The Anti-Economic Freedom Party

The Club for Growth rates each member of Congress annually for their commitment to economic freedom and growth.  The 2022 ratings are not available, since the 2022 sessions are still underway.  The 2021 session ratings for the House of Representatives, controlled by a Democratic Party majority, are available here.  There are some very important lessons to keep in mind for the 2022 mid-term election coming up.

First, lets get the Big Picture View:

Republican Rating Breakdown:

28 earned 100% rating

79 earned 90-99% ratings

74 earned 80 - 89% ratings

19 earned 70 - 79% ratings

7 earned 60 - 69% ratings

3 earned 50 - 59% ratings

1 earned 40 - 49% rating

Democrat Rating Breakdown:

7 earned 10 - 19% ratings

3 earned 1 - 9% ratings

210 earned 0% rating

First Observation:  It is most remarkable that all but 10 Democrats had a 0% rating on economic freedom and growth, making the median Democrat rating 0%.

Second Observation:  The entire range of Democrat ratings was between 0 and 17%.  Democrats are extremely united in their opposition to economic freedom and growth.

Third Observation:  Republicans range from 48% to 100%.  There are Republicans who are not highly committed to economic freedom and growth.

Fourth Observation:  Democrats universally move in lock-step with Nancy Pelosi and her 0% rating, with a very few symbolic instances of rebellion, often because Nancy Pelosi was not thought to be as strongly anti-economic freedom as the Democrat wanted her to be.  Examples -- Ilhan Omar 13%, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 10%, and Rashida Tlaib 10%.

Many of these 0% Democrats will tell you they favor capitalism over socialism, but that is a lie.  They are adamantly anti-economic freedom.  They are universally in agreement that we should be driven into energy poverty.  They are universally in agreement that we should be hounded by IRS agents armed to the teeth and wasting many tens of hours of our time, with horrible economic costs.  They are universally in favor of ever more regulations weighing down small businesses.  They are universally in favor of mandating our subservience to corrupt union bosses.  They are universally determined to force our children to go to government-run schools where they are besieged with propaganda in favor big government as a supposed protection against immoral businessmen, never mind the immorality of politicians and bureaucrats.  Many of these Democrats believe the Earth cannot sustain its 8 billion people and are so anti-human as to suggest that we need to reduce the human population!  How can they make that happen?  

Simple -- destroy the capitalist private sector that provides us a high standard of living by putting it completely under the control of politicians, bureaucrats, experts in universities, and union bosses.  With the exception of a good fraction of the Republican politicians, these groups are in it only so they can exercise their own power lust.  They long for the control of the old Medieval aristocracy and clergy over the impoverished serfs.  But now with the establishment of huge databases of information on each of us, they can classify us as being in their camp as fellow elitists, in their camp as deceived dependents, or as their opposition -- that is as The Deplorables.  It is The Deplorables who want freedom and in the context of an increasingly authoritarian government, we are the Rebels.  Biden just called us near Nazis, revealing his total ignorance and transferring to us his own behavior and motivations.  Biden and the Democrats in the House of Representatives see eye to eye.  Economic freedoms must be suppressed in order that they can micromanage our lives and make us their serf slaves.

Of course our freedom of speech, freedom to write and read, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, and freedom of association are all also being ever more restricted too.  The Elite aristocracy cannot allow these freedoms either, because they can be used by the rebellious freedom-lovers to deny them power.

Scientific Illiteracy at the CDC and White House

Nancy Pelosi kissed the Pretender in Chief Biden on his cheek before she was known to have Covid-19.  But no worry.  The White House says she was not within 6 feet of him for 15 minutes, so according to the CDC criteria for close contact for Covid-19, she was under the time limit.  No worry.

Most people have enough sense to understand that how close they were matters.  They were not 6 feet apart, they were an inch apart.  Common sense proves here to be vastly superior to the "science" of the CDC and the regulatory sense of the White House.

Let us see if we can explain this to the scientifically illiterate of the CDC and the White House.  A simple model of the dispersion of the virus as it spreads out over distance is that it is diluted as the cubic power of the distance between the people involved.  The density of the virus in the air is approximately proportional to the volume of a sphere centered on the point of emission.  Now the distance between Nancy and Joe was about 1 inch and its cube is 1 cubic inch.  6 feet in inches is 72 inches, whose cube is 373,248 cubic inches.  So the dose rate of virus someone 6 feet away from Nancy is about 1/373,248 times that which Joe experienced.  This number is 2.68 millionths.

The threshold viral dose for close contact is this viral density times the time of exposure.  The CDC critical time is 15 minutes, so the critical time when the dose rate is 373,248 times greater than it is at 6 feet is 15 minutes/373,248 = 0.000040 minutes or 0.0024 seconds.

Nancy must be the fastest kisser ever if she managed to smack the Great Pretender in less than 0.0024 seconds.  Not to mention that she had to have spent some additional time within that 6 foot distance.

Science and good old American common sense agree that the CDC and the White House are wacko!

You know, if Nancy can move so fast that her bussing the Great Pretender on the cheek was really no cause of Covid-19 concern, then her propulsion system is so good, we should send her on the first human mission to Alpha Centauri.  She can traverse that 4 light years distance in no time at all.  Nancy, it is your patriotic duty to take on this mission to Alpha Centauri!  Do it right now.

As for the CDC, that distance within 6 feet matters hugely and cannot be ignored in any scientific criterion for close contact.

Obama's Comrade Pants Act

I was recently commenting on the repeal of ObamaCare in response to an article on-line at the Foundation for Economic Education and said that ObamaCare was a sad case of one-size-fits all.  An anonymous pest named D G then called me stupid for not knowing that there are three plan levels in ObamaCare.  Of course, I did know that there are four plan levels, but one could say that I did somewhat exaggerate in the one-size-fits all.  But, really only a little bit as will be apparent in my discussion of how Obama, Reid, and Pelosi had planned to pass the Comrade Pants Act, but they lost control of the House and the Senate due to the reaction against ObamaCare before they could carry out their plans.

Recognizing that pants are very important to the welfare of Americans and that some people did not have pants of sufficient quality to meet the standards of Democrat politicians and bureaucrats, Obama and his party in Congress decided that something had to be done about this.  Of course they were quite busy with passing ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank so they were running badly behind schedule in pushing the Comrade Pants Act through Congress.  It was a race against time also, because they knew they were about to lose their legislative majorities, having sacrificed it to the principle that the government held ownership rights in everyone's mind and body, thus allowing them to dictate the means of maintaining everyone's mind and body.  Pants were important, but what could in principle be as important as that mind and body collective ownership principle?

So the Senate had had a thousand-page act thrown together by pants manufacturers, cloth makers, pants manufacturing equipment makers, haberdashers, egalitarian professional agitators, and their Senate staff members. None of the Senators had had time to read the act, but they knew there would be more time to do that after the act was passed.  Now there was a problem -- the act had tax penalties in it for anyone who wore pants that were not up to the standards set in the act.  Well, more precisely most of the standards were to be set up by federal government bureaucrats.  Those penalties would also have to be levied on anyone who did not purchase the required pants as well.  But constitutionally, all legislation levying taxes, tariffs, and other fees has to originate in the House of Representatives. So how could they satisfy this requirement without starting over, which time did not allow?  Simple.  They stripped out all but the bill number of a bill passed in the House to establish National Lollipop Day, changing the name of the bill to the Pant-wearer Protection and Affordable Pants Act, colloquially known as the Comrade Pants Act.  They poured the Senate act text into it and passed this act in the Senate after sufficient non-citizen votes were cast for Al Franken to allow the Senate to do so.  By then, the House did not have time to approve the act that resulted from reconciliation of the PPAPA and the National Lollipop Day texts.  Usually a reconciliation can be performed quickly, but the differences in the two texts were just a bit too much for the remaining time before recess.

While all of this legislative activity was carried out at a frenzied pace, Obama and Pelosi had been telling the American people over and over that if they liked their pants they could keep them.  It they liked their pants providers, they could keep them also.  They also said that because pant making equipment was to become standardized, as were the patterns and styles, the cost of pants would drop.  Everyone could efficiently examine them on on-line exchanges and purchase them there under competition among many pants suppliers, once they provided their social security numbers and credit card information to the government with its well-known regard for the security of their information.  People with qualifying incomes would receive subsidies for their critical pant purchases, while people with higher incomes would pay full price.  People who bought many pants with subsidies were thus supported by those who bought pants at full price, but of course those people who bought many pants must have needed them and it was recognized that need was an irrefutable claim on the labor and income of others.  Tax forms were to have a new line.  It was the shared pants responsibility line that one had to fill out proving that one had either purchased pants on-line from one of the pants exchanges or that pants from any other source met the specifications for what was deemed good pants by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Democratic Party did not want to be criticized for forcing everyone to wear a single pant size, so they set up four levels of pants that one could purchase.  The Act itself was vague about what distinguished these pants levels, but the bureaucrats anticipated the House passing the legislation and rapidly filled out the requirements.

Platinum Level: 44-inch waist, 40-inch in-seam, wool cloth, gray, pockets both front and back, six pair a year.

Gold Level:  40-inch waist, 36-inch in-seam, linen cloth, cream-color, pockets in back only, four pair a year.

Silver Level:  36-inch waist, 32-inch in-seam, denim cloth, blue, pockets in front only, 2 pair a year.

Bronze Level:  32-inch waist, 28-inch in-seam, polyester cloth, pink, no pockets, 1 pair a year.

As you can see, this is not a one-size-fits-all law.  There is all the accommodation for different needs that any comrade might reasonably have.  All you have to do is sign onto the federal pants exchange in your state and choose your bronze, silver, gold, or platinum pant plan.  What could possibly be wrong with this?

To this day there are many Democrats who bemoan the failure to pass the Comrade Pants Act.  That act was so going to address everyone's pants needs and in the process make us all a little more equal.  Of course, this was just a second step in this quest for equality.  There were many more goods and services to which the Democratic Socialist Party planned to apply the same legislative methods.

20 Feb 2017 Update:  It has recently been suggested that the government having established the right to force individuals to buy a product or service should now force the People to buy Ivanka's clothing line.  As we know from ObamaCare, this requirement must be implemented without regard for the individual's sex, age, or personal needs.  So guys, line up and select your Ivanka clothing of choice!  The choices will only diminish with time.

Making ObamaCare a Power-Luster's Dream

As the 137 agencies and panels are set up and start issuing their many rulings on who will receive health care and who will not and at what cost, the total package of power manipulations of our lives by bureaucrats and politicians will become more clear.  But we have already seen states and certain health care operations acquire special treatment for political reasons in the maneuvers to get the votes to pass the unread, unconstitutional legislation in a most unseemly rush to exert the power of the Democrat Socialist Party.

Since that time, we have seen the Obama Department of Health and Human Services grant 1,372 waivers of a provision of ObamaCare.  These waivers are for one year of the medical expense limit requirements, which are higher than those many company or union health plans now offer.  They can be applied for annually through 2014.  These waivers have been granted to hundreds of union locals, despite the unions being the most vociferous of ObamaCare supporters when it was being considered in Congress.  Apparently many union locals changed their minds when they had a chance to actually read it afterward.  Or were the unions assured ahead of time that they would be granted such waivers as they wanted, seeing as how they were such munificent contributors to the election of the Democrat Socialists?  It is hard to know with this most open and transparent group of political operatives who were running the show in the 2010 Congress and the Obama gang.  Oh, did I say open and transparent?  Sorry that must have stuck in my mind from the election campaign that put these Democrat Socialists in control of our government and they thought of our lives.  I meant to say in this closed, deep-caved, murky regime of moles and voles.

These waivers now cover 3.1 million people.  The Daily Caller reports that:

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Now there are 435 Congressional districts and each has about the same number of Americans in the district.  If 204 waivers were granted equally among these districts, the distribution should average 0.47 per district.  But, somehow, surely just a statistical anomaly, the district of Nancy Pelosi, the ObamaCare prime mover through the House of Representatives, just happened to get 38 waivers or 81 times her district's equal share of waivers.  God must be loading the dice when he sees that the good people of Pelosi's district are so willing to delegate powers to the federal government that they elected this good, god-favored woman to Congress.  But I, not being much of a god-fearer, must note that this is a severe injustice in a nation of sovereign, equal individuals with full rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their minds and bodies, and the pursuit of their personal happiness.  This is the hand of tyranny and it should be no more tolerated than when that hand was the actually lighter hand of King George III.  Under Democrat Socialist rule, there is no such thing as equal individual rights.  No, those are traded for status as either a crony to a powerful politician or the status of the Forgotten Man.  Most of us are forgotten.  I certainly am, unless I am on their enemies list.

One of the remarkable things about the companies getting waivers from Nancy Pelosi's district is that they were expensive, high-end restaurants, hotels, spas, night clubs, and car dealerships.  Apparently many other Congressional districts did not get so many waivers because they just do not have enough wealthy business establishments to compete with Pelosi's San Francisco crony mercantilism companies.  Unless maybe, just maybe, these businesses have special tutoring in how to take advantage of the overly complex and overly belligerent Washington power brokerage system that ordinary Americans will never figure out.  Of course, a call from the office of Nancy Pelosi to HHS head Kathleen Sebelius in her murky subterranean den probably does not hurt either.

Democrat House Puts Dirty Foot in Corporations' Mouths

The Democrats were furious that the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case last fall that corporations and unions could fund ads supporting or opposing candidates for federal offices during the critical periods before elections and primaries.  Facing an election bloodbath in November, they were desperate to find a way to gain some advantage.  They passed the DISCLOSE Act yesterday by a vote of 219 to 206.  Two Republicans joined the majority Democrats.  DISCLOSE stands for the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act.  The light is only cast on corporations.  It is not cast on large unions, the NRA, the AARP, or the Humane Society.  Obama supports the bill and wants the Senate to pass it.

Democrat Representative Jared Polis of Colorado said that corporations are "zombies consuming the flesh of profit."  Therefore, corporations should forfeit their freedom of speech.  They should also understand how vehement the Democrat hatred of business activity is from this statement and from this act.  One would think that business would learn that Democrats cannot be trusted with power because they are strongly opposed to people's freedom to earn a living.

The bill requires not that disclosure of who paid for the ad be available or on file, but that the CEOs of funding companies must appear in the TV ad or talk on the radio ad and disclose their funding of the ad.  This will take so much time that 15 second ads will become useless to corporations.  The more expensive 30 second ads will have more like 15 seconds of content.  In addition, corporations with $10,000,000 of government contracts will not be allowed to run election ads at all.  Companies with 20% foreign ownership or which are 5% owned by a foreign nation also will have no freedom of speech.  It is clear that this bill is unconstitutional.

The Democrat dirty trick to remove the democratic voice of businessmen from elections, was compounded by their favorite legislative dirty trick of disclosing the content of the DISCLOSE bill only the day before the vote.  Then that dirty trick was further compounded by only allowing 1 hour for the debate on the bill on the House floor!  This, after the House allowed 41 hours of floor time for the naming of new post offices!!!!  This is a mind-boggling display of hatred for business.

The two idiot Republicans who voted for the DISCLOSE Act are Joseph Cao of Louisiana, who has a record of voting for awful Democrat bills, and Mike Castle of Delaware.  Mike Castle is running for the Senate after serving 9 terms as a Representative.  If he wins the election, he would complete the four years left on Joe Biden's seat in the Senate.  It appears that Mike Castle is a RINO, which may not be too surprising given that he runs for election in Delaware.  Suppressing freedom of speech is very popular in Delaware, as the highly restricted speech allowed at the University of Delaware makes very clear.

Never allow anyone to get away with the statement that Democrats believe in freedom of speech and Republicans suppress it.  In recent times, it has been clear that Democrats are more inclined to suppress the freedom of speech than are Republicans.  Of course, it should be so clear that the suppression of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional that no party could get away with anything like the DISCLOSE Act.  It will likely be declared unconstitutional, but the Democrats are counting on it taking too long to get to the Supreme Court for them to rule that freedom of speech will prevail in the November 2010 election which has the Democrats now shivering in their hob-nailed boots.

Dems: We Don't Need No Stinking Budget!

The Budget Impoundment and Control Act of 1974 requires that a budget resolution be produced by 15 April each year in the House of Representatives.  The Pelosi House still has not produced that required budget resolution, let alone an actual budget.  First, the Democrats are divided.  One faction wants to spend lots and lots of money, none of which is covered by tax receipts.  The other faction wants to spend a little less.  Second, neither Democrat faction wants to go on record with an actual budget deficit and thereby allow easy and definitive projection of the national debt given the upcoming fatal elections.  If they produce no budget until after the election, they hope the bloodbath for the Dems will be lessened.  This is pathetic.

The Democrat chairman of the House Budget Committee complained when the GOP did not pass a budget resolution in 2006, "If you can't budget, you can't govern."  Now he and the Democrats are proving they cannot budget and cannot govern.  Obama is calling on non-security departments to suggest 5% budget cutbacks.  A Democrat proposal in the House for a 2% budget cutback will not get a vote on the floor of the House.  Without the budget resolution, each of next year's 12 spending authorization bills will have no limits. 

Pelosi's Money-Saving Calculation for House Cafeteria Lighting

Nancy Pelosi called a press conference on 21 April 2010 to announce that the government had just spent $140,000 to put a new LED (light-emitting diode) lighting system into the House cafeteria in the Rayburn Building.  This new lighting system is supposed to pay for itself in a bit less than 10 years with energy use savings.  Great fanfare with all the politically correct words of energy-saving, sustainability, environment-friendly, Mother Earth, and green were used at the press conference.  It is hardly surprising to see the government spend $140,000 on something that gives it such a fine opportunity to look so green and earth-loving. 

Now, other things being equal, saving money on energy is a good thing.  However, we have to remember that the federal government is running huge deficits, which clearly are not sustainable.  We can look a little closer at this as well.  If the $140,000 lighting system pays for itself in 10 years, then the LED lights are saving about $14,000 per year.  It was noted that about 1 year ago, the light fixtures installed cost about $800 each and they cost just over $300 when the upgrade of the House cafeteria lighting system was performed.  So, in one year, the cost dropped to about 3/8 ths of what it was.  If in the next year it dropped as much, the cost per fixture would fall to about $112.50.  Perhaps the rate of the drop in price will not be as much, but it is reasonable to think it might fall to, say, $200/fixture.  If it did, the payback time would then be only about 6.67 years, or about 3.33 years less.  Since they said the payback was a bit less than 10 years, let us say the difference in payback is 3 years.

Thus, delaying the installation of the LED lighting system for one year would mean the government would pay out $14,000 more in electric bills.  Installing the $200 fixture LED system 1 year later, would save three times $14,000 in installation cost, however.  Subtracting the $14,000 not saved for 1 year in energy, means that delaying the installation for a year would have saved the taxpayer $28,000 more than installing the system will when it was installed!  Now, admittedly, I have assumed the cost of installation of each fixture is either minimal or included in the cost per fixture as given.  Perhaps this assumption is not justified and some other cost calculations need to be performed to determine the rational time at which the installation should be performed.  But, I have no confidence whatsoever that Congress performed any such rational calculations before they decided to spend $140,000 of taxpayer easy-come, easy-go money on this project.

Such rational calculations are much more likely to be performed in the private sector than they are in the public sector.  The lame media, many of the academics, and most politicians and bureaucrats are forever pointing at some failure in the private sector with harm coming to some relatively small numbers of people usually in some voluntary association with the persons or company causing the harm and claiming that if only the judgment of the government were brought into these associations and trades, events would turn out better.  This argument keeps foundering on one very important observation:  the assumption that the government will act rationally, more often than the private sector does, is demonstrably wrong.  It is very clear that the government acts less rationally and when it does, that the consequences fall upon many who have not made any voluntary choices based upon their own evaluations at all.  Government increases the number of irrational decisions and lays the sad consequences on many more people, many of them innocent of any irrational decision themselves.

The government has too little invested in other people's lives and fortunes and the money it spends comes too easily to it, for it to bother to make rational decisions even when it has adequate information at hand as we have seen from the House cafeteria lighting system decision.  In most cases in which the government wants a hand, it lacks the necessary and adequate information, which is either not available to it or takes more effort to find than it is willing and able to do.  After all, its SEC employees are too busy at Internet sex sites to have the time to gather the knowledge they need to do their job!  Frankly, even much more conscientious government employees will commonly fall short here as well.  Finally, what really matters is the press conference at which all the politically correct words can be spewed and the politicians can pretend to be paragons of virtue.  The reality is that they are commonly buffoons and wastrels.

Tom Minchin - Hope is Dead - Long Live Optimism

Tom Minchin in yesterday's TIA Daily discussed how we ought to go forward in the face of the coup scored by America's fascist socialists on ObamaCare.  Here are a couple of quotes from his post:

You need a way to maintain your morale—to counter the effects of dispiriting circumstances. In short you need a solid basis to expect a better future. 

What can provide it when the news headlines fill you with revulsion? 

The virtue of optimism.

The virtue of what? Optimism. But this is a very particular type of optimism. It is not wishful thinking, and it is not mere hopefulness or even assuredness based on favorable circumstances—an assuredness that vanishes with the first real adversity. It is confidence in one's own potency, and it has to be maintained and fought for like any virtue.....

Holding optimism as a virtue begins with understanding what it is and is not. Optimism in its most basic sense is "confidence in the future." And that kind of confidence is only possible to a rational man. As Ayn Rand wrote in "Epitaph for a Culture," the Apollo space program was the supreme demonstration, for it "has shown us the precondition of self-confidence, optimism, and progress, like skywriting left in the wake of those rockets: rationality." That bears repeating: the pre-condition of optimism is not faith, good fortune or wishful thinking. It is rationality. 

Of course, I can choose to be rational, but will other Americans make the same choice?  I can be certain that I will not waver in my own rationality and be confident that if it is up to me, America will not commit to this fascist socialist doom that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their many followers are trying to force upon us.  But, can I count on my fellow Americans to rally to the cause of the rights of the individual and to name their importance to us all as the central American value?  The Tea Party Movement, the many commentators who have realized that this is the central issue, and the 38 states either passing laws to prevent the federal government from forcing their citizens to purchase a government-dictated health insurance product or launching constitutional court challenges, have given me a sound basis for thinking enough Americans are up to the task, or coming up to the task, to turn back the bloodthirsty horde of cutthroats who are presumptuous enough to claim they control our lives, our fortunes, our bodies, and our health or death.  This will not happen, not in America!

Prof. Phil Jones Admits No Significant Warming since 1995

Following the ClimateGate e-mail and documents dump scandal, the then director of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was asked to step down while an investigation of such things as his refusal to provide data requested under a freedom of information act was underway.  Phil Jones was a principal author on the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

In an interview on the BBC on 13 February 2010, Phil Jones admitted that (here and here):

• There has been no "statistically significant" warming since 1995.
• The warming periods of 1860 to 1880, 1910 to 1940, and 1975 to 1998 were very similar and could all be explained by natural forces.
• The data and papers the hockey stick graph used prominently in the last two UN IPCC reports is based on has been lost.  The hockey stick temperature record was the basis for a claim of unprecedented warming recently, which was attributed to man's CO2 emissions due to using fossil fuels.
• The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) may have been warmer than now and recently, but there is insufficient data from the tropics and the southern hemisphere to be sure of that.  He says the MWP is best expressed in North America, the North Atlantic and Europe, and parts of Asia.

Wow, is Phil Jones' fall from being a top global warming alarmist scientist amazing evidence of the collapse of this scientific foolishness, or what?

Strangely enough, though Phil Jones concedes that the warmings from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998 are remarkably similar and may be entirely natural events and he says that no statistically significant warming has occurred since 1995, he also claims that only man-made warming effects can explain the warming since 1998!  Now this is a simple breakdown of logic and reveals how strongly the religion of man-made global warming has its claws sunk into him.

Note also that the warmth of the MWP can hardly be ignored for the North Atlantic,  Europe, and parts of Asia, because there are plentiful human records of the crops grown, the extent of glaciers, and the natural flora and fauna of the time from those areas.  North America and many of those areas have been particularly subject to scientific studies as well.  But, there is much less land in the Southern Hemisphere, especially if the unpopulated Antarctica is discounted, and none of it was settled by advanced civilizations that kept significant written records.  His claim that warming in the tropics should also be shown before the MWP is thought of as a global warming is actually showing ignorance of the science of the Earth's climate.  When the Earth warms from temperatures similar to those we have now, the temperature in the tropics is hardly changed at all.  The reason is that water evaporates so much more quickly there with any warming.  In evaporation, the absorption of heat from the environment to turn liquid water into vapor has a counteracting cooling effect.  This effect is large, since it takes a lot of heat to vaporize water.  As a result, the temperature of the tropics tends to be quite stable even when the warming at higher latitudes is significant.

Prof. Phil Jones wrote in a dumped e-mail that he would destroy the temperature data before he would turn it over in response to freedom of information act requests.  Is losing the data the same as destroying it?  Maybe he lost it in a trash dumpster in Northumberland.  He claimed in the interview that his office was so piled with papers that maybe it was lost there.  He admitted that he was not a good record-keeper.

Dr. Benny Pieser, director of the skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, noted that Prof. Phil Jones had shared his data with colleagues and 'mates', so the claim that he had lost the data did not ring true.  He went on to say that this was Phil Jones' first admission that the science of global warming was not settled.

Folks, it is much worse than that.  Phil Jones was one of the most cited scientists in the scientific literature as an authority on catastrophic man-made global warming.  Now, he clearly has no evidence for any warming since 1995 and he has said the earlier warming from 1975 to 1998 was no different than that from 1910 to 1940, so there is simply no longer any late 20th Century warming that can be claimed to be unprecedented and/or due to man's use of fossil fuels!  Whether he lost the hockey stick data or not is now irrelevant with respect to the catastrophic man-made global warming argument.  He has already logically admitted that the hockey stick temperature graph is wrong!  And prior to this, every effort was made by the scientists in his alarmist cabal to erase the Medieval Warm Period, but now we have his confession that he is not at all sure that it can be erased!

The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) science house of cards has collapsed very rapidly.  Unfortunately, it is hanging in there in much of the media and in the Democrat Party.  The Economist and even Forbes Magazine have had recent articles assuming its truth.  The EPA has failed to reopen consideration of its foolish recent declaration that CO2 is a pollutant which it must regulate tightly under the Clean Air Act.  The Obama administration has announced the formation of a new department under NOAA to serve as a central government advocate for catastrophic man-made global warming, though they name it as simply a climate research and study department.  The momentum of the religious movement for catastrophic AGW rumbles on, even after its obvious scientific collapse.

But, fewer independents and fewer Republicans now believe in it.  Even among Democrats, some have now become atheists or agnostics.  It will take time for the media and the politicians to correct themselves, but most of them will either do so or simply stop advocating it.  I am sure the latter option will be the more popular.  We can expect to hear few apologies from those who so strongly advocated shutting off our inexpensive fuel supplies, making our electricity system much less reliable and much more expensive, causing coal miners and oil refinery and pipeline workers to lose their jobs, many a manufacturing industry to move abroad, and many homes and workplaces to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  The false claims of catastrophic AGW will simply fade away.  Eventually.

We should remember who took the wrong side on this very important issue.  People such as Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Markey, Waxman, McCain, Lieberman, Bayh, Boxer, Feingold, Gillibrand, Inouye, Leahy, Mikulski, Murray, Schumer, Specter, Wyden, Edwards, Hoyer, Kratovil, and Van Hollen should all be thrown out of office as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma has been a long-time foe of the hypothesis of catastrophic AGW and this should be remembered to his advantage.

Medicare and the Public Option

Robert Romano, the Americans for Limited Government Senior Editor, has written a good article on Medicare and the Public Option and on taxes and health care rationing.  It is called Washington's Degenerate Elite.  It tells a story of complete fiscal irresponsibility and of upcoming drastic health care rationing necessitated by biting off more than the government can chew on top of already legislated massive revenue shortfalls.  Even so, Romano does not make a critical part of the problem clear because he allows the government to get away with one of its most irresponsible ruses.  Let's follow his argument and his tale of the numbers and I will point out where the situation gets still more awful and to use his term, still more degenerate.

The Medicare Board of Trustees says Medicare has $2.5 trillion of assets in 2009.  Under a worst case scenario, its assets reach a maximum in 2012 of $2.712 trillion.  The program starts operating at a deficit thereafter.  In 2019, assets will be down to $2.279 trillion after accumulated losses of $433 billion.  Every year after 2012, losses will average about $169 billion per year.  In 2028, Medicare assets will be zero.

Now this is bad, but it is actually much worse than this.  What are these assets?  Well, they are just IOUs written to the program by the government.  To make these IOUs good, the government has to increase taxes or greatly decrease its expenditures elsewhere.  Obama and the Democrat Congress have no intention of generally decreasing spending by enough elsewhere, so taxes will have to go up greatly.  The above paragraph makes it seem as though the increased taxes to continue to fund Medicare must go up when the Medicare assets are gone in 2028.  This is not at all the case.  They will have to go up in 2013 and thereafter in order to cover the average shortfall in Medicare taxes of $169 billion per year!  This is the same year that ObamaCare is supposed to start.  So, the degenerates Obama, Pelosi, and Reid plan to add a new huge spending program the same year that the Medicare program starts operating at a loss.  Brilliant!!!!  These wily, sly socialists are counting on few of the People recognizing this in 2009, which is another of many reasons why they wish to pass this legislation through the Senate this year.

Romano continues with the story.  The Public Option of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid will initially cover about 36 to 45 million people.  The number of covered people is expected to increase with time.  According to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the cost of the Public Option will be an additional $935 billion by 2019.  How do our degenerate socialists plan to pay for this?  Well, they plan to ration care under Medicare to the extent that they will reduce its costs by $427 billion by 2019.  Note that with no changes of law, we were going to have a deficit of $433 billion by 2019 in Medicare, so these cuts in Medicare, if made, would leave a net deficit of $6 billion in Medicare without the Public Option added expense.  With the Public Option added expense, new taxes are required and Obama and his socialist cadres propose new taxes of $574 billion to be collected by 2019.  This leaves a combined Public Option and Medicare deficit of $367 billion in 2019.  Actually, the deficit will be greater since tax increases do not bring in as much revenue as projected and government plans to cut expenses never reach their goals.

The situation gets worse with time.  The Public Option is initially funded by taxes that go up before the program starts, but which will actually be used to pay the government deficits already in place (Stimulus Bill and other expensive programs).  Consequently, when the Public Option starts spending money, it will also have to convert IOUs into spendable money, which in practice means that either the deficits will be larger at an earlier time than projected or taxes will have to go up still more.  But in the government's ruse, IOUs are gold in the bank and the Public Option debt is only $32 billion in 2017, $59 billion in 2018, and $108 billion in 2019.  By 2030, the deficit from this one program would be more than $1 trillion.  This is based on a number of people covered which many reviewers think is lower than will actually be the case.

The combined costs of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Public Option will soon be greater than $1 trillion per year.  The costs will be increasing every year, which will require severe cuts in health care coupled with severe increases in taxes.  The rich will not be able to bear the cost of these taxes, so Obama's pledge to not raise taxes on the middle class will be meaningless, though that has already become very clear in other contexts.

All of the projections on expenses above were made on older June estimates and on very favorable assumptions.  The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services now says those June estimates are much too low.  The cost of health care will increase fast enough that the deficit in the Pelosi House Public Option plan will be $289 billion greater than the numbers discussed above by 2019.  How much greater will they be in the outlying years?  Based on past government health care programs, one has to assume they will be many times higher than the costs now projected.

As Romano points out, things get still worse.  PriceWaterhouseCooper says the cost of private insurance will be driven upward sharply by ObamaCare.  An insurance plan that now costs $4,700 will cost $9,917 by 2019 or 2.1 times more than now.  The cost increases for the young will be even larger factors.  Many individuals who are now privately insured will be driven onto the Public Option, raising its costs many times.  When the Public Option is the last resort, it will also be bankrupt!

This Public Option plan simply makes the already intractable problems with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security much worse.  It is utter insanity to add to this existing problem with the Public Option.

Of course, as I have said repeatedly, Obama made his insanity very clear when he long ago said that he intended to bankrupt the coal-fired electric power plants which produce half of American electricity.  Apparently, being merely insane is no reason for the American people not to pick a man to be President.  In fact, it almost seems that they thought it was a requirement of the job.  This man is so wrongheaded on so many things that it is not possible to believe that he perceives reality at all.  And he has much company in Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, Waxman, Markey, Baucus (perhaps slightly less insane than the others), Franks, Hoyer, and many others in the Democrat Congress leadership.  All of them are bonkers.  All of them are Looney Tunes.

Socialism - My Definition

Recently, a commenter was upset with the way I used the word "socialist" in my blog entry Tides Foundation Screed Against Capitalism in Schools.  The individual with no name and identified only by a negation did point out that

Socialism is defined by The Princeton WordNet as:

1. a political theory advocating state ownership of industry
2. an economic system based on state ownership of capital

 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says socialism is

1. A theory or policy of social organization which aims at or advocates the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc., by the community as a whole, and their administration and distribution in the interests of all.

2.  A state of society in which things are held or used in common.

Most Americans reading definition 1. from either to these sources would say, oh, so socialism and communism are the same thing.  I am sure that some or maybe all real Marxists would say, not necessarily.  But let us check out the definition of communism offered by the OED.

1.  A theory which advocates a state of society in which there should be no private ownership, all property being vested in the community and labour organized for the common benefit of all members; the professed principle being that each should work according to his capacity, and receive according to his wants.

This definition for communism is the same as that for socialism, except in the very last part.  Apparently socialism allows for a distribution which may be on a slightly different basis than according to everyone's wants, since it is to be in the interests of all.  Rather subtle difference and actually very academic, since by these definitions, both socialism and communism are impossible!

It is frankly impossible for a community to find any way to distribute production, capital, land, property, etc. in the interests of all.  It has never happened and never will, so socialism does not, has never, and never will exist.  Similarly with communism, no society has ever or ever will be able to distribute enough goods and property to satisfy everyone's wants.  That would be the end of economics.  It would require infinite resources and infinite free pools of labor and genius.

So, Not a Socialist is hardly a surprise.  There is no such thing, unless we allow for those who dream for the impossible, which in the real world we must do.  People are often subject to control by their irrational dreams, or even the irrational Dreams of My Father, in the case of one well-known socialist of our time.

Indeed, many people think they are socialists.  In addition to the Marxists and before Marx, the founders of New Harmony, Indiana, there have been many who have been socialists.  Mussolini and Hitler thought they were socialists, yet they did not advocate the end of all property.  Instead, they sometimes stole property, but more often they used government regulations and just plain commands to force private property owners to do as they were told.  They believed in control of the economy and the means of production, but not necessarily in the need to bother themselves with all the pains of actually owning property.  Besides, people would work harder for you if you allowed them the pretense that they had some control over their property.  But Hitler and Mussolini did claim to be running societies organized for the purpose of distributing goods and services to the people for their best interests.  They actually did redistribute the wealth with such popular aspects of socialism as government-run health care systems.

During and after WWII, it became an embarrassment to many socialists in the West that these fascists had been considered socialists.  It became very important to then try to define socialism in such a manner that the fascists were excluded.  As the Marxists and other varieties of socialists took over most universities, the dictionaries fell more and more into line with this effort to define the fascists out of socialism.  Despite this, in more recent years, many have come to be embarrassed to be called socialists, since almost everyone now understands the terrible evils of socialism in the USSR, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and elsewhere.  Now, these same people and those they have taught are more likely to be environmentalists or social democrats, or some other new fad.  Strangely enough, the policies these people favor are those of fascism.  It is not practical to have community ownership of all property and Americans do not like the idea of that anyway.  So, those who seek major redistribution of the wealth leave most property in the hands of the prior owners, but saddle them with extensive regulations and controls.

A much more practical and useful concept of socialism would be:  A theory or policy of social organization which aims at or advocates the ownership or the extensive control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc., by the government, and their administration and distribution in extensive measure as is favored by the government of the community.

Under this definition of socialism, everyone does not have to share the same toothbrush or at least put them all in one pot and pick one out with one's eyes blindfolded.  Socialism is a broader concept which some people might strive for and achieve.  It is not a desirable state of affairs at all in my opinion, but the concept has some usefulness in describing what people actually might do and can do.  By this definition, Obama, Pelosi, Mao, Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Mussolini, and Hitler are all socialists.

Like it or not.

A House Resolution to Allow Bills to be Read before Votes

The trillion dollar stimulus bill allowed the House of Representatives members only 12 hours to read the bill between its being set and the vote for passage.  It was passed despite the members not having read its 1071 pages.  The carbon cap and trade bill was about 1500 pages long and was passed in the House only 16.5 hours after it was put to bed as a document in the early morning hours.  In 2006, Nancy Pelosi promised bills would be published at least 24 hours prior to voting on them.  I suppose she meant this will happen someday, long after she has left this Earth.

182 House members have signed onto House Resolution 554, which will require that a bill be published for 72 hours prior to a vote.  Both congressmen and the People will have 72 hours to read the bills.  Nancy Pelosi has not signed on to the bill.  This discharge petition was first pushed by Rep. Greg Walden (R, OR) and was sponsored by Rep. Brian Baird (D, WA).  It was introduced the same day the Senate Finance Committee voted against publishing the ObamaCare bill 72 hours before the Senate is scheduled to vote on it.  There is a lot of evidence that our Representatives and Senators cannot read, because surely they would understand that they cannot pretend to know whether the General Welfare of the People is served or not without reading the bills.  Therefore, it must be that they view the attempts to publish the bills as a means to pressure them to read them.  This is embarrassing for someone who cannot read!

OK.... maybe they can read and they are such villains that they want to be able to shove bills though our venerable Congress without having to stir up the People, some of whom can read the wrongheaded bills for which these power-hungry congressmen vote.  The stimulus bill only spent $819 billion.  Why would we want to know anything about that?  The carbon cap and trade bill is only going to require our using 83% less industrial and  commercial energy by 2050!  We would not want to read about that!!!

The majority of our enlightened congressmen, who god-like know all about each of us and our welfare, have not signed this petition.  It would be great if it passes.  It probably will not, despite the fact it is simple common sense.  There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, so 182 members are still well less than half.  The majority of the House members who have not signed onto this bill just might be really close relatives to Ardi, who could not read either.

Blue Dog Democrats - Do They Exist?

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann give a list of 'moderate' Democrats in the House of Representatives in their book Catastrophe. They are rated for the percentage of time they voted with the very socialist party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. They list 30 Blue Dogs in the 2007 Congress and 53 in the 2008 Congress. All of the listed 2007 members were listed again in 2008. Apparently, the Democrat leadership became much more effective in 2008 than they were in 2007 in getting all Democrats to vote with them. Only 3 of the 30 in both Congresses voted less often with the leadership in 2008 than they had in 2007. Another 3 had the same percentage of agreement and the remaining 24 voted more often with the socialist leadership.

If one grades them with A, B, and C grades, in 2007 only one member had a C and it was a 79. But do not get too excited, since in 2008 he had a 91 or an A minus. In 2007, 19 of these so-called Blue Dogs had an A and 9 had a B. In 2008, there were 48 with an A and 5 with B pluses!

I see no reason to differentiate an A follower of Nancy Pelosi as either a moderate or a Blue Dog. It is even questionable whether the 5 earning B pluses are worth distinguishing from the Rabid Dogs. In many cases, these Democrats pretended to be much more conservative or at least much less socialist than they are when they ran for election. It is clear that no such distinction is meaningful. They were all wolves in sheep's hides.

Gov. Kaine of Virginia: Families Cannot Handle Truth of Virginia Tech Massacre

Democrat Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia is proving once again how little confidence the leaders of the Democrat Party have in the People. In April 2007, he had set up a Virginia Tech Review Panel to find out if the mass murder committed by Seung-Hui Cho could have been avoided. That panel issued its report and the Governor accepted it.

But ...... the families of Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson, who had refused to join the $11 million settlement, dug into the matter. Their lawyers found out that Dr. Robert C. Miller who had been head of the Cook Counseling Center at Virginia Tech, had removed Cho's mental health records and taken them home with him. These records were not supplied to the panel.

In addition, the campus wide alert was found to have been sent out 46 minutes after the university had claimed it had been. This was 10 minutes after Cho had started his shooting spree in Norris Hall and well after the initial dorm shootings of two students.

Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner has written about this here.

One might think all this would be reason to reopen the panel. Gov. Kaine refused to do so. His lawyer, Mark Rubin, wrote an e-mail to the victim's families and said the panel would not be reopened because doing so would further upset the families. 60 families objected, so Kaine hired TriData, an Arlington consulting firm, that had so poorly handled the initial panel to be in charge of any revisions of the report.

Hollingsworth asked:

• Why was Dr. Miller never interviewed by the panel?
• Why didn't the State Police find Cho's records?
• How many student records have been removed from campus by university staff without legal authorization?

To these questions, I will add this: How on Earth could university officials have gotten away with falsifying the timeline on the campus-wide alert by 46 minutes? Surely the panel should have uncovered this lie. Clearly, the panel's investigation was incompetent or meant from the beginning to be a cover-up. The latter looks the more likely of the two.

And clearly Gov. Kaine does not want the public to know this, so he responded by in effect telling the victim's families that they could not handle the truth. Kind of reminds one of Nancy Pelosi claiming that Nazis are opposing the Obama-Pelosi-Reid health care government takeover. Odd, because as I recall it, the socialist Nazis themselves did take over German health care and did ration it to the elderly, the mentally handicapped, and such people as they regarded as undesirables. That seems to me to bear a considerable resemblance to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid plan. I suppose that is why they are early-on trying to create the illusion that the Nazis and various un-Americans are opposing them, rather than a massive grassroots uprising of many Americans.

It is very clear that Democrat leaders do not think very highly of the People.

Pelosi Misleads and Misinforms Again

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is misleading and misinforming us once again. She recently complained that she has been met by angry mobs of people displaying swastika signs. She was clearly trying to create the impression that the protesters were Nazis.

The economist John Lott has a blog here, which makes interesting reading. On this issue, he requested a picture from Nancy Pelosi's office showing the crowd waving swastikas. The picture they sent him showed one swastika and it was superimposed with a red circle with a diagonal crossing line. Clearly, the protester was protesting fascism, not promoting it. The picture Nancy Pelosi's office sent John Lott is shown on his blog.

Nothing makes a socialist angrier than to be identified with fascism and Nazism. Yet, this is the most common form that socialism takes in America today. To be sure, there are still many who favor communism and there are still more who mix the two forms of socialism liberally.

So, Nancy Pelosi just cannot help but to embellish the truth until it takes on the form of a lie. Her accusations against the CIA were not enough to even teach her the least bit of restraint. But, what can you expect of a committed socialist? All of socialism is built upon a foundation of lies. They have no choice but to lie. It is their nature to use lies and ever bigger lies to achieve power over their fellow man.

The Federal Minimum Wage Increase

In the midst of the worst recession in several decades, the federal government is about to carry out the third stage of a federal minimum wage increase from $5.15/hour to $7.25/hour on 24 July. In July 2007, it was increased to $5.85 and in July 2008 it was increased to $6.55. These minimum wage increases will contribute further to the unemployment which in June rose to 9.5% of the workforce. Why does the federal government interfere with the employment contract between a worker and an employer in such a manner? For that matter, why do many states also establish minimum wage rates by law?

Nannies argue such things as: A family of four cannot possibly be supported by a single wage earner being paid $5.15/hour so government must step in and force the employer to pay its workers more. Implicit in this argument, there is an assessment of the cost-of-living according to some standard held by the nanny and there is a failure to note the individual nature of the employee and the job in which he is employed. The employee may not have graduated from high school and if he did, he still may not know how to read or add and subtract numbers. The employee may not have an IQ of 100 or more, so his abilities may not be those that most voters imagine the employee may have. And, of course, the employee may have other means of support and just wants a few more spending dollars, or he may be looking for a good job, but needs whatever supplemental income he can get in the interim.

Then again, the employee may live in a community where the cost-of-living is very much lower than it is where the plurality of voters who favor a given minimum wage come from. Or, frankly, someone who wants a particular job in a particular industry may simply have to take what that industry can afford to pay in that area of the country. A lemonaide stand operated in New York City may be able to generate much more income per hour than one operated in Lance Creek, Wyoming. The lemonade stand in NYC may be able to pay $7.25/hour to the lemonade dispenser, while this may be a hopeless prospect in Lance Creek.

If there were a valid justification for government to interfere with the freedom of employment, it is clear that any minimum wage laws that might be justified should be established on as local a level as possible. Even when these are established at the state level, there will be huge cost-of-living differences across many states and great differences in the kinds of jobs available and the customers who will provide the income to the company providing the jobs. Lemonade stands in Cheyenne, Casper, and Yellowstone National Park may be able to generate much more income and pay higher wages than can one in Lance Creek. This is no reason to deny the people of Lance Creek jobs at a lemonade stand and lemonade as well! Yet, the many states with minimum wage laws do just such nonsensical things. Then we compound this extreme nonsense with the still more ridiculous nonsense of a national minimum wage law.

Why do we do this? Well, it clearly is not to address any actual concern for fairness to employees, since if such arguments as that they were unfairly treated by the free market forces of supply and demand were actually true, then these issues would have to be addressed by very local governments which could more nearly deal with the many different local conditions. I maintain that they should not attempt to do this because it violates the rights of both the employer and the employee, but even for those who have no concern for rights and moral behavior, but who do pretend to be pragmatic, the argument for a national minimum wage rests on quicksand.

The real reason for a national minimum wage law, and in many cases for state minimum wage laws, is so local governments can minimize the tendency of some businesses to locate in areas where the cost of living is lower. The high-cost-of-living states and locales are commonly suffering an out-migration of people and businesses to lower cost-of-living areas or at least they have slower growth rates. The governments have a particular interest in stopping this out-migration because in many cases they have had a major hand in increasing the cost-of-living in their areas. The areas with the higher cost-of-living, higher taxes, greater restrictions on business operations and new home building, tend to be dominated by the Democrat Party. These areas also tend to have higher population densities, which make it easier to pay service workers more than they can make in lower population density areas of the country. So, establishing a federal minimum wage requirement which is higher than the level at which some people in some parts of the country are willing to work in certain jobs, kills the competitive industries or retards their competition in those areas of the country.

In practical terms, the recent increases in the minimum wage retard the growth of companies in the South and in the Plains States and outside many metropolitan areas of the remaining states, in addition to eliminating jobs for many of the least skilled, commonly very young, workers in the many metropolitan areas where the city public school systems are a horrifying joke. This is an act of unbridled cruelty, dressed up as nanny compassion. This is the wolf under a sheep hide.

Once again, the progressive agenda is simply a transfer of wealth, jobs, and dreams from those with less political power to those with more political power. The big push for these federal minimum wage increases came from Pelosi (D, CA), House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D, CA), and Kennedy (D, MA). In this case, it is clear that the Blue States are taking advantage of the Red States in an effort to keep the Red States from taking advantage of their lower cost-of-living, lower taxes, and better business climates. It is also clear that despite the great pretense, the Progressives do not care a fig for those they have not bothered to educate decently in their public schools in the many major cities controlled by the Democrats or for jobs lost to people who are less likely to vote for them. Furthermore, it is clear that whether people actually have jobs or not is much less important to the Progressives than is their quest for the power to control all of our lives from cradle to grave.

Let us all give a great big hand to the fascist Democrat Party which once again is destroying American jobs and hurting those with minimal jobs skills or opportunities, even as they continue the pretense of caring for the Little Guy, the Common Man, and the Disadvantaged. Once again, it is revealed that the Party of Mass Destruction is primarily motivated by a lust for power rather than a caring heart.

The Puzzling Pelosi Affair

You may be wondering what I might be referring to. After all, Nancy Pelosi appeared clearly to have been lying that she was not briefed by the CIA in 2003 that they were using the enhanced interrogation method of waterboarding. This is a method many call torture and the Bush administration banned its use after a period of use in 2002 and 2003 for being too odious. It might be possible that she would not remember when she was briefed, but it is very hard to believe that she would not remember that she was so briefed. Now she has admitted that she was. Nothing is puzzling about this, except her behavior. This is not the puzzle I wish to address today. She is a very foolish woman, so I am not going to waste my time worrying about why she does the puzzling things she does. Mark Steyn has written a history-commentary on this Polosi affair. Here is a 9 December 2007 account of what Congress knew in the Washington Post.

There were quite a few accounts in the fall of 2007 that waterboarding had been used. If Nancy Pelosi actually did believe that the CIA had only described waterboarding as a possible tool they might later use, rather than one they had used, why did she not speak out against it then given that she now considers it torture and the news reports had removed it from an hypothetical method? Or, if she still believed the CIA had not used it, and that it was only for possible future use, why did she not perform her leadership responsibility and use her great influence with the mainstream media to correct the record? Or if she believed the new reports then, why did she not call for an investigation of the way the CIA had misled Congress then? Was it just that by this time, the claim that the Bush administration was engaged in torture was just too juicy a presidential campaign issue so it had to be saved for the latter part of that campaign? Was it better for the Democrats to feign ignorance for the time period prior to the fall of 2007 news reports? Why didn't the current controversy of Pelosi and what and when did she know it not come up in the fall of 2007? If she were a responsible leader, it would have.

This is my beef on the issue. Whether she was lying or the CIA and other Congressmen were lying is an interesting issue, but it is not nearly as critical as the clear and great abrogation of responsibility Nancy Pelosi has shown one way or another on this matter. If the news reports were wrong or she had believed the CIA briefings as she says she remembered them, she had a responsibility to set the record straight, one way or another, with the American people. She failed us. Her judgment definitely failed, whether her memory failed her or not.

Anyone who has paid attention to this woman over time cannot help but understand that she plays the people for dupes and that her near constant grin is because she thinks she is putting one over on us.