Junk politics, backed by junk science

So the House of Representatives, that august body led by union-backed leftists and intellectual dwarfs, has managed to narrowly pass a Climate change bill that will put a major burden on our fragile economy by taxing every source of energy at our disposal. Its unfathomable to me how we can spend billions of taxpayer dollars in bailouts and then make it even more difficult for the economy to recover. Worse, we are unilaterally disarming -- as other nations that have attempted "cap and trade" schemes are abandoning them left and right. As Kim Strassel at the WSJ shows today, the "climate" around climate change is, well, changing: Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

So it turns out that the whole climate change movement is based on science that is far from certain. In fact, the science may be junk: the earth has been cooling for the past decade, and it turns out that the hottest year on record was in the 1930s -- not the recent result of all the greenhouse gasses we've been polluting the atmosphere with. As Strassel shows, much of the world is wising up to the farce.

But not the U.S., which appears to be lagging behind the rest of the world, intent on repeating the mistakes of others. The truth, of course, is that the science has never mattered -- it was only a pretext to get people on a bandwagon that is really about social engineering.  The left wants us to live differently, and the only way that they can enforce their social agenda is to play fast and loose with the facts to convince people we are on a slippery slope to self destruction. The goal is deprivation, driven by a "consumption guilt" that regrets the plenty we have because others have so little. Never mind that the most egregious offenders of CO2 emissions are the less developed nations that are clear cutting forests with reckless abandon with no limits on carbon output. But that's another inconvenient truth that Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore and the other true believers don't want to talk about.

The madness of all this is that this is bad policy -- even if it is good politics for a public that has been brainwashed into believing that "green jobs" can save the world. We will figure this out eventually -- as Australia and others have. But it won't be before we take a costly trip down a path paved with good intentions.

Thoroughfare of Freedom

Slated on Backbone Radio, June 28 Listen every Sunday, 5-8pm on 710 KNUS, Denver... 1460 KZNT, Colorado Springs... and streaming live at 710knus.com.

"O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress a thoroughfare of freedom beat across the wilderness!" So wrote Katherine Lee Bates in the inspiration of climbing Pike's Peak on a summer day in 1893. Have you been to a mountaintop lately? A friend of mine recently did his first 14'er and came back all aglow. But it's easy to lose the lofty vision in the flatlands of daily life. Time overtakes nations as it does individuals. If we allow America in its third century to grow soft and tired, the thoroughfare of freedom could become a road to serfdom. What a betrayal of our trust that would be; what a tragedy for the world.

This Sunday, Backbone Radio gets you ready for Independence Day with viewpoints from "stern impassioned" patriots helping relate the news of 2009 to the spirit of 1776. I hope you'll be listening.

** I'll talk about Iran with Steve Schippert of ThreatsWatch.org and North Korea with Chuck Downs, an expert on human rights violations in that hellhole.

** Plus health care and the "cap & tax" bill with former congressman Ernest Istook of the Heritage Foundation and Jeff Crank of Americans for Prosperity.

** Plus a report on the Wounded Warriors project from Col. John Folsom and another lesson in History 101 with our own Dr. Bill Moloney.

"Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law," prayed Katherine Bates for our country in her famous poem. Scandals, celebrity headlines, and the Obama agenda all suggest we're not quite there yet. We're not about to quit, though -- not while we have breath.

Yours for America the Beautiful, JOHN ANDREWS

'Axis of Evil' outfoxes Uncle Sam

(Boston) While the world watched the fraudulent Iranian elections, by chance I found myself here in the historic capital of American election fraud. Just a few steps from Boston’s City Hall the Union Oyster House has been a favored haunt of local politicians since Colonial times. As we sampled the culinary delights of this Beantown landmark my companion- a wryly self-described “humble servant of the people”- noted that two centuries earlier Governor Elbridge Gerry had enjoyed similar fare here. It was he who invented “gerrymandering”, a method of redistricting now institutionalized in every state as the most successful form of election fraud in American history.

Through the years Boston continued to invent, refine and export to grateful imitators nationwide many new breakthroughs in election fraud. One of the most productive was creating the key patronage post of Cemetery Commissioner said official being responsible not just for mowing the grass above the graves but much more importantly insuring that those loyal Democrats beneath the grass were not deprived of their right to vote “early and often” every election day.

While stealing votes outright was more cost effective sometimes it was necessary to buy them. Even then these thrifty New Englanders deplored wasteful spending. Jack Kennedy’s grandfather Boston Mayor “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald insisted that the “Machine never bought more votes than actually required”. In another context his son-in-law Joe Kennedy sternly told a Chicago alderman that he “wasn’t paying for a landslide”.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ignored these counsels of moderation, apparently being quite willing to pay for a landslide and/or steal more votes than actually required.

The initial U.S. response to this self-evident fraud was somewhere between an embarrassment and a disgrace (when you sound less tough than the Europeans you know you’ve dropped the ball badly). Waffling between saying it didn’t matter who won the election and being fearful of accusations of “meddling” Obama and company demonstrated once again why foreign and national security policy has been the Achilles Heel of the Democratic party for over forty years.

In its obsequiousness Obama’s expression of gratitude to “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei for his willingness to look into irregularities in a few precincts rivaled the notorious bow to the King of Saudi Arabia.

Amazingly none of this qualified as the week’s top example of U.S. spinelessness. After North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-IL defiantly announced that he was (A) weaponizing his nuclear stockpile, (B) conducting further tests of his Hiroshima sized bomb, and (C) scheduling tests of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the U.S., the Obama Administration announced it would adhere to a new “get tough” policy proposed by Chinese and Russians at the United Nations.

The heart of the policy involves intercepting North Korean vessels suspected of carrying nuclear presents to friends like Syria or Iran and asking permission to board and search; however if they say no, that’s O.K. too.

When loony right-wingers in Congress questioned the adequacy of this response the Administration gave further evidence of its resolve by announcing that if North Korea persists in its’ nuclear naughtiness in next year’s budget we may refuse to make further cuts to Missile Defense spending beyond these already included in this year’s budget.

Right now, if you’re keeping score the old “Axis of Evil” – Syria, Iran, and North Korea-is definitely ahead on points. Obama’s much hyped but pathetic speech in Cairo (“America is one of the largest Muslim nations; my daddy was a Muslim”) clearly signaled he isn’t going to fuss too much when Iran inevitably gains full nuclear power status. As noted above he’s O.K. with letting Russia and China via the UN set the limits of U.S. toughness with North Korea.

The only member of the “Axis” who’s even been scored upon in this contest is Syria and that only because the Israelis who know a threat when they see one helpfully bombed that country’s rising nuclear facility flat.

The Boston Globe (owned by the N.Y. times since 1994 and hopefully soon going bankrupt) was “deeply troubled by this unilateral Israeli action” and this week even had the effrontery to editorially call on Obama to “oblige Netanyahu to rearrange his governing coalition to be more in accord with U.S.. policy toward the Palestinians”.

What’s wrong with this picture? A lot, and the price of folly may be exacted sooner than we think.

William Moloney’s columns have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, and Rocky Mountain News.

First fix Medicare, Mr. President

America's health care system certainly has its share of problems, of which most emanate from politicians' tinkering. They keep tempting the frustrated consumer with promises of better benefits at someone else's expense. So the prospect of President Obama and Congress remaking American health care in their own image should scare the pants off anyone who looks not merely at the existing problems but at government's abysmal record as a problem-solver.

Since last November, Obama and Congress have operated in crisis mode. They hastily passed a stimulus bill that still hasn't stimulated - only to be subsequently embarrassed by provisions that no one, except select staffers and lobbyists, had actually read.

The President incessantly beats the drum for grandiose new programs in health care, "clean energy," and education, touting them as fundamental steps in a regimen of economic recovery and fiscal responsibility.

This, of course, is hogwash.

Even the Washington Post observed that "these pursuits have little to do with the economic crisis, and they are not the key to economic recovery."

Before overhauling what remains of a voluntary, market-based system of private-sector health care delivery, the President and Congress should focus instead on Medicare, the $462 billion-a-year boondoggle that is on course to devour the federal budget and ruin the U.S. economy.

President Obama argues that health care change is necessary because 46 million people don't have insurance. Setting aside the questionable validity of that statistic, compare it instead to the 45 million people currently enrolled in Medicare.

Today, Medicare consumes 13 percent of the federal budget and 3.2 percent of the national economy. (Medicare and SCHIP push total federal government health care spending to more than one-fifth of all federal outlays - more than spending on national defense.)

According to the annual Trustees' report, in 2008 the Medicare Trust Fund began paying out more in benefits than it was collecting in payroll taxes and interest. By 2017, the fund will be completely exhausted and staring at a $37.6 trillion - with a "T" - deficit over the next 75 years.

Of all the reckless, irresponsible promises made by Washington politicians and charged against our children and grandchildren's future, Medicare is the largest and most costly. In 20 years, its costs will surpass Social Security and are forecast to more than triple unless politicians muster the courage control spending or allow private competition to control costs.

The rush to "do something" to reform health care is doubly dangerous and counterproductive because the numbers used by the President don't add up - not remotely.

The President and his budget office vow that the as-yet-incomplete plan will be "deficit neutral." Why then has it been exempted from the new "pay as you go" spending rules? Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of the Senate's Kennedy-Dodd health care bill at $1.6 trillion over 10 years. And that's just for the portions that have been unveiled.

Get this: despite the embarrassment of voting for a non-stimulative stimulus bill that they couldn't take time to read, Democrats are now amending a health care bill even before a complete version has been introduced - a process Sen. John McCain aptly labeled "a joke."

CBO's estimate does not include the cost for Obama's "public option," under which a government insurance program would compete with private plans. An independent analysis by the Lewin Group suggest that up to 119 million people currently insured by their employers could be shifted to a public plan.

So Obama claims he can create a new health care program nearly three times the size of Medicare and that he can do it for free? Compared to that, loaves and fishes are child's play.

Given that 67 percent of Americans still rate their own health care coverage as excellent or good and that the federal government's existing health care programs are budget-busters, President Obama should take some divine advice: "Physician, heal thyself."

Family ties through music

Recently I attended a wedding of a friend at church, followed by the customary reception. After a delightful meal, some charming innovations to commemorate the occasion and the cutting of the cake, there followed hours of dancing, slow and fast, as also is customary. What struck me in this quite ordinary and conventional setting was how a kind of folk music has returned to our society that had been practically banished long ago by the popularity of ballroom dancing with the waltz, foxtrot and two-step and the decline of what was called folk dancing, not to mention square dancing. The latter are by no means dead but it would be inaccurate to say that their appeal had not been eclipsed by the dancing of couples as distinguished from larger groupings. As a children, many of us developed a decided prejudice against folk dancing as quite beyond the pale, for squares and old fogies. But those who have attended ethnic weddings, as we tend to call them, particularly Jewish and Greek (or just seen movies), experience, if only vicariously, group dancing on as big a scale as the number of people in attendance will encourage. Young and old, "cool" and "uncool," will join hands and dance with abandon with no reservations about being out of place, or worse, mixing adult dancing with kid dancing. I still recall a comment made by a friend who suggested that we not object to loud, raucous music played by young people because it is "their" music. That divide always has bothered me.

However, partly because I am widowed and partly because I like the exercise, I have taken to the floor and "danced' for hours to whatever music was being played, occasionally but not often well, and enjoying it. (I just learned how to line dance too.) At the wedding last week I danced with my 30-something daughter and two teenagers from her church youth group and realized that it might just as well be a Jewish or Greek wedding, because adults were dancing with children and bonding by means of music. Indeed, the bride was holding a small child and dancing around the room, quite common these days. I realized that some of the music was the sort that I have long disdained, especially "rap," but because the occasion called for a sort of communal expression, I danced to whatever was playing.

I used to criticize the rather unstructured form of dancing that has become so popular, on the grounds that there were no partners per se. But that presupposed that the only legitimate form of dancing was the kind I grew up with. (Granted, growing up in the 1950s, as I did, meant learning to dance to rock 'n roll, etc.) As a parent I tried to impress upon my children the virtues of slow dancing, and that lesson has been learned well enough. But now I'm just having fun and glad that the generation gap can be bridged at least under the circumstances which originally threatened to foreclose that possibility. If it is natural for families and friends to bond, then nature has found a novel way to reassert itself. That's a gain.