Friday, February 10, 2012

Ann Coulter Still Thinks Newt Gingrich Is The Main Threat To Mitt Romney

Quoted here:

So I ask you, CPACers, who are you willing to stake the future of this country on winning? Who is going to appeal to the most Independents? Because, if we’re betting the future of this country on Next Gingrich not being repellent to Independents, I want my money back. I’m not taking that bet.

So, the three back-to-back victories this week for Sen. Rick Santorum are chopped liver?

Mitt Romney (and Rush Limbaugh) Do Not Understand The American Founding

Here's Rush cheer-leading Gov. Mitt Romney for something Romney said today at CPAC, something which shows neither he nor Limbaugh really understand the American Founding:

ROMNEY: We believe in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence!  We believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!  We know the brilliance that suggested that individuals pursuing their own dreams would make us the most powerful nation on earth, not a government trying to guide our lives.  This is who we are! This passion we must take to the American people.  This is our moment! This is why we're conservatives.  The task before us now is to reaffirm the convictions that unite us and go forward, shoulder to shoulder, to secure victory that America so desperately needs and deserves. 

CROWD: (cheering)

ROMNEY: Let's do it together! Thank you, and God bless America. 

CROWD: (cheers and applause)

ROMNEY: Thank you.

RUSH:  Right on, dude.  Right on.  I mean, that's... What did you think of that, Snerdley?  Did you it? That was! It was severe.  It was.  It was "severely conservative."  You know that I'm just gonna get beat up so bad for this.

Rush should get beat up for this, along with Romney, because becoming "the most powerful nation on earth" was as foreign a concept to the Founders as it is to conservatism.

The Founders sought independence from England in order to enjoy membership in the family of nations, instead of enduring the on-going disrespect with which King George treated his colonies in America. A grandiose design to become world hegemon, pace Mitt, pace Rush, was a . . . uh hum, foreign concept.

From "The Original Intent of the Declaration of Independence" by John Fea, here:

Historian David Armitage, in a fascinating book entitled The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, has argued convincingly that the Declaration of Independence was written primarily as a document asserting American political sovereignty in the hopes that the newly created United States would secure a place in the international community of nations. In fact, Armitage asserts, the Declaration was discussed abroad more than it was at home. This meant that the Declaration was "decidedly un-revolutionary. It would affirm the maxims of European statecraft, not affront them."

To put this differently, the "self-evident truths" and "unalienable rights" of the Declaration's second paragraph would not have been particularly new or groundbreaking in the context of the 18th-century British world. These were ideals that all members of the British Empire valued regardless of whether they supported or opposed the American Revolution. The writers of the Declaration of Independence did not believe that they were advancing political principles unique to America. This was a foreign policy document.

In an 1825 letter to fellow Virginian Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson explained his motivation behind writing the Declaration:


When forced, therefore to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our jurisdiction. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.

John Adams, writing five years after he signed it, called the Declaration "that memorable Act by which [the United States] assumed an equal Station among the nations." There is little in these statements to suggest that the Declaration of Independence was anything other than an announcement to the world that the former British colonies were now free and independent states and thus deserve a place in the international order of nations.

Alas, we are left with ignorant fools, appealing to ignorant fools.

Same as it ever was.

Fritz Vahrenholt's Climate Apostasy Partly Due to Solar Research of Henrik Svensmark

So says journalist and film-maker Michael Miersch for Germany's FOCUS, as translated by Phillip Mueller in "Solar Shift Rocks Germany", here:

The work of the Danish researcher Henrik Svensmark and other climate scientists convinced him that the fluctuating magnetic field of the sun is a driver of climate change, because it shields cyclically more or less cosmic radiation from the earth. This particle radiation from space contributes to cloud formation.

A Little Friday Night Truck Humor

















h/t Scott

Potential Juror Number 382 in Hutaree Trial Sticks Up For 4th Amendment

The Detroit Free Press has the story here:


The last person added to the final jury pool said he is skeptical about police and paid informants going undercover to spy on people.

His views struck a nerve with the prosecution, whose key witnesses include a federal agent and paid confidential informant who infiltrated the Hutaree group, secretly recorded conversations with members, then reported everything they saw and heard back to the FBI. ...

He said he believes spying on people is an invasion of privacy. 

“You’re basically paying someone to lie and deceive people. I don’t think that’s right,” said the potential juror.

The country could use a lot more jurors 382.

Mormons Still Practice Polygamy in the Form of "Sealing"

So says Tresa Edmunds here:

Today polygamy still echoes in our doctrine as men can be "sealed", or united for eternity in a religious ordinance, to more than one woman. ... 

[M]y co-blogger, Lindsay Hansen Park, . . . writes . . . "[H]istory forces us to reflect on current practices and policies and we begin to question the reasoning of it all. Mormons still practice polygamy posthumously in the temple? Is polygamy the law we're to expect in the afterlife? And better yet, who are we to tell the world what a traditional family looks like, when our past is far from traditional?"

One's a Creep, the Other a Monster

Tim Noah of The New Republic (who admits Edward Kennedy was "criminally irresponsible" in 1969) helps you decide which is the creep, and which the monster, here.

Progressivism can only be said to be making progress, however, when people such as these are flailed while they are alive and still in power.

The West's Problem: Ongoing Misdirection of Capital

So says Nicole Gelinas, here:

In the years leading up to 2007, the rules necessary to govern a flourishing market economy broke down, producing a financial and economic crisis. Rather than responding to the crisis by fixing those rules, the West aggressively repudiated market economics, and the repudiation continues to this day.

Or, to put it the way George Bush did, we've abandoned free-market principles to save the market.

Never works. Never will.


Thursday, February 9, 2012

Guttmacher Institute Report Claims 2% of US Catholic Women Use Natural Family Planning

The Guttmacher report also claims 98 percent of sexually-active American Catholic women use contraceptives:

Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same, 98%, among sexually experienced Catholic women. ...

Only 2% of Catholic women rely on natural family planning; even among Catholic women who attend church once a month or more, only 2% rely on this method (not shown). Sixty-eight percent of Catholic women use highly effective methods: sterilization (32%, including 24% using female sterilization,) the pill or another hormonal method (31%) and the IUD (5%). ...

Data were gathered using in-person interviews with 7,356 women aged 15–44 between June 2006 and December 2008. All data used for this analysis were weighted, and the findings are nationally representative. ...

Current contraceptive use was measured only among women who had had sex in the three months prior to the survey and refers to the method used in the most recent month she had sex. Among women who reported using multiple methods in the survey month, priority was given to the most effective method. The category of “other” methods mainly consists of withdrawal but also includes less common methods, such as suppositories, sponges and foams. Natural family planning includes periodic abstinence, temperature rhythm and cervical mucus tests.


The Guttmacher Institute was originally in 1968 a creature of Planned Parenthood, and became independent from it in 1977. Alan Frank Guttmacher was once the president of PP.

The 4-6 year old study on which the data are based is described as "weighted," which means some data points count more than others. Which ones no one knows. I'll leave it to statisticians to decide if 7,356 women comprise enough of a data set to draw sweeping religious conclusions about any religious group, Catholic or otherwise.

From what I know of Catholics, however, the religion is "orthopractic" more than it is orthodox, emphasizing religious obligation more than religious belief, which would help explain why US Catholic women apparently routinely ignore official teaching.

Protestants have tended rather to emphasize correct belief, but in truth are not really less likely to practice otherwise.

Catholicism is a much bigger tent than Protestantism, which is a sea of tents. The strength, and the weakness, of Catholicism is its ability to co-opt pre-existing belief and absorb it.

The present struggle over reproductive issues in America highlights a struggle against an ideology not unlike that which the church faced in the Soviet era in the Eastern Bloc.

This may be a long war which doesn't end until America does.

Catholicism, however, will still be here when America is gone.   

German Lefty Fritz Vahrenholt Questions CO2 Climate Change Hypothesis

Interviewed here in Der Spiegel:

"Today, I want new scientific findings to be included in the climate debate. It would then become clear that the simple equation that CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases are almost exclusively responsible for climate change is unsustainable. It hasn't gotten any warmer on this planet in almost 14 years, despite continued increases in CO2 emissions. Established climate science has to come up with an answer to that. ...

"The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don't know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it's also good news. ...

"In terms of the climate, we have seen a cyclical up and down for the last 7,000 years, long before man began emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. There has been a warming phase every 1,000 years, including the Roman, the Medieval and the current warm periods. All of these warm periods consistently coincided with strong solar activity. In addition to this large fluctuation in activity, there is also a 210-year and an 87-year natural cycle of the sun. Ignoring these would be a serious mistake …

"In the second half of the 20th century, the sun was more active than it had been in more than 2,000 years. This "large solar maximum," as astronomers call it, has contributed at least as much to global warming as the greenhouse gas CO2. But the sun has been getting weaker since 2005, and it will continue to do so in the next few decades. Consequently, we can only expect cooling from the sun for now. ...

"Many scientists assume that the temperature changes by more than 1 degree Celsius for the 1,000-year cycle and by up to 0.7 degrees Celsius for the smaller cycles. Climatologists should be putting a far greater effort into finding ways to more accurately determine the effects of the sun on climate. For the IPCC and the politicians it influences, CO2 is practically the only factor. The importance of the sun for the climate is systematically underestimated, and the importance of CO2 is systematically overestimated. As a result, all climate predictions are based on the wrong underlying facts. ...

"[T]he declining solar activity, as well as the fluctuations in ocean currents, such as the 60-year Pacific oscillation, which was in a positive warm phase from 1977 to 2000 and, since 2000, has led to cooling as a result of its decline. Their contribution to the change in temperature has also been wrongly attributed to CO2. Most of all, however, the last sunspot cycle was weaker than the one before it. This is why the sun's magnetic field has continued to weaken since 2000. As a result, this magnetic field doesn't shield us against cosmic radiation quite as well, which in turn leads to stronger cloud formation and, therefore, cooling. What else has to happen before the IPCC at least mentions these relationships in its reports? ...

"In addition to carbon dioxide, we also have black soot, for example. It creates 55 percent of the warming effect of CO2, but it could be filtered out with little effort within a few years, especially in emerging and developing countries. And, in doing so, we would achieve huge benefits for human health. ...

"All I'm saying is that CO2 is a climate gas, but that its effect is only half as strong as the IPCC claims. ..."

Total World Stock Market Capitalization Year-End 2010 at $56 Trillion

Data here.

Total Demand Deposits in January at $0.8 Trillion

Total Savings and Money Market Deposits in January at $6.057 Trillion

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Irrational Exuberance in Home Ownership Rates

MJ Perry has a good post on the deflating home ownership bubble here, and this cool chart, which shows once again that starting in 1995 all manner of metrics assumed an irrationally exuberant upward trend.

An additional chart at the link less convincingly makes the case that low down payment loans were a cause, rather than a by-product, of the bubble.  Looks like a lagging indicator to me, but obviously it is an imprudent policy to require only 3 percent down.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Famous Republican Ted Olson Responsible For Challenging CA Proposition 8

Conservatives needing another reason not to support the Republican Party need only look to this case:

Ted Olson, one of the lawyers representing couples who challenged Proposition 8, said: "This case is about equality and freedom and dignity and fairness and decency. It is about whether we are going to eliminate government-sponsored discrimination written into the constitution of the biggest state in the U.S."

Mr. Olson, a Republican stalwart, teamed up with David Boies, a Democrat and his adversary in the 2000 presidential-election case of Bush v. Gore, to bring the challenge to Proposition 8. ...

Six states, plus the District of Columbia, permit same-sex marriages, and proponents of gay marriage are gearing up to press their cause during this election year, including in Maine and Washington state.

From the Log Cabin Republicans to Ted Olson, Republicans have been in the vanguard of the insane waging war on nature and nature's God.

To hell with them all.

Radioactivity 150 Miles From Vermont's Troubled, Aging Yankee Nuclear Plant Blamed on Atmospheric Testing in 1940s and 1950s, and on Chernobyl

Strontium-90 has been found in bass far from Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, according to this story:

Now, new tests of bass caught 150 miles away in northwestern Vermont and outside the area affected by the plant's groundwater show similar levels of Strontium-90, said William Irwin, chief of the Vermont Health Department's radiological division.

The likely source, rather than Vermont Yankee, is residue from above-ground nuclear testing in the 1940s and 1950s and the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in the Soviet Union in 1986, he said.


This report puts it as follows:

Irwin said Lake Carmine, in Enosburg Falls, is about as far away from Yankee as you can get and still be in the Green Mountain State.

"The results are that cesium-137 and strontium-90 in Lake Carmi fish is in the same range as Connecticut River fish," said Irwin. "We take this as some evidence that all fish in Vermont are likely to have radioactive cesium and strontium at these levels and that, as we've hypothesized, it is from nuclear weapons fallout and the releases of Chernobyl. All of us are glad to have proof and not just conjecture."


The similar levels of radioactive contamination suggest that the reasons for shutting down an aging plant like Vermont's Yankee Nuclear are distinct in this case, not the least of which is that the design is identical to the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power plants which melted down after the earthquakes and tsunami in March 2011.

Obama: Pesky Constitution Gets In Way of Getting Things Done

Quoted here:

"What's frustrated people is that I've not been able to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes. But what we have been able to do is move in the right direction," Obama said.




Obama Knows His Base Is Women, And ObamaCare Was Designed For It

Romney would lose in November because he's competing for a voting block which Obama already owns. While 48 percent of Romney's voters said they were Republican, 41 percent self-identified as Independent.

Once again, from the Florida exit polling here, Romney's biggest support came from women (52 percent), Hispanic/Latino (54 percent), moderate/liberal (59 percent), oppose Tea Party (57 percent), Roman Catholic (56 percent), and the abortion should be legal crowd (54 percent).

Compare that with this from CNN (here):

Catholic teaching opposes abortion and the use of contraceptives, though a 2011 study by the Guttmacher Institute showed 98% of sexually active Catholic women had used contraception.

The Democrat strategy, as always, is to divide and conquer, but when it comes to the Catholic church, there isn't a lot of dividing work to do. Obama has known for a long time that the loyalty of Catholic women to the church is divided over reproductive issues, as is the loyalty of Christian women generally.

Women in this country want the freedom to kill their unborn children. Otherwise Roe v. Wade would not continue to stand.

Obama knows his base. ObamaCare was designed for it. Catholic women in Florida went for Romney like they'll be going for Obama in November. The better to eat you with, my dear.



"Those domestick traitors, bosom-thieves,
Whom custom hath call'd wives; the readiest helps
To betray the heady husbands, rob the easy."

-- Ben Jonson

Thomas Sowell Says Mitt Romney's Minimum Wage Views Prove He's No Conservative



When you set minimum wage levels higher than many inexperienced young people are worth, they don't get hired. It is not rocket science.

Milton Friedman explained all this, half a century ago, in his popular little book for non-economists, "Capitalism and Freedom." So have many other people. If a presidential candidate who calls himself "conservative" has still not heard of these facts, that simply shows that you can call yourself anything you want to. 

Monday, February 6, 2012

The Difference Between Us and Them, Well Stated


For conservatives, answering the essential question of what our political goals are is not difficult. We do not believe in the perfectibility of the world. Those of us who are Christian conservatives believe that the government can fight wars, as well as provide protection from discrimination and a safety net for the poor. Capitalism and the free market are not perfect systems, but they are the best systems for providing human flourishing. We believe in progress that reenforces timeless truths.

Yet if you do believe in the perfectibility of the world -- or "fundamental transformation" in the president's phrase -- then nothing, not even the human conscience, can be allowed to get in the way.