If All You See…

By William Teach November 5, 2013 – 1:00 pm

…is a horrible dog which will cause the global temperature to go up 5 degrees, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Sweetness and Light, with a post on how many have lost their insurance so far.

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Flat Earth Warmists Really Upset About Nature Changing In Alaska

By William Teach November 5, 2013 – 11:23 am

How dare the biosphere of the Earth ever change?

(Alaska Dispatch) Dead seals littering beaches, bolts of fur dangling from deer, white worms squiggling in the meat of freshly killed grouse.

Incidents like these are some of the dozens of reports from the front lines of climate change in rural Alaska, where a volunteer army of observers is documenting unusual events to warn of potential health threats as new plants, bugs and animals migrate to the Far North.

My goodness, worms in dead grouse? Has that ever happened in the history of the world? And dead seals? I thought they lived forever!!!!1!!! Deer shedding? Good grief!

Odd insects that crawl like spiders and open and close their pincers while walking have been spotted in Kotzebue, said local observer Maija Lukin.

Boy howdy, how could new species that we’ve never seen before come about? Hasn’t there always just been a fixed amount?

“Insects that we have never seen are a threat to the ecosystem that we have here,” she wrote. “We don’t need new insects arriving and eating anything except mosquitoes!”

Love the qualifier at the end.

Taken together, the events can provide insight into important trends, such as the geographic range of deaths from sick seals that washed onto Alaska’s beaches, part of an “unusual mortality event” that began two years ago and prompted an international investigation by researchers. Why scores of seals got sick and died in that event is still unknown.

Unknown? Interesting, because the beginning of the article seemed to blame “climate change”.

Read: Flat Earth Warmists Really Upset About Nature Changing In Alaska »

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ENDA May Not Get A Vote In House

By William Teach November 5, 2013 – 9:25 am

Here’s what John Boehner’s spokesperson had to say

(Politico) “The Speaker believes this legislation will increase frivolous litigation and cost American jobs, especially small business jobs,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in an email Monday.

That’s one of the problems Republicans had when ENDA was passed in 2007, when Democrats owned both the House and Senate. Here’s the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, who conveniently forgets to include some information

Today John Boehner declared he opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and senior House GOP aides said the bill is unlikely to get a House vote — putting its passage in doubt.

So perhaps it’s worth recalling some historical context: Two well known House Republican leaders voted for ENDA the last time it was put to a House vote, in 2007: Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP’s vice presidential candidate in 2012, and Rep. Greg Walden, who as NRCC chair is in charge of protecting the House GOP majority.

The Democrats stripped out the provisions regarding LGBTs (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered), ie, “gender identity”, for the 2007 attempt, which stalled in the Democrat led Senate, after first dying in a House committee because of the “gender identity” provisions. Barney Frank submitted separate legislation on the issue.  They added the provisions back in for the 2009 vote, which failed again, even though Dems still controlled the House and Senate, and also had a Democrat president who said he supported the legislation.

In fairness, in those same interviews, both Ryan and Walden opposed the inclusion of protections for transgender Americans. And that protection is in the current version set to pass the Senate. But Boehner’s statement grounds House GOP opposition to today’s version of ENDA in the notion that it will lead to frivolous lawsuits and kill jobs, not in transgender protections.

What ENDA is about, as I noted yesterday, is an attempt to change the discussion away from the utter failure of Obamacare and get back to assaulting Republicans. If it couldn’t pass in 2009 and 2010 with full Democrat control of Congress and the White House, they knew it wouldn’t go through now. This is a political game.

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Obama Changes “If You Like Your Plan…” Messaging

By William Teach November 5, 2013 – 8:56 am

I wonder how this would have played prior to the 2012 elections? (Real Clear Politics has the video)

(Fox News) The president told about 200 of his campaign supporters and health care activists Monday that the administration had promised Americans they could keep their current coverage — as long as their plans hadn’t changed since ObamaCare was signed into law.

“If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law’s passed,” Obama said. “So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act you are grandfathered in on that plan. But if the insurance company changes it, then what we’re saying is they have got to change it to a higher standard. They’ve got to make it better.”

Really? That’s “what we said”? Let’s go to the video tape

Did anyone hear any qualifiers? I did hear “If you like your plan and doctor, you won’t have to do a thing. You can keep your plan.” People aren’t receiving change notifications, they are receiving pure cancellation notices because the insurance companies are required to make big changes to the plans because of Obama’s POS signature legislation. He and his people…OK…mostly his people because he’s too lazy to be involved in any actual work…intentionally crafted rules which blew out the grandfathering of plans. They new back in 2010 this would happen.

The Lonely Conservative calls Obama a pathological liar.

Scared Monkeys notes that Obama is doubling down on his lies.

Newsbusters notes how Obama told Senator Kyle in 2010 that you could keep your not so good Acme plan.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

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A Dying Culture

By William Teach November 4, 2013 – 8:56 pm

Thoughts of the night from the late Robert Heinlein, from his novel Friday

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot…”

What made me think about that quote was a minor confrontation this morning. I went to the community gym, and this lady saw me right behind her and still didn’t even bother to hold the door into the community center. I was right behind her going to the door into the gym area. She again failed.

On the way out, I didn’t bother holding the door for her (it was serendipitous that we left at same time. Was not planned). She started laying into me, saying how rude and nasty I was. When I pointed out that she had done the same thing twice, she told me that was different, and was talking about herself. I just turned and left. Along with the gross growth of the Entitlement mentality has also brought on a loss of politeness and manners, a loss of consideration.

I’m sure we each run into this little losses on a daily timescale. People not only think they’re entitled, but the do it at the expense of others.

A few others:

  • “‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
  • “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”
  • “The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.”
  • “Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.”

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Trial Balloon: Obamacare Fixes The Problem Of Insurers Ripping Off Consumers With Lousy Plans

By William Teach November 4, 2013 – 1:21 pm

There’s political spin, then there’s plain lying. Obama was plain lying when he said you could keep your plan (and doctor). Then there are those who are attempting to protect Obama, Democrats, and Obamacare. Many of them have crossed the line from spin to performing an oral sexual act. Yesterday we had the big NY Times editorial saying Obama “misspoke”. You know, like at least 27 times. I’ve documented others, now here comes Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer

The Real Story Behind the Phony Canceled Health Insurance Scandal

Insurance companies ripped off Americans for years with lousy health plans. Obamacare was designed to fix that.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama first promised that people who liked their insurance coverage would be able to keep it under the Affordable Care Act, he overlooked one critical fact: Many of the health policies that Americans like are terrible insurance plans that were created to scam consumers. (snip)

The media have covered these complaints with gusto, as if the cancellations are a genuine crisis and indication of a failure of Obama’s health care law. The ACA was designed specifically to prevent insurance companies from peddling lousy insurance plans and to force these firms to replace these subpar products with affordable plans providing better and effective coverage. The plans being canceled are ending because they offered insufficient coverage—and only a few years ago both Rs and Ds were upset about these kinds of plans. But there’s been collective amnesia about the shoddy plans that GOPers have happily exploited in recent days. Perhaps Obama should have said, “Those of you who obtain insurance on the individual market can keep your plans unless it’s the sort of rip-off plan the ACA will forbid. Otherwise, you will be offered new options that actually give you decent coverage at a decent price.”

So much fail in so few words. The “A”CA was never designed to do any of those things, at least as how it was portrayed by Democrats. The idea was to offer quality, affordable health insurance to those who couldn’t afford it or couldn’t get it. Not to force mandates down the throats of insurers and consumers causing the plans to be cancelled. We could easily get into the nuts and bolts, but this is simply a huge pile of mule fritters in an attempt to defend the law which the majority of Americans hate.

As far as for what Obama should have said, well, he didn’t. He said something else.

As some guy said “don’t tell me that words don’t matter.”

Read: Trial Balloon: Obamacare Fixes The Problem Of Insurers Ripping Off Consumers With Lousy Plans »

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If All You See…

By William Teach November 4, 2013 – 1:00 pm

…is an evil fridge that should be restricted from people in “developing nations”, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is A View From The Beach, with a post noting that Brits find no problem with fracking.

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Richmond Paper Suggests Warmists Stop The “Climate Porn”

By William Teach November 4, 2013 – 11:27 am

I hadn’t actually heard the term “climate porn”, so it must be a good day, I learned something new! Anyhow, this editorial from the Richmond Times Dispatch is interesting in that it tends to take a moderate view, rather than the typical unhinged doom and gloom we typically hear/read from Warmists

Editorial: Block the porn

Climate-change deniers might be the worst enemies of sound science — we accept the scientific consensus regarding man-made global warming — but climate-change alarmists are quickly catching up. By making unsupportable claims that deniers and skeptics can easily knock down, the alarmists undermine their own case.

Well, you can’t expect Warmists to do away entirely with their “anti-science” meme, can you?

Seemingly every major weather event — hurricane, heat wave, snow storm, flood, or drought — is accompanied by overwrought suggestions that global warming is to blame, or might be, or that it probably will be in the future because climate change “loads the dice,” or because — well, just look at these pictures of the devastation. Do you really need any more proof?

The actual picture is far more nuanced. While hurricane intensity has increased (WT-no, not really, it hasn’t), there has been no global increase in hurricane frequency. Last year’s drought in the U.S. was considerably milder than the droughts of the 1930s and 1950s. As for temperature extremes, science writer Bjorn Lomborg says global warming “will mean . . . more heat waves. . . . But it also causes fewer cold waves — less extreme weather. Many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, so fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future. By mid-century, researchers estimated in 2006, that means about 1.4 million fewer deaths per year.”

One thing that’s missing amongst the reality is proof of anthropogenic causation. Most “skeptics” understand that the current warm period is mostly/solely caused by nature. Most anthropogenic causes are from agriculture and landfills on a global scale, while the urban heat island effect (UHI) and land usage play the biggest roles in giving the appearance of massive warming.

The editorial goes on to note that the 15 year pause does great damage to the prognostications and computer models of Warmists

It isn’t proof at all. It — or at least the publicity surrounding it — is, rather, what skeptics call “climate porn.” The quintessential example of climate porn is a picture of a polar bear balanced precariously on a shrinking hunk of ice. The image is supposed to provoke an emotional reaction — save the polar bears, stop global warming! — but it conveys little information.

In fact, conservatives sometimes claim the population of polar bears has increased in recent decades. Those claims are unprovable, because polar bear counts from earlier decades were just wild guesses. Asked if polar bear numbers are rising or falling, an honest scientist will say he doesn’t know — and neither does anyone else.

If we can’t claim that numbers are improving (which they actually are during the study times), Warmists can’t claim that they dropped. Warmists use “climate porn” to get that emotional response. They turn the dial to 11, go way beyond sanity and science, all in an attempt to push their narrow, cult like Progressive dogma.

I’d like to assign good motives to those who wrote the editorial, but, color my skeptical. I’ve spent many years watching, reading, and listening to Progressives/Lefties. I would suspect the editorial is telling Warmists to cool it with the bat guano crazy talk, writings, and visual material, because it hurts their efforts to use “climate change” to push for bigger and bigger government with more and more control over citizens and businesses while enacting redistributive programs, making people more and more reliant on Government.

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The Washinton Post Notices That There Are Lots Of Losers In Obamacare

By William Teach November 4, 2013 – 8:11 am

Bloomberg’s Megan McCardle notices that consumers were sold a lemon (too bad Obama’s Consumer Protection Agency can’t do anything about that bad actor, Barack Obama), based on a New Yorker article which states that most people will either be winners or unaffected. What’s the reality?

(Washington Post) Americans who face higher ­insurance costs under President Obama’s health-care law are angrily complaining about “sticker shock,” threatening to become a new political force opposing the law even as the White House struggles to convince other consumers that they will benefit from it.

The growing backlash involves people whose plans are being discontinued because the policies don’t meet the law’s more-stringent standards. They’re finding that many alternative policies come with higher premiums and deductibles. (snip past yet another story of someone losing their plan and paying a lot more)

If the poor, sick and uninsured are the winners under the Affordable Care Act, the losers appear to include some relatively healthy middle-income small-business owners, consultants, lawyers and other self-employed workers who buy their own insurance. Many make too much to qualify for new federal subsidies provided by the law but not enough to absorb the rising costs without hardship. Some are too old to go without insurance because they have children or have minor health issues, but they are too young for Medicare.

They’re losers by design. The “Affordable” Care Act needs healthy people with good jobs to pay for all the people who aren’t healthy and are getting subsidies, along with the massive number of people being moved to Medicaid. The rules set up by HHS, which was granted enormous power and latitude to establish How Obamacare Works by the horribly written law, bake the cake to make some winners and many many more losers.

Remember, we haven’t even gotten to the point where employers are receiving their cancellation notices.

Others are upset because they don’t want coverage for services they’ll never need or their doctors don’t participate in any of their new insurance options.

Again, this was baked in the cake. The extra coverages are cover for the bad parts of the law, much like the “popular” ideas, like insurers not being able to cancel coverage or deny coverage. This gives Democrats talking points about how much better the coverage is than before. The reality is people will pay more for things they will never use, and that extra money goes to make up for those who will overuse and/or aren’t healthy. Reducing the coverage system will also reduce costs. Baked into the system, just like Conservatives said would happen.

Instead of creating a system where everyone was a winner, which is what government should do (except in cases of criminal activity), they created a system where most with insurance will be losers.

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Obama Pushes ENDA, Shows He Still Has No Clue How Business Works

By William Teach November 4, 2013 – 7:47 am

Yes, the business of Government must move along with more than one issue, but, in reality, Obama jumping in on ENDA, the Employer Non-Discrimination Act, is simply red meat thrown to Democrats who have lost faith in him over the idiocy of Obamacare and NSA spying. He just tried the same thing last week with new “rules” on “climate change” (which, incidentally, vastly increased the power of the executive branch of the federal government in your lives). He’s also attempting to gin up yet another fight with Republicans

Congress Needs to Pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act

Here in the United States, we’re united by a fundamental principle: we’re all created equal and every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law. We believe that no matter who you are, if you work hard and play by the rules, you deserve the chance to follow your dreams and pursue your happiness. That’s America’s promise.

Funny, because agencies under his direction are not treating American citizens equally. Also funny, because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars discrimination based on “race, color, national origin, sex, and religion.” The Act a good chunk of Democrats opposed. And that there are many laws that bar discrimination. Including ENDA in 2007.

That’s why, for instance, Americans can’t be fired from their jobs just because of the color of their skin or for being Christian or Jewish or a woman or an individual with a disability. That kind of discrimination has no place in our nation. And yet, right now, in 2013, in many states a person can be fired simply for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

As a result, millions of LGBT Americans go to work every day fearing that, without any warning, they could lose their jobs — not because of anything they’ve done, but simply because of who they are.

Interestingly, he fails to include one single example of people being fired for being gay or cross-dressers. I’m sure there are a tiny, miniscule number of stories of LGBT’s being terminated, some, if not most, of which are really about being a substandard employee or having engaged in misconduct rather than being LGBT. Oh, and conservatives and their groups have been singled out by the Obama regime.

That’s why Congress needs to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, also known as ENDA, which would provide strong federal protections against discrimination, making it explicitly illegal to fire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. This bill has strong bipartisan support and the support of a vast majority of Americans. It ought to be the law of the land.

Really? I doubt most have ever heard of it before or know what it does.

Business agrees. The majority of Fortune 500 companies and small businesses already have nondiscrimination policies that protect LGBT employees. These companies know that it’s both the right thing to do and makes good economic sense. They want to attract and retain the best workers, and discrimination makes it harder to do that.

So most businesses already have policies? So why is there a need for Government? And here’s where he really shows why the country is mired in economic malaise during his presidency

So too with our nation. If we want to create more jobs and economic growth and keep our country competitive in the global economy, we need everyone working hard, contributing their ideas, and putting their abilities to use doing what they do best. We need to harness the creativity and talents of every American.

He seems to think that jobs just magically appear because people are creative and because they want them. And because LGBT’s can’t be fired for being LGBT. And that increasing the power of the Federal Government will somehow increase hiring. But, then, can we really expect more from the Most Partisan President Ever, who has never run a business, never had to make a payroll, never had to deal with tough employee situations?

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

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