service:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Looks like Milbank showed up Rahm Emanuel’s strategy session this week, because he has reached into his bag of tricks to smear the Tea Party rallies.

Organizers of the conservative protest were told at the last minute that they didn't have a permit to dump a million tea bags in the square, as they had planned.

Instead, they served up a rather noxious brew.

"Hey Big Brother: Show us Your Real Birth Certificate," said one sign in the rain-soaked crowd.

"Blackbeard Obama, King of the Tax Pirates," said another.

A third showed the president dressed up as Steve Urkel, the nerdy black kid with big glasses and suspenders from "Family Matters." "Did I do that?" the sign said, showing a graph of the economy plunging.

Closeted racists and crakpots, that’s the Rahm Emanuel’s meme for the day, and you’d better play along lest you get a talking to by the CEO of GE.

Anderson Cooper on Teabagging

It makes sense when you think about it ...... after all, being one of the most well known closeted queers around, Cooper probably has a perspective on what can and cant be done with another guys balls in his mouth that most people lack.

Lisle Illinois Tax Day Tea Party

To be honest, I had no idea what to expect. I am not exactly the protesting type ... this was my first foray to an event like this. All my exposure to “protests” have been images on TV and the web of the Code Pink burnout hippie type, college aged “my mommy and daddy made sure my Visa was paid off so I can come to this” and the professional trustafarian Block Blockers who frequent G8 meetings.

Needless to say, what I saw in Lisle was nothing like this.

Mostly it was people like me who took a long lunch to see what all the hubbub was about with some stay at home parents (kiddies in tow) and some retirees sprinkled in. There were a dozen or so speakers ... no one whose name I recognized but they all received an enthusiastic welcome from the crowd. There was talk that ACORN had notified the organizers that they would be coming for a counter demonstration, but I hadn’t seen anything like that by the time I left.

I am no professional at crowd estimation, but when I got there at 12:00pm on the dot (I am a stickler for promptness) there looked to be around 500 people present.

By 1:30 (when I had to go back to work) that number had easily doubled.

Now 1000 people isn’t a lot, but this is Lisle, not downtown Chicago and there were half a dozen other rallies within 20 miles of this, so yeah, I think its safe to say that this was pretty significant.

Naturally, NPR (like the NY Times yesterday) did its part to marginalize whats going on with a half assed hit piece and a lot of dismissive commentary on "Talk of the Nation" this afternoon but Glenn Beck put alot of this into context:

"The mainstream media doesn't get it. They'll report on the tea parties just as a -- you know, oh, they're just a bunch of whack job Republicans who only care about taxes on the rich. Where were they with George Bush? . . . But the tea parties are not about taxes. They are about the reason for the taxes, which is an out-of-control government that cannot control its own spending."

He’s right, this isn’t about taxes or spending so much (from my perspctive) as its about a government out of control, and I think the press is certainly doing a disservice to the country by ignoring and minimizing this.

Beware the Polls

Great comment about the partisan use of polling from the National Review:

There is an effort afoot to marginalize and demoralize people who refuse to hop aboard the Good Ship Obama. Dishonest polling is one of many tools in the Left's arsenal, but it's especially effective because these surveys can actually warp how people perceive the nation's mood. If a conservative were to catch in passing banner headlines proclaiming that 2/3 of the country approves of Obama's job performance and nearly 3/4 find him strong on national security, he may understandably feel isolated and powerless. That's the entire message implicit in these tactics—from the attack Rush strategy to DHS' outrageous "Right-Wing" threat assessment: Pipe down, conservatives. You're isolated, part of a hopelessly tiny minority, and possibly even dangerous. For the good of the country, keep your thoughts to yourselves.

NY Times Rides to The Dear Leader's Rescue (yet again)

Our new political overlords never have to look too far for cover when inconvenient truths raise their ugly heads. Take a look see at the latest from the Times on the Tea Party Protests tomorrow: Hold the Tea: Americans Fine With Taxes.

In news that will be bad for activists hoping to start another American Revolution with a series of protests modeled on the Boston Tea Party, a new Gallup Poll finds that a solid majority of American say the income tax they pay is “fair,” and that slightly more than half classify their own tax burden as either “about right” or “too low.”

Not that the hacks from the Times actually bother to ask anyone involved what their beef is, after all, its much easier to construct a straw man and bash it for a while. As an interesting side note, the percentage of people who think they pay a "fair" amount of incomes taxes is eerily close to the percentage that pays no federal income tax at all.

What the real beef is, or mine at any rate, is not what the marginal tax rates are today, but what they are going to be in 5 or 10 years after the bill for our Dear Leader's "First of the Month economic development plan" comes in.



This is the problem, trillion dollar deficits financed by China for as long as the eye can see.

People are tired of being ignored, and worse they hate being kicked and mocked by assholes like the Time's Robert Mackey.