Posts Made By: Dave Snope

What's the PLAN?

September 03, 2010
BHO: But I want all Americans to remind themselves there are better days ahead.

James Hansen, of NASA GISS and Columbia U. has long been the U.S.A.'s leading Anthropogenic Global Warming scientist since 1980. He may be the top climate scientist in the world. That's why it is very important to pay attention when he suggests solutions:

if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, can we make a citizen's arrest on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for violating the Security Act? If they were put in the back of a hot paddy wagon in DC and held for at least several hours with their hands tied behind their backs, maybe they would have a chance to think over this matter more clearly.

While this may sound like a hellish torture, and usually leads to an arrest when applied to dogs left in cars, don't forget that our top AGW scientists have repeatedly reminded us that the ends justifies the means to save our planet. Because it's like, on it's fifth tipping point or something, since Hansen has been making predictions.

Then he proposes the most incredible carbon tax, and equivalent of $1/gal of gas that would be redistributed in it's entirety to the people, and somehow equates this to a "market principle". The more gas we buy, the more money we get. It works like magic, I suppose, because it cannot work in a sober economic reality or within any normal understanding of human behavior.

This is your leader, folks. And he is not well.


http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110902_WhiteHouseAndTarSands.pdf

Oh yeah, THIS will really stimulate the economy. And where does the $300M come from? Word is that he also wants tax increases to be added later. Someone still hasn't gotten a clue about economics.

According to people familiar with the White House deliberations, two of the biggest measures in the president's proposals for 2012 are expected to be a one-year extension of a payroll tax cut for workers and an extension of expiring jobless benefits. Together those two would total about $170 billion.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan was still being finalized and some proposals could still be subject to change.

The White House is also considering a tax credit for businesses that hire the unemployed. That could cost about $30 billion. Obama has also called for public works projects, such as school construction. Advocates of that plan have called for spending of $50 billion, but the White House proposal is expected to be smaller.

Obama also is expected to continue for one year a tax break for businesses that allows them to deduct the full value of new equipment. The president and Congress negotiated that provision into law for 2011 last December

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44418047/ns/politics-white_house/#.TmdUpahU2So

When even the Washington Post calls Obama a 4-pinnochio liar, you know it beyond spinning. 4 Pinocchios is a bald-faced lie on the WaPo fact check scale.


“We said working folks deserved a break, so within one month of me taking office, we signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history, putting more money into your pockets.”

— President Obama, Sept. 5, 2011



John F. Kennedy seems to win the prize for biggest tax cut, at least in the last half century. By the same measure, the income tax provisions of George W. Bush tax cuts are more than twice as large as Obama’s tax cut over the same three-year time span. (Yes, a large portion of Bush’s tax cut went to the wealthy, but it also benefited the working poor. We still don’t know what Obama means by “middle class,” since his definition also seems to include the working poor.)

Incidentally, the report that the administration official cited as “outside validation” for the 95 percent statistic just mentioned it as an aside. We checked with one of the co-authors, and he said the source for the figure was a White House fact sheet.
...

Obama’s claim of having passed the “biggest middle-class tax cut in history” is ridiculous. He might have been on more solid ground if he had claimed the “broadest” tax cut, but that doesn’t sound very historic.

We went back and forth over whether this was a three or four Pinocchio violation, until we found evidence that Obama knew he was saying a whopper. Here’s how he put it in his 2010 State of the Union speech: “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.” That phrasing, at least, would not have been so misleading.

Four Pinnocchios


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-whopper-of-a-claim-on-tax-cuts/2011/09/06/gIQAmL2h7J_blog.html

Obama has the nicest visitors to the White House. He has repeat guests like Rick Trumka whose union captains murdered a man, and you have these Solyndra guys getting 20 visits and now being raided by the FBI.

This is what happens when you give government money to enterprises for political reasons. Corruption. Pork. They built a building that they never intended to occupy, spending taxpayer money knowing full well that they could not compete in the free market and would go out of business. It was a rush to spend all the free taxpayer money that they could before going bankrupt and never paying it back. This was a company that was already looking like it was going under before getting a visit from O and getting federal funding. What a scam.

So what do you do if you want to get a leg up on the other creditors in a bankruptcy? If you are the federal government, you send in the FBI to grab documents. The other creditors can't do that.


FBI agents armed with search warrants descended Thursday morning on bankrupt solar company Solyndra.

The investigation comes after a request by the Department of Energy's inspector general, FBI spokesman Peter Lee told NBC Bay Area News.

Agents arrived at Solyndra at 7a.m. and were examining the factory. Solynrda has a skeleton crew of 100 workers on the scene, who are closing the factory down.

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy last week, shocking both workers and the Obama administration, which had given the startup $535 million in low interest loans.

The announcement was a devastating blow to Mr. Obama who is set to deliver a speech on job creation Thursday evening.

Congress has demanded a hearing into the matter. Wednesday the company was reported to be for sale.

There are no reports of any arrests at this time.

Solyndra officials made numerous visits -- 20 -- to the White House, according to logs and reporting by The Daily Caller.

Solyndra officials in the logs included chairman and founder Christian Gronet and board members Thomas Baruch and David Prend, according to the Caller.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/FBI-at-Solyndra-Headquarters-129455348.html

Prof. Motl (who is not paid money to do climate science so his opinions do not count), thinks that we are trending towards another La Nina year.

This text is just a tiny update of what I wrote a month ago. The results are almost unchanged. The La Niña odds have considerably strengthened.

According to RSS AMSU, the first 8 months were the 2nd coldest January-August period in this century so far (second among 11 candidate years).

The top 15 ranking of the years 1979-2011 according to the average temperature during the first eight months is as follows:

1.1998: 0.642
2.2010: 0.546
3.2002: 0.364
4.2005: 0.344
5.2007: 0.310
6.2003: 0.293
7.2004: 0.230
8.2001: 0.225
9.2004: 0.211
10.2006: 0.209
11.1991: 0.163
12.2011: 0.157
13.1995: 0.152
14.1983: 0.116
15.1988: 0.111

You can see that the first eight months of 2011 were colder than the same period of 1991 which was 20 years earlier; and of course, 1998 remains the leader of the league: its first 8 months were almost 0.5 °C warmer than the same months of 2011. At the 12th position, 2011 is out of top ten. Only Jan-Aug 2008 with –0.013 °C managed to be colder than the same period of 2011 among the years of the 21st century. So 2011 is helping to make the preliminary 21st century temperature trend even more negative than before; this is no bulšit, angry Al.

Some warming may have been taking place in recent months – because of the delayed effect of the disappearing La Niña a few months ago. But it may be replaced by another cooling in the coming months.

The ENSO oscillations have returned to the negative, La Niña territory after a few months in the neutral interval. For example, the latest weekly ENSO report says that the ONI 3.4 anomaly is at –0.6 °C (and the 1+2 region is at –0.7 °C) – it went down from –0.4 °C a month ago and has slipped below –0.5 °C, the boundary of the La Niña conditions, again.

Some of their models still show that there are equal odds that we will see neutral conditions in the Fall – but the next update is likely to predict another La Niña episode for the winter 2011/2012, in agreement with very recent NOAA press releases. In fact, the picture from Thursday shows a nice blue spot near the South American Western beaches:

I think that the blue spot sits at an important place – and is already big enough – and could help to decide that La Niña conditions will return on a more permanent basis. Just to be sure, that would be the second consecutive La Niña episode.

Whatever will happen to ENSO in the Fall, I think that it will only substantially influence the global temperatures in 2012. In the rest of 2011, we will see comparable temperature anomalies as in the first half of 2011 which may be smaller than the anomalies from July and August. That will mean that 2011 may slightly jump from the 12th warmest place (preliminary ranking), perhaps to a spot in the top ten, or drop slightly – but it will surely not get to the medal places for the warmest years.

It's more likely than not at during 2012 or at the beginning of 2013, we will actually see an RSS climate record that will display a cooling trend during the most recent 15 years – partly because of the expected 2011/2012 La Niña, partly because the warm 1998 year will emerge at the beginning of the 15-year interval. Recent years increasingly paint the story that the "global warming" stopped more than a decade ago.

The first 11 years of this century surely display a cooling trend. One may believe that during the century (e.g. in 2040), the sign of the slope will be reverted but it doesn't have to be. There doesn't exist any convincing scientific evidence that it has to.



http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/rss-amsu-jan-aug-2011-second-coldest-in.html

Because they are dumb. About science. And weather. How dumb are they? They are soooooooo dumb, they write things like this:


NEW YORK (AP) — The extreme heat that's been roasting the eastern U.S. is only expected to get worse, and residents are bracing themselves for temperatures near and above boiling point.

Weather service heat warnings and advisories have been issued Friday from Ohio to Maine.

The high temperatures and smothering humidity will force up the heat indexes. Boston's 99 degrees on Friday could feel like 105 degrees; Philadelphia's 102 degrees like 114 degrees and Washington, D.C.'s 103 degrees may seem the same as a melting 116 degrees.

http://news.yahoo.com/northeast-braces-temps-near-boiling-point-104346055.html

Exhibit A: Al Gore

Gore’s transcript documents that during his sophomore year at Harvard he earned a "D" in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature). Also, as a senior at Harvard, he earned a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118. For his college board achievement tests, Gore earned a 488 (out of 800) in physics, and a 519 (out of 800) in chemistry.

I always thought that if you are going to spend the taxpayer's money, you ought to at least build something. That's why Obama should follow the Dutch lead, and build something grand with his next stimulus. Really, really grand. And it will cost less than what he's planning to spend on the next stimulus. And it will require lots, and I mean lots, of shoveling.

What he should propose is to build Mt. Barack on reclaimed land on the Potomac. The good people of D.C., as currently configured, are deprived of opportunities to be professional skiers, bicycle racers, or alpine climbers, because they are deprived of a mountain. They have an alpine divide, if you will. Obama can change all that and leave a permanent legacy to himself. Win-win.

The Netherlands is to spend thirty years and as much as £270 billion building a fake mountain to help the famously flat country become a winter sport superpower.
The idea came from a Dutch sports journalist called Thijs Zonneveld, who suggested in a tongue-in-cheek article that a man-made mountain should be built to help overcome the lack of decent hills in his homeland.

But his cheeky suggestion was taken seriously by Dutch architects' firm Hoffers and Kruger, who drew up plans for a 7,000ft mountain - that's twice the height of Snowdon, and far bigger than 4,409ft Ben Nevis.

The plans caught the imagination of the Dutch, and quickly received backing from the Dutch Ski Association, Dutch Climbing and Mountaineering Association and Royal Dutch Cycling Union.

Now, local authorities and several major corporations are getting involved in the idea, with sponsorship deals on the horizon that could help start the far-fetched plan on the road to fruition - and the man who had the original idea is delighted.

"This plan is serious," insisted Zoneeveld. "All kinds of big companies have now stepped in, various municipalities and investors are interested."

The project is provisionally named "Die Berg Komt Er", or "The Mountain Comes", presumably in a reference to the phrase, "bring the mountain to Mohammed".

A working group has already been set up to look further at the feasibility of the project, which is projected to cost anywhere between £40bn and £270bn and take up to 30 years to build.


http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/world-of-sport/article/66194/

Does anyone really believe Obama's BS class envy rhetoric? Not if you actually ever looked at the IRS revenue reports.

The leftist AP does the fact-checking this time.

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”

The data tell a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes and payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent


There you go. On AVERAGE they are paying 29%. With a max bracket of 34%, some deductions for home mortgage, charity, plus the usual small things, and 29% seems like plenty.

In a state like mine, you add 10% state income tax, another 10% for all the state and fed payroll taxes, and you're at 50%. Add property taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes, gas taxes, etc., and you hit 60%. I know I have.

Millionaires aren't numerous. A much more populous class below them are the bread and butter of tax revenues. The 'class' that gets screwed the most are the people who are in the top tax brackets but are far from millionaires. The hundred-thousandaires, if you will. Professionals living in major metro areas on 40% of their income, where mortgages on tract homes are $4000 per month, and property taxes are $1000 per month. People I know who are making $100K are buying trashed fixer-uppers, eating PB&J at work every day, and buying their household goods from Craig's list. Those are the ponies with the big saddles on their backs.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iP3lhS4ZQ-UhyUvFfUgdPCiu-jJA?docId=47a565563a294b2bad96544a7f0ddc1b