If 61% Of Arizonans Can Defeat Big Sis' Speed Cameras By Not Paying, Americans Can Do The Same To ObamaCare

Flashback to the November 2010 story in CAR AND DRIVER, "Arizona's Speed Cameras Come Down . . . Arizona drivers win one with civil disobedience" here:

Last summer [2009], with Arizona locked in a national shouting match over its clampdown on illegal immigration, the state’s Republican governor was quietly pulling the plug on a two-year photo-camera reign of terror that nailed 1,109,035 motorists, mostly along a Phoenix freeway, with mail-in citations that started at $181. Governor Jan Brewer called the cameras “invasive” and said she believed they were put in place by Janet Napolitano, her Democratic predecessor, as a “revenue-generating solution to solving our budget [problems].” Others pointed out that the state got only half the cash projected by Napolitano—about $64 million instead of $120 million. And that was because only 39 percent of those ticketed drivers (432,367 of 1,109,035) knuckled under and paid up—the other 61 percent simply tossed the tickets and then avoided process servers for 90 days.

Ann Coulter Says The Only Way To Get Rid Of ObamaCare Is To Elect The Republicans Who Invented It

And anybody who tells you differently is a con man or scam artist.

Here.

Uh huh.

Corporate Cash Is At $1.9 Trillion

Story here.

GLD is down to 795.61 tons

Seen here:

SPDR Gold Trust, the world's largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, said its holdings fell 0.70 percent to 795.61 tons on Wednesday from 801.25 tons on Tuesday.

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Holdings have fallen 25% since May 2013.

Oops: Last Fall NOAA Predicted Above Normal Temps November Through January

Reported here:

Surprised by how tough this winter has been? You’re in good company: Last fall the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that temperatures would be above normal from November through January across much of the Lower 48 states. ... The big red blotch in the top map represents parts of the country in which the Climate Prediction Center forecast above-average temperatures. The frigid-looking blue blotch in the bottom “verification” map shows areas where temperatures turned out to be below average. “Not one of our better forecasts,” admits Mike Halpert, the Climate Prediction Center’s acting director.

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How come the experts are always surprised?

This is another climate model failure, you know the kind, like the ones which claim global warming continues even though it stopped fourteen years ago.

Peggy Noonan Wants To Know: "What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens?"

Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu

This, Peggy.

Column here.

How The 2009 Stimulus Has Hidden The Obama Decline

As everyone knows by now, when the Democrats swept into power in the 2008 election one of the first things they did was pass the stimulus spending bill in February 2009, five years ago this month.

The passage of the stimulus has been a boon to Democrats and their program. One, the added spending for fiscal 2009 got charged to George Bush's account, not Obama's, making Bush's spending record look worse than it was. Two, the added spending became the new baseline for spending in every year since, keeping government big, its most insidious affect. Three, because Republicans retook the House in 2010, spending in 2011 and 2012 has had to hew more closely to what it was in 2009 because of Tea Party demands to put the brakes on spending, allowing Obama to brag that he's kept government spending increases low for a longer period of time than has been usual. This is sort of like how Obama takes credit for our oil production boom, which happens in spite of him on private lands, not because of him.

What's so disturbing about the increase to baseline spending is that over 75% of the GDP gains for 2009 through 2012 can be attributed to that, not to anything real in the US economy. In other words, GDP growth from government spending has been propping up reported GDP and masking the severity of the current economic depression in which millions of homeowners remain underwater, similar millions remain without work after five years, and those still working suffer under a real multi-year decline in their earnings because of stagnant wages and increased costs for food, energy, clothing, healthcare and taxes. The middle class is being pushed inexorably downward. Like the infamous Climategate emails which showed an effort by scientists to hide the decline in global temperatures over the last decade, US government spending has been doing the same for the decline of GDP.

The figures are startling.

Using 2008 as the baseline from Table 3A of the Bureau of Economic Analysis's summer 2013 comprehensive revision of GDP ($14,720.3 billion), the net increase to GDP in nominal dollars for each year 2009 through 2012 relative to 2008 was $2.8782 trillion:

2009    -302.4 billion dollars

2010   +238.0

2011   +813.5

2012 +1524.3.

Similarly, using 2008 as the baseline for federal outlays as tracked by the Tax Policy Center using figures from the OMB ($2,982.5 billion), the net increase to federal spending in nominal dollars for each year 2009 through 2012, again, relative to 2008, was $2.1841 trillion:

2009 +535.2 billion dollars

2010 +473.7

2011 +620.6

2012 +554.6.

Thus the nominal gain in GDP relative to 2008 for all four years apart from nominal increases to government spending has been all of $694.1 billion, for a gain overall of 4.71% since 2008, 1.17% per annum on average, one of the most appalling records in all of American history because that figure is not adjusted for inflation. The all items CPI has risen 19.388 seasonally adjusted between January 1, 2009 and January 1, 2013, an increase of 9.1% which completely wipes out the nominal GDP gain of 4.71%.

So GDP has actually been negative for the whole of Obama's first term, but completely hidden from view by the increase to baseline spending caused by the 2009 stimulus. If it has felt like a depression, it's because it is one.

59% Of American Adults Sympathize With The Main Goal Of Communism, And 83% Of Democrats Do

The goal? Wealth redistribution.

Gallup. April 2013. Here.

Garbage in, K-12 . . . garbage out forevermore.

No wonder upper class self-identification is down a whopping 29% under the leader. 

Social Conservatives Save, Liberals Just Go Into Debt

Social conservatives tax themselves (it's called saving for retirement, now $21.9 trillion saved), liberals tax everyone but never save anything (it's called the Total Public Debt, now $17.3 trillion owed).

Gold Stats For 2013

The gold stats for 2013 are out, reported here:

• Chinese consumer demand: a record 1,066 tonnes.
• Indian consumer demand: 975 tonnes.
• Global consumer demand: 3,864 tonnes.
• Average price: $1,411/ounce, down 15% from 2012.
• Overall demand: 3,756 tonnes, down 15% from 2012.
• Net outflows from ETFs: 881 tonnes.
• Central bank purchases: 369 tonnes, down 32% from 2012 when demand was at its highest in half a century.

Michigan Spends 53% More Per Mile On Roads Than The National Average

The news is full of doom and gloom about Michigan spending on roads based on per capita measures. You can get that news here from the Detroit News, where you will learn Michigan is in dead last for spending per capita and that road industry lobbyists think this is terrible and advocate more spending to solve Michigan's road problems.

What a shock. Industry wants us to spend more money on roads.

From all that you wouldn't know that Michigan spent 53% more per mile than the national average, as reported here in 2013 (overall story here).

Michigan actually ranks 37th in total disbursements per mile.

That's quite a different picture than being dead last per capita.

Think about it. If Michigan roads are so bad, maybe spending per mile has been spent on the wrong people, namely the unions in control of the industry. If we're not getting what we're paying for, maybe we should hire someone else instead of throwing more money at the problem.

I'll Believe In The Liberals' Idea Of Equal Dignity Of Work When Paul Krugman Gets Paid To Scrub Toilets

Here he is in all his liberal splendor, refusing to grant the dignity he demands:

It’s all very well to talk in the abstract about the dignity of work, but to suggest that workers can have equal dignity despite huge inequality in pay is just silly. In 2012, the top 40 hedge fund managers and traders were paid a combined $16.7 billion, equivalent to the wages of 400,000 ordinary workers. Given that kind of disparity, can anyone really believe in the equal dignity of work?

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I'll spell it out for you: if your dignity depends on how much you make rather than on doing your job, whatever it is, well, then you will never have any dignity.

Yes, there is dignity of work, but only if work is done well. The real indignity accrues to those who do not value the work of others, however humble, and imagine that they are better because of what they do and how much they make.

Michael Mann Of Penn State Claimed He "Shared" The Nobel Peace Prize For Almost Five Years

As reported here. And the guy still won't say in the revised bio to whom the Nobel was actually awarded: "jointly" to the IPCC and Al Gore. The IPCC and Al Gore shared the prize, not the IPCC authors, the IPCC and Al Gore.

"He shared the Nobel Peace Prize"

"He contributed to the award of the prize", but to whom exactly?

Ah, to these, exactly.

These Men Shared The Nobel Prize . . .

. . . these men did not:

Al Gore

Michael Mann

VW Workers Reject UAW In Tennessee 726-612

Reported here:

The rejection is a major blow to the UAW which has never organized a foreign-brand auto plant operating in the U.S.

Penn State Alumni Newsletter In November 2007 Bragged That Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Shared In The Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To The IPCC And Al Gore

And worse, the association puts Mann on the same level as a real Nobel winner like Paul Berg who was a named winner who shared the Prize for Chemistry with two others. Michael Mann cannot be said to have shared the Peace Prize with Al Gore and the IPCC, nor can any of the other 2000 members of the IPCC or however many there were be said to have shared it, either. To say this diminishes the achievement of named winners of prizes who may have won them alone or in company with other named individuals.

Seen here:

Five Penn State scientists, all members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize when the 2,000-member IPCC and former vice president Al Gore were recognized for their work on climate change issues.

The five Penn State scientists and IPCC members are: Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences; William Easterling, dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and professor of geography and earth system science; Klaus Keller, assistant professor of geosciences, Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology; and Anne Thompson, professor of meteorology.

They join the select company of Paul Berg ’48, the only Penn State alumnus to win a Nobel Prize. Berg, the “father of genetic engineering,” shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Harvard Professor Walter Gilbert and Cambridge Professor Frederick Sanger. The Nobel committee recognized Berg for his groundbreaking construction of the first recombinant-DNA molecule—a discovery that paved the way for scientists interested in understanding the interactions between the chemical structure of DNA and resultant biological structure, or function, of an organism.

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Al Gore can claim to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the IPCC can claim to, but none of the individual panel members can claim to have shared in the winning of that prize. Michael Mann did not win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. Mann has had to retract his own claims to the prize as reported here:

Disgraced Penn State University (PSU) climatologist, Michael Mann, concedes defeat in his bogus claims to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mann’s employer this weekend began the shameful task of divesting itself of all inflated claims  on university websites and official documentation that Mann was ever a Peace Prize recipient with Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Thanks to a tip off from respected climate researcher, Dr. Klaus Kaiser, myself and Tom Richard (who scooped the original Nobel story) obtained “before and after” copy images from PSU websites as records of this damning retraction. (follow the link above for the screenshots)

Evidently alumni sites have not been purged.

Obama Delays Global Warming Until 2016

Seen here.

Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Isn't Like Galileo, Trofim Lysenko Is More Like It

So says Robert Tracinski, here:

Mann is attempting to install himself as a kind of American Lysenko. Trofim Lysenko was the Soviet scientist who ingratiated himself to Joseph Stalin and got his crackpot theories on genetics installed as official dogma, effectively killing the study of biology in the Soviet Union. Under Lysenko, the state had an established and official scientific doctrine, and you risked persecution if you questioned it. Mann's libel suit [against Mark Steyn] is an attempt to establish that same principle here.

Mann has recently declared himself to be both a scientist and a political activist. But in attempting to intimidate his critics and suppress free debate on global warming, he is violating the fundamental rules of both science and politics. If it is a sin to doubt, then there is no science. If it is a crime to dissent, then there is no politics.

Federal Judge Appointed By Obama In Marriage Ruling Says "All Men Are Created Equal" Comes From The Constitution

Another mediocrity appointed by Obama proves the worthlessness of her degrees from Kutztown State College and the North Carolina Central University School of Law, quoted here:

"Our Constitution declares that 'all men' are created equal. Surely this means all of us," Judge Allen wrote on the first page of her opinion. That line opens the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and appears nowhere in the Constitution. The line, in which Thomas Jefferson, with signature flourish, borrowed the words of theorist John Locke: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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Thanks Jim Webb and Mark Warner.

The Odds Of Winning Lotto Are About 20% Better Than Your Congressman Knowing Your Name

In Michigan your best odds of winning a lotto jackpot are in the game named "Fantasy Five". Your odds of winning are about 1:575,757.

The likelihood your congressman knows your name on average in the United States today are 1:728,712 (316.99 million current population divided by 435 members of the US House).

So your lotto odds are about 20% better than your representation odds.

If we followed the constitution, however, and had the representation it prescribes (1:30,000), your representation odds would improve almost 96% instantly (10,566 members of the US House).

Now there's an instant game we can all play.