ObamaCare support fading, Journolister Ezra Klein having palpitations

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2/9/11, "ObamaCare support melting away," Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin

"Pretty much as expected by conservatives, Obamacare has remained unpopular with the public. It's under attack in the courts. And now, vulnerable Senate Democrats are running for the hills. ABC News reports:

"We're looking at everything humanly possible. I've always had a concern and a problem with the mandate, that we were forcing it, basically saying by the law of the land you have to buy the product," Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, told ABC News today. "But on the other hand, I know that's been the linchpin. I'm looking for flexibility any way I can."

Manchin is one of the moderate Democrats trying to figure out how to repeal the individual mandate. While talks are still in the early stages, Manchin hopes the push will take shape sooner rather than later.

Joining him in these efforts could be a handful of other Democrats who are also up for reelection in 2012: Nebraska's Ben Nelson, Missouri's Claire McCaskill, and Montana's Jon Tester.

You can understand why liberals might be starting to panic. So earnest Obamacare supporters are rushing in. Ezra Klein offers his contribution:

Replacing the individual mandate wouldn't be particularly hard. All we need is another policy that does the same thing -- specifically, discourages free-riders who don't want to buy insurance until after they get sick and thus leave the rest of us paying for them.

Not only is the repeal of the individual mandate no big deal, it's actually better for the Dems! Ezra announces, "The danger, as I say at the end, is not that the law does get changed, but that it doesn't. That the GOP won't let it thrive and the Democrats won't let it die and so it just limps along." (I guess the "historic legislation" was

• badly crafted, after all.)

This is not one of the more effective spin-squad efforts. To begin with, Democrats are running from Obamacare Their willingness to push for a major revision, one vehemently opposed by the White House, of the "historic legislation" is

• not a helpful sign for the saleability of the plan in the 2012 election.

As for the politics, Ezra has missed a key stumbling block: House Republicans and more than 40 Senate Republicans

• will not vote for an individual mandate-lite,
  

if you will. They want to repeal Obamacare outright or defund it. Remember, the Republicans are running and governing on repeal and replace. In other words, Obamacare can't be fixed in their eyes because the entire premise of the legislation and the cost it entails are unsustainable. Oh, and the president is opposed to it, too. In other words, virtually

• everyone save the nervous Senate Democrats is opposed to the idea of fiddling with the individual mandate.

Eventually the choice for red-state Democrats will be: Defend Obamacare as is or vote to repeal it. In the realm of electoral politics this is a

• "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition for the Republicans."

Sarah Palin was unknown in 2007 when Arizona shooter first targeted Giffords. They still want you to think Palin made him kill.

Tweet Did the NY Times object when George Bush was burned in effigy? The NY Times liked the clubhouse GOP who were happy being in the minority, and now begs the clubhouse GOP to join with them against the 'embarrassing' Tea Party. They and other media still try to paint Loughner --obviously incoherent and mentally ill, and who singled out Congresswoman Giffords as much as 4 years ago-

• before anyone outside of Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin

• and at a time when the Tea Party did not even exist...

as motivated to murder due to an anti-abortion belief obtained from Sarah Palin.

Even if 'political rhetoric' were the culprit in 2007, all he could have seen at that time were violent images against George Bush and war. (Examples below).

Loughner facts they hate, source link next to each:

1. His known confrontations with Giffords were easily accomplished as he lived with his parents "about a five-minute drive from the shootings." He also may have heard her speak at Pima Community College. AP

2. Loughner saved a letter from Giffords from 4 years ago (when her would have been 18 or 19, Sarah Palin was unknown and the Tea Party did not exist). "Instead, Loughner may have had some self-generated dislike of Giffords that stemmed from when he first spoke to her at an event in 2007.

Court filings indicate the FBI seized papers from his home Saturday that talked of planning an assassination of Giffords and also included a letter she sent him four years ago thanking him for attending the event.

One Loughner friend, Bryce Tierney, told Mother Jones magazine that Loughner had harbored a grudge against Giffords for more than a year, saying that he considered her a "fake."" McClatchy

3. He had had numerous run-ins with the police. "Between February and September, Loughner "had five contacts with PCC police for classroom and library disruptions," the statement said. He was suspended in September 2010 after college police discovered a YouTube video in which Loughner claimed the college was illegal according to the U.S. Constitution. He withdrew voluntarily the following month, and was told

• he could return only if, among other things, a mental health professional agreed he did not present a danger, the school said."AP (Where were this kid's parents?)
  

4. He was a high school drop out. McClatchy.

5. The Fox News report suggesting a link to supremacist groups has been discredited. The Real News Journal

6. He was expelled from an 8 week course at Pima County College after 3 weeks for "incoherent outbursts." McClatchy

7. Loughner was a daily pot smoker and drank heavily at least once to the point of hospitalization "and almost died." AP

8. He was an "ardent atheist" and believed "the government was behind 9/11." He did not engage in political discussions. AP "He had no coherent political ideology." (Reuters).

9. Here's the piece they're trying to make fit the anti-abortion motive (AP): "When other students, always seated, read their poems, Coorough said Loughner "would laugh at things that you wouldn't laugh at." After one woman read a poem about abortion, "he was turning all shades of red and laughing," and said, "Wow, she's just like a terrorist, she killed a baby," Coorough said."...

(Laughing about abortion shows someone not connected with the subject at all, not someone with a serious investment in it. ed)

"He appeared to be to me an emotional cripple or an emotional child," Coorough said. "He lacked compassion, he lacked understanding and he lacked an ability to connect."" AP

10. He had made numerous death threats against many people (no mention of abortion rights.) He never mentioned Giffords, guns or politics. Reuters.

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Below, "Peaceful political rhetoric" available in 2007 when he targeted Giffords was about hating and bombing George Bush in his 'f-ing house':

"KILL BUSH, BOMB HIS F--- HOUSE," Anti war protest March 18, 2007, San Francisco
via zombietime.com

• George Bush burned in effigy, November 2004, San Francisco. No calls to "TONE DOWN THE RHETORIC" of left wing speech: via Zombietime.com

"NYT: 'It's Legitimate to Blame Republicans and Their Most Virulent Supporters in the Media'" Newsbusters, 1/10/11

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In 2009 an Islamic member of the US Army slaughtered 13 innocent Americans. His violent ideas and emotional problems were known but the Army kept moving him through the system. We were told not to jump to conclusions about anything. The media was hushed.

• (No mention of the US Army being accessories to murder via political correctness, or the killer being confrontational about Islam during work concurrent with references to violence and death).

Reference: 9/16/10, "The Tea Party's Snarl," NY Times Editorial

• Part of it may be that Sarah Palin does not need the NY Times and symbolizes their loss of authority. ed.
  

Mariano Rivera at Rangers-Coyotes game, 12/16/10

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NY City Hall ghostwrote letter to help Ground Zero mosque group while St. Nicholas Church destroyed by Islam at Ground Zero gets bupkis

Tweet 12/24/10, "City Hall ghostwrote GZ mosque's letter," NY Post, Sally Goldenberg

"Dozens of e-mails between Mayor Bloomberg's aides and developers of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero reveal a cordial, if not downright cozy, relationship and the length to which a top city staffer went to help the project -- even drafting a letter for the group

• soliciting support from the community board, and providing the fax number to send it.

In one exchange, Community Affairs Commissioner Nazli Parvizi penned the draft of a letter to be sent by Daisy Khan, a key sponsor of the project known alternately as Cordoba House or Park51,

• to the chairperson of Community Board 1, Julie Menin,

• as the panel prepared to vote on its recommendation on the project.

The letter drafted by Parvizi thanked Menin for being open-minded about the plan for a mosque and cultural center -- which by then had become a flashpoint issue around the nation.

Parvizi e-mailed the draft to Khan and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf -- ending with the salutation, "Best, Daisy,"

• indicating that she actually was preparing Khan's letter to a city agency.

She also included the fax number and mailing address for CB1 -- which ultimately voted in favor of the project in May --

• and offered further assistance.

The letter -- which Menin said she never received -- thanked her personally for "giving us an audience to share our vision of the Cordoba Center in Manhattan."

"We are incredibly saddened by the media distortion on what this project actually is and to whom it serves," Parvizi went on to write, according to a May 14 e-mail the Mayor's Office made public yesterday.

• Opponents of the plan were furious.

"The mayor was touting, ironically, government

• not being involved in religion,
  

and here you have the mayor's staffer assisting in a public-relations campaign on behalf of a mosque and Islamic center," said Debra Burlingame, whose brother was a pilot of one of the hijacked planes on 9/11.

"I think this is highly improper.""

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at Ground Zero was completely destroyed by Islamic terrorists in 2001 but gets no help from NYC.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg intervened for Ground Zero mosque group

Tweet 12/24/10, "Records: Mayor intervened for mosque group," AP by Chris Hawley

"Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office worked behind the scenes to help the organizers of a mosque and community center near Ground Zero, intervening with city administrators to get a temporary prayer service permit and having an official ghostwrite a letter to community leaders.

E-mails released by the city document the cooperation between Bloomberg's Community Affairs Unit and the Cordoba Initiative, even as a furor erupted this year over the center's proposed existence two blocks north of Ground Zero. The city released the documents

• in response to a public-records lawsuit by Judicial Watch, a conservative group.

Bloomberg's spokesman said the city has extended similar help to other religious groups. But Judicial Watch says the e-mails show the city government went too far with its assistance.

Bloomberg has been one of the strongest supporters of the project, which drew huge protests on both sides in the months before the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Opponents argued that locating a mosque so close to the attack site is insensitive to the victims' memories. Bloomberg and other supporters have said allowing the center to be built reflects American values of tolerance and religious freedom.

• The city's help was no different than the assistance it gives other organizations, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said.

"It is nothing out of the ordinary. This is what the Community Affairs Unit does," he said, citing assistance the mayor's office gave Roman Catholic officials in composing a letter to community boards asking for their help with a papal visit and in rushing through a permit for a temporary hut erected for a Jewish holiday.

In May, Nazli Parvizi, the head of the city's community affairs unit, composed a 500-word letter to send to Community Board 1, an advisory council in lower Manhattan, about the mosque project.

The draft of Parvizi's letter describes the center as

• a "wonderful expression of our religion" and laments "media distortion" of the project.
  

The letter in e-mails was signed by Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the project.

• In August, Bloomberg cited the community board's support in a speech endorsing the project.

In January the Cordoba Initiative asked Bloomberg's commissioner of immigrant affairs, Fatima Shama, for help getting a temporary permit to hold Friday worship services at the proposed site. The city had approved permits for previous weeks, and the group believed the omission was due to a clerical error.

• Shama responded a few hours later, saying the problem had been fixed.

As public anger over the mosque began to spread in May, supporters turned to the city for advice.

• "Is there a good time to chat tomorrow. We need some guidance on how to tackle the opposition," Khan wrote to Shama.

The e-mails also document donations of $300 from the Cordoba Initiative and $150 from the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a sister group, to help pay for an Aug. 24, 2009, dinner celebrating the holy Islamic month of Ramadan at the mayor's residence.

• Loeser said the donations did not influence the mayor's support of the project.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the documents show the city was an active proponent of the project. "He obviously feels strongly about it, but he

shouldn't turn the taxpayers of New York into advocates for this group," Fitton said."...

The most important thing to know about the Tea Party "is that there are more of them than ever before in American history." Spengler

Tweet And we are just beginning to come of age. Speaking as a supporter, the Tea Party isn't only about finances and Obama, though those issues alone could end the country.

• Being routinely scorned by George Bush and his cronies got many of us going.

Those career politicians and lobbyists still populate the GOP and still scorn us. Every one of them must go. Someone once said, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." It can apply to men as well.

12/7/10, "Longevity gives life to Tea Party," Spengler

"How could the Tea Party elect five senators and 40 members of the United States Congress last November, none with political experience and many with evident eccentricities? The answer is that a single issue united a slapdash agglomeration of amateurs, with sufficient power to override all the sources of weakness.

The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Governments that run huge deficits normally reduce them by debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts in inflated money.

In fact, the Tea Party is a triumph of economic rationality over lack of talent: its reason for being is so compelling and so clear that it has succeeded despite the silliness of some of its candidates. One top Republican pollster thinks that the "I am not a witch" message aired by losing Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell in Delware was the

• single worst piece of advertising in political history.

Elite commentators tend to dismiss the Tea Party as a mob of engaged boos. On the contrary, pollster Scott Rasmussen, reports, the Tea Partiers tend to be older than 45, married, wealthier and better educated than the general population, and concerned first of all with federal spending and deficits.

• The most important thing to know about such people is that there are more of them than ever before in American history.

Young families with small children borrow money from older people who have finished raising families. Most Americans begin adulthood heavily in debt and become lenders as they approach retirement. The changing proportions of young and old Americans has enormous bearing on political outcomes.

Elderly dependents have remained fairly static as a percentage of total population during the past 40 years. But the proportion will jump from 19% today to 32% in 2030. This seismic change in American demographics explains a great deal.

In 1975, when Jimmy Carter ran for president, 39 out 100 Americans were dependent children, but only 16 out of 100 Americans were dependent elderly. The baby boomers were in their twenties and starting families. Once elected president, Carter allowed the inflation rate to reach double-digits by 1981. A family that bought a house for $60,000 in January 1975 could have sold it for $110,000 in January 1981. In fact, home prices offered positive returns after inflation (stocks, bonds, and cash all showed negative real returns during the 1980s).

Elderly people on fixed pensions took part-time jobs or ate pet food as the value of money shrank; young people caught a free ride on the inflation wave. No one liked inflation, to be sure, but it was an ill wind that blew good to a great many people. The Carter administration, though, made an elementary blunder: as inflation drove up nominal income, it also pushed middle class taxpayers into higher tax brackets intended to soak the rich. With a top tax rate of 70%, the tax squeeze due to inflation became a crushing burden on the middle class, and the high rate of taxation on nominal capital gains was often confiscatory. If the Carter administration had indexed tax rates to inflation, it might have lasted a second term.

Now the tables are turned. By 2030, elderly dependents will comprise 32% of the American population, twice the level in 1975.

• For the first time in history, the number of elderly dependents will equal the number of child dependents. Americans now aged 45 will retire in 2030, and it is their concerns that give buoyancy to the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is an exercise in economic rationality. Measured inflation in the United States is less than 1% (according to the woefully inadequate Consumer Price Index), but the Tea Partiers anticipate higher inflation in the future should the federal government remain at 11% of gross domestic product.

This is not the first time that monetary issues have motivated the formation of an important third party. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a prolonged deflation under the gold standard drew Western farmers to the inflationist Free Silver movement. Permitting silver coinage would have increased the money supply, raised the price level and helped debtors. The movement was powerful enough to take over the Democratic Party in 1896, when its candidate William Jennings Bryan (an unknown 36-year-old congressman) excoriated Eastern creditor interests and their ''cross of gold'' imposed by Eastern creditor interests.

• The proportion of prospective pensioners in the rest of the industrial world exceeds that in the United States...

America's open political model makes it relatively easy for challengers to force their way onto the stage (although not to remain their for long), so the Tea Party as such is likely to remain a distinctly American phenomenon. But the shift towards an older population also will act as a brake on inflationist impulses elsewhere,

• for example, on the extent to which France and Germany will bail out Ireland, Portugal, Greece, or Spain.

In its first electoral outing, America's Tea Party helped shift the political balance. It would be incautious to view it as a passing expression of voter frustration. On the contrary: spontaneity and inexperience held the Tea Party back from harvesting the political support that should come to it. If the Tea Party does a better job of screening and prepping candidates - or the Republican party has the good sense to adopt its program -

• demographics and rational interest will make it an

even stronger force as time passes, and an obstacle to a new inflation cycle."

####

• (As for the left, they believe the country is theirs because we will be dead soon. Many Tea Partiers are in their 40's or younger, so they'll have a long wait. They hope to hurry us off by giving us a UK style medical system where seniors are routinely left to starve. They figure in a few years we'll be gone, and a snakepit of crime, poverty and despair will be theirs. A land mass with no borders. But our numbers are just beginning.
  

We didn't work our whole lives to watch some slobs throw the country down the toilet to George Soros and his relatives. ed)

Individuals in Kenyan government stealing a third of national funds. Africa is poor because of corrupt leaders NOT 'climate'

Tweet 12/3/10, "Kenyan corruption costs government dearly," BBC

"The Kenyan government has said it could be losing nearly one-third of the national budget to corruption.

• Finance ministry officials told a parliamentary committee the losses could be nearly $4bn (£2.5bn) a year.

They said individuals were taking huge sums meant for development projects.

• Analysts say many Kenyans will be surprised not by the news of the losses, but by the fact the
  

admission has come from such senior officials.

• Kitu kidogo - the Swahili for "something small" - is how the kickbacks are commonly described in Kenya.

Taking 10% of an awarded tender or inflating project costs are said to be the commonest means of dipping into government coffers.

• Corruption has been the Achilles heel of successive Kenyan regimes.

But the efforts of the country's newly-appointed anti-corruption commissioner - who now has the power to prosecute individuals -

• are causing ripples in government quarters."

Reference: 11/9/10, BBC, "French appeals reopens African assets case"

• 3 African leaders accused of stealing $223 million from their goverments

"France's highest appeals court has authorised judges to proceed with an investigation into assets held in the country by three African leaders.

• The anti-corruption group Transparency International has accused the three of using African public funds to buy luxury homes and cars in France....

The three leaders, one of whom is now dead, had denied wrongdoing.

• They are Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo and
  

• Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, as well as
  

• the late Gabonese leader, Omar Bongo (whose living relatives are also named).
  

Transparency estimates the total value of the three leaders' estates in France at 160m euros (£140m, $223m)."...

.

ClimateGate leader Phil Jones is 'in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC' and governments

Tweet Nov. 28, 2009, Telegraph UK: "The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents (emails) is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics.

• Their importance cannot be overestimated.

What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC

• and governments rely –
  

not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless

• trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
  

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

• Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself....

• But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide?...

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which

• much of the future of the US and world economy may hang.
  

In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society –

• itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause –
  

is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age."

by Christopher Booker, "Climate Change: This is the worst scientific scandal of our generation" Telegraph, 11/28/09