More on Obama’s policy cluelessness

Need more reasons to oppose Obama for president? Here are 10 very specific policy problems as outlined by Bill Bennett: 10 Concerns about Barack Obama

Why liberals must lie

Another guy who absolutely nails it:

What is important to liberals is whether supporting or opposing that policy makes them feel good about themselves.

This is why liberals continue to support dysfunctional policies that have been failing miserably for decades and why they often oppose common sense programs that have been proven to work time and time again — because it isn’t about whether it works or not, it’s about how it makes them feel.

In other words, a liberal will almost always prefer a policy that’s extremely expensive, is difficult to implement, helps almost no one, but seems “nice” — to a policy that is cheap, simple to implement, extremely effective, and seems “mean.”

However, since most Americans make decisions about policies based on whether or not they believe the policy makes people’s lives better or worse, liberals have had to become habitually dishonest about what they believe and want to do to get their ideas put into action.

For the rest of this great article see Why liberals lie about what they believe

Give me a break

More evidence that Barack Obama is a clueless lightweight on policy issues surfaced with this quote from Richard Danzig, the man who is rumored to be Obama’s likely National Security Advisor: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.” (See the full article here.)

How’s that again??? It’s bad enough that Obama agrees with the totally idiotic recent Supreme Court decision giving full constitutional rights to non-American terrorists who have never set foot on US soil, but now he is going to be looking to Winnie the Pooh for tips on dealing with terrorists????

This is the great “messiah” who is going to save us all and cure all the evils in the world?? Give me a break!

Satire

For a great example of the art of satire, see Why I’m Voting Democrat.

10 Questions Al Gore can’t answer

I’m going to post a much longer quote than usual today than I normally do because it so perfectly captures the problems that I have with the global warming alarmist crowd:

…like most conservatives, I’m open minded and could be convinced that mankind is responsible for causing global warming — but with science, not scaremongering. If the proponents of the manmade global warming theory can come up with good answers to questions like these, you can expect everyone, including me, to accept their theory:

1) The earth has warmed and cooled numerous times in the past and many of those temperature swings have been much greater than anything we’ve experienced so far. So, since we human beings don’t really understand why those temperature swings occurred, how can we be sure that the very mild warming we’ve seen so far hasn’t been caused by normal changes in our climate?

[My note: Exactly what did humans do that caused the "Little Ice Age" from the 14th-18th centuries and what did we stop doing that caused it to end?]

2) If greenhouse gasses produced by mankind are behind the roughly one degree increase in temperature over the last century, then why did the global temperature go down from roughly 1940 to 1975 even though mankind’s production of greenhouse gasses was skyrocketing during that same time period?

3) We can’t accurately predict whether it’s going to rain or not a week from now. We can’t accurately predict what the weather will look like next year (Remember that in 2005, they were predicting we’d be hammered with non-stop hurricanes in 2006 because of global warming. It didn’t happen). Since that’s the case, how can we possibly have any confidence in predictions of what the weather will be like in 50-100 years?

4) Mars has also been experiencing global warming. Since man can’t be a factor on that planet, doesn’t it suggest that perhaps a factor other than man, i.e. the sun, is responsible for the warming on both planets?

5) Back in the early seventies, the in-vogue scientific theory was that we were in the midst of global cooling that was caused by man. Now, it turns out that there was nothing much behind that except that the global temperature was getting cooler. So, where did they go wrong back in the early seventies and how do we know that we’re not making the same type of mistake today in forecasting global warming?

6) Global warming alarmists will tell you that there is “scientific consensus” that mankind is causing global warming and that only a few scientists disagree. But, there are more than 17,200 scientists who say that, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Since that’s the case, how can anyone credibly claim that there is “scientific consensus” on the issue?

7) Even if mankind was responsible for global warming, how would the solutions that are being offered, like Kyoto or carbon credit trading schemes, fix the problem? Big developing countries like India and China are exempt from Kyoto and unlikely to sign on to any deal that hurts their economy, Europe isn’t meeting its Kyoto goals, and environmentalists say Kyoto wouldn’t fix the problem even if all of its targets are met.

In Bill Bryson’s book on science, “A Short History Of Nearly Everything,” (and yes, Bryson does appear to be a believer in manmade global warming), he notes that,

“For most of its history until fairly recent times, the general pattern was for earth to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere.” — P.427

That would seem to suggest that despite everything we hear about the “hottest temperatures on record,” the global temperature is significantly cooler than it has been throughout much of earth’s history. Since that’s the case, is the small change in global temperature we’ve seen so far really out of the ordinary or anything to be alarmed about?

9) As Carl Zimmer has noted in Discover, at times in the earth’s past, we’ve had considerably more carbon dioxide in the air that we do today, and yet it’s debatable whether the temperature was significantly warmer,

“During the Ordovician Period, 440 million years ago, there seems to have been 16 times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is today–and yet, judging from the gravelly deposits it left behind, there was also an ice sheet near the South Pole that was four-fifths the size of present-day Antarctica. The second exception is even more troubling. The Cretaceous Period, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and CO2 levels were about eight times what they are today, has been one of the most popular case studies for global warming forecasters. And everyone knows what the climate was like during the dinosaurs’ heyday: steamy. Or was it? The latest evidence, reported just this past summer by British researchers, suggests that temperatures in the tropics 95 million years ago were no higher than they are now; and while it was a lot warmer at the poles than it is today, it was still freezing cold.”

Doesn’t this suggest that there isn’t anywhere near as much of a close relationship between greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and the temperature as many people seem to believe?

10) Skeptics of manmade global warming have often pointed out that the rise in global temperature seems to track much more closely to increased solar activity than it does to an increase in manmade greenhouse gasses. Doesn’t that seem to strongly suggest that the sun, not mankind, is more likely to be responsible for global warming?

Bonus Question) If people like Al Gore believe their own hype and think it’s necessary for us to cut back our energy consumption, why aren’t they practicing what they preach? If a global warming fanatic like Al Gore can’t get by on less than 20 times the amount of energy that a regular family uses, how can we reasonably expect the average family to dramatically cut their energy usage?

Quite frankly, if you buy into manmade global warming, you should have good answers for these questions or, if you don’t, admit that your opinion is based more on faith and guesswork than it is on science.

For the full article, click here.

Grow up

Democrats are going to have to grow up. The oil-rich areas they want to leave untouched are accessible with minimal environmental disturbance, thanks to modern technology. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill. As for anticarbon theology, oil will be indispensable over the next half-century and probably longer, like it or not. Airplanes will never fly on woodchips, and you won’t be able to charge your car with a windmill for some time, if ever.

- from Wall Street Journal editorial titled $4 Gasbags.

Well said

If Obama’s so-called Change means anything it is Neville Chamberlain Foreign Policy and Herbert Hoover Economics. - Peter J. Wirs

For those unsure of the historical references, see the full column here.