January 12, 2020
Isn't it funny how liberals tell YOU that you can't have a valid opinion of climate change because "you aren't a scientist," and yet they make climate heroes of a former Tenn. politician whose only qualification is that his father was a Senator, a bunch of Hollywood actors who have no qualifications at all, and a 16-year-old kid who has openly admitted she is skipping school.
A reader named KC added:
We may not be scientists, but I'm pretty sure we have enough knowledge to determine how many genders there are.
I added:
Or how Cindy Sheehan had "absolutel moral credibility" because she lost a son in Iraq but the left has repeatedly try to shut the mouths of women who have had children murdered by illegal aliens. Strange.
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Jon Cryer, crybaby former star of Two and a Half Men, bitterly complained on Facebook about Trump's failure to cooperate with the Democrats trying to impeach him, and said it was proof of his guilt:
He'd be sending Congress thousands of documents to prove his innocence instead/
But he isn't because he's guilty.
I replied:
He immediately released the transcripts of the call when Congress demanded he do so. Your premise is incorrect.
If he has been slow to cooperate with the House (and perhaps you have forgotten that President Obama was equally slow, leading to the conviction of Attorney General Eric Holder for Contempt of Congress) but why should he? Do YOU tell a home invader he's welcome to rummage around? Do you tell about all the special features on the car someone is jacking from you? Come on!
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January 11, 2020
Chelsea Clinton, homely daughter of Bill and Hillary, has been suckling at multiple teats to make her millions of dollars, none of them earned.
The Washington Times dishes:
[...]
In 2017, Chelsea Clinton was also named to travel site Expedia’s Board of Directors. Because she’s a … business genius? A travel genius? An investment prodigy? The Hill reported that position "typically earned $250,000 in 2015. … Both IAC and Expedia are controlled by Barry Diller, the business and television mogul, who is a friend of Hillary Clinton.â€
[...]
In 2017, Chelsea Clinton was also named to travel site Expedia’s Board of Directors. Because she’s a … business genius? A travel genius? An investment prodigy? The Hill reported that position "typically earned $250,000 in 2015. … Both IAC and Expedia are controlled by Barry Diller, the business and television mogul, who is a friend of Hillary Clinton.â€
[...]
According to Politico, Marc Lasry, a major Clinton Foundation donor, "employed Chelsea Clinton as a chemical industry analyst at his own hedge fund Avenue Capital Group
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It's a short article, but very much to the point. Go here https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/01/10/texas-becomes-first-state-to-close-its-doors-to-refugees-n2559345 to read it.Texas Governor Greg Abbott has closed the doors to new refugees in the state of Texas, making him the first governor to refuse new refugees under an executive order signed by President Trump empowering state and local governments with control over refugee resettlement within their jurisdictions.
While other Republican governors have come under fire for allowing refugee resettlement to continue within their states -- at least 18 Republican governors have given their consent -- in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Abbott writes that Texas has already taken in more than its fair share of refugees while also contending with the "disproportionate migration issues resulting from a broken federal immigration system."
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David Harsanyi puts the lie to the claim "it was Iran's money and Obama couldn't refuse to give it to them".
Here are his tweets:
Obama had no obligation to settle with Iran (using the logic of factcheckers Iran still owes *us* money). Anyway here is the link to the Wapo piece: washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…
Also: using the factcheckers' logic, Iran owes us $817 million for a counterclaim at The Hague, and over $1 billion to U.S. victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism.
Not to mention, The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, signed by Clinton in 2000, stipulates that Iran’s money could not be unfrozen until all those cases were paid. Obama ignored that law.
... the subrogated claims were dealt with by being completely ignored.
And by ignoring those claims Obama undermined any legal claims terrorism against Iran -- in the US there have been 16 cases with compensatory damages = $400 million and punitive damages = $3.5 billion.
Every president since Jimmy Carter somehow managed not to hand this money over, but factcheckers are framing O's capitulation as a fulfillment of some obligation to make Iran whole. The funds were in dispute. We owed them nothing. fin.
Hat tip: Willis Eschenbach
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Poor pathetic SOB!
Eddie Munster is Alive - and Living in Missouri
How sad, living off a television show you made as a kid back in the '60's. This guy never had a life.
From the article:
Patrick is a master at this kind of deal making. A self-described "hustler" all his life, years after dropping out of Hollywood and beating drug addiction, Butch Patrick (legal name: Patrick Lilley) has built a fine life as a former child star. From his base in Missouri, he works his way through small and mid-sized towns across the heartland, visiting twenty to thirty car shows, conventions and festivals every year.
Finding new opportunities among the constant churn requires the ear of a salesman and a certain amount of humility. The conventions are in many ways the absence of glamor for celebrity guests. For hours, they sit in plastic folding chairs and hawk autographed photos of their younger, more-employable selves in hotel ballrooms and re-purposed gymnasiums.
He really should have gone to school to do something with his life. Being Eddy Munster is only good for a couple of years.How much do you want to bet this guy is a Democrat? He even took his wife's last name (He's now Patrick Lilly, rather than Butch Patrick.) He may not live in his mother's basement, but he probably lives in his wifes.
Bet he votes for Bernie Sanders.
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Climate scientists say the best strategy is to lie to the public if they don't know the answer ... and then they spend hours discussing "communication strategies" and wondering why people don't believe them.
The answer is simple.
Bad science, exaggerated claims, endless failed doomcasts.
Oh, and lying to the public ...
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If you think PETA is just about helping animals, think again.
Care About Australia’s Wildlife: Please Don’t Give Money To PETA
From the article:
Well, if we begin to take a look at PETA’s Australia chapter, we can imagine why they are not first in line to help those poor koalas and kangaroos we keep hearing about on the news. For example, PETA’s Australia chapter received over $49 million in contributions in 2019, but only less than 1 percent went into actually helping troubled animals. The rest of the money, in true PETA fashion, was used on advertising, public disturbances, paying off celebrity spokespersons, and lobbying politicians and businesses into getting what they want and they want one thing, and one thing only-total animal "liberationsâ€. This would mean no zoos, no aquariums, no responsible meat, or dairy consumption, no pets, no wildlife conservation efforts that require rehabilitation or breeding programs, and no use of animals for therapeutic purposes. PETA is also against the use of guide dogs for those who are blind. If that is not enough to throw you over the edge about who PETA is, they once compared farm animals to Jewish Holocaust victims in order to convince the public to switch over to a vegan lifestyle. In addition, they also have long ties to eco-terrorists groups such as the Animal Liberation Front, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and the Earth Liberation Front.
If you still think PETA still cares about animals, then you might start developing some second thoughts after hearing what I am about to tell you next. As of 2018, PETA has killed around 39,961 adoptable animals while only 3,459 animals, which is less than 7.31 percent of all animals that were taken in by the Virginia-based extremist group over a period of 20 years. According to government documents, PETA employees often kill the animals within 24 hours after taking them into custody and just to make matters worse, PETA’s very own "animal shelterâ€, which is located on the fourth floor of it’s headquarters, only consists of three rooms that are nestled among the cubicles and conference rooms that are used to discuss new plans to profit off of animal and wildlife tragedies in the name of "animal rightsâ€. It’s implied that the shelter is also not accessible to the public. If this is the case, then this would mean that PETA does not operate as a facility that would meet the definition of an animal shelter, especially if they have no intention to find permanent homes for animals in need.
Thanks to Kim W.!
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Once again, I have to argue with an idiot, this time over global warming.
Kevin stated:
Putting up the signs in the first place was probably driven more by politics than science, and likewise calling global warming a hoax is politically rather than scientifically based.
Glacier National Park is named primarily for all of the glacial landforms carved by glaciers rather than by the glaciers themselves. The glaciers that do exist are tiny, hiding in steep, high-altitude, shaded bowls; and are not even truly remnants of the last glaciation of the Pleistocene ice ages. The massive glaciers that carved the GNP landscape completely melted at the end of the last glaciation, and these small glaciers formed several thousand years ago as climate naturally cooled a bit. The existing glaciers have expanded and contracted since then, but have never grown large. It was probably scientifically questionable to say that these small, fragile glaciers would disappear by 2020, but it would not take much to make them completely melt.
Given that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, it is reasonable to conclude that pumping copious amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere will cause the atmosphere to warm. There are many complicating factors, but this is what has been understood for over 100 years, and it is what I was taught as a meteorology undergraduate student in 1980, before climate studies became politicized by both sides. It is one thing to dissent from the majority scientific position, but to call this near consensus a hoax is quite simply indefensible, as a hoax implies a deliberate deception. The evidence for human-caused global warming is strong, and is accepted by many Christian scientists. You may think these scientists are wrong, but being wrong is not the same as perpetrating a hoax.
I replied:
Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, with just about four molecules per every ten thousand molecules of air, and we've put less than one of those molecules there. The notion that this is going to cause any great warming is dubious, and even Roger Revelle didn't think it would - at least until it became politicized. HE thought it would drive no more than two degrees C of warming, making it something of a novelty, but little else.
I would point out that the modern incarnation of catastrophic global warming theory was brainstormed at the Endangered Atmospheres Conference. They realized the atmosphere was the one thing everyone shared, and so it could be used to promote world government and socialism, and they decided to back Global Cooling first, but the cooling trend ended before they could really get that going so the same people immediately shifted to Global Warming, knowing there was likely a forty year trend to ride. It was a lie, a farce, and I suspect they knew it. But they also knew that, with the government taking over most science funding in 1979 they could steer "science" to promote this. And that is what has happened.
Funding does not go to someone who says "well, yes it has warmed but that is likely natural variability" but instead to people claiming doomsday. Why? They can impose regulations and new taxes, the bread and butter of government.
Meanwhile government scientists here and in Europe have been systematically politicizing peer review - read the Climategate e-mails. Ask Joanna Simpson of NASA. Ask Roy Spencer, whose article was rejected after one of the publishers was bullied by climate alarmists. Yes, this largely IS a hoax.
There has been some planetary warming,, and it is undoubtedly caused in part by human activity (Roger Pielke Sr. thinks it is primarily land-use changes, like blacktops where there used to be forests) and carbon dioxide may play a small part in it, but it is an issue primarily to promote the destruction of capitalism, as Christina Figueres of the U.N. Framework Convention plainly stated.
As to your "concensus" based on What? Naomi Oreskes? John Cook? Cook had less than 1100 papers he reviewed. Funny; the Oregon Petition has over 30,000 signers. Ever if you subtract all but ten percent of the signiatures you still have almost ten times as many scientists who disagree than those cited by Cook. The concensus was always one of the lies of this hoax. In fact, the claim is so preposterous it pretty well PROVES climate change is a hoax.
Oh, and Kevin what exactly has been understood for a hundred years? Arrhenius' work was based on carbon dioxide in an enclosure. HE never said atmospheric carbon dioxide would drive planetary warming. That is primarily a concept from the mid twentieth century. I've been hearing you alarmists make this claim more and more of late. You need to prove the claim or stop using it.
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Here is another unintended consequence of the rush to legalize marijuana. Dogs are ingesting pot and suffering THC poisoning.
Gee; whoda seen THAT coming?
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Tim McNabb makes the following observation:
The mainstream press ROUTINELY gets stories 180 degrees wrong. They have a narrative, and that narrative is "Orange Man Bad". Those of us who do not trust the media do not buy the narrative.
Most people I know who are reflexively anti-Trump generally accept the mainstream press reporting at face value - something the press really does not deserve.
I replied:
As Frank Capra said "if you want to sent a message try Western Union". Sam Goldwyn said something similar. Sadly the only people who actually make it in the profession are activists and sycophants.
This judgment won't stop them, because they believe this is their job, to promote leftist causes. Modern journalism is hopelessly corrupt. There is no commitment to truth, because truth won't advance their leftist beliefs.
Amazing; the media ARE the comfortable and they rage against anyone who afflicts them in the slightest.
It's past time we put the media on the hot seat. It's why Trump is so popular; he calls them out, afflicts these privileged, entitled stuffed-shirts.
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Michael Morrison
Maybe this explains one aspect of California politics?
In his excellent autobiography, "Dick Van Dyke," the author tells how one of the "Dick Van Dyke Show" stories came about.
"Carl [Reiner] continued to draw on of all our lives for material. In the Episode 'A Bird in the Head Hurts,' Ritchie [the Petries' young son] is traumatized after a woodpecker pecks him in the head. Well, that had actually happened to Carl's son, Rob."
So, maybe "Meathead" was the wrong name for Rob Reiner to play in "All in the Family"?
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January 10, 2020
Here is a story in NPR chronicling a deep, dark plot by those eeevil Republicans to gerrymander North Carolina.
Democrats just happened to get their claws on one of the chief strategists for the GOP's electronic gadgets, and found a vile plot to try to win elections.
From the article:
Lawyers with the law firm Arnold & Porter — which represented both Common Cause and some of the citizenship question's challengers — uncovered an unpublished study in which Thomas Hofeller concluded using responses from such a question would be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" when voting districts are redrawn. The revelation came weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in June, affirming a lower court's decision against the question, which has been permanently blocked from forms for the upcoming national head count.
The question was if an alien was in fact a legal immigrant or not.
Oh the horror! A Republican lawyer thought it would benefit the party if illegal aliens were asked if they were here illegally - and thus discourage them from voting!
Well, if this benefits the GOP, who benefits from NOT asking the question? Anyone?
And then about gerrymandering districts, the article states:
Unfairly? Why does the judge think the Founding Fathers gave the power to control redistricting to the state governments in the first place? Why does it matter who wins control of the governorships and state houses? This was done precisely to give the winners of elcctions control of redistricting. The idea is it is an expression of the will of the People.
Who is opposing the will of the People? The COURTS, who are overturning one of the cornerstones of Federalism.
In a Microsoft Word document last saved in 2015, Thomas Hofeller warned against changing the Census Bureau's policy of including prisoners in the population counts of the areas where they're incarcerated, expressing concern that "the actual effect on reapportionment and redistricting is not clearly known for individual states."
Gosh; he doesn't want incarcerated prisoners being used to reapportion districts, since they, uh, can't vote.
What a monster!
The sad thing is this information was stolen by his estranged daughter, who contacted the Leftist Common Cause upon her father's death.
These people are despicable, and I don't mean the Republicans.
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On Facebook one of the resident liberals got his panties in a bunch when someone said the Trump Administration was scrupulous about following the law and appealing bad rulings. This fellow accused Trump of being completely lawless and claimed he was only reined in when "adults" stopped him.
Now, that is patently absurd; President Trump would have been impeached long ago, and the Republicans would have happily turned him out of office. As it stands, nobody has been able to point to a single incident where Mr. Trump violated a court order or a Constitutional mandate.
I pointed this out tot he fellow. In evidence I submitted tis little reminder of how much Barack Obama violated the law.
From the article:
Obama Only Furthered the Imperial Presidency
He points first to the 2011 Libya intervention. It involved neither a congressional authorization of the use of force, nor compliance with the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires at least congressional notification of troop commitments and affirmative permission after 60 days. Every president since the WPA’s enactment has claimed that it’s an unconstitutional limit on inherent executive authority over military power. Obama instead claimed that hundreds of missile strikes and dozens of air missions didn’t trigger the WPA because they only constituted "kinetic military action†rather than war.
[...]
Indeed, once he lost the congressional majority that allowed him to sign breathtakingly unconstitutional legislation like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, Obama began using his pen in other ways. Hearkening to Woodrow Wilson’s progressive view of the administrative state, President Obama steadily took out his frustrations with the checks and balances that inhibited his ability to "fundamentally transform†the country.
A lack of congressional acquiescence didn’t stop this president. Even in Obama’s first term, the administration launched a "We Can’t Wait†initiative, with senior aide Dan Pfeiffer explaining that "when Congress won’t act, this president will.†And when the reelected President Obama announced his second-term economic plans, he said that "I will not allow gridlock, or inaction, or willful indifference to get in our way.â€
But no matter how much you hold it up to the light—and no matter what textual penumbras you induce—there’s no "gridlock clause†in the Constitution by which the president’s power increases to the extent Congress doesn’t support him. Indeed, gridlock is a feature of our system, not a bug, meant to check executive abuse and majoritarian populism both.
And do not forget Obama lied about granting amnesty to illegal aliens to a judge and admitted it in court. He implemented DACA without authorization. He granted waivers from Obamacare to his buddies in the unions in violation of the law. He was truly an imperial president.As I told this guy, he was projecting. That's all the Left ever does.
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Here's a fun story.
250 Amish Men Lift Barn With Their Bare Hands And Carry It Across Ohio Farm To Its New Spot
Too bad the Amish are pacifists; imagine what great soldiers they'd make!
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09:00 AM
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Well, lookie at this!
Appeals Court Rules Trump can use nearly 4 Billion in Military Funds for Border Wall
Hat tip: Warner Todd Houston
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Heartland Institute's Willis Eschenbach posted the following good points on his Facebook page:
In the last 2 weeks, I've watched astounded as Democrats attacked someone who stopped a church shooting, defended an Iranian terrorist, and blamed Trump for starting a war with a country that's been attacking us for 39 years ...
... and then said it was Trump's fault when the Iranians shot down an airliner.
TDS ... don't leave home without it.
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January 09, 2020
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
01:20 PM
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No indeed. The rest of the article is here https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/01/08/why-barring-gun-sales-is-bad-idea/ and is certainly worth reading.A while back, Republicans floated the idea of barring people on gang lists from buying guns. It wasn’t very different from Democrats who push to bar folks on the no-fly list from exercising their Second Amendment rights, though probably slightly more reality-based. However, Democrats weren’t fond of the idea in the least.
In that post, I pointed out the differences between a gang database and the no-fly list, but also said I didn’t favor this kind of thing in the least.
Now, thanks to the LAPD, we have a prime example of just why I didn’t support it.
An internal investigation uncovered several officers within the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) falsely identified innocent Californians in traffic stops as gang members in an effort to make their police work appear more successful.
A statement released Tuesday by the LAPD says that the investigation began in 2019 when a mother living in San Fernando Valley contacted the department after receiving word from the LAPD that her son was a gang member. A supervisor at a local station investigated body camera footage and other documentation gathered by an officer and found inconsistencies with the information provided. The department has not disclosed any other details about how the investigation began.
The woman’s son’s name was cleared and three officers were investigated as a result. An Internal Affairs investigation found that over a dozen officers assigned to Metropolitan Division crime suppression duties had falsified information on field-interview cards to identify non-gang members as belonging to gangs.
Now, imagine someone of legal age found a threat against their life and went to purchase a firearm so they could protect themselves, only to find out that a couple of police officers had added them to a list of gang members and couldn’t buy a gun.
That’s the problem with denying gun purchases to anyone on any kind of list that hasn’t undergone the due process of law.
These officers were able to add this individual to the database with impunity because there was absolutely no judicial oversight. There was apparently no oversight at all. And yet, some actually think it’s a good idea to bar the sale of firearms to people on such a list?
No.
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An article at Space.com says a recent paper suggests Dark Energy may be hogpoo.
From the article:
In a new study, published to the pre-print server arXiv and accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, along with collaborators at Lyon University and the Korea and Space Science Institute claim that they have found proof that dark energy might not exist at all. They studied a small sample of galaxies hosting about 30 type Ia supernovas and claim to have disproven the assumption that supernova luminosity evolves.
"Quoting Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I am not sure we have such extraordinary evidence for dark energy. Our result illustrates that dark energy from SN cosmology, which led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, might be an artifact of a fragile and false assumption," professor Young-Wook Lee of Yonsei University, who led the study, said in a statement.
"Taken at face values, our result suggests that ~100% of the evidence for dark energy simply goes away. This will be confirmed by future observations," Lee and co-author Yijung Kang told Space.com in an email.
To come to such a bold conclusion, the researchers observed the spectra — bands of colors that can be produced when matter interacts with or emits electromagnetic radiation — of the stars in nearby galaxies that host these supernovas. Studying the light coming from these galaxies helped them to determine the ages of the stars in those galaxies.
The
team found what they reported as a significant correlation between the
luminosity of these supernovas and the ages of the stars in these galaxies.
They found that supernovas in younger galaxies are fainter than in
older galaxies, which would upend the assumption that supernova
luminosity doesn't evolve over cosmic time. So, because they found
fault with one of the main pieces of evidence for dark energy, they
concluded that there is a likelihood that dark energy may not exist at
all.
After all, we have Dark Energy to explain the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the Universe and at the same time have Dark Matter to explain the opposite. It's very Medieval; like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. One starts to think that perhaps we are on the wrong track entirely.
Maybe not. But I'm always willing to keep an open mind on such things.
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