Cartoon Round Up

From SOTU to SNAFU

By Alan Caruba

Despite the rosy scenario provided by the President’s State of the Union (SOTU) Speech on February 12, a far more realistic presentation was made on February 13 by Douglas W. Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO is apolitical and non-partisan, relying solely on the cold hard facts about the economy that are gleaned from the data it gathers and its role of advising Congress.

The CBO are the government’s bean-counters and, not surprisingly, the mainstream media paid Elmendoft little attention, thus rendering Americans subject to the bloviations of the President and members of Congress who, as we know, have not received a budget from the White House in three years, despite the Constitutional obligation to provide one.

The government has been running on “continuing resolutions” and political battles have focused on raising the “debt ceiling”, the ability to borrow more and more to cover its spending addiction. It is government on a credit card and as the global economy slows, so does ours.

Elmendorf addressed the House Committee on the Budget because all bills affecting spending must constitutionally be initiated in the House. The bills to reform entitlement programs and the tax dode, and address the national debt that the House has sent the Senate have died there.

Elmendorft’s subject was the budget and economic outlook for the fiscal years 2013 to 2023. It is an economic forecast and baseline budget projections.

“Economic growth will remain slow this year,” said Elmendorf, but “after this year, economic growth will speed up.” But not by much. The unemployment rate will remain “above 7½ percent through next year “and, if that happens, 2014 will be “the sixth consecutive year with unemployment exceeding 7½ of the labor force—the longest such period in the past 70 years.”

While deficits (the difference between the revenue the government takes in and the spending it authorizes) will shrink to $845 billion, “its smallest size since 2008”, the CBO anticipates that they will rise in the coming decade due to “pressures of an aging population, rising health care costs, the expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance, and growing interest payments on federal debt.”

“As a result, federal debt held by the public is projected to remain historically high relative to the size of the economy for the next decade…such a large debt would increase the risk of a fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose so much confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget that the government would be unable to borrow at affordable rates.”

Need it be said that President Obama has tripled the nation’s debt in his first term in office? Or that the nation's credit rating was reduced?

The reality facing the economy is slow growth, barely 1.4 percent this year. “That pace is much slower than the average growth rate of potential GDP since 1950.”

The President’s proposed “investments” (spending!) on absurd “renewable energy”, wind and solar, are a very bad idea, along with the nearly 30 other proposed “investments” and projections of the costs of Obamacare, a massive government program, are characteristically unrealistic, disconnected from reality. His claims about growth in the energy sector did not include the fact that it has occurred mainly on privately owned land, while continuing to deter is expansion domestically and offshore.

The SOTU was yet another opportunity since 2008 to repeat that “nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.” I am still waiting for the mainstream media to challenge him on this, but unfortunately everyone will have to wait four years more before we don’t have to listen to it again.

The House Committee on the Budget has been provided with the facts, even if the public remains only vaguely aware of them. What the public will encounter is a growing population of older Americans that will be a drag on the economy through no fault of their own. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid represent, automatically, forty percent of all government expenditures. An entire generation of younger Americans, often saddled with college debt, will encounter problems finding employment commensurate with their education and skills.

The other reality is a Congress dithering over new efforts at gun control and the usual plethora of new spending bills that are oblivious to a growing national debt that currently exceeds $16 trillion. The debt ceiling will be raised because there is no alternative. Sequestration cuts—the result of a 2011 bipartisan failure to address spending—will represent a minimum impact on domestic spending and a dangerous impact on defense if they kick in.

The President’s ideological devotion to the notion that government can “fix” every problem and create job growth is a Marxist fantasy that will affect everyone’s life in the decade ahead. The sum total of the CBO projections is that socialism does not work and capitalism, when it is allowed to function, does.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Happy Valentine's Day

May you find or have found
the true love of your life.

What the Sex Lives of California Mice Can Tell You

By Alan Caruba

According to Cheryl Rosenfeld, an associate professor of biomedical sciences in the University of Missouri’s Bond Life Science Center, loading up a bunch of California mice with a mega-dose of bisphenol A (BPA) showed researchers that “What we have observed in those models is that BPA affects male rodents differently from females.”

The February 11 UM news release that announced this was titled “Bisphenol A affects sex-specific reproductive behaviors in a monogamous animal species” with a sub-headline that said “Animal findings suggest that gender may also influence chemical risks for humans.”

So, humans are expected to demand that BPA be banned based on the behavior of BPA-besotted California mice, but not the deer mice on which previous similar research was conducted. As noted in the release, “The two rodent species have contrasting mating behaviors.” That’s right, it depends on the sexual proclivities of the species of the mice involved and one has to make a mighty leap of faith that Ms. Rosenfeld’s research applies to humans.

Rosenfeld’s earlier work received notice in a January 2, 2013 Science Daily article which pointed out that, “Following a three-year study using more than 2,800 mice, a University of Missouri researcher was not able to replicate a series of previous studies by another research group investigating the controversial chemical BPA.”

A synopsis of the earlier study noted that “Rosenfeld’s group extended the studies to include animal numbers that surpassed the prior studies to verify their findings were not a fluke and to provide sufficient numbers of animals to ensure that significant differences would be detected if they existed. However, even these additional numbers of animals and extended experiments failed to reproduce the earlier findings.”

It’s worth noting that Ms. Rosenfeld’s later research involving monogamous California mice represented a dose that is a 1,000 times greater than a human would ingest. This research suggests that the anticipated outcome would demonstrate that BPA is harmful.

It reflects a global propaganda campaign to ban a chemical that has been safely in use for fifty years. This campaign is the subject of my six-part series on BPA that can be found at http://thebpafile.blogspot.com/, a blog I maintain that includes other articles on the subject.

As noted on The BPA File, “In 2011, ‘the German Society of Toxicology released a review of more than five thousand previous studies of PBA exposure that concluded that BPA exposure represents no noteworthy risk to the health of the human population, including newborns and babies. Researchers concluded that BPA is neither mutagenic nor likely to be a carcinogen.”

Five thousand studies! At what point does 50 years of safe use to coat the insides of aluminum food cans, protecting the contents against food pathogens such as botulism, put this campaign by environmental groups and others to rest? How many more studies do we need to demonstrate the safety of BPA in making shatterproof safety goggles, DVDs, and scores of other products we use every day?

In March 2012 an Associated Press health reporter, Matthew Perrone, reported that “The Food and Drug Administration has rejected a petition from environmentalists (the Natural Resources Defense Council) that would have banned the plastic-hardening chemical bisphenal-A from all food and drink packaging, including plastic bottles and canned food.” The petition was rejected because the “petitioners did not present compelling scientific evidence to justify new restrictions…”

How compelling is yet another study that involved feeding California mice 1,000 times more BPA than humans would ever ingest? And how would any rational person conclude that alleged changes in monogamous California mice—but not the polygamous deer mice—could be extrapolated to suggest that humans would be affected?

An August 8, 2011 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, “Postscript to a Panic”, noted a study, “financed by the EPA…involved feeding (human) subjects a BPA-rich diet for 24 hours. Researchers then monitored their blood and urine for traces of the chemical” only to find that “the result was BPA levels too low to detect.”

The sheer absurdity of the campaign to get BPA banned reflects a deeper, more sinister agenda by environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council. It is the belief that the Earth’s human population must be reduced to protect it. Banning BPA would put millions at risk of death from food-borne diseases like botulism.

Given the tenacity with which such groups prosecute their agendas, we can be assured that these obsessed anti-BPA “researchers” aren’t going to go away.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Obama's Do Nothing Iran Policy

By Alan Caruba

Since the 1979 Iranian revolution in which American diplomats in Tehran were taken hostage and held for 444 days, the U.S. has had no discernible policy regarding Iran except to talk endlessly about talking with the handful of ayatollahs that have run that prison nation ever since their takeover. The Shah was no choir boy, but he was a reliable ally. Iran has been in a virtual state of war with the U.S. for 34 years.

When John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as our new Secretary of State, Reuters reported that “Iran’s supreme leader Thursday (Feb 7) strongly rejected proposals for direct talks with the United States, effectively quashing suggestions for a breakthrough one-on-one dialogue on the nuclear standoff and potentially other issues.” Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continues to make it clear that Iran views America as its most detested enemy.

The other piece of news that day was that the USS Harry S. Truman, an aircraft carrier, would not leave for the Persian Gulf as part of the Department of Defense’s two-carrier policy that has been in effect for the past two years. The decision was based on the sequestration expected to go into effect that would cut $4 billion over the next six months, the last half of fiscal year 2013.

Secretary Kerry will be a reliable hand puppet for President Obama. Recall that, during the 2009 protests in the streets of Tehran, Obama offered no support whatever to the Iranian people, saying instead that he didn’t think the U.S. should “meddle” in its internal affairs. In effect, he abandoned the Iranians to further tribulations.

Obama did the same when he over-ruled his entire state, defense and intelligence community by refusing to arm the insurgents in Syria, a major ally of Iran. A Wall Street Journal editorial said, “Syria is showing how doing nothing has costs of its own. By overruling his advisors, Mr. Obama has prolonged Syria’s civil war, increased regional instability, and delivered a strategic gift to Iran, the main enemy of Israel and the U.S.”

Kerry’s foreign policy as chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee was that the United States must be “respected” when negotiating with dictators. Iran has never shown any respect for the U.S. It has, in fact, a long history of supporting terrorists that have attacked U.S. embassies. It recently sent its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on a mission to Egypt to establish better relations since it slid into the control of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Whether it is Iran, Egypt or anywhere else in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world, under Obama the U.S. has been steadily withdrawing from showing any overt support for opponents of tyranny whether it was providing missile defense in Poland or its “lead from behind” approach to efforts to overthrow dictators.

The timeline of U.S. blather about Iran would be amusing if it were not so deadly serious. In 2009 Obama said, “My expectation would be that if we can begin discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian elections, we should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction…” The only direction Iran has been moving has been the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

By 2012, Obama was still talking about discussions with Iran. “We want them to demonstrate clearly in the actions they propose that they have truly abandoned any nuclear weapons ambition.”

Every U.S. administration has sought to open a dialogue with Iran and all have failed. At some point, one would expect those in office to draw some conclusions from this. Indeed, all the efforts of the United Nations, particularly that of its International Atomic Energy Agency, have been complete failures. At some point, Iran’s nuclear weapons program must be destroyed by military means and one suspects everyone is hoping Israel will do it for them.

There appears to be a complete lack of understanding that Iran’s leaders still operate with a seventh century mentality. One way to grasp this is a recent news story about the public amputation of a convicted thief’s fingers. It was broadcast on television. In addition, he had been sentenced to three years in prison and 99 lashes. A week earlier two men convicted of mugging a man at knife point were publicly hanged in Tehran from a pair of cranes. Such punishments are the norm in Iran. As in all authoritarian regimes, such public punishments keep the population in a state of fear.

A variety of sanctions on Iran has created internal problems, but has not deterred its drive for nuclear weapons. Unlike other nations, the factor of irrational religion-based beliefs makes Iran more dangerous.

In effect, the Obama administration policy toward Iran is little more than vague talk of negotiations that will never occur. Financial problems at home have triggered a drawdown of our ability to project power in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the world.  If history is a guide, this is likely to encourage increased Iranian aggression.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Protecting Global Warming Liars

By Alan Caruba

The debasement of science continues as various elements, organizations and publications, and the mainstream media circle the wagons to protect those who continue to spread lies about global warming.

Most recently, the National Geographic Science Blogs have added Dr. Peter Gleick to its roster of contributors despite the fact that he stole documents from The Heartland Institute in 2012, creating and disseminated a phony “memo" to defame the 28-year-old, non-profit research organization.

In his initial National Geographic blog post, Dr. Glieck described himself as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is also the president of the Pacific Institute. Among the topics he intends to address are “misrepresentations of science.”

You can read the facts about his deception on www.fakegate.org, a website Heartland created after Dr. Glieck’s aborted effort to spread a variety of lies about its funding and efforts to debunk the global warming hoax. Dr. Glieck admitted to this and one would think that such behavior would not be rewarded, but neither the National Geographic nor the Pacific Institute and other organizations that claim to be devoted to scientific accuracy and ethics were bothered in the least.

He was welcomed back to the Pacific Institute with a statement that blandly stated that Dr. Glieck “has apologized publicity for his actions, which are not condoned by the Pacific Institute of Directors and run counter to the Institute’s policies and standards of ethics over its 25-year history. The Board accepts Dr. Glieck’s apology for his lapse of judgment.”

Lapse of judgment? Using deception to deliberately slander the Heartland Institute is hardly a lapse of judgment. Those invested in keeping the global warming hoax alive are happy to forgive and forget, and hope the public does so as well.

At a recent convention of the American Geophysical Union, Dr. Glieck was among the featured speakers, along with Michael Mann, a key figure in “Climategate”, the 2009 exposure of emails between himself and other global warming schemers. Mann is famous for creating false data to support it and, in 2012, claimed to have been a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize! The Norwegian Nobel Institute issued a statement “affirming that climate scientist, Michael Mann lied…”

Penn State University where Michael Mann remains on the faculty despite his Nobel Peace Prize lie, the university simply scrubbed its websites and official documentation of his claim.

Considering that global warming is a lie from start to finish, one must conclude that all those involved have few, if any, qualms about lying. Indeed, this year the American Geophysical Union honored Dr. Glieck as a new AGU Fellow.

A year earlier, then AGU president, Michael McPherson stated that Dr. Glieck’s “transgression cannot be condoned” and had “compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society.” But that was last year and AGU has the same short memory as other scientific organizations that have put their reputations on the line for global warming.

Other professions, such as the law, drum out such people, deny them the right to practice law in the courts, and treat them with contempt when they engage in criminal or unethical behavior, but in the world of science these days, such behavior ends up being rewarded and, by inference, defended.

It is not surprising that National Geographic has provided Dr. Glieck a platform for his defense of global warming. It has long perpetrated all the global warming lies we associate with the hoax.

It is not surprising that AGU has honored Dr. Glieck barely a year after the revelations of his attack on The Heartland Institute.

It is not surprising that Michael Mann remains on the faculty of Penn State University and continues to earn thousands for speeches about global warming.

Nor should we be surprised that Al Gore who spent years campaigning against fossil fuels as the “cause” of global warming should sell his television channel to Al Jazeera, funded by Qatar, a leading oil producer.

What we are witnessing is the web of deception, a global conspiracy joined by governments, including our own, to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Its victims are those forced to pay higher prices for the energy provided by traditional sources, oil, natural gas, and oil, along with the higher cost of gasoline that must be blended with ethanol even if it damages the engines of our automobiles and drives up the cost of food as a large percentage of our corn crop is diverted for its production.

If the so-called “greenhouse gas emissions” of carbon dioxide can be taxed governments such as Australia’s benefit while the industries and businesses affected are defrauded and even driven to close their doors. Carbon dioxide does not trap heat. The Earth balances its absorption and release. It is a minor gas in the atmosphere, barely 0.038%

There was a time when science adhered to strict rules of ethical behavior. When those are thrown overboard, everyone is victimized.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Obama's Carbon Dioxide Lies

By Alan Caruba

The utter desperation of the “Warmists”, the advocates of global warming—now called climate change—is evident in a recent “study” reported in the Daily Caller in which “an international team of researchers” concluded that “earthworms could be contributing to global warming.” Earthworms! 

That's how stupid they think the public is.

 

It is useful to know the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, the object of much fear-mongering by Greens and Warmists. According to Wikipedia, “Air is the name given to the atmosphere used in breathing and photosynthesis. Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1%. While air content and atmospheric pressure vary at different layers, air suitable for the survival of terrestrial plants and terrestrial animals is currently only known to be found in Earth's troposphere and artificial atmospheres."

The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is extraordinarily low compared to its other elements. Edmund Contoski, the author of the award-winning “Makers and Takers”, a study of how wealth and progress is created or thwarted, has noted that “Not only is carbon dioxide’s total greenhouse effect puny, mankind’s contribution to it is minuscule. The overwhelming majority (97%) of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere comes from nature, not from man.”

Not only are worms contributing to the CO2 in the atmosphere, but Contoski notes that “Volcanoes, swamps, rice paddies, fallen leaves, and even insects and bacteria alone emit ten times more carbon dioxide than all the factories and automobiles in the world. Natural wetlands emit more greenhouse gases than all human activities combined.” Contoski’s data is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy which also notes that 98% of all the carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed again by Nature.

According to a February 5 Wall Street Journal article, President Obama’s forthcoming State of the Union speech “will lay out a renewed effort to combat climate change that is expected to include using his authority to curb emissions from existing power plants…Mr. Obama is likely to signal he wants to move beyond proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules on emissions from new power plants and tackle existing coal-fired plants…”

There is not a scintilla of evidence that reducing carbon dioxide to avoid global warming has any basis in science, but ample evidence that Obama sees it as a way to reduce the nation’s capacity to generate the energy—electricity—it requires for economic growth. The effort to impose a carbon tax would suck more wealth out of the private sector while fueling the government’s insatiable desire for more funding.

The administration’s efforts to maintain this absurd, baseless notion were on full display when a report was released in January by the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee, claiming that “humans have so altered the composition of the atmosphere that the next glaciation (ice age) has now been delayed indefinitely.” The northeastern states were hit with a monster blizzard in February.

In late December, The Heartland Institute brought together fourteen conservative think tanks and advocacy groups to urge Congress to oppose carbon taxes. In a letter sent to all U.S. Senators and Representatives, they pointed out that a new tax on carbon content of fossil fuels would be a job killer and raise energy costs across the board, “hurting every industry and every consumer.” The letter noted that carbon is already taxed enough and that U.S. carbon emissions are already declining, but the bottom line is that reducing U.S. emissions will have no effect at all on the so-called climate change. Why? Emissions from China, India, and other developing nations are rising rapidly.

The irony of this is that more carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would contribute to healthier forests and jungles, and most importantly, to increased crop yields that provide food for mankind and livestock, as well as all other creatures that consume vegetation as part of their diet. Carbon dioxide is Nature’s fertilizer for vegetation from a single blade of grass to a giant Sequoia tree.

There is no “consensus” among scientists regarding global warming and many, like those warning about earthworms, have misled Americans and others around the world with the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Since 2008, the U.S. has wasted nearly $70 billion on “climate change activities.” A report by the Congressional Research Service revealed that, from fiscal years 2008 through 2012, the federal government spent $68.4 billion to “combat climate change.” In addition, the Department of Defense spent $4 billion on the same futile, idiotic efforts when, in fact, humans play no role whatever in the changes occurring in the Earth’s climate. The Earth has actually been COOLING since around 1998 and that is entirely the result of less solar radiation. Those billions are an obscene waste of taxpayer funding.

Obama is lying. And he is using the Environmental Protection Agency to advance his lies as they produce more and more regulations whose sole purpose is to shut down existing coal-fired utilities and render impossible the construction of more utilities using coal in a nation that has centuries-worth of affordable coal reserves for the generation of more electricity to serve our energy needs. He is no friend of any other fossil fuel if the delay of the XL Keystone pipeline is any indication.

Energy, indeed, energy independence and the wealth and prosperity that would be generated is within our grasp. The only person standing in the way is Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2013