Total crap: CNBC/Reuters blaming the weather for another GDP miss

The story is here.

Just how bad was the winter? Out of 69 winters in the post-war 2015 ranked 22nd worst for heating degree days, and all Obama could manage is 0.1% nominal growth over the prior quarter, $6.3 billion. But 1959 came in 21st and somehow America under Eisenhower could manage 2.0% nominal growth q/q in winter. And 1964 ranked 23rd and somehow America managed 3.1% nominal growth under JFK in winter.

The winter of 2014 ranked 10th worst, and Obama gave us a pathetic nominal growth of -0.2%, yet in 1977 which ranked 9th worst winter in the post-war Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter!, gave us +2.6% nominal growth. The 12th worst winter was in 1962 and again JFK gave us 3.4% nominal growth.

The story is the same for 2010 and 2011, 33rd and 35th worst winters, which is to say, not very bad. These winters appear in the warmer half of the record. Obama gave us just 0.8% and 0.1% respectively, flanked by winters of like severity in 1972, 1951 and 1957 posting nominal growth of 3.4%, 6.3% and 2.2% respectively.

2013? Only the 42nd worst winter. But 1967 was worse and we got 2.4% nominal then, thanks to LBJ. Obama gave us 1.0%. And 1950? 43rd worst, but it clocked in with 3.7% nominal growth.

2012? The warmest winter in the record at 69th. So the weather argument should have meant economic growth had been absolutely stellar by comparison with everything going before it, right? Instead Obama gave us 1.1% nominal. Well, that IS Obama's best performance in winter, so maybe the heat helped a little. But 1990, which ranked 68th, witnessed 2.3% nominal growth under George H. W. Bush.

You see the pattern here? Obama "underperforms" everybody around him in similarly situated weather. But actually his numbers are so bad in winter it's like he's not even in the game.

Average Obama score in winter outside of recession: +0.5%.

Everybody else in the same boat: +3.1%.    

Without the Protestant reformers, the USA had never existed

“I love and revere the memories of Huss Wickliff Luther Calvin Zwinglius Melancton and all the other reformers how muchsoever I may differ from them all in many theological metaphysical & philosophical points. As you justly observe, without their great exertions & severe sufferings, the USA had never existed.”

-- John Adams

What do you mean try finding one? Congress is full of the one type, and most of them are Republicans.

Nicholas Kristof, here:

'After all, American adults have, on average, one ovary and one testicle. But try finding such an “average person.”'

We don't have free trade WITHIN the United States: Companies in just 13 states get over 90% of $110 billion in government subsidies since the 1970s

We're talking over $100 billion of taxpayer money favoring companies, in descending order, in New York way ahead in first, then Washington, Louisiana, and Michigan rounding out the top four, Kentucky, Oregon, Indiana, Texas, New Jersey, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Mexico over every other company in those states and throughout the states.

View the report here, and the state by state map here. For a shorter period involving additional federal subsidies adding another $68 billion to the above total see this report at the same site.

Forbes Magazine is not amused, here:

According to Good Jobs First, there are 514 economic development programs in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. More than 245,000 awards have been granted under those programs. I ask again, where is the outrage? The system is antithetical to the idea of free markets. A quarter of a million times, state governments decided what is best for producers and consumers. That should make us cringe. First, the government is inefficient at providing public goods, and it is terrible at manipulating the markets for private goods. But more importantly, those 514 economic development programs are almost all the result of insidious cronyism. Narrow business interests manipulate government policymakers, and those interests prosper to the detriment of everyone else. Free markets be damned.

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For the top four, think Wall Street, aircraft, oil and autos.

Highly secretive trade deal negotiations with Pacific "partners" no doubt reproduce sweeteners all around no different from what has been going on within our own country for a long time right underneath our noses.

The first step to curtailing this cronyism is to stop calling the one free trade and the other free-market capitalism. We have neither.

They ought to know: Most WOMEN think Hillary Clinton is dishonest and can't be trusted

"American voters say 54 - 38 percent that Hillary Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, a lower score than top Republicans."

So says a recent poll taken by Quinnipiac University, reported here. 

The 10 Idiot Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Loretta Lynch as Attorney General

The 10 Republicans who think being in the majority is a sin:

Ayotte (R-NH) oh yes she votes. just. like. a. woman.

Cochran (R-MS) senile old codger

Collins (R-ME) gender before party

Flake (R-AZ) aptly named

Graham (R-SC) McCain's errand boy

Hatch (R-UT) competing with Harry Reid for Mormon infamy

Johnson (R-WI) used to be the Tea Party's Senator! Go Feingold! Go Feingold! Go Feingold!

Kirk (R-IL) soon to be replaced by another disabled person of the same political party

McConnell (R-KY) recently had unsuccessful testicle transplant surgery

Portman (R-OH) has never had any testicles according to anonymous sources 

The roll call vote is here.  

What Richard Feynman might have said to today's climate cultists

''They follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential because the planes don't land warming never arrives.''

From the obituary, here.

Oh look! A GDP deer!

Liberals are trying to hide Obama's lousy winter GDP in a broader story about historical first quarter economic weakness.

A classic red herring maneuver designed to obscure the uniqueness of GDP weakness under Obama.

First it was CNBC here with "The Mysterious Case of Weak 1Q GDP, for 30 years!", and now it's The New York Times here with "Why You Can't Put Faith in Reports of First-Quarter Economic Slumps".

Consider these new pre-emptive first strikes designed to take the confidence out of opponents' sails when expected awful 1Q2015 GDP comes out next week. The weather argument used in the past is not going to fly this year simply because overall this last winter was pretty average, so another argument is being proposed which couches Obama's repeated first quarter failures in a broader context of perennially suspect first quarter GDP reports.

Oh look! Over there! A deer!

You wouldn't know from either of these stories that economic weakness in the first quarter under Obama has been uniquely weak. It doesn't matter if there is something seasonally different about the first quarter in general. What matters is that Obama can't even hit that.

Outside of recession Obama has had five first quarters with average nominal GDP change from the fourth quarter to the first of just 0.60%.

Forget the articles' fascination with the previous 30-year record. The 50 year record outside of recession going back to the years since 1946 shows that before Obama the average nominal GDP improvement from 4Q to 1Q was 2.3%.

Obama is underperforming that by 74%. His record is a complete outlier in the series, even compared to George W. Bush, who before Obama otherwise had the worst GDP record overall in the post-war. Bush's six first quarters outside of recession averaged 1.5%, 150% better than Obama. Add in the recession years and Bush still averaged 1.2%, 100% better than Obama in winter.

To make matters worse, five of the six quarters of Bush doing 150% better than Obama occurred in the warmer half of years in the 50 year series, when GDP naturally has run behind the GDP of the colder half of years. Include all eight first quarters for Bush when he did 100% better than Obama and seven of eight were in the warmer half of years when it's harder to post higher GDP, and the one was on the borderline of those warmer years. Obama by contrast in 2014 had the tenth coldest winter on record since 1946. That was actually an advantage to him for GDP because GDP in the colder half of winters has actually run 19% ahead of the warmer half. Instead Obama blamed his poor performance in 2014 on what was really to his advantage.  

Barack Obama's poor winter GDP record sticks out like a sore thumb, and no amount of excuse-making can change that fact.

Winter GDP under Obama has underperformed everyone who came before him for 50 years by 74%

There's nothing wrong with GDP that a change of leadership at the top couldn't fix. I'll bet Caligula's favored horse Incitatus, whom the crazed Roman emperor wanted to install in the consulship, could have done better, that's how bad Obama has performed.

To date we've had five first quarters outside of recession under Obama and the average nominal GDP addition in the first quarter from the preceding fourth quarter has been just +0.60%. From coldest to warmest here the five are: 2014 (-0.20%), 2010 (+0.80%), 2011 (+0.1%), 2013 (+1.00%), 2012 (+1.1%). Incidentally, 2014 was the 10th coldest first quarter since 1946, but 2012 was the hottest, and Obama still couldn't pull out a decent performance from that advantage.

It's not the fault of the weather. It's Obama.

GDP measured in exactly the same way before Obama and going back to 1947 has averaged +2.3% in the first quarter, which means that under Obama GDP has lagged the average by 73.9%. In fact, Obama's record in winter is so bad that he's pulled down the long-term average by 0.2 from 2.3% to 2.1%.

But wait, it gets worse.

America actually posts better GDP when winters are colder, and poorer GDP when they are warmer.

The twelve warmest winters since 1946 have added just 1.5% to nominal GDP on average, but the twelve coldest added an average 2.7%.

For a president, and economists, to blame cold weather for poor economic performance shows a level of ignorance and intellectual laziness which is shameful.

America can do much better than Obama, and it will. 

Scott Walker receives the kiss of death . . .

. . . the endorsement of the Koch brothers.

That conservatism stuff is just for show. The real Scott Walker is a libertarian.

Story here.

Hey global warming frauds: FBI admits bogus science reigned supreme for decades at hair comparison unit and in courts

And you climate fraudsters will be the next to be exposed.

From the story here:

"The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989."

Kathy Shaidle: You can't bomb people back to the Stone Age who never left it

Here:

So after we bombed the crap out of them (although not enough in Germany’s case to suit me), at least some survivors retained memories of their culture’s rational past, all the better to reconstruct or even surpass it. (With an infusion of American billions, that is.)

Today’s Muslim belligerents either have no such past, or are busily trying to eradicate any trace of it. When we bother destroying their strongholds, who can even tell? You can’t bomb people back to the Stone Age if they never left. And in any case, this time we reinstituted the Marshall Plan before we half wiped them out—a fatally ass-backwards move.

Hey Obama! You're embarrassed by the process? You're an embarrassment to the constitution!

Video here:

"And I have to say that there are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it. It's gone too far. Enough. Enough. Call Loretta Lynch for a vote. Get her confirmed. Put her in place, let her do her job. This is embarrassing, a process like this. Thank you."

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[The President] shall nominate, and, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments. -- Article II, Section 2

Are bankrupt people who commit crimes absolved of them because they were bankrupt?

Then why should GM get off for killing over 80 people?

If corporations are people who have free speech rights just like everyone else, they have personal liability when they break the law, bankrupt or not.

Poor people go to jail all the time, but rich, well-connected corporations do not. How convenient.

Hillary the cheapskate: stiffs on the tip at Chipotle

"Well, that's what you get when you don't recognize me you morons!" (note: this is not a real quote)

Bankruptcy judge lets GM off the hook for 80 deaths

Here's the lede from the story:

A federal judge handed General Motors a multi-billion-dollar reprieve Wednesday, ruling that the company could not be sued in hundreds of death and injury claims related to the defective ignition switches that are estimated to have killed more than 80 people.

According to [retiring] Judge Robert Gerber, GM’s government-overseen bankruptcy and reorganization in 2009 shields it from liability for actions the company had made previously, despite claims by the families of people injured or killed by the ignitions that GM had been misleading the court at that time about the ignition-switch woes in older, smaller cars.

Read the rest here.

Marco Rubio joins the gay normalization crowd

Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood

So says Camille Paglia, here.

Hillary and State both stonewalled the House Committee on Oversight about her private email already in December 2012

Hillary Clinton knew well in advance that what she was doing in shielding her email was wrong and likely to get her into trouble, which is why she subsequently destroyed the evidence, obstructing justice. Hillary makes Richard Nixon look like a piker in comparison to the scope of her crimes.

The New York Times reports here that she and the State Dept. deliberately did not respond to the House's inquiries about whether she used private email for government business while she was still Secretary of State in December 2012:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.

The query was posed to Mrs. Clinton in a Dec. 13, 2012, letter from Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Issa was leading an investigation into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.

“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Mr. Issa wrote to Mrs. Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.”

Marco Rubio is just another liberal

Marco Rubio, quoted here, wouldn't recognize conservatism if it bit him in the ass:

"[O]ur country has always been about the future and before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. But we can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past. We must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them.”

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How about going back to the American founders for inspiration? Can't do that.

How about going back to the constitution? Can't do that.

How about the anti-Federalists? or the Bible? or Shakespeare? Can't do that.

Did changing the people in charge make a difference between 2000 and 2008? How about after 2008?

Change is the mantra of liberalism, and belief in the essential superiority of a certain kind of person its fatal conceit. 

Dingbat feminism should make up its mind already

Hillary Clinton knows the way to San Jose . . . San José de las Lajas, Cuba

Hillary campaign logo: Don't call her Hillary?

Flag of Cuba

The libertarian free-traders in both parties have killed the American middle class: Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, Obama

From Patrick J. Buchanan, here:

The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit. Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.

And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too. The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade. Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”

The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes. If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy. And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?

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I've checked Buchanan's math and he's exaggerating a bit. The total is precisely $9.5 trillion . . . if you go back as far as 1982 under Reagan, but you get the point.

Winter 2015 temperatures were above average in the lower 48

The first quarter of 2015 was a lot warmer than last year.

For 2014 minimum temperature January through March ranked 25th going back to 1895, meaning there were 24 winters that had colder minimum temperature, 41st for average temperature, so obviously below normal, and 104th for heating degree days (the coldest year ranked 120th, meaning 2014 was the 16th coldest first quarter since 1895 in terms of the energy needed to keep comfortable).

2015, despite the horror stories heard from places like Boston, was overall much warmer. For minimum temperature the first quarter ranked 96th, for average temperature 98th, and for heating degree days, above average at 75th. An average winter involves 2317 heating degree days. 2015 came in at 2370, not very much higher at all. The worst winter on record was in 1912, with 2761 heating degree days.

Consider yourself armed when the wusses blame the weather for the bad economy.

You know who to blame . . . the gutsy one.

This woman should be deported today

Story here.

Gun production triples under Obama to 10.8 million in 2013 to meet sales and concealed carry demand

Seen here:

The biggest change in production has come under President Obama. From 2001 to 2007, gun production held steady at between 3 million and 4 million units a year. It topped 4 million in 2008 but shot to 5.6 million in 2009, held steady in 2010 and then spiked to 8.6 million guns in 2012 and a record 10.8 million in 2013, according to ATF data. ...

Mr. [John R.] Lott [Jr.] said firearm sales, even more than manufacturing statistics, are a measure of the health of the movement, and those are also on the rise, with adjusted background checks — a good proxy for sales — growing from 8.9 million a year in 2008 to nearly 15 million in 2013. ...

Nationally, concealed carry permits have grown from 4.6 million in 2007 to more than 12 million now, Mr. Lott said.

Einstein's successor Freeman Dyson: Climatologists don't understand the climate, burning coal is good for crop yields

Quoted here in 2013:

"I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic."

"I just think they don’t understand the climate," he said of climatologists. "Their computer models are full of fudge factors."

"The models are extremely oversimplified," he said. "They don't represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds."

"It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation," Dyson said. "About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO-2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil."

"They’re absolutely lousy," he said of American journalists. "That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed."

"It was similar in the Soviet Union," he said. "Who could doubt Marxist economics was the future? Everything else was in the dustbin."

Scott Walker could be the middle class' punk: Gabba Gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us

From a story here:

In an age when most potential presidential contenders are millionaires, Walker may end up being the closest thing to a middle-class presidential candidate that voters will see in 2016.

For most of the 1990s, the son of a Baptist minister made less than $40,000 a year from his salary as a lawmaker. As recently as 2006, Walker was making about $70,000 a year and living in a two-bedroom house with an unfinished basement, in part because as Milwaukee County executive he was giving a chunk of his salary back to taxpayers. ...

"They're as common as an old shoe," said Betty Balsley, who got to know the Walker family while the now-governor's father was serving as a pastor in Plainfield, Iowa.

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Ramones, Pinhead, here

Scott Walker's school voucher program is enormously popular with the poor in Wisconsin, but not with the establishment

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported here last May about applications for the school year just now winding down:

Under state law, the 25 private schools that receive the most applications are selected for the statewide voucher program. Because of a tie, 26 schools are selected for the upcoming school year.

Six new participants in the program are Fox Valley Lutheran High School in Appleton, Saint Paul Lutheran School in Bonduel, Winnebago Lutheran Academy in Fond du Lac, Twin City Catholic Educational System in Menasha and Neenah, and Saint Paul Lutheran School and Trinity Lutheran School, both in Sheboygan.

Each of the 26 schools will receive at least 10 voucher slots, with the remaining assigned through a random selection process. ...

A total of 1,000 vouchers are available, up from 500 in the first year of the program. ...

"Once again, applications far exceeded the cap," Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, said in a statement. "For the second year in a row we have thousands of parents — over 70% — on the outside looking in." ...

The statewide program, called the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, is in its second year and is separate from voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine. There are 1,220 students in the Racine Parental Choice Program and 25,397 in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, according fall enrollment data.

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Governor Walker has proposed a complete elimination of the caps for the next two years, expanding the vouchers apparently at reduced amounts, and paying for it all by reducing allocations to the public school system by $150 per pupil in the first year.

School officials are predictably livid, as this story about a day long public hearing at Brillion High School recently reported:

Nearly all of the administrators who spoke opposed the expansion of the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which allows low-income students to attend private or religious schools using a taxpayer-subsidized voucher.

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Here's a novel idea. True "parental choice" would allow the taxpayers themselves to decide which schools their taxes fund. Imagine a check off list on your income tax form or property tax form like they have now for various charitable causes to which you may allocate all or a portion of your tax refund. Let's see how the taxpayers vote to spend their education money. Now that might really upset the establishment.

Let the people decide!

Try getting a gay wedding cake in Dearborn: So when are the corporations packing up to leave Michigan, huh?

Trolling the bakeries. Video here.

The Anthropocene Follies

Seems some people at Nature want to change the name of the current geological interglacial period now commonly known as the Holocene (the "completely newest period" for you Greek men out there, a very small part of, or the end of the much larger "most recent" Pleistocene and its Ice Ages, depending on who you read) to the Anthropocene (the new human epoch). To some this signifies that if you thought science had long ago killed-off anthropocentrism, you must think again because geology is being pressured to ascribe change to human influence just as has climate science. 

The wags here have suggested some amusing alternatives to the Anthropocene:

• Hubrisocene
• Windowsocene
• Googolocene
• Neocene
• Hollowscene
• Hollowcene
• Misanthropocene (very popular)
• Stultucene (probably the most anthropologically apt)
• Epicene (not that there's anything wrong with that)
• Crimescene
• Hubriocene
• Absurdopocene (has a real ring to it)
• Alarmistocene
• Nihilicene
• Anthroporcene (my personal favorite, but should be Anthropoporcene)
• Bulshitocene
• Horshitocene
• Whorshitocene (tmi if you ask me)
• Algoreopocene (quite)
• Narcissistocene
• Narcissene (not to be confused with Nazarene but gets at the religious underpinnings)
• Narcissicene
• Climeobscene
• Preposterousocene
• Mommymommylookatmeocene
• Bureaucrocene
• Anthropobscene
• Plasticene (for all you Beatles fans)
• Wherethehelldidiputitcene
• Mannthropocene (that's inviting a lawsuit I'd say)
• Sputnikocene (too brief to be measured)
• Incrediblyobcene
• Anthropoidiotcene
• Needtobecene (for the selfie craze)
• Egocene (nice)
• Fantacene
• Herbacene
• Vulcacene
• ChickenLittleocene
• Idiocene.

Perhaps more amusing is how contemporary science still must fall back on a long dead language of the Bronze Age in order to fish out the finest distinctions which only the Greek language can offer. Some animals are indeed more equal than others.

Memories Pizza has raised over $225K since this morning at 8:30

Obama's shitty jobs machine sputters out in March 2015: 3 month average adds falls to 197K (watch 'em blame the weather)

Support for Memories Pizza on GoFundMe soars above $500K, putting it in the top six causes ever

To avoid the Gay Mafia, almost all of the donations are anonymous.

Ronald Machen's miscarriage of justice in the matter of Lois Lerner

Seen here:

'Ellis [1969] involved a defendant who voluntarily testified before a grand jury but then refused to testify at trial, asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Once Lerner voluntarily spoke to Justice Department prosecutors without receiving a grant of immunity, she lost her ability to invoke the privilege to avoid answering congressional questions about the same information she had already provided.

'Machen says that a “team of experienced career prosecutors” was assigned to review this matter, so certainly they would know about the Ellis rule. They also must know about Lerner’s extensive testimony to the prosecutors. So why would Machen completely ignore this in his letter?

'Ignoring highly relevant, although perhaps inconvenient, facts, outgoing U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen has issued a flawed legal analysis. It reaches an erroneous, but politically expedient, conclusion — one that gives Lois Lerner a pass and further hinders congressional efforts to get to the bottom of this scandal. It’s a pretty slick trick. No wonder Machen’s pulling a disappearing act.'

Winter in Grand Rapids Michigan was 23% colder in 2014 than in 2015

Grand Rapids, Michigan, was 3.2 degrees F below normal on average in March 2015, bringing the cumulative anomaly for the first three months of 2015 to -19.9 degrees F. The corresponding deficit from normal in 2014 was -24.4 degrees F, almost 23% colder. 

To that stupid prick, Josh Earnest, the Treaty clause of the Constitution doesn't exist

Seen here:

EARNEST: Well, again, I think it's hard to take seriously from some members of Congress who deny the fact that climate change exists, that they should have some opportunity to render judgment about climate change agreements.

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[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur...

-- Article II, Section 2

What's hard to take seriously is anyone from this administration.