Considerettes

That was then:

During George Bush’s term in office, every renewal the Patriot Act became grand theater, with newspapers inveighing against the overreach of Bush and the danger to American liberty in the bill, which wasn’t an entirely vacuous argument.  Protesters would fill streets, and reporters would demand positions from various members of Congress.

This is now:

The House of Representatives reauthorized the Patriot Act for one year Thursday.

The vote was 315-97 .

Many liberals in the House opposed the controversial act, saying it tramps Constitutional protections and civil liberties.

It’s not so much that the Congressional Democrats didn’t want another major battle in the middle of trying to get other massive legislation passed that I noticed as much as the lack of outrage from the grassroots Left prior to this.  Massive protests did not seem to appear on the MSM radar, or perhaps they ignored them.  But there’s certainly been a lot less harping on civil liberty issues from that side of the aisle ever since their guy sat down in the Oval Office.

But apparently, this was a battle that Democrats just didn’t seem to think mattered enough to fight.  Now that’s change hypocrisy we can believe in.

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Otherwise known as the Health Care Summit.

Bruce McQuain at Q&O has a good round-up of the day’s talkfest. 

I’ve been watching and/or listening to the health care summit today and it became fairly obvious from the opening bell that there wasn’t going to be much of anything worthwhile or substantive accomplished – not that I’m surprised.   5 hours into it, it has been mostly the exchange of talking points.

Did anybody really think this was anything more than a very long press conference?  Or perhaps a fig leaf of "transparency" for a bill that has been worked out almost entirely in back rooms.

One thing I thought was interesting was that tort reform, often handwaved away as not really saving much, was shown to be something that, if Democrats are serious about controlling costs and not beholden to the trial lawyers, should be in any reform bill.

Republicans have argued for tort reform for medical malpractice. Democrats (Dick Durbin in particular) have argued against it. McCain used the Texas model to make the point for tort reform. Texas, which has instituted tort reform has seen malpractice premiums reduced by 27% and has had a net gain of 18,000 doctors – extrapolated nationally using direct savings (malpractice insurance premium cost) and indirect savings (reduction of the “defensive medicine” practiced by doctors) the amount saved could be in the $150 billion range.

Certainly worth putting in if the Democrats are serious.  We’ll see.

In going through anecdote after anecdote trying to prove their points, it seems one Democrat got the wrong moral of the story.

Chris Dodd is now telling a story about a guy who privately put together a small business health care association in CT. Of course the point lost on him as he argues for the government to act is it was done privately and perhaps the government’s role ought to be enabling that. Rep. Joe Barton is now making that point.

Local solutions to local problems, not one-size-fits-all square pegs in round holes.  Give the people the freedom to get done what they need to, and whadaya’ know; they will!

Bottom line – no bi-partisan attempt on either side to reach a compromise. And again, that’s fine.

Amen to that.

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When Democrats in Congress refused to vote for Republican bills during the Bush administration, they’d often cite the President’s poor approval rating numbers as demonstrating that the country didn’t want what Republicans were selling.  Never mind that their own approval ratings were often lower, that reason was used as a bludgeon over and over.

While Obama’s number have been tanking faster than any President in half a century, he’s not at Dubya-depths yet.  (Though, stay tuned.) Congress, however, can only pine for those heady days of 20-something approval.

Voter unhappiness with Congress has reached the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports as 71% now say the legislature is doing a poor job.

That’s up ten points from the previous high of 61% reached a month ago.

Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.

I don’t think legislation passage should necessarily be tied to approval ratings, but if you live by the polls, you’ll die by the polls. Will this Democratic Congress judge itself by the same standard it holds others to?

(Hint: No.)

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That was then:

We are in a war because the Generals want to play with their toys and don’t give a damn how many people get hurt in the process.  We are in a war without direction, or discipline, led by a disengaged simpleton who will do whatever he is told by the unelected war mongers who are running our government. 

This is now:

Now, we seem to be in a fight against a force of vicious murderers, using civilians as human shields, and misleading us at every turn, while taking a high toll on NATO troops.  But the military is not supposed to kill anyone?!!!

(Emphasis hers.)  Same DailyKos diarist, and encouraged in both statements by droves of commenters.  The difference?  The first was written in September, 2008 against the military causing the death of 90 civilians.  The second was written yesterday, against the president of Afghanistan condemning the deaths of 27 civilians.

That was then as well, by another Kos writer, who gets front page access.

One million dead. And each day, a few more. If that isn’t a reason to flood the streets in D.C. tomorrow and in your hometown all this week and next Friday for the Iraq Moratorium, what is?

But this is now, and it looks like the Left is going all warmonger on us in the Middle East.  Hey, it’s their guy doing it, so now they can take credit for it and declare victory. 

The double-standard-bearers are certainly hoping we won’t notice.  They probably don’t really notice themselves.

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A Knights of Columbus / Marist poll shows that the trend in the abortion debate is moving towards the pro-life side.  And not just from a political standpoint, but from a moral one as well.

On the eve of the 37th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the United States, a new survey shows a strong majority of Americans believe abortion to be "morally wrong."

"Millennials" (those 18-29) consider abortion to be "morally wrong" even more (58%) than Baby Boomers (those 45-64) (51%). Generation X (those 30-44) are similar to Millennials (60% see abortion as "morally wrong"). More than 6 in 10 of the Greatest Generation (those 65+) feel the same.

The most recent Knights of Columbus – Marist survey – conducted in late December and early January – is the latest in a series of such surveys commissioned by the Knights of Columbus and conducted by Marist Institute for Public Opinion. In October of 2008 and July of 2009, the survey has been tracking an increasing trend toward the pro-life position – a trend confirmed by Gallup and Pew surveys in mid-2009. K of C – Marist surveys are available online at www.kofc.org/moralcompass.

"Americans of all ages – and younger people in even greater numbers than their parents – see abortion as something morally wrong," said Supreme Knight Carl Anderson. "America has turned a corner and is embracing life – and in doing so is embracing a future they – and all of us – can be proud of."

I count myself as a Baby Boomer, in age if not general philosophy.  The "free love" ideas that this group fostered has put it out of the mainstream with generations before and after them.  I think this is a proper shunning of that mindset, and a great trend to see.

Polls are still, indeed, a temperature of temperament, but if this stays on course, as it appears to be doing, this could translate into more action to protect the least of "the least of these".

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From MIchael Ramirez (click for a larger version):

Why does Obama think he can avoid the same fate while piling up the same kind of debt? 

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Last week, Iran announced it can produce weapons-grade uranium.  British PM Gordon Brown spoke out "strongly".

As Gordon Brown warned that the world’s patience is wearing thin, Ahmadinejad told scores of cheering Iranians that the Islamic Republic is capable of producing weapons-grade uranium.

Does this remind anyone of Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam as they got red-faced and growled, just before Bugs Bunny again showed them for the fools they are?  I took Brown’s actual words and tossed them through The Dialectizer, and they sound much more "in character", shall we say.

‘I bewieve the mood awound the wowwd is now incweasingwy one whewe, patience not being inexhaustibwe, peopwe awe tuwning to wook at the specific sanctions we can pwan on Iwan,’ Mr Brown said. ‘Dis is a cwiticaw time fow Iwan’s wewationship wif the west of the wowwd.’

Follow this by dropping an anvil on his head to complete the mental picture.

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This Mountain Dew fan loved this headline:  "Indiana man survives on Mountain Dew after spending 3 days in snow-covered SUV in Colo."

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As my co-blogger on Stones Cry Out, Jim, noted earlier, the increased snow the US has seen is properly called "weather", vs. those who want to call it proof that there is no climate warming.  Equally, he has called out those who find one warmer-than-normal summer and call it definitive proof of warming.  It, too, is weather.

And while he is my co-blogger, Jim’s also my brother-in-law, and I took his note to "good friends and relatives" doubly to myself, as he and I are both of those (the latter if only by marriage). 

And so, in the same spirit, I offer this bit of climate information from Wes Pruden.

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.

Granted, 15 years of a reversing trend does not, in and of itself, prove that global warming isn’t happening.  However, it does call into question those computer models that didn’t predict this, it calls into question policies made based on those computer models, and 15 years is a fair bit longer than one winter or summer. 

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.

Terry Mills, a professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Loughborough University, looks at the U.N. panel’s data and applies a little skepticism. "The earth," he told London’s Daily Mail, "has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last thousand years."

The coup de grace of global warming science, the UN’s IPCC report, itself has had some of it’s claims exposed as fraudulent or included simply based on the biases of its authors.

The biggest issue coming out of this is that all of this information may have been still unknown to the public at large had someone not dumped data and e-mails from East Anglia and created "Climategate".  The only reason we know much of this is that someone broke through this new Iron Curtain and showed that there is more politics going on here than climate scientists were willing to admit.  And now the backpedaling is amazing to see.

So yes, let’s find out "weather" or not man is truly warming the planet, but let’s do it honestly and openly.  Doing it any other way is nothing but a power & money grab.

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The mechanical feats that have occurred at Olympic opening ceremonies keep getting more elaborate.  Last night’s lighting of the cauldron in Vancouver would’ve been spectacular if not for the problem with one of the pylons that was to emerge from the floor.  What a bummer.  Nice idea, though.

But the best cauldron lighting ever, in my mind, depended not on mechanics but solely on athleticism.  A million variables meant this could have gone anywhere from slightly to horribly wrong, but Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo nailed an amazing shot to light the torch in Barcelona in the summer of 1992.

Truly impressive.

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Today there was snow on the ground in 49 states. 

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Just after Barack Obama won the presidency, gun sales rose dramatically, in the fear that he’d be going out rounding up firearms.  Well, that round-up didn’t happen, but something else didn’t happen either; a rise in crime.

After all, it has been an article of faith among gun-control advocates that guns cause crime. That catechism was repeated relentlessly after the 2008 Heller ruling, in which the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on gun ownership: "Introducing more handguns into the District will mean more handgun violence," D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty lamented.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin agreed: "There is no question that this decision from the Supreme Court makes it harder for all mayors to keep their city safe," she told NPR. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley called the ruling "very frightening." The New York Times fumed the court had "all but ensured that even more Americans will die senselessly." The Chicago Tribune issued an equally nuanced and measured response: "Repeal the Second Amendment," it begged.

Yet despite a remarkable uptick in gun sales, during the first six months of 2009 violent crime fell 4.4 percent, property crime fell 6.6 percent, homicides fell 10 percent, and car thefts fell 19 percent.

As Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute recently pointed out, the falling crime rate was particularly precipitous in big cities such as Los Angeles, where homicides fell 17 percent in 2009, and New York, where they fell 19 percent.

If guns caused crime, then we should have expected precisely the opposite to happen — particularly given the related liberal belief, which Mac Donald dissects, that hard economic times drive people to desperate acts. Among others, she quotes a New York Times editorial in late 2008 fretting that "the economic crisis has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities." If liberal orthodoxy held true, then the combination of hard times and more guns should have made the past year a record-setting period for bloodshed. It didn’t.

And yet this perfect storm of circumstances, long held by liberals as a reason for crime, not only didn’t happen, but things went precisely in the opposite direction.  I’ve been noting this for over seven years now.

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Hey, what’s a few more cases of breast cancer when something so important as the "right" to an abortion is on the line?  For some, that’s just a necessary tradeoff.

A women’s group is asking Congress and the Obama administration to investigate the expose’ showing how a top National Cancer Institute researcher recently admitted that abortion causes a 40% breast cancer increase risk but organizing a meeting to get the NCI to deny it.

As LifeNews.com reported earlier this month [January], the main NCI activist who got the agency to deny the abortion-breast cancer link has co-authored a study admitting the abortion-breast cancer link is true, calling it a "known risk factor."

The study, conducted by Jessica Dolle and NCI official Louise Brinton, appears in the April 2009 issue of the prestigious cancer epidemiology journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

The Dolle study, conducted with Janet Daling of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, cited as accurate Daling’s studies from 1994 and 1996 that showed between a 20 and 50 percent increased breast cancer risk for women having abortions compare to those who carried their pregnancies to term.

Now, the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer informed LifeNews.com today it is sending a letter, signed by doctors and pro-life organizations to President Obama and the leaders of Congress calling for an investigation of the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

Karen Malec, the head of the group, told LifeNews.com the letter "puts political leaders on notice of a discrepancy between what the National Cancer Institute says about the breast cancer risks of abortion … and what Louise Brinton, the NCI’s Chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch, has reported in her research."

"The letter asks Congress to investigate the NCI’s failure to issue timely warnings about breast cancer risks and asks political leaders to remove public funding for abortion from all legislation being considered by this Congress," she said.

The truth doesn’t matter to these people.  What’s more important is the freedom to kill their inconvenient children.  Are those the kind of politics your vote supports?

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In one of the McCain/Obama debates, candidate Obama promised this:

So there are some — some things that we’ve got to do structurally to make sure that we can compete in this global economy. We can’t shortchange those things. We’ve got to eliminate programs that don’t work, and we’ve got to make sure that the programs that we do have are more efficient and cost less.

OK then, how about the Head-Start program?  Does it work?  Not according to HHS.

“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An earlier iteration of the study, published in 2005, had found a few modest improvements in the language skills of participating students while they were enrolled in the program. But by the end of the first grade, even those few effects have disappeared, according to the follow-up released this month. Out of 44 separate cognitive tests given to former Head Start students at the end of the first grade, only two showed even marginally significant effects. The other 42 showed no statistically significant effect at all.

But even that overstates the case for Head Start. That’s because, on each of the 44 separate tests, there is a 1 in 10 chance of a false positive: a test result that appears to show a positive impact but is really just a random fluke. With so many test results, we’d expect to see at least a few false positives. Statisticians have ways to control for this problem, and when the authors themselves applied such a control, they found that the two apparently “significant” effects vanished.

What’s more, this applies to all the non-cognitive tests administered to students as well. After controlling for the likelihood of false positives, the study’s authors found no “socio-emotional” benefits and no “parenting practice” benefits either. No benefits to Head Start of any kind at the end of first grade. None.

Government education programs just give liberals the warm fuzzies, but we’ve spent half a century dumping money down this particular drain and no Democrat worth his NEA card would dare touch it.  Certainly President Obama won’t; he increased funding by more than a full one-third last year, and he shows no sign of stopping.

We’re not getting our money’s worth with Head Start, so how about funding another program that shows demonstrable results?

But President Obama and Congress have already had a golden opportunity to show that they will heed their own scientific evidence, supporting what works and what is efficient: the D.C. private school voucher program. The latest Department of Education study revealed that after attending private schools for three years, voucher-receiving students were reading more than two grade levels ahead of the randomized control group who had remained in public schools. What’s more, the average voucher value was a mere $6,600, compared to D.C. per-pupil education spending of over $28,000.

What did Congress do to the program that has proven itself dramatically more effective and many times more efficient than D.C.’s public system? They decided to sunset its funding, effectively killing it. What did President Obama do to save it? Nothing. He let it die despite having previously said that “if there was any argument for vouchers it was, ‘Let’s see if the experiment works.’ And if it does, whatever my preconception, you do what’s best for kids.”

Or not.

Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.  Democrats kill education programs that work and pour money into those that don’t.  The voucher program is a classic conservative, free-market approach to education, and it works.  We need more policies like it.

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What if I told you that we’re spending as much on defense now as we were when Jimmy Carter was President?  Yeah, I’d laugh, too.  But the Cato Institute notes that, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, defense spending is indeed at late-1970s levels.

What’s also interesting to see is that non-defense spending, by the same measure, having stayed at about the same percentage of GDP for 30 years or so, has skyrocketed under Obama.

(Click on the image for the accompanying article.)

Defense spending, a constitutional role of government, is really not the problem when it comes to our national debt.  Just an FYI.

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