The "Epic Beard Man" of Oakland, and the Double Standard

An essay by Alexander Hart that bears repeating:

Americans fed up with black on white crime have found an unlikely hero in Thomas Bruso, who has been dubbed "Epic Beard Man". In a widely circulated YouTube video posted on February 16, Bruso defends himself against a black thug. [Bad language warning—YouTube may require you to sign in because of adult language or violence.]

Bruso is a 67 year-old Vietnam veteran, who apparently has some history of mental illness. While riding the bus in Oakland, he was talking to someone about getting his shoes shined for his mother's funeral and a black man named Michael—whose last name is unknown—managed to get offended because the words "shoe shine", "boy", and "brother" were used in the same sentence. He confronted Bruso, who initially misinterpreted the man as offering to shine his shoes. Michael yelled "Why a brotha gotta spit-shine yo' shoes?" and "Why a white man can't shine his shoes?"

Epic Beard Man responded by saying he wasn't into prejudice, [VDARE.com note: Proving that Mr. Bruso has totally missed the Political Correctness memo he expressed his unwillingness to discriminate on grounds forbidden by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by saying "It could be a Chinaman--it don't matter. I ain't prejudiced." ] to which Michael said "You take your a-- back up there and get the f--- out mah face right now."

Not wanting trouble, Bruso went to the front of the bus, but said "You ain't scaring this white boy. I'm 67 years old", as he walked away.

When Michael continues to harass Bruso, he tells him to "Sit your little black ass down."

Needless to say, Michael does not leave him alone. Iyanna Washington, a black female college student (!) who taped the incident, egged Michael on calling Epic Beard Man "pinky"—a racial slur for Whites—and yelling, "Beat his white a--! F--- this bitch!"

Michael went to the front of the bus and sucker punched Bruso who was sitting down. But Epic Beard Man rose up and scored several clean shots to Michel's face. He was knocked to the ground and covered with blood.

Bruso then storms off the bus, yelling "He f------ hit me first! He hit me in the face! It was self defense! Don't f--- with me boy! Don't f--- with me!"

(...)

Michael, who just got a bloody nose, is seen both whining to "call an amba-lamps [Ebonics for ambulance]" while at the same time saying "I will come back, I will kill dat n------[sic]"

Washington then videotapes herself going through Bruso's bag, which he had left on the bus, yelling "Go through dat sh--!"

She tells Michael, "We can press charges, I got it on videotape", apparently oblivious to the fact that Michael is clearly seen starting the fight and she videotaped herself stealing.

Later that day she posted the fight on YouTube, still oblivious to how bad it made her look. [Epic Beard Man, Encyclopedia Dramatica]

The video instantly became a hit. At one point, "Epic Beard Man" was the 16th most frequently searched term on Google. To date, over 3 million people have seen the original video entitled "AC TRANSIT BUS FIGHT I AM A MOTHERF*CKER." At least another million people have seen it posted under other names like "OLD WHITE MAN BEATS THE SHIT OUT OF A WANNABE THUG ON THE BUS!" and "Epic beard old white guy beats the s*it out of *sshole black guy."

The original video has over 50,000 comments. Virtually all of the comments praise Epic Beard Man, and many are even too politically incorrect for VDARE.COM. Some of the more sober ones include:

• when will the black girls that yelled "beat his white ass" be brought up on racial hate crimes?
  
• I try to see everyone as the same and not agree with stereotypes/ racist comments until they are proven by an individuals actions. But African Americans are always complaining that whites don't like or respect them......... Well... that stupid, ignorant man picking a fight with an old man is the reason we don't. So instead of getting angry at racist comments how about you try and prove us wrong.
  
• I love the part where the lady filming says, "I got it on tape. We can sue his *ss!!"…Mmmmmhmmm....only in America can you assault someone, get your ass beat and sue.

Meanwhile, thousands of video responses and parodies are made such as making the fight look like the videogame Mortal Kombat, or animated versions imagining that Epic Beard Man was having a Vietnam Flashback.

Many videos make light of Michael's Ebonic pronunciation of "ambulance" as either "amber lamps," "m and ms" and "ambalamps." There are even websites and videos devoted to an attractive girl who is sitting next to Michael on the bus, and is listening to music who manages to completely ignore the chaos a few feet away from her. She is dubbed "Amber Lamps."

Many websites are even selling shirts with slogans like "Mess with Epic Beard Man...Go Home In An Amber-Lamps."

What should we make out of this internet phenomenon? It is easy to dismiss it as just some silly incident between two crazy people caught on tape that brings out a few racial slurs from immature anonymous internet posters.

While the crazy banter and Bruso's colorful personality makes this video very amusing, and allows people to get away with more politically incorrect thoughts, it is the audacity of some blacks that really inspires most of the comments. It is not just that Michael picks a fight with an old man that makes people upset. It is that he starts it because he imagines a perfectly innocuous comment is racist. It is that after he starts the fight, both he and videotaper Iyanna Washington still think they are in the right. It is that the Washington thinks she can yell anti-white slurs and steal on tape without any repercussions.

They may have seen the video of a white student brutally beaten by blacks on a bus in Belleville, IL who does not even try to defend himself.

Americans are glad to see someone finally fight back.

Bruso clearly has a few screws loose. He had earlier been videotaped getting tasered by police at an Oakland A's game for being belligerent. But given how self-defense against blacks is often criminalized, as in the Rodney King and Bernie Goetz cases, you need to be a little insane to stand up to the abuse.

Many commenters noted that had the situation been reversed and a white attacked an elderly black man with other whites yelling "Beat his black ass," he would have been charged with a hate crime, which is obviously true. It is also true that had this not been caught on video tape, Epic Beard Man could very easily be charged with a hate crime himself--especially after staying "You ain't scaring this White Boy" and "Sit your little black ass down", even though he clearly was acting in self defense.

During the Rodney King trial, Lew Rockwell joked "Liberals talk about banning guns. As a libertarian, I can't agree. I am, however, beginning to wonder about video cameras."

But in 1992, no one could see videos that weren't on the evening or cable news. The Main Stream Media selectively showed the police subduing King without the context of King violently attacking them.

No doubt if this fight were caught on tape ten years ago, the MSM would splice a video together with Epic Beard Man yelling "sit your little black ass down" and then hitting Michael, without any of the context.

Thanks to the internet, I'm willing to drop the campaign against video cameras.

Whitman proves California GOP leaders still don't get it....

I have been unhappy with the campaign antics of both Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, but what is really glaring is the California Republican Party leadership. They have apparently anointed their candidate, and no vetting of her is allowed! Never mind that you can bet the Demunists in California will do much worse "vetting", and never mind that the California GOP is choosing another wealthy dilettante without a political track record.

Earlier this month, former Gov. Pete Wilson sent out a letter calling on good Republicans to "unite" behind former eBay CEO Meg Whitman's bid for governor. A largely Democratic effort had been formed to raise $40 million to defeat the billionaire candidate, which Wilson argued, forced Team Whitman to launch its general election campaign early.

It was an arrogant move — calling the GOP primary before a single voter has cast a ballot in the June 8 election. Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is still in the race. No wonder Poizner recently told me, "She wants to be ordained."

After pouring $39 million of her own money into her campaign, Whitman has blanketed the airwaves with commercials and, as a result, has been trouncing Poizner in the polls. Poizner, who is also rich and put about $19 million into his effort, has preferred to campaign using free media, including debates with former rival Tom Campbell (which Whitman skipped). Poizner wants to debate at the GOP convention in March. Whitman says no.

I reached Wilson on his cell phone Wednesday to ask: How can a candidate who never has run for office, and ducked every debate to date, dare to try to elbow out of the primary the one candidate who has won statewide office?

Wilson answered that even though Whitman is skipping a debate at the March GOP convention, she has agreed to a later debate. I should understand, he said, that Whitman is doing what all savvy candidates, including the likely Democratic nominee, Attorney General Jerry Brown, do — limiting debates and press interviews. "You don't accept every one," Wilson explained, using his why-do-I-even-have-to-say-this voice. "I think this is small potatoes, Debra."

Wilson added, "I don't know what more clear evidence there is" that Whitman is the stronger Republican, other than the fact that Democrats have made it clear that she is the Republican "they don't want to face in November."

Indeed, protesters turned out to picket against Whitman on Tuesday night as she addressed the Commonwealth Club in Lafayette. Big Labor and big Democrats have put together an independent expenditure effort called Level the Playing Field 2010 — an allusion to Whitman's supersize wealth, if an odd title for a group dedicated to outspending any entity that tries to introduce fiscal discipline to Sacramento.

 Inside, the Commonwealth Club moderator was a chummy fellow who asked only one tough question about her spotty voting record. (Whitman responded with a mea culpa.)
(...)
I still don't know why GOP voters are supposed to trust Whitman to take on Jerry Brown, when they don't even know if she can out-talk Poizner.

George Will: Climate Science Tantrums

This is so good it bears repeating:

Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

"They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder — and I hope they put it on their faces every day."

Do not judge him as harshly as he speaks of others. Nothing prepared him for the unnerving horror of encountering disagreement. Global warming alarmists, long cosseted by echoing media, manifest an interesting incongruity — hysteria and name-calling accompanying serene assertions about the "settled science" of climate change. Were it settled, we would be spared the hyperbole that amounts to Ring Lardner's "Shut up, he explained."

The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children's story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months, which began Nov. 19 with the publication of e-mails indicating attempts by scientists to massage data and suppress dissent in order to strengthen "evidence" of global warming.

But there already supposedly was a broad, deep and unassailable consensus. Strange.

Next came the failure of The World's Last — We Really, Really Mean It — Chance, a.k.a. the Copenhagen climate change summit. It was a nullity, and since then things have been getting worse for those trying to stampede the world into a spasm of prophylactic statism.

In 2007, before the economic downturn began enforcing seriousness and discouraging grandstanding, seven western U.S. states (and four Canadian provinces) decided to fix the planet on their own. California's Arnold Schwarzenegger intoned, "We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment." The 11 jurisdictions formed what is now called the Western Climate Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Or not. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently suspended her state's participation in what has not yet begun, and some Utah legislators are reportedly considering a similar action. Brewer worries, sensibly, that it would impose costs on businesses and consumers. She also ordered reconsideration of Arizona's strict vehicle emission rules, modeled on incorrigible California's, lest they raise the cost of new cars.

Last week, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar, three early members of the 31-member U.S. Climate Action Partnership, said: Oh, never mind. They withdrew from USCAP. It is a coalition of corporations and global warming alarm groups that was formed in 2007 when carbon rationing legislation seemed inevitable and collaboration with the rationers seemed prudent. A spokesman for Conoco said: "We need to spend time addressing the issues that impact our shareholders and consumers." What a concept.

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain's Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years. Small wonder that support for radical remedial action, sacrificing wealth and freedom to combat warming, is melting faster than the Himalayan glaciers that an IPCC report asserted, without serious scientific support, could disappear by 2035.

Jones also says that if during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (circa 800-1300) global temperatures may have been warmer than today's, that would change the debate. Indeed it would. It would complicate the task of indicting contemporary civilization for today's supposedly unprecedented temperatures.

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change — yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government — warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern's portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

The "Man Made Global Warming" scam unravels....

....further and further still.

political fraud and scientific swindle can be measured by collapsing "science." The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain was regarded as the leader in climate research and the fount of raw data on which the science was based until leaked e-mails between researchers revealed evidence of doctoring of data and manipulation of evidence. The director of the research unit, professor Phil Jones, was regarded as an archbishop in the Church of Global Warming. He was pressured to resign in the wake of the scandal. Now he has conceded to an interviewer from the BBC that based on the evidence in his findings, the globe might have been warmer in medieval times. If so, the notion that fluctuations in earthly temperatures are man-made is rendered just that, a man-made notion. 

The learned professor told his interviewer that for the past 15 years there has been no "statistically significant" warming. He conceded that he has lost track of many of the relevant papers — that his office was overwhelmed by the clutter of paper. Some of the crucial data to back up scare stories might be lying under other stuff, but he's not sure. An environmental analyst for the BBC said the professor told him that his "strengths" include "integrity" and "doggedness" but not record-keeping and "office tidying." He's just not dogged about keeping things straight. 

This was good enough in the early years of the scam, but not any longer. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and once a ranking member of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the temperature records have been compromised and cannot be relied on. The findings of weather stations that collected temperature data were distorted by location. Several were located near air-conditioning units and on waste-treatment plants; one was next to a waste incinerator. Still another was built at Rome's international airport and catches the hot exhaust of taxiing jetliners.

The global-warming hysteria, on which the Obama administration wants to base enormous new tax burdens, is a fraud. Leftist Man wants more statist control over us and invents this fraud with which to do it. But I think it goes even deeper than that. Leftist Man is driven by his ego and finds it impossible to think even the weather is not all about him.

The other main organ of the climate "consensus" is the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It won the Nobel Peace Prize for its 2007 report, which turns out to have been so riddled with errors it could have been researched on Wikipedia. It said Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, warned that global warming could reduce crop yields in Africa by 50 percent by 2020, and linked warming to the increased economic cost of natural disasters — all nonsense.

These aren't random errors. As former head of the IPCC, the British scientist Robert Watson notes, "The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact."

Of course they did.....

Too many of the creators and guardians of the "consensus" desperately wanted to believe in it. As self-proclaimed defenders of science, they should have brushed up on their Enlightenment. "Doubt is not a pleasant mental state," said Voltaire, "but certainty is a ridiculous one." The latest revelations don't disprove the warming of the 20th century or mean that carbon emissions played no role. But by highlighting the uncertainty of the paleoclimatic data and the models on which alarmism has been built, they constitute a shattering blow to the case for radical, immediate action.

But does that give the hoaxers pause? Of course not. They double down.

The real purpose behind class warfare

Thomas Sowell, as he so often does, has the Left's number:

....those who are taking away our freedoms, bit by bit, on the installment plan, have been incessantly supplying us with people to resent.

One of the most audacious attempts to take away our freedom to live our lives as we see fit has been the so-called "health care reform" bills that were being rushed through Congress before either the public or the members of Congress themselves had a chance to discover all that was in it.

For this, we were taught to resent doctors, insurance companies and even people with "Cadillac health insurance plans," who were to be singled out for special taxes.

Unless those plans were Automaker Union or government employee plans, of course. Then the Demunists fell silent.

Meanwhile, our freedom to make our own medical decisions — on which life and death can depend — was to be quietly taken from us and transferred to our betters in Washington. Only the recent Massachusetts election results have put that on hold. 

Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against "the rich."

The distracting phrases here include "obscene" wealth and "unconscionable" profits. But, if we stop and think about it — which politicians don't expect us to — what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn't we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced —and increasing a country's productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting "the rich."

You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called "unconscionable" but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.

The assumption that what A pays B is any business of C is an assumption that means a dangerous power being transferred to politicians to tell us all what incomes we can and cannot receive. It will not apply to everyone all at once. Like the income tax, which at first applied only to the truly rich, and then slowly but steadily moved down the income scale to hit the rest of us, the power to say what incomes people can be allowed to make will inevitably move down the income scale to make us all dependents and supplicants of politicians.

The phrase "public servants" is increasingly misleading. They are well on their way to becoming public masters — like aptly named White House "czars." The more they can get us all to resent those they designate, the more they can distract us from their increasing control of our own lives...

Global Warming? Child Obesity? The Big Lie Agenda

They're caught lying about "Global Warming"--again:

During the 1960s and into the 1980s, the number of stations used for calculating global surface temperatures was about 6,000. By 1990, the number of stations dropped rapidly to about 1,500. Most of the stations lost were in the colder regions of the Earth. Not adjusting for their lost made temperatures appear to be higher than was in fact the case. According to Science & Environmental Policy Project, Russia reported that (the British) Climate Research Unit was ignoring data from colder regions of Russia, even though these stations were still reporting data. That means data loss was not simply the result of station closings but deliberate decisions by Climate Research Unit to ignore them in order to hype their global warming claims.

(...)

Mounting evidence of scientific fraud might make little difference in terms of the response to manmade global warming hysteria. Why? Vested economic and political interests have emerged where trillions of dollars and social control are at stake. Therefore, many people who recognize the scientific fraud underlying global warming claims are likely to defend it anyway. Automobile companies have invested billions in research and investment in producing "green cars." General Electric and Phillips have spent millions lobbying Congress to outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL). Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention massive subsidies.

(...)

I bet that even if the permafrost returned as far south as New Jersey, as it once did, the warmers and their congressional stooges would still call for measures to fight global warming.

And They are hyping a Childhood Obesity Scare, which *they* caused:

Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple — as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don't care about slimming your kids' waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.

Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students' physical fitness. The East Wing is now in full campaign mode — leaning on the nation's mayors, traveling with the surgeon general and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children.
(...)
For decades, school administrators have criticized this Great Society relic for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses. In the late 1970s, New York principal Lewis Lyman skewered it as a federal "boondoggle" in a seminal essay for the education journal Phi Delta Kappan. But Democrats demagogued the GOP's responsible attempts at financial reform during the Clinton years as "starving the children." While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school-lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed by the White House's most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the first lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What's in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: "A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC (the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program) is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers (emphasis added)."

There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. "More robust expansion" of the federal school-lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats' health care takeover bill).

The SEIU's front group, "Campaign for Quality Services," is clamoring for "the right to sick days and training" for school food-services workers. Never ones to let a crisis go unexploited, SEIU sent its members to lobby in front of Chicago public schools last year and scare parents into supporting their labor agenda. They accused the school system of "putting our kids at risk" during flu season by resisting the SEIU's sick day coverage demands. "Without sick days, I can't take a day off, so I have to bring germs to school," an SEIU janitor lamented.

Along the same lines, they are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind P.R. efforts casting them as superheroes "serving justice, and serving lunch." Opposing the union means opposing children's health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J., lamenting: "I love my work, but it's getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we're working with. It breaks my heart to see a child who's hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed."

Actually, that's the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a "stronger nutrition safety net." Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.

Cede the children, feed the state.

And Meg Whitman makes it worse....

Now Meg Whitman won't debate Steve Poizner.

As if one dumb move justifies another.

Do you two *want* the Jerry Moonbeam Brown and the Commiecrats to win?

Have a spirited campaign and keep it positive. It's all you two have to do. Really. Please.

Steve Poizner: Crybaby or Paranoid?

You decide.

Steve Poziner seems to me to be a crybaby putz here. All the Whitman campaign was saying in the memo was "Let's bury the hatchet rather than have Poizner and Whitman tear each other apart, and keep the focus on preventing Former Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown from becoming Governor again (shudder)...."

Poizner could have replied that he still wanted a healthy competition and reaffirm that he would not go negative (which Whitman has not done as of yet). Indeed, if Whitman goes negative, my sympathies would be with Poizner.

There is a good argument for Poizner politely disregarding the Whitman campaign offer:

I, for one, don't want Poizner to drop out. With the occasional exceptions, contested primaries are good for the candidates. It warms them up for the general election, helps them vet their strengths and weaknesses, and those of their campaign organizations. They can learn from bonehead moves like complaining to state and federal law enforcement because an opposing campaign asked you to drop out, and avoid similar mistakes in the general election.

Republicans cleared the field for Attorney General Dan Lungren in 1998, on the theory he'd enter the general election at the head of a united GOP against the nominee of a Democratic primary splintered by a bitter primary. Gray Davis pulled a win out of that firefight, and went on to wallop Lungren by twenty points.

So better for campaigns to get poorly-conceived tactics like this one out of their systems early on when few voters are paying attention, and learn from the mistakes.

But Poizner is still being a putz here. And to go to the now Attorney General and future rival Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown to cry about it--wow, that's just political genius at work!!!!

You know, initially I favored Steve Poizner, the seasoned politico, over Meg Whitman, the wealthy dilettante. But not anymore. I wasn't sure which of the two was the more Real Republican and which was more of a RINO. But as of now, I'm choosing Meg.

little differences of opinion

As I have many times before, I recently watched a political discussion where a statist had centered his argument on a popular (and generally worthless) idea. The idea was that proposed legislation was worthy of passage because of the good intentions of those who wrote it. The problem arises that everyone thinks they have good intentions. Aside from a few actual psychopaths, we can safely assume that even history's monstrous leaders never woke up and asked themselves, "How can I make life worse for my people? How can I advance the cause of evil?" Even as they sent countless people to their deaths in gas chambers, dissident executions, mass starvations, and other atrocities, it's a safe bet that they had convinced themselves that it was for the greater good, that they were using the government's power to solve the people's problems but that every great omelet requires breaking a few eggs. And, they seldom acted without some imprimatur of popular support: Many people agreed to trust the politicians and governments to solve perceived social problems, rather than to tackle the problems as free individuals with the uncoerced aid of others.

There are plenty of ways to encapsulate the dichotomy between that way of thinking and the thinking represented by the American ideal. Here's one of them. (Click to see it full-sized.)

5 Real Ways To Make Health Insurance Affordable

Rather than Obamunist "Care", there are alternatives, says Dr. C.L. Gray, president of Physicians for Reform.

1. Sell insurance across state lines:

• State mandates drive up costs; health insurance for a 25-year-old male in New Jersey costs nearly six times what it does in Kentucky, largely because of state mandates.
• Allowing businesses to purchase insurance across state lines empowers consumers, not Washington, and does not cost a dime.
• An effect of this would be to make the more ridiculous state mandates, like insurance coverage birth control for women when out of pocket it costs them less to get a month of "The Pill" than it does to get a month of Ipad or other cell phone service. 

2. Let individuals purchase health insurance with pre-tax dollars, just like businesses can:

• Insurance companies serve businesses, not patients; businesses purchase employee health insurance with pre-tax dollars while individuals purchase insurance with post-tax dollars making their insurance far more expensive.
• This reform lets patients buy products that meet their needs and makes insurers more accountable to patients.

3. Encourage Health Care Savings Accounts (HSAs), along the lines of Education Savings Accounts. FlexBenefit accounts could be allowed to rollover at the very least.

• HSAs reduce health care costs without rationing (cutting Medicare); they also let patients control their own money, decreasing health care spending by 13 percent. Things always cost more when a 3rd party is paying the bill.
• During 2005 and 2006, traditional insurance rose 7.3 percent annually while lower cost / higher deductable plans combined with HSAs rose only 2.7 percent annually.

4. End abusive medical litigation. Easier said than done, but real tort reform is a must on so many levels.

• Frivolous litigation drives physicians out of medicine; bringing tens of millions of new patients into the system requires more physicians, not fewer.
• Frivolous litigation reform lowers cost and improves access to care; Americans spend approximately $124 billion every year because physicians practice defensive medicine.

5. What about the uninsured?

• We can insure the uninsured without expanding American debt; approximately 25 percent of patients who visit the emergency rooms do not have health care coverage.
• A system of tax credits can help the uninsured purchase coverage; this would cost approximately $80 billion annually.
• Doctors taking charity tax deductions by treating indigent patients.

How Liberals "Close Achievement Gaps"

How? By dumbing down the whole curriculum, that's how. Berkeley High School is their model:

If liberal politics and good intentions helped all students learn, then Berkeley High School should be an exemplar to all California. Yet, according to its governance council, Berkeley High was identified last year as the high school with "the largest racial equity/achievement gap in the state."

And why is this? Could it be that White or Asian American students are more likely to have both parents at home, parents who actually *care* about their children's academic performance? Could it be that the very same students are not as immersed in a culture that looks down on academic achievement and "acting white"? Or perhaps that should be "acting Asian".

NO, the good liberals at Berkeley can't acknowledge *that*, because that would be "racist". As opposed to the real racism of believing in "authentic blackness".

The worst part, as far as low-performing students are concerned, is that you can't expect the school district to turn its record underachievement around — not when its governance council, which makes recommendations to the school board on operations, approves a plan with a preamble that quotes Karl Marx: "From each according to his (or her) ability, to each according to his (or her) need."

There is the tip off--right in the Berkeley High preamble.

Then there's the science lab issue. Last month, the East Bay Express reported that the council was working to eliminate science labs at Berkeley High. The story burned through the Internet as it fed into the town's stereotype as a left-wing bubble that puts political correctness before all else.

The story also bolstered the common suspicion that some educators want to close the achievement gap by dumbing down public schools. As Peggy Scott, a governance council parent who voted against the plan, told KQED's "Forum's" Michael Krasny on Wednesday, "Closing the achievement gap really means bringing the bottom up, and the problem is that it does seem and it does feel like what might be happening is trying to bring the top down."

It turns out, as The Chronicle's Jill Tucker later reported, Berkeley High's science labs are conducted before or after school. As district spokesman Mark Coplan explained, years ago, the district decided to use parcel tax money to fund labs — which meant they had to be extracurricular. When you have science labs before or after the regular school day, some kids can't make them.

Berkeley Unified Superintendent William Huyett contends that the district did not plan to get rid of science labs, but to "integrate the labs into the regular school day" — which could benefit some students. The school board will look at the issue next month.

That said, action-plan supporters on the governance council have to own up to the fact that they are talking about taking something away from Advanced Placement and college prep students. As science teacher Mardi Sicular-Mertens told KQED, eliminating the labs means eliminating about 20 percent of instructional time from a program with "a proven track record."

Another cause for alarm: It is not clear where the money that went to this academic program will go, other than toward unnamed "equity grants."

Scott told me that the governing council never voted on the Marx-loving preamble. That's good to know, given this language: "Every students (sic), particularly" minority students, "have access to rigorous culturally-relevant curriculum that empowers them to be active participants in creating a more just society AND have any support they need to access and excel in curriculum."

Here's an example: "de-track" freshman math in favor of "heterogeneous classes." Beware: Those terms are educratese for dumping honors and dumbing down content.

The result will not be a more just society. Instead, a declining number of Berkeley High students will be able to do the math.

Obamacare Reveals Moral Bankruptcy Of The Left

We already knew of their financial bankruptcy, but the Leftist Democrats always preened about how moral they were, and how much they cared.

Oh really?

Throughout this fight over ObamaCare, Leftist Democrat Senators have lied about the privacy of medical records....they've lied about the deficit....they've lied about the costs of health insurance premiums and how the bill will affect senior citizens. They have lied over and over to their constituents about all these issues.

That's why it's time that we tell Democrat Senators how corrupt their vote for ObamaCare really was. Obviously, they won't agree. So let each Senator make the argument that, "I am not a crook."

That argument never wins elections.

Already, more than a few Democrat Representatives and Senators are either switching parties or announcing their retirements. They know the American people are disgusted with the moral bankruptcy of the U.S. Congress -- a situation that has become obvious to anyone who watches the nightly news.

Consider the following despicable practices which were perpetrated in order to push ObamaCare through the Senate last month:

1. Bribes
* A $100 million bribe to treat Sen. Ben Nelson's state different from all others, in exchange for Ben Nelson's vote.
* A $100-300 million bribe to treat Sen. Mary Landrieu's state different from all others, in exchange for Mary Landrieu's vote.
* $10 billion for community health centers operated by groups similar to ACORN, in exchange for Sen. Bernie Sanders' vote.
* A bribe to Sen. Max Baucus not only to treat Montana different from most other states, but also a bribe in order to treat Libby, Montana, different from any other town!
* A bribe to Sen. Chris Dodd consisting of a $100 million medical center in Connecticut.
* Bribes to Sens. Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Bill Nelson, etc., etc., etc.
* In fact, there are so many bribes in the Senate version of the ObamaCare bill that the bribe-meister himself, Majority Leader Harry Reid, publicly bragged that if your senator doesn't have a bribe in this bill, it "speaks poorly" of him.

2. Extortion
* Threats to take away Sen. Joe Lieberman's chairmanship because of his opposition to the government run "public option."

3. Fraud
* Senators are claiming that the Senate-passed version reduces the deficit, even though:
a. $247 billion of the bill's costs are being snuck through in separate legislation;
b. The "savings" rely on $465 billion of Medicare "cuts," which no one believed were achievable, unless they want to concede the truth about "death panel" rationing on the elderly; and
c. The "savings" rely on making new taxes take effect 3-5 years before any of those tax monies are spent!
* Senators are claiming that the bill would make Medicare solvent -- but this claim can only be made by fraudulently double-counting the effects of the phony Medicare cuts.
* Senators are claiming that health care costs would be brought under control, when the government's own Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that costs would go up $245 billion.
* Senators are claiming that premiums would be brought under control, even though the Congressional Budget Office found that policies under the "exchange" (i.e., those policies which you would have to buy, under penalty of law) would be 10-13% more expensive than if Congress did nothing.

4. Secrecy / hiding from the public 
* The final version of the 2407-page bill wasn't revealed until less than 48 hours before Congress began voting on it.

And there is a "marriage penalty" too.Some married couples would pay thousands of dollars more for the same health insurance coverage as unmarried people living together, under the health insurance overhaul plan pending in Congress, says the Wall Street Journal.

The built-in "marriage penalty" in both House and Senate health care bills has received scant attention. But for scores of low-income and middle-income couples, it could mean a hike of $2,000 or more in annual insurance premiums the moment they say "I do."

• The disparity comes about in part because subsidies for purchasing health insurance under the plan from congressional Democrats are pegged to federal poverty guidelines.
• That has the effect of limiting subsidies for married couples with a combined income, compared to if the individuals are single.
• People who get their health insurance through an employer wouldn't be affected.
• Only people that buy subsidized insurance through new exchanges set up by the legislation stand to be impacted.
• About 17 million people would receive such subsidies in 2016 under the House plan, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

The bills cap the annual amount people making less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level must pay for health insurance premiums, ranging from 1.5 percent of income for the poorest to 11 percent at the top end, under the House plan:

• For an unmarried couple with income of $25,000 each, combined premiums would be capped at $3,076 per year, under the House bill.
• If the couple gets married, with a combined income of $50,000, their annual premium cap jumps to $5,160 -- a "penalty" of $2,084.

The disparity is slightly smaller in the Senate version of health care legislation, chiefly because premium subsidies in the House bill are more targeted towards low-wage earners, says the Journal:

• Under the Senate bill, a couple with $50,000 in combined income would pay $3,450 in annual premiums if unmarried, and $5,100 if married -- a difference of $1,650.
• Republicans say the effect on married couples whose combined income makes them ineligible for subsidies is even greater -- up to $5,000 or more -- but that is more difficult to measure because it includes assumptions about the price of insurance policies.

"Avatar": Awesome special effects, but Commie crap

It's Christmastime and you are done shopping, done with presents, done with the relative invasion, or perhaps that hasn't hit yet, and / or you are done with church. Since you have time to kill, Hollywierd has learned to give you the Christmas blockbuster flick. This years one is James Cameron's "Avatar", with Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" a not too distant second?

Gabriel Malor reviews Avatar at AOSHQ, and kind of likes it for its awesome special effects, in spite of the Commie political message.

John Podhoretz at The Weekly Standard can't get past the Commie message and hates it.

I just saw it. My take: utterly lame-ass and laughable Commiecrat and romanticize the primitive politics in the film, and a story that heavily takes from other movies such as "Dances With Wolves" (in fact, wags are calling it Dances With Smurfs because the alien creatures are blue) , Disney's "Pocahontas" and "Quigley Down Under", done in a Sci-Fi context with lots of CGI animation. Except for some creative imagining of animal and plant life on another world with a different atmosphere, and of course those undeniably awesome special effects, nothing is original in this movie.

John Podhoretz states that:

[T]he movie is nearly three hours long, and it doesn't have a single joke in it.

But honestly, there were a few unintentional funny moments in the film. The mineral the corporation and its mercenary army are seeking is called "unobtanium". As opposed to Upsadaisyium? I half expected Rocky and Bullwinkle avatars after that. The subsequent "floating mountains" in the movie didn't help either. (Mount Flatten!)

On the upside, Gabriel Malor is right: it's visually gorgeous, loud, and stuff blows up in really cool ways. And the 3-D version I saw didn't overkill on the gimmicky pop-right-out-at-the-audience shots. After the first 20 minutes, I stopped noticing the 3D glasses and just saw the movie. On the level of an action flick with cool explosions, you could like it.

You just have to overlook gaping holes in the plot. For no good reason other than to get the movie into its second act, the shallow corporate head honcho and the (obviously) evil and sadistic military commander decide to stage a military attack on the massive Tree City where the funky giant blue critters live, thus blowing the zillions of dollars they sank into the project of making blue critter avatar ambassadors in the hope of negotiating with the blue critters.

They attack the massive Tree City where the blue critters live simply because "It's the largest deposit of Unobtanium in two hundred clicks!" gushes the shallow corporate, played by Giovanni Ribisi. As if 200km is that major a distance in travel, even today, to say nothing of an interstellar traveling future. And as if the corporation wouldn't have picked easier deposits to mine first where the pesky blue critter tribes weren't. Path of least resistance and all that.

Suspension called and it said the disbelief load is way too heavy to carry, even if you fancy the idea of plugging your fiber optic cable tail into Mother Gaia and having sex with her.

If the special effects were not there, if Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on sound stages with sets and the like, would anyone really like this movie? Nope. Even the most hard core eco-greenie won't claim there was a really deep message here. Unlike the protagonists in Cameron's Titanic, who you could cheer on even as you knew at least one of them was doomed, none of the characters in the movie comes across as anything more than a cartoon.

The Carbon Dioxide Fallacy

And the Man-Made Global Warming, I mean Climate Change, hoax continues to unravel:

We are told, based on computer models, that human beings burning fossil fuels -- and exhaling -- is increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. This, in turn, is trapping heat, which is responsible for the modest temperature increase between 1976 and 1998. The conclusion is that we must alter our entire lifestyles to avoid a planetary catastrophe.

For computer models to be accurate, inputs must include all of the factors that can impact climate. Knowing this, as well as believing it likely that the majority of factors that do impact climate are yet unknown, how can we trust the models?

Especially when we find out the inputs were "fudged" if not outright fabricated.

And yet, we who doubt the agenda driven alarmism, are said to be "anti-science." Ha! The real "anti-scientists", also sinister liars, are those pushing the man-made global warming hoax. The hoax is put forth by those out for more research grant money at best, crypto totalitarians looking to take away our mobility and therefore freedom at worst, and those looking for another excuse to tax us in between.

Gee, it sure is "science" when the "scientists" have been caught red-handed adjusting / fabricating data to fit the "computer models". If the data doesn't fit the models, make it fit! Science!

Wow, what happened to empirical proof and causal links?

Solar orbital cycles, sunspots, natural non-industrial increases in carbon dioxide output, and volcanic eruptions could not be reached for comment.

It is also important to understand what the measure of "global warming" in degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Celsius/Centigrade *really* means. Remember, zero degrees Fahrenheit and zero degrees Celsius/Centigrade are man-made conventions. To state a percent temperature change relative to either is meaningless.

Temperature is simply a measure of heat. At absolute zero (-460 degrees F or -273 degrees C) there is no energy. So, any thermodynamically relevant measure would consider a percentage energy change relative to absolute zero (that is, in degrees Kelvin) rather than an arbitrary Fahrenheit or Celsius/Centigrade measure.

Why is this distinction important? Because variations in the sun's radiation on the earth are defined against a true zero (usually as watts/sq. meter). When stated as a percentage relative to absolute zero, changes in the earth's average temperature can easily be explained through the typical variations in the sun's radiant energy. That no "climate expert" mentions this only further solidifies my dislike for the lot of them.

What "Climategate" reveals

It is revealing to see the Global Warming, I mean Climate Change, hoax imploding at the University of East Anglia. "Climategate" as some wags call it, refers to a series of emails "hacked"—as in leaked— from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom.

What they reveal is indisputable: the "science" of global warming has, at the very least, been compromised by the political ideology that drives it. Data has been manipulated or hidden from public view. Skeptical scientists have been marginalized along with academic journals that have printed their doubts, and the peer review process has been tainted by those who should know better.

The lessons of this scandal are instructive:

1. The manufacturing of "Overwhelming Consensus":

....the e-mails suggest that CRU scientists have been suppressing and misstating data and working to prevent the publication of conflicting views in peer-reviewed science periodicals. Some of the more pungent e-mails:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

"Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4?"

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can't."

"I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU temperature station data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"

2. The corruption of the "peer-reviewed" process:

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the "science" behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

But don't worry, it's all "peer-reviewed."

Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review". When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor," and Mann advised that "we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers."

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the "consensus" reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley ("one of the world's foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to "get him ousted." When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." 

The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:

"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.

"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"

And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!

"Re, your point at the end – you've taken the words out of my mouth."

And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.

Which brings us to:
3. The agenda behind all this:

....you can't make informed decisions when those decisions have already been made for you by an educational establishment which has been in the liberal tank for decades. With respect to this particular subject, how many school age children have been forced to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and given the impression that a blowhard politician with no scientific credentials whatsoever, a man whose own lifestyle contradicts everything he ostensibly believes in, is the last word on the subject? How many kids have been told global warming is "settled science" without offering them a scintilla of contrasting information? How many have been brainwashed into believing that "living green" is tantamount to the religious mandate to "go and sin no more?"

Every effort mankind has ever undertaken to obliterate individual freedom and increase the power of the state has always included the inculcation of children too young to think independently. This one is no different. If America is going to right itself, the war for our children's hearts and minds must be won.

But in order to win it, more people have to realize it exists. More importantly, they have to do something about it. This is a difficult undertaking for parents who are the front-liners in this fight. At the end of a busy day, very few people want to know—exactly—what their children are learning in school. Unfortunately, such apathy is the mother's milk of progressives for whom raising a generation of school children who disdain American exceptionalism is a prime directive. People with no particular pride in their country are a much more malleable bunch than those with a real understanding of self-reliance, Constitutionalism, and historical perspective.
A "burning planet"—only thirty-three years removed from a "freezing" one—reveals the true nature of "progressivism". It is about the accumulation of power by any means necessary. And, as evidenced by the purloined emails, even the ostensible epitome of rational thinking, aka the scientific method, is as exploitable as anything else. But such people could never get as far as they've gotten without getting the children on board. 

Ironically, they have told us so. How many times has a liberal touted this or that government agenda with the idea that they're doing it "for the children." When more Americans begin to understand that the more accurate phrase it "to the children," it will be the beginning of the end for these power-hungry thugs.

4. The double standard of the liberal lamestream media:

The reaction to these revelations? Perhaps as revealing, if not more so, than the revelations themselves. Much like the ACORN scandal, the mainstream media—once again with the exception of Fox News—has either avoided the story completely, or sought to focus on the manner in which the emails were procured. This last bit is pivotal, because it is the basis by which the intrepid folks at the New York Times and other media sources have determined that they will withhold the damning evidence from the public: stolen material is unfit for print or broadcast.

Apparently this is a spanking new standard for the Times, whose appetite for disseminating purloined or secret stuff goes back at least as far as the top secret, "not intended for publication" Pentagon Papers in 1971, all the way through to revealing top-secret info about how the Bush administration conducted various aspects of the war on terror.

While "errors" of omission and large dollops of hypocrisy are nothing new in the annals of MSM behavior, what is new is that they can no longer get away with them. This story has legs for two reasons: 1. it is a genuine scandal and 2. the blogosphere, unlike far too much of the MSM, will not let it go unreported simply because it doesn't jibe with the liberal agenda.

Thus on the plus side, those of you who have heard of this story realize that the old media can no longer be trusted. As a result, your understanding of what is actually happening in the world goes far deeper than the average American. That is the minus side: too many of our fellow citizens still believe watching TV news makes them informed Americans. Too be kind, they don't know what they don't know. Too be less than kind, it's long past time they learned.

Copenhagen, despite Barack Obama's presence, seems sure to be a bust — there will be no agreement on mandatory limits on carbon emissions. Even if there were, it would probably turn out to be no more effective than the limits others agreed to in Kyoto in 1997. In any case, China and India are not going to choke off their dazzling economic growth to please Western global warming alarmists.

But that's just it---the elites pushing this *don't mind* if the Red Chinese won't choke off their economic growth. They just want to choke off *ours*.

Either out of some multicultural brainwash guilt, or a peevish resentment that the Soviets didn't beat us, so they hope the Red Chinese do so, or they genuinely believe the world is better off with another superpower to keep what they see as "Amerikkka" in line. They are old fellow travelers.

Some, like Tom Friedman at the New York Times, do nothing but praise Red China's new spin on statism. In his coverage of China, Tom Friedman reminds me of people like Charles Lindbergh who were impressed with and gushed about what they saw coming out of the Third Reich prior to 1939.

Obamacare To Hike State Taxes

Remember when the Obamunists claimed that their health care plan would allow you to keep your current insurance if you liked it, AND insure all the uninsured, AND would somehow save money and lower costs?

Well, gee, they lied. Here is a math problem for you: Assume that the legislation establishing government control of medical care is passed and that it "brings down the cost of medical care." You pay $500 a year less for your medical care, but the new costs put on employers is passed on to consumers, so that you pay $300 a year more for groceries and $200 a year more for gasoline, while the new mandates put on insurance companies raise your premiums by $300 a year, how much money have you saved?

While Obama has been at great pains to make a show of avoiding taxes on the middle class to pay for his health care changes, his proposed increase in Medicaid eligibility will have a huge impact on the 39 states whose income cutoffs for the program are below those required in the new federal legislation.

All states except for Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Wisconsin (plus the District of Colombia) will have to raise their eligibility for Medicaid under the Senate health care bill. And they will have to pay for part of the cost. Under the House bill, with a higher Medicaid eligibility standard, Massachusetts and Vermont would also have to pay more.

The magnitude of the new Medicaid spending required by Obamacare is such as to transform the nature of state finances. A large part of the reason that some states, particularly in the South, have been able to avoid higher taxes is because they have chosen to keep down the Medicaid eligibility level.

The hardest hit states would be Texas ($2.8 billion in extra state spending), Pennsylvania ($1.5 billion), California ($1.4 billion) and Florida ($909 million). Who knows if Florida could avoid imposing an income tax if it has to meet so high an unfunded mandate?
The Medicaid expansion provisions of the Senate bill are complex. In the first year of the program (2013), states must enroll anyone who earns less than 133 percent of the poverty level in their programs. For a family of four, the national average poverty level in 2009 is $22,000 a year. So any family that size that makes less than $29,000 would be eligible for Medicaid. Many states, particularly in the South, actually have Medicaid cutoffs that are below the poverty level. Arkansas, for example, cuts off its Medicaid eligibility at only 17 percent of the poverty level, and in Louisiana, it goes up to only 26 percent. For these states, the spending increase required by the new bill is huge.

For the first three years of the program (2013-2015), the federal government would pay for all of the costs of the Medicaid expansion. But, starting in the fourth year of operation — 2016 — the average state would be obliged to pay 10 percent of the extra cost.

The following chart indicates the amount of new state money each of the 39 affected states would have to come up with apart from federal aid to cover the unfunded mandate in the Baucus or Senate version of the health care bill:

STATE SPENDING INCREASES IN MEDICAID REQUIRED BY SENATE HEALTH BILL (in millions of dollars)
Alabama $394
Alaska 39
Arizona 217
Arkansas 402
California 1,428
Colorado 163
Delaware 35
Florida 909
Georgia 495
Hawaii 41
Idaho 97
Iowa 77
Indiana 586
Kansas 186
Kentucky 199
Louisiana 432
Maryland 194
Michigan 570
Mississippi 136
Missouri 836
Montana 29
Nebraska 81
Nevada 54
New Hampshire 59
New Mexico 102
North Carolina 599
North Dakota 14
Ohio 399
Oklahoma 190
Oregon 231
Pennsylvania 1,490
South Carolina 122
South Dakota 33
Texas 2,749
Utah 58
Virginia 601
Wash State 311
West Virginia 132
Wyoming 25

Global Warming Ate My Homework!

100 events attributed to man made global warming. Never mind the contradictions, non-sequiturs or other absurdities:

Late for a party? Miss a meeting? Forget to pay your rent? Blame climate change; everyone else is doing it. From an increase in severe acne to all societal collapses since the beginning of time, just about everything gone wrong in the world today can be attributed to climate change. Here’s a list of 100 storylines blaming climate change as the problem.
1. The deaths of Aspen trees in the West
2. Incredible shrinking sheep
3. Caribbean coral deaths
4. Eskimos forced to leave their village
5. Disappearing lake in Chile
6. Early heat wave in Vietnam
7. Malaria and water-borne diseases in Africa
8. Invasion of jellyfish in the Mediterranean
9. Break in the Arctic Ice Shelf
10. Monsoons in India
11. Birds laying their eggs early
12. 160,000 deaths a year
13. 315,000 deaths a year
14. 300,000 deaths a year
15. Decline in snowpack in the West
16. Deaths of walruses in Alaska
17. Hunger in Nepal
18. The appearance of oxygen-starved dead zones in the oceans
19. Surge in fatal shark attacks
20. Increasing number of typhoid cases in the Philippines
21. Boy Scout tornado deaths
22. Rise in asthma and hayfever
23. Duller fall foliage in 2007
24. Floods in Jakarta
25. Radical ecological shift in the North Sea
26. Snowfall in Baghdad
27. Western tree deaths
28. Diminishing desert resources
29. Pine beetles
30. Swedish beetles
31. Severe acne
32. Global conflict
33. Crash of Air France 447
34. Black Hawk Down incident
35. Amphibians breeding earlier
36. Flesh-eating disease
37. Global cooling
38. Bird strikes on US Airways 1549
39. Beer tastes different
40. Cougar attacks in Alberta
41. Suicide of farmers in Australia
42. Squirrels reproduce earlier
43. Monkeys moving to Great Rift Valley in Kenya
44. Confusion of migrating birds
45. Bigger tuna fish
46. Water shortages in Las Vegas
47. Worldwide hunger
48. Longer days
49. Earth spinning faster
50. Gender balance of crocodiles
51. Skin cancer deaths in UK
52. Increase in kidney stones in India
53. Penguin chicks frozen by global warming
54. Deaths of Minnesota moose
55. Increased threat of HIV/AIDS in developing countries
56. Increase of wasps in Alaska
57. Killer stingrays off British coasts
58. All societal collapses since the beginning of time
59. Bigger spiders
60. Increase in size of giant squid
61. Increase of orchids in UK
62. Collapse of gingerbread houses in Sweden
63. Cow infertility
64. Conflict in Darfur
65. Bluetongue outbreak in UK cows
66. Worldwide wars
67. Insomnia of children worried about global warming
68. Anxiety problems for people worried about climate change
69. Migration of cockroaches
70. Taller mountains due to melting glaciers
71. Drowning of four polar bears
72. UFO sightings in the UK
73. Hurricane Katrina
74. Greener mountains in Sweden
75. Decreased maple in maple trees
76. Cold wave in India
77. Worse traffic in LA because immigrants moving north
78. Increase in heart attacks and strokes
79. Rise in insurance premiums
80. Invasion of European species of earthworm in UK
81. Cold spells in Australia
82. Increase in crime
83. Boiling oceans
84. Grizzly deaths
85. Dengue fever
86. Lack of monsoons
87. Caterpillars devouring 45 towns in Liberia
88. Acid rain recovery
89. Global wheat shortage; food price hikes
90. Extinction of 13 species in Bangladesh
91. Changes in swan migration patterns in Siberia
92. The early arrival of Turkey’s endangered caretta carettas
93. Radical North Sea shift
94. Heroin addiction
95. Plant species climbing up mountains
96. Deadly fires in Australia
97. Droughts in Australia
98. The demise of California’s agriculture by the end of the century
99. Tsunami in South East Asia
100. Fashion victim: the death of the winter wardrobe

And the list goes on. The truth is climate change is causing some of these events, but the earth’s average temperature has been increasing and decreasing since the beginning of time. Maybe the increase in UFO sightings can’t be pinpointed to climate change but certainly animals will adapt to new habitats as the climate changes. But climate change and adaptation to it is nothing new. There’s an underlying assumption that human activity is causing the climate to change in many of these stories, but the scientific consensus on what causes climate change is anything but a consensus. Temperatures have risen and fallen many times before and the earth was cooling as recently as the period from the 1940s to the 1970s giving rise to fears of a coming ice age:

“At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

The other implication of this list is that a reduction in Co2 with cap and trade policies like Waxman-Markey and Boxer-Kerry will cure problems as disparate as hurricanes, wars, crime, hunger and…cow infertility. The problem is that no one can actually claim that a reduction of Co2 will prevent these occurrences; one can only speculate that they will be worse in a world that has more rather than less Co2. Given cap and trade’s massive economic consequences and negligible effects on the earth’s temperature, this is a bold and potentially very costly speculation.

Socialized Medicine: The battle begins....

Saturday night, all 58 Democrats and 2 Independents in the U.S. Senate voted to bring H.R. 3590, the government healthcare takeover bill, to the floor for a debate and possible amendments after Thanksgiving. It was the bare minimum to achieve the 3/5ths majority. The senators are now flying to their home districts for a weeklong vacation.

Whenever that final debate occurs, it will take another 60 votes to invoke "cloture" to end that debate. The good news is several senators who voted "aye" to allow debate say they will kill the bill unless the "public option," the very foundation of the legislation, is removed.

ACTION: Thank you to everyone who called, emailed and faxed senators to oppose government-controlled healthcare. Now, please call and protest at the district offices of your U.S. senator and other U.S. senators -- especially the swing votes (Democrats Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and Independent Joe Lieberman) -- to express your deep concern.

The key vote will be on shutting down a Republican filibuster of the ObamaCare bill, HR 3590. In the Senate, we are faced with a health care bill that:

* Costs $2.5 trillion during its first ten years of full implementation (2014-2023);

* Increases insurance premiums and imposes $376 billion in tax increases -- many on the middle class; and

* Cuts Medicare by $465 billion, while increasing health costs by over $100 billion.

The word "tax" appears 183 times in the latest health care bill. Is Obama serious? Is that what he and Reid want to do to us in the midst of a recession?

Of course, all this increased spending -- and taxes -- means that you will have less money to spend on providing for your family and/or pursuing your real passions.

The strategy in the Senate is to cram this bill down the American people's throats before we have a chance to fully read and evaluate it.

Do you want left-wing bureaucrats appointed by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid determining whether you should own a gun via the health care system?

Remember, H.R. 3590 would increase insurance premiums, increase taxes, costs $2.5 TRILLION over 10 years, imposes an individual mandate that everyone buy health insurance, launches a federal "abortion insurance" program, cuts and restricts MediCare, and would result in rationing.

The Democrats' plan would NOT increase affordability or portability of health insurance. NOR would it restrain frivolous medical lawsuits that have been driving up doctor's insurance and insurance premiums over the last several years. NOR would it reward, instead of financially punish, consumers who live healthy lifestyles.