What complete rot: Drudge's heat index map for 6PM EST shows 92 for Lake Michigan when it's 78 in Grand Rapids

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July 2015 average temperature anomaly for Grand Rapids, MI is 1.7 degrees F below normal

The July 2015 temperature anomaly for Grand Rapids, MI at 1.7 degrees F below normal means the cumulative anomaly for 2015 increases to 21.4 degrees F below normal from 19.7 degrees F below normal through June and 18.0 degrees F below normal through May.

For a warming planet, we're doing nothing in Grand Rapids this summer to erase the negative average temperature anomaly . . . but there's always August if you are a grower, or hope if you're a warmist.

The total temperature anomaly for 2014 in GR was 30.3 degrees F below normal, a little over 2.5 degrees on average per month.

The significance of that may be lost on you, but here in Michigan a couple of degrees makes all the difference between being Michigan and being Wisconsin. On the other side of Lake Michigan at this latitude, average temperature is historically two degrees colder than here on average. There they are exposed to the cold drying winds which come off the plains in winter. Here we have the warming effect of Lake Michigan in winter as it gives off its heat and the attendant snows, unless it's frozen solid like a brick. And that makes all the difference to berry, grape, apple and other growers who proliferate on the warmer side of the lake and depend on the warmth and the snow cover to protect their plants.

Senate Dems Pull All-Nighter Talking Global Warming As Lake Michigan Posts All-Time High Ice Cover

The Christian Science Monitor reports here:

Twenty-eight Democrats and two left-leaning Independents, including Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada and his top lieutenants, are scheduled to speak in shifts until about 9 a.m. Tuesday. The event is not a filibuster, nor is it related to any legislation. The intent is to urge a divided Congress and nation to “wake up” on this issue.

Meanwhile Lake Michigan broke a record on Saturday for ice coverage at 93.29%, as reported here:

The National Weather Service says more than 93-percent of the lake was covered in ice on Saturday. A rapid build-up of ice came with a stretch of cold weather from late February into the first week of March. The Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory measured the ice cover at 93.29 percent. That's the most since record keeping started in 1973, breaking the record of 93.1 set in 1977.

It Takes One To Know One: Carl Bernstein Smells Radicalism In The Air

Carl Bernstein of Woodward-Bernstein fame thinks he's caught a whiff of radicalism in Mitt Romney and the Tea Party, here at The Daily Beast, imagining all sort of vain things about both of them.

By the end of the hysterical tirade he calms down a little and realizes his own progressivism qualifies as radicalism, too, but he'd much rather call his beloved progressivism a "transformational movement". In other words, "progressivism good, radicalism bad", sort of like how liberalism got a bad name and had to be replaced at all costs if liberalism were to continue to retain influence.

The reality is the Tea Party is a reactionary movement trying to forestall the radicalism of Barack Obama. Reactionary movements often are mistaken for radical movements because in order to succeed in their objective they have to get to the root being yanked out of the ground by others, by the revolutionaries, and replant it. As such reactionaries, the Tea Partiers are counter-revolutionaries: "Put It Back!"

This is not to say that reactionary movements cannot be hijacked by ideologues any less than true revolutionary movements are inspired by them. The American revolutionaries are a case in point. They never embraced the idealisms which turned into a class war against aristocrats in France. It is unthinkable that the history of the early American independence movement would have turned out as it did had it otherwise been a movement about liberty, equality and fraternity. Former loyalists were welcomed back. While enthusiasm for the idealism of natural rights among Tea Party activists is reminiscent of this, especially among the libertarian elements, the genesis of the movement was in reaction to Obama's proposed mortgage bailouts of deadbeat homeowners, many of whom were becoming infamous for "walking away". Like a good reactionary, Rick Santelli gave voice to his indignation at these people on national television in February but characteristically planned a Tea Party protest on the beach of Lake Michigan for months later, during his summer vacation. In the interim, he had to go to work.

The people, however, had other ideas about waiting. But unlike real radicals such as the Occupy Wall Street types, their protests were peaceful, orderly, clean, and came to an end, and then transformed themselves into the constructive activity of political action, retaking the US House in 2010 for the Republicans in order to stop Obama. As a political movement, it should be understood in those practical prophylactic terms despite the efforts of Republicans to co-opt the movement. The Tea Party is a movement of Americans who are radical only in the sense that they have rediscovered their roots in the constitution and the world which gave it birth.

The true radicals in the bad sense are those who would extirpate them.  

Rush Limbaugh's Mission Accomplished: Tea Party Absorbed by Republican Party

Otherwise, Rush would not have tried so hard today to disagree with a caller who suggested the Tea Party was born of outrage over the bailouts. He even repeated the MSM mantra that TARP has been repaid in full by the banks, even though the program will end up costing taxpayers $37 billion.

It is apparent Rush now discounts Santelli's galvanizing rant against HAMP on CNBC in February 2009, which first floated the idea nationally of a Tea Party at Lake Michigan in August.

The nascent Tea Party didn't wait for summer.

The reason, of course, is that it is now safe for Rush to spin all that, with Palin and her cronyism message safely out of the way, since she announced yesterday she is not going to run.

Rush doesn't want the troops confused by an anti-bank message now that the left and the unions in league with Democrats and George Soros are in the process of co-opting the original message of the Tea Party. Rush is clearly aware that the Tea Party doesn't have the edge anymore, is politically leaderless, is inured to the problem, and just plain old too tired to mount a new charge against government bailouts. Most of us are graying baby-boomers, after all, taking naps in the afternoon, or wanting to. And some of us are broke.

Besides, Republicans have their mits all over the banking crisis, with New Gingrich and Phil Gramm leading the charge to overturn Glass-Steagall in 1999. Better now to emphasize the private, capitalist character of the banking industry as a target of the socialist left, rather than its dependence on and compromised relationship with the public, government institution called the Federal Reserve Bank, with its phony money and monetarist mission.

Rush Limbaugh the chameleon turns on a dime once again. 

Santelli's Rant, One Year Later

A year after Rick Santelli's heated objections in February 2009 to the moral hazard posed by government efforts to bail out troubled mortgagers with $75 billion from the taxpayers, the foreclosure crisis only continues to worsen. Foreclosures have steadily increased in number from 1.3 million in 2007, to 2.3 million in 2008, to 2.8 million in 2009. An additional 3 to 3.5 million are expected in 2010.

At the time, Santelli intended to take a little time off in July for a tea party on Lake Michigan:

SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.

The people of the country didn't wait for July to organize, however, and by April 15th last year hundreds of tea party protests had already materialized all across the country, and their influence has been felt in elections in New York, New Jersey, Virginia and most of all Massachusetts.

Today, tea partiers everywhere stand poised to throw their weight behind candidates in the November elections who oppose everything that's happened under Pelosi, Reid, and Obama to interfere with the operations of free markets and the aspirations of free peoples. They understand that government isn't a magic money machine, churning out a buck and a half for every buck they put in. They understand with Santelli the threat left-wing Democrats represent to the very meaning of America, and who the real subversives are:

SANTELLI: You know, they’re pretty much of the notion that you can’t buy your way into prosperity, and if the multiplier that all of these Washington economists are selling us is over 1, then we never have to worry about the economy again. The government should spend a trillion dollars an hour because we’ll get 1.5 trillion back.

QUICK: Wilbur?

WILBUR ROSS (chairman, W.L. Ross & Co.): Rick, I congratulate you on your new incarnation as a revolutionary leader.

SANTELLI: Somebody needs one. I’ll tell you what, if you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.

When the tea parties succeed at the polls, the Founders will stop their spinning and return to their rest, and we to our labors rebuilding our broken country.