Tag: Investor’s Business Daily

Amusing

Carbongate

We are in the middle of the Progressive Dark Ages where logic, truth and integrity have no value.

Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?

This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters’ arguments.

On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing “an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

In the release, the institute’s Richard Morrison said “internal EPA e-mail messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.”

Reading the report, available on the CEI Web site, we find this “endangerment analysis” contains such interesting items as: “Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is “at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field” and ignores the latest scientific findings.

Besides noting the decline in temperatures as CO2 levels have increased, the draft report says the “consensus” on storm frequency and intensity is now “much more neutral.”

Then there’s one of Al Gore’s grim fairy tales — the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers the size of Tennessee roaming the North Atlantic. “The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for operations of such processes,” the report says.

Little evidence? Outdated U.N. research? No reason to rush? This is not what the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were telling us when they were rushing to force a Friday vote on Waxman-Markey. We were given the impression that unless we passed this cap-and-tax fiasco, polar bears would be extinct by the Fourth of July.

We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth’s climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those “experts” that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.

“A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West,” the report says, “suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth’s global temperatures.”

The report was the product of Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). He’s been with the EPA for 38 years but now has been taken off all climate-related work. He is convinced that actual climate observations do not match climate change theories and that only the politics, not the science, has been settled.

Thomas Fuller, environmental policy blogger with the San Francisco Examiner, wrote Thursday in a story developed in conjunction with Anthony Watts’ Web site wattsupwiththat.com: “A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2.”

All this is particularly interesting because of the charges by Al Gore, NASA’s James Hansen and others that the Bush administration and energy companies actively suppressed the truth about climate change.

One of the e-mails unearthed by CEI was dated March 12, from Al McGartland, office director at NCEE, forbidding Carlin from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues such as those in his suppressed report.

Carlin replied on March 16, requesting that his study be forwarded to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA’s climate change program. Carlin points out the peer-reviewed references in his study and points out that the new studies “explain much of the observational data that have been collected which cannot be explained by the IPCC models.”

For saying the climate change emperors had no clothes, Carlin was told March 17: “The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

In other words, the administration and Congress had their collective minds made up and didn’t want to be confused with the facts. They certainly didn’t want any inconvenient truths coming out of their own Environmental Protection Agency, the one that wants to regulate everything from your lawn mower to bovine emissions and which says the product of your respiration and ours, carbon dioxide, is a dangerous pollutant and not the basis for all life on earth.

The problem the warm-mongers have is they now are in a position of telling the American people, who are you going to believe — us or your own lying eyes? Forget the snow in Malibu, the record cold winters. Forget that temperatures have dropped for a decade.

In April, President Obama declared that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” Apparently not, for as he spoke those very words his administration was suppressing science to advance a very pernicious ideology.

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Amusing

Nukes Are OK For Iran, But Not For Us?

As usual, Liberal inconsistency reveals that their true motivation is the destruction America.

Nuclear Power: If Iran has “legitimate energy concerns” that make its nuclear plants OK, doesn’t the energy-starved U.S.? Why doesn’t Iran, with the second-largest proven oil reserves, just build some refineries?

Normally, a nation with significant oil resources that decides to develop nuclear power would and should be praised for its prudence. Nuclear power is an emission-free domestic form of energy that is good for the environment and the economy.

Except when it’s a country that builds missiles instead of refineries and pledges to wipe a neighbor off the face of the earth.

Iran says it’s developing nuclear power to generate electricity while it waits for the 12th Imam and the apocalypse to arrive. To hasten the process, however, it is using its nuclear knowledge to amass fissile material necessary to build a bomb. It’s developing missiles to deliver that bomb, presumably somewhere in the heart of downtown Tel Aviv.

Our new administration is trying to talk them out of it, and the Iranians are quite willing to drag out the conversation as long as it takes to develop their nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it.

“Although I don’t want to put artificial timetables on that process,” President Obama has said, “we do want to make sure that, by the end of this year, we’ve actually seen a serious process move forward. And I think that we can measure whether or not the Iranians are serious.”

Unfortunately, Iran by the end of the year should have enough weapons-grade material to make a bomb, if it doesn’t have enough already. One thing we can measure is the increasing number of centrifuges they have spinning. They are not designed to keep the lights on in Tehran.

It would seem to us that encouraging Iranian use of nuclear energy in any context is the last thing we should be doing. In a BBC interview broadcast on Tuesday, President Obama said:

“Without going into specifics, what I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations. On the other hand, the international community has a very real interest in preventing a nuclear arms race in the region.”

This echoes remarks made in Prague last month, when the president said his administration would “support Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy with rigorous inspections” if Iran gives up its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

But it hasn’t, and the race is already on. Iran state television interpreted these remarks as recognizing “the rights of the Iranian nation,” by which it means its right to develop nuclear power unencumbered.

That Iran is not serious about peaceful nuclear energy is shown by its refusal to build the refinery capacity needed to eliminate its dependence on imported gasoline. That money instead has gone to buying more centrifuges and expanding nuclear facilities. If Iran’s energy aspirations were legitimate, it would be building refineries and not bombs.

The irony here is that at the same time we are encouraging Iran to exploit the peaceful uses of nuclear power, we are discouraging its use here at home. We have legitimate energy aspirations as well, and one of them is reducing our dependence on imported oil from countries that do not have our interests at heart.

We let billions flow overseas and domestic oil resources from the Chukchi Sea to ANWR to Western oil shale to the Gulf of Mexico go unexploited. We have one thing in common with Iran: We’re not pushing refinery construction here either.

We prattle on about nuclear power being costly and nuclear waste being a danger without a safe place to store it even as we shut down Yucca Mountain, a perfectly safe place to store it. We place all sorts of regulatory and environmental impediments in its way.

Why is nuclear power a viable energy source for Iran but not for America?

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Amusing

A Time For Choosing Again?

This is our must read of the day. Even though Reagan’s gave his speech in 1964, so much of it applies today. Truer words were never spoken and we need to heed them now more than ever.

Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” arguably, was the pivotal moment when Reagan became the Reagan America knows. He gave “the speech,” as he often referred to it, not long after switching from FDR’s Democratic Party to the Republican Party of Lincoln. The theme of Reagan’s speech was that Americans had to choose between up versus down, freedom versus servitude, self-government versus bureaucratic fiat.

“The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people,” Reagan explained, “and they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.” So, he concluded, “we have come to a time for choosing.”

Reagan became Reagan by studying the political science of the American founding, without which he could not have ushered into American politics a new kind of conservatism, Reagan conservatism. Reagan sought to reign in government by recovering the authority of the Founders’ Constitution and the principles that informed it. He believed nothing less would save freedom in America.

Reagan’s challenge was to remind Americans of the importance and goodness of constitutional government in a time of constitutional darkness, a time when virtually all the leading intellectual and political lights in America had come to ignore or twist beyond recognition the meaning of the Constitution.

In this way, Reagan’s statesmanship paralleled that of Lincoln, who tried to preserve the principled ground of constitutional self-government — the idea that each human being is endowed by the Creator with equal, unalienable, natural rights — at a time when that idea was denied and ridiculed by most prominent minds in America.

Today, the lights of the Constitution have again grown dim, as the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats unfold what is amounting to be the most massive government budgetary and regulatory expansions in American history.

Everyone seems fixated on the costs associated with Obama’s corporate bailouts, universal healthcare, environmental regulations, and other items on his liberal to-do list. But few people, in or out of government office, ask whether these policies are constitutional. The reason, sadly, is that few people care.

Our challenge today of recovering the authority of the Constitution is greater than Reagan’s and perhaps even greater than Lincoln’s was. Since Roosevelt launched the New Deal in the 1930s, several generations of Americans have grown up knowing nothing but big, paternalistic government.

The feisty independence and healthy suspicion of government power that characterized the founding generation of Americans — think of the people who defiantly flew the flag with the coiled-up snake announcing, “Don’t Tread on Me” — is now mainly the stuff of boring history textbooks.

It’s no exaggeration to suggest that the Constitution itself has become radical. Most Americans today probably cannot imagine what truly constitutional government might look like—virtually the entire federal bureaucracy, for example, would need to be eliminated. That’s why the Constitution cannot be used as a club to smash unconstitutional proposals and programs, because no one cares. If you doubt it, ask Ron Paul how much success he’s had waving his pocket Constitution at every unconstitutional policy.

Still, the extravagant spending and regulating and interfering with the private sector economy happening in Washington DC today forces upon us a choice: Either we allow it to continue, or not. Either we choose to remove all limits on government power and scope in exchange for promised socialized security, or we choose a government that operates within certain limits and we accept certain responsibilities for ourselves. This is again a time for choosing.

If we do the former, if we trade freedom and limited government in the hope that bureaucratic “experts” can govern and provide for us better than we can govern and provide for ourselves, then let us be honest about what we are choosing. And let us acknowledge openly what Reagan and Lincoln and the Founders understood, that a government of unlimited power is less likely to provide security for us, more likely to threaten us.

If, however, we choose to limit our government, we need not even agree right now on what the limits are. Reasonable minds can differ on where the line should be that separates government power from private freedom. But if we can agree in principle that limited government is the only kind befitting a free people, then we can begin asking how we might limit government’s power.

A constitution, if recognized and obeyed, is a useful means for limiting government. And if well designed, a constitution can also help us identify and enjoy the ends of political society—justice, domestic tranquility, security from foreign and domestic threats, prosperity, freedom, all within the framework of a more perfect union. Indeed, a constitution is what we need most today. The good news is that we already have one. Let us choose to understand and defend it.

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Amusing

IBD: Is It Any Wonder The Market Continues To Sink?

This is another in a long line of excellent editorials from Investor’s Business Daily.

Like Jimmy Carter, Obama has the “Midas Touch” in reverse. Except that in Carter’s case it was probably unintentional.

Is It Any Wonder The Market Continues To Sink?

Last Oct. 13, in trying to explain why the market had sold off 30% in six weeks, we acknowledged that the freeze-up of the financial system was a big concern. But we cited three other factors as well:

• The imminent election of “the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party.”
• The possibility of “a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.”
• A “media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises.”

No wonder, we said then, that panic had set in.

Today, as the market continues to sell off and we plumb 12-year lows, we wish we had a different explanation. But it still looks, as we said four months ago, “like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.”

How else would you explain all that’s happened in a few short weeks? How else would you expect the stock market, where millions cast daily votes and which is still the best indicator of what the future holds, to act when:

• Newsweek, a prominent national newsweekly, blares from its cover “We Are All Socialists Now,” without a hint of recognition that socialism in its various forms has been repudiated by history — as communism’s collapse in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China attest.

Even so, a $787 billion “stimulus,” along with a $700 billion bank bailout, $75 billion to refinance bad mortgages, $50 billion for the automakers, and as much as $2 trillion in loans from the Fed and the Treasury are hardly confidence-builders for our free-enterprise system.

• Talk of “nationalizing” U.S.’ troubled major banks comes not just from tarnished Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but also from Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former Fed chief Alan Greenspan.

To be sure, bank shares have plunged along with home prices, and many have inadequate capital. But is nationalization really the only solution for an industry whose main product — loans to consumers and businesses — has expanded by over 5% annually so far this year?

• A stimulus bill laden with huge amounts of spending on pork and special interests is the best our Congress can come up with to get the economy back on track. Economists broadly agree that the legislation has little stimulative power, and in fact will be a drag on economic growth for years to come.

The failure to include any meaningful tax cuts for either individuals or small businesses, the true stimulators of job growth, while throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at profligate state governments and programs — such as $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities” and $740 million to help viewers switch from analog to digital TV— has investors shaking their heads.

• A $75 billion bailout for 9 million Americans who face foreclosure, regardless of how they got into financial trouble, is the government’s answer to the housing crunch. Many Americans who have scrupulously kept up with payments are steaming at the thought of subsidizing those who’ve been profligate or irresponsible.

With recent data showing that as much as 55% of those who get foreclosure aid end up defaulting anyway, a signal has been sent that America has gone from being “Land of the Free” to “Bailout Nation.”

• Energy solutions ranging from the expansion of offshore drilling and the development of Alaska’s bountiful arctic oil reserves to developing shale oil in America’s Big Sky country, tar-sands crude in Canada and coal that provides half the nation’s electric power, are taken off the table.

The market knows full well what drives the economy and that restraining energy supply will make us all poorer and investing less profitable. Taking domestic energy sources off the table makes us more reliant on sources from hostile and unstable regimes, breeding uncertainty in a capital system in which participants seek stability.

• Lawmakers who seem more interested in pleasing special interests than voters back home now control Congress. Some of the leading voices in crafting the massive bank bailout and stimulus packages — including Sen. Chris Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — were the very ones who helped get us in this mess.

They did so by loosening Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lending rules and pushing commercial banks to make bad loans. Both Dodd and Frank were recipients of hefty donations from Fannie, Freddie and other financial firms they were charged with regulating.

• Trade protectionism passes as policy, even amid the administration’s lip service to free trade. Congress’ vast stimulus bill and its “Buy American” provisions limit spending to U.S.-made products and will drive up costs, limit choices and alienate key allies.

Already, it has triggered rumblings of retaliation in a 1930s-style trade war from trading partners, just as the Smoot-Hawley tariffs prolonged the Great Depression. Several European partners have begun raising barriers. Meanwhile, three signed free-trade pacts with Colombia, Panama and Korea languish with no chance of passage. Free trade offers one way out of our problems, yet it’s been sidetracked.

• A 1,000-plus page stimulus bill is bulled through Congress with no GOP input and not a single member of Congress reading it before passage. It borders on censorship.

GOP protests of the bill’s spending and the speed it was passed at were dismissed by Obama and other Democrats as seeking to “do nothing” or “breaking the spirit of bipartisanship.” But voters are angry.

Along with thousands of angry phone calls to Congress, new Facebook groups have emerged, and street protests have sprung up in Denver, Seattle and Mesa, Ariz., against the “porkulus.” CNBC Chicago reporter Rick Santelli’s on-air denunciation of federal bailouts for mortgage deadbeats attracted a record 1.5 million Internet hits.

• Business leaders are demonized. Yes, there are bad eggs out there like the Madoffs and Stanfords. But most CEOs are hugely talented, driven, highly intelligent people who make our corporations the most productive in the world and add trillions of dollars of value to our economy.

They don’t deserve to be dragged before Congress, as they have been dozens of times in the past two years, for a ritual heaping of verbal abuse from the very people most responsible for our ills — our tragically inept, Democrat-led Congress.

• Words like “catastrophe,” “crisis” and “depression” are coming from the mouth of the newly elected president, rather than words of hope and optimism. Instead of talking up America’s capabilities and prospects, he talks them down — the exact opposite of our most successful recent president, Ronald Reagan, who came in vowing to restore that “shining city on a hill.”

Even ex-President Clinton admonished Obama to return to his previous optimism, saying he would “just like him to end by saying that he is hopeful and completely convinced we’re gonna come through this.”

• The missile defense system that brought the Soviet Union to its knees, and which offers so much hope for future security, is being discussed as a “bargaining chip” with Russia. This, at the same time the regime in Iran is close to having a nuclear weapon and North Korea is readying an intermediate-range missile that can reach the U.S.

This sends a message of weakness abroad and contributes to a feeling of vulnerability at home. A strong economy begins and ends with a strong defense.

All this in barely a month’s time. And to think that more of the same is on the way seems to be sinking in. Investors are watching closely and not caring for what they see. Sooner or later, the market will rally — but not without good reason to do so.

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