Chelsea Gruenwald at Resist 44wrote this lovely piece about eight things you should do when dealing with liberals:
The 8 Simple Rules for Defeating Liberals (And Remaining Sane in the Process):
1.Keep calm. One of my grandmother’s favorite sayings is, “Never discuss religion or politics in polite company.” This is because both topics are often accompanied with strong opinions and even stronger emotions. Because of the emotional connection it is easy to get lost in the moment and lose your temper. However, losing your temper rarely wins over the opposition. If you are able to keep your cool during a political debate, it shows leadership and maturity and people are more likely to take your message seriously.
2. Expose the lies but focus on promoting the truth. As with many campaigns, attacks and smears ran ramped in the Wisconsin recall election. The most famous attack came from the Barrett campaign claiming Wisconsin finished last in job creation. Governor Walker produced federally verified numbers proving this claim to be wrong. While acknowledging the falsity of Barrett’s claim, Governor Walker did not dwell on it. Instead, he launched a series of messages to promote the truth. The average American admits to distrusting politicians, so dwelling on a false claim won’t increase support and trust, but producing the truth will.
3.Do not stoop to their level. Yes, liberals are notorious for playing dirty tricks in elections. They are also famous for their “the ends justify the means” mentality. Do not be like them. What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander. Even if you are not running, you are a member of a community, act accordingly.
4.Actions speak louder than words. I have had several extremely liberal friends recently convert to conservatism and they always cite people’s actions as a reason. For example, compare the Wisconsin union protest to the Tea Party rally that happened at the same time. The union protesters surrounded the Tea Party rally, booed during the national anthem, threatened and degraded tea partiers, and left a trail of trash and trampled flowers behind. The tea partiers stuck to their side, were courteous, cleaned up after themselves, and took the time to clean up after the union protesters as well. So while the unions were preaching solidarity, brotherhood, and kindness, it was the tea partiers who actually practiced those values. And people took notice. One friend described that very event as the reason for his conversion.
5.Get involved. One of the powers of the Left is their ability to organize and create a sense of community. There is nothing more defeating than feeling alone. This is why it is essential to reach out to others like you. Volunteer on a campaign, attend a Tea Party; even reaching out to others online can make all the difference.
6.Don’t preach. Engage yourself. Just like a child being scolded by a parent, people are less likely to absorb a message if their thoughts and concerns are ignored. Even if you don’t have the solution, engaging and addressing the concerns of others shows you care. People are more likely to vote for a candidate (or party) if they think they truly care about them. Governor Walker mastered this skill. While Barrett was busy giving speeches and holding rallies, Governor Walker was visiting local businesses, churches, and events to talk with people individually.
7.Know what you are up against. Any psychologist will tell you that personal accounts have much more meaning than statistics. This is because humans can relate to a personal story (and all the emotions that come with it) better than impersonal numbers. Hearsay can only get you so far, but a first hand account, video, and pictures of an event leave a much bigger impact. This is why it is important to have first hand experience with your opponent. I have attended dozens of Wisconsin Union protests, marches, and sing-a-longs. These experiences not only allowed me to develop better-informed opinions, but also to share my experiences with others.
8.Vote. This might be the most important rule. All of your hard work engaging others, promoting the truth, and community involvement will be wasted if you don’t actually vote. Barrett and the unions learned this important lesson on June 5th. While the unions were able to make a lot of noise, cause a fuss, and bring about the recall, they had difficulty getting those same people to vote. This eventually led to their defeat.
Conservatives have been dubbed “the silent majority” for a reason. While liberals beat conservatives 10-to-1 in protest enthusiasm, conservatives continue to show their dominance at the voting booth. You don’t need to be loud and carrying a sign to get your message across, instead practice what you preach, talk to an elderly neighbor, or get involved in a local campaign. The Revolution wasn’t won by occupying a British ship, but by people, big and small, coming together as a community. This holds true for the election in November: we can’t win an election as an individual; we must work together as a team.
It’s as if Solyndra never happened. The Obama Administration is giving $737 million to a Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve. PCG is an investment partner with SolarReserve. Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law happens to be the number two man at PCG.
Why weren’t even more jobs created during the Bush years? Because we were at full employment for 5.5 years. John Merline says “A key attack line in President Obama’s campaign stump speech these days is to claim that the country has tried Mitt Romney’s economic policies already, and they were a dismal failure. ‘The truth is,’ Obama says, ‘we tried (that) for almost a decade, and it didn’t work.’ . . .
“The month after Bush signed that 2003 law, jobs and the economy finally started growing again. From June 2003 to December 2007, the economy added 8.1 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The unemployment rate fell to 5% from 6.3%. Real GDP growth averaged close to 3% in the four-plus years after that, and the budget deficit fell steadily from 2004 to 2007.
“What’s more, the rich ended up paying a larger chunk of the federal income tax burden after Bush’s tax cuts went into effect [This is true, I wrote about this in 2006 HERE – PoliticalArena Editor]. Obama is correct that the country has tried a combination of deregulation and tax cuts before; that took place under President Reagan.
“Reagan aggressively deregulated entire industries, while putting the brakes on new federal rules. As a result, regulatory compliance costs fell 8% during his time in office, and staffing dropped almost 7%. At the same time, Reagan’s tax cuts knocked taxes as a share of GDP down by 6%.
“The result was an almost eight-year economic boom in which real quarterly GDP growth averaged 4.3%. That’s nearly double the average growth rate Obama’s economic policies produced during the 3-year-old recovery.”
I will never forget how the elite media gave sympathetic treatment to Major Nidal Hasan. The Obama administration has worked to prevent his victims from getting the Purple Heart and defined his act of Islamic terrorism as “workplace violence”.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of America’s poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.
Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.
The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.
Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.
Related: Obama Advisor Valerie Jerrett’s Cook County Luxury Towers Assessed at 25% of Value – LINK
by Chuck Norton
Who gets damaged when journalists pining for access allow themselves to be the tools of political corruption?
Access is king for journalists and all too often journalists will do most anything to secure it. Just as CNN was forced to admit that it not only whitewashed the atrocities of Iraqi regime, but it also published and disseminated Saddam Hussien’s propaganda for over a decade in exchange for access. Such actions are not without consequences. The suffering associated with such corruption is very real.
Yesterday the Chicago Sun Times reported that, “two analysts working for Cook County’s tax appeals board were arrested and charged Wednesday with accepting a $1,500 bribe in exchange for greasing the wheels to slash property taxes to the tune of $14,000 on three properties”. According to federal prosecutors the two employees for the Chicago Board of Review (BOR), “discussed scheming with others to make property tax reductions in exchange for bribes” and “The two men worked for Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr. when the bribe was allegedly paid in 2008 …”.
Dane Placko, A MyFox Chicago Reporter Who Traded In His Ethics For Access
Enter MyFox Chicago News reporter Dane Placko. Larry Rogers at the Chicago Board of Review (BOR) hands Placko a ready made, seemingly picture perfect scandal accusation. Members of the BOR accuse former employee Victor Santana of using his access to the BOR office and his former employee relationship with BOR member and Cook County Democratic Chairman Joe Berrios to peddle influence for the purpose of getting tax appeals greased for friends of the Democratic Party. The BOR, using Placko, very publicly assails Santana, singles him out and bans him from the BOR office premises; thus destroying his tax consulting business.
Placko even goes so far as to include the spin that Santana must have acted inappropriately because only attorneys are allowed to represent clients in front of the BOR and Santana is not an attorney; thus implying that Santana is somehow acting illegally. Of course this leaves out the fact that many such tax appeals are done without an attorney by private citizens acting on their own behalf. Santana, along with other tax consultants, merely aid their clients up to the point of the actual hearing in front of the BOR. Similarly, when one goes to a local H&R Block to have taxes prepared it is expected that each person in the office is not a tax attorney, but merely a trained consultant. But when a story is just too juicy to check, critical truths end up unreported.
Members of the BOR were aware that they were under investigation, so in order to present themselves as crusaders for justice, they invent the allegation against Victor Santana, who was a safe pick because he never made campaign donations to Rogers, Berrios, or his cronies. Santana was also friends with former Illinois 56th District Representative Paul Froehlich. Froehlich, who was an active member of the Republican Party, wished to continue to serve after his district had been redrawn to be a majority Democratic district, switched parties. Believing that he could represent constituents better than a hand picked machine candidate Froehlich defeated was victorious in the Democratic primary and went on to with the election. Froehlich became a targeted man, elements in the GOP wanted revenge and the Democratic machine didn’t trust him.
[See the RICO filing against the Chicago BOR HERE. The RICO complaint charges the Commissioners on the Board of Tax Appeals and their staff with extortion and bribery. It states that the Commissioners, powerful members of the Cook County Democratic Party and the Machine, grant tax reductions based upon the campaign contributions made by property tax law firms and lawyers who practice before the Board of Review. Institutionalizing “bribery and quid pro quo as the mandatory means for the adjudication of tax appeals” in Chicago.
I would like to see the property tax appeal success rate for Micheal Madigan’s property tax law firm that donates to the campaigns of all elected members of the BOR. Shall we ask Dane Placko to report it? In either case, the civil RICO filing is just the beginning as now it is known that the state and federal authorities have been investigating since 2008 – Political Arena Editor]
The Berrios machine now had their way to kill three birds with one stone and MyFox Chicago reporter Dane Placko, reveling in his access, became their willing tool. How?
It is no secret that after the mortgage bubble collapsed that millions of Illinois residents and businesses were left with tax assessments that were based on highly inflated values that required adjustment. Froehlich, having formerly been a township assessor, reached out to these constituents to help them get their tax assessments brought in line with post collapse market values as allowed by law, in some cases even going door to door. In short, Froehlich was doing what any concerned representative would do for his constituents.
Of course, since there were thousands of people that needed to have their assessments adjusted after the collapse, some of Froehlich’s constituents were willing to have a sign placed in their yard and some were campaign contributors.
Along comes Dane Placko to paint Froehlich as a corrupt politician who was trading tax assessments quid pro quo’s for donations and/or permission to place yard signs. It gets even better for the Berrios machine, because after Placko’s irresponsible reporting the BOR used that as an excuse to reverse the previously approved post mortgage collapse tax adjustments for Froehlich campaign contributors such as Sharad and Harish Dani who own a hotel in Schaumburg.
Perfect.
Victor Santana’s livelihood is destroyed because he wouldn’t pay to play, Froehlich’s career in politics is destroyed because he made the mistake of putting his constituents ahead of the political machines, those who would donate to candidates not entrenched in the machine are made an example of with inflated property tax bills, the corrupt party bosses at BOR appear as those who helped “root out this corruption”, and the icing on the cake; all of the genuine victims of this political corruption had their reputations trashed on MyFox Chicago courtesy of Dane Placko.
Paul Froehlich, A Man Falsely Accused
Placko’s “proof” – 94% of property tax adjustment Froehlich assisted with were approved, which is higher than the “traditional” number of approvals, but when have property values precipitously fallen for the length of time we are experiencing? Have not the number of property tax appeals and approvals gone up since the mortgage collapse? Is there anything traditional about this mortgage crisis?
Some of those whose reputations were trashed by Dane Placko such as Sharad and Harish Dani sued MyFox Chicago claiming defamation and false light regarding the stories that ran on MyFox Chicago News and subsequently by the blog Illinois Review, alleging the statements published and posted on the website were false and defamatory, and assumed criminal wrongdoing, but the plaintiffs will have to appeal all the way to federal court because a state law called the Illinois Citizen Participation Act is written in such a way that it gives news organizations near absolute libel immunity which stands at odds with Supreme Court precedent on libel law. How convenient. In short, the political machine in exchange for access, can use feed stories to reporters destroying the reputations of anyone they like until the law is challenged in federal court; an expensive proposition. The Illinois Citizen Participation Act is sold on the basis that it protects the little guy who speaks out, in practice it creates a David & Goliath scenario that favors media corporations and the state.
Is it any surprise that Dane Placko was the only reporter invited to a virtually closed hearing of the BOR on this matter? Attorney R. Tamara deSilva, who is representing some of the victims of this travesty tells us that Dane Placko demanded an exclusive interview with her clients or he would use (read edit in) the worst parts of his footage on the air just as he did in the following video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nrq_nuDdc8] trashing Paul Froehlich. DeSilva’s answer to Placko’s threat is not suitable for publication.
Now that the cat is out of the bag and there are federal charges against employees of the BOR where is Dane Placko with a carefully edited video and big expose? Where is MyFox Chicago? All they have isthis automated line story from the Associated Press on their web site with no local followup [and I head to use a search tool to find it].
No charges were ever filed against former Rep. Froehlich and the investigation resulted in no wrongdoing on his part. Froehlich said in a letter to Dane Placko:
Yet I still have the perpetual stigma of “under criminal investigation.” As the public record now stands, my obituary some day will repeat he “under investigation” accusation. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never been officially charged, much less indicted, I’m still guilty in the minds of Fox Chicago News viewers who translate repeated reports of “under criminal investigation” into “another crooked Illinois politician.” In other words, I get pretty much the same stigma as if I had been indicted and convicted — but without the due process.
When the news media public identifies someone as the target of criminal investigation, nothing ever comes of it, and there’s some doubt he ever was the target, who does he see to get his reputation back? Do journalists have any professional responsibility to update, if not to correct, the record? Or does the person whose reputation was sullied simply have to live with an indelible blot that follows him to the grave while the reporter keeps his award?
In a statement forwarded to us from Paul Froehlich:
I don’t agree with much that Rush Limbaugh has to say. I ran across this quote that hit home:
“The drive-by media. It’s like a drive-by shooter except the microphones are the guns, and they drive into groups of people, they report a bunch of totally wrong libelous stuff about people. Sometimes people get really harmed. They go out and try to destroy people’s careers.”
Were truer words ever spoken?
UPDATE – R. Tamara deSilva, attorney for the plaintiffs, will be in oral arguments in federal court this Tuesday July 24, 2012. Please examine the press release at the link below.
UPDATE II– Interesting link shows how the machine uses access as a weapon: Washington Times reporter files battery charges against Rahm Emmanuel’s staff – LINK
People in government do not behave this way because they fear Republicans…. Newsmax:
The FBI was too concerned about political correctness and did not launch an investigation into a man who was later charged with killing 13 people in a 2009 attack at the Fort Hood military installation in Texas, despite significant warning signs that he was an Islamic extremist bent on killing civilians, according to a lawmaker briefed on a new report about the terrorist attack.
In emails to a known terrorist, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan expressed his support for suicide bombings and killing civilians, while the terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, encouraged Hasan to stay in touch, Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, told The Associated Press on Wednesday after he was briefed on the findings of a new review of the attack.
The review was done by former FBI Director William Webster and was more than two years in the making. FBI Director Robert Mueller asked that Webster conduct an independent review, and the bureau is expected to release an unclassified version this week.
Much was already known about the series of oversights and missteps the government made leading to the terror attack at the Fort Hood Army post.
Soon after the attack, it was revealed that members of two FBI anti-terrorism task forces saw emails between the Army psychiatrist and al-Awlaki beginning in December 2008. Those task forces reviewed the communications and decided they were in keeping with Hasan’s research at the time, and as a result, no formal investigation of Hasan was opened. Hasan was writing a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But McCaul said Webster’s report offers some new details that show the FBI was concerned about investigating an American Muslim in the military, and that is why an investigation was not pursued.
I know what the Romney camp is thinking: They have conservatives locked up so they don’t need Palin; since she is polarizing some independents won’t like her. That thinking while having some merit is still very wrong headed.
Independents have voted for TEA Party candidates in droves in 2009 and 2010. Sarah Palin was the driving force behind it. People tell pollsters what they want to hear very often. People who intend to vote GOP and don’t want their friends to know have a history of lying to pollsters. On the other hand I know LOTS of conservatives who intend to stay home this November. The travesty from Chief Justice Roberts helped to motivate them, but make no mistake, there is still a real problem that true conservatives have with Mitt Romney.
If Palin is a master of one thing it is political payback. When Gov. Christie said something stupid about her she let him have it so hard that he never did it again. If Sarah Palin is not invited to the convention with a prominent roll there will be a price to pay and she WILL exact it. She may even stage her own event nearby to suck the wind out of a key Romney event. Palin is far more charismatic than Romney, she knows it and so does the media. She may even rip up the Republican establishment “Good Ole Boy” network at her event. Palin has a long and very effective history of doing just that.
Canadian Free Press:
In the roughly three years since she quit as the state’s chief regulator of the oil industry, Palin has crushed the Republican hierarchy (virtually all male) and nearly every other foe or critic. Political analysts in Alaska refer to the “body count” of Palin’s rivals.
“The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign. It includes Ruedrich, Renkes, Murkowski, gubernatorial contenders John Binkley and Andrew Halcro, the three big oil companies in Alaska, and a section of the Daily News called “Voice of the Times,” which was highly critical of Palin and is now defunct.
The bottom line is that Sarah Palin is still the most powerful figure in the Republican Party and too many in the beltway still haven’t managed to accept that. Palin is also a fund raising machine who can help Romney raise funds for the election. In either case, if you guys at the Romney camp think you can out-smart her, you can’t. Just the attempt will raise her ire and you will only end up paying a heavier price.
I have been waiting for this for a long time. When I was in college finishing my latest degree I was making many of these very same claims about global warming alarmist nonsense as the IAC report below. Leftist students and faculty pretty much told me that I was nuts, and I wasn’t a climate scientist so how would I know? Well it looks like I knew. It was easy. First of all it doesn’t take a genius to see when the scientific method is being ignored and second of all, what I am an expert on is politics and I know a political movement when I see one.
At the bottom of the article I posted a list of links that I wrote starting in 2007 saying many of the same things the IAC has pointed out below. Why am I so often using the word “I” when that is not an attitude that as editor I often take here at Political Arena? To be honest, I am going to take the low road and revel in rubbing it in my critic’s noses. I reactivated my old college blog just for the purpose of posting this story. We should ask ourselves what has happened to our education system when the doctoral academics who doubted me and called me names behind my back were all wrong, while the mere undergrad like me was spot on? – Chuck Norton
On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had “complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the Inter Academy Council (IAC), the group created by the world’s science academies to provide advice to international bodies.”
Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world’s most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as “proof” that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.
If the IPCC’s reports were flawed, as a many global warming “skeptics” have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made global warming movement — the environmental movement’s “mother of all environmental scares” — is undermined. The Obama administration’s war on coal may be unnecessary. Billions of dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted. Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been squandered worldwide in campaigns to “fix” a problem that didn’t really exist.
The “recommendations” issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the IAC’s 2010 report.
Alternative views not considered, claims not properly peer reviewed
The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.
No formal criteria for selecting IPCC authors
The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18). Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18). In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.
Too political…
The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking. “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25).
Really? Too political? We were told by everyone — environmentalists, reporters, politicians, even celebrities — that the IPCC reports were science, not politics. Now we are told that even the scientists involved in writing the reports — remember, they are all true believers in man-made global warming themselves — felt the summaries were “too political.”
Here is how the IAC described how the IPCC arrives at the “consensus of scientists”:
Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting. Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).
How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the “true consensus of scientists”?
Phony estimates of certainty
Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony “confidence intervals” and estimates of “certainty” in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34). Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007. Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as “80% confident.” Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.
The IAC authors say it is “not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty” (p. 34), a huge understatement. Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called “level of understanding scale,” which is more mush-mouth for “consensus.”
The IAC authors warn, also on page 34, that “conclusions will likely be stated so vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore statements of ‘very high confidence’ will have little substantive value.” Yes, but that doesn’t keep the media and environmental activists from citing them over and over again as “proof” that global warming is man-made and a crisis…even if that’s not really what the reports’ authors are saying.
IPCC participants had conflicts of interest
Finally, the IAC noted, “the lack of a conflict of interest and disclosure policy for IPCC leaders and Lead Authors was a concern raised by a number of individuals who were interviewed by the Committee or provided written input” as well as “the practice of scientists responsible for writing IPCC assessments reviewing their own work. The Committee did not investigate the basis of these claims, which is beyond the mandate of this review” (p. 46).
Too bad, because these are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are environmental activists, not scientists at all. That’s a structural problem with the IPCC that could dwarf the big problems already reported.
IPCC critics vindicated
So on June 27, nearly two years after these bombshells fell (without so much as a raised eyebrow by the mainstream media in the U.S. — go ahead and try Googling it), the IPCC admits that it was all true and promises to do better for its next report. Nothing to see here…keep on moving.
Well I say, hold on, there! The news release means that the IAC report was right. That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable. Not just “possibly flawed” or “could have been improved,” but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.
It means that all of the “endorsements” of the climate consensus made by the world’s national academies of science — which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis — were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised. It means that the EPA’s “endangerment finding” — its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health — was wrong and should be overturned.
And what of the next IPCC report, due out in 2013 and 2014? The near-final drafts of that report have been circulating for months already. They were written by scientists chosen by politicians rather than on the basis of merit; many of them were reviewing their own work and were free to ignore the questions and comments of people with whom they disagree. Instead of “confidence,” we will get “level of understanding scales” that are just as meaningless.
And on this basis we should transform the world’s economy to run on breezes and sunbeams?
In 2010, we learned that much of what we thought we knew about global warming was compromised and probably false. On June 27, the culprits confessed and promised to do better. But where do we go to get our money back?
Related from my old college blog:
Inconvenient Questions Global Warming Alarmists Don’t Want You to Ask – February 18, 2007 – LINK
Top Scientists Say: You Are Not the Cause of Global Warming – October 22, 2007 – LINK
Global Cooling Continues; Global Warming Alarmists Still Issuing Death Threats – December 28, 2008 – LINK
UK Telegraph: 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved – December 28, 2008 – LINK
National Climatic Data Center: Cooling in Last 10 Years – January 10, 2009 – LINK
The Debate is Over. Global Warming Alarmism is About Achieving Central Control of the Economy and Now They Admit It Openly – March 27, 2009 – LINK
Al Gore: Climate change issue can lead to world government – July 11, 2009 – LINK
EPA Tried to Suppress Global Warming Report Admitting Skeptics Correct – October 23, 2009 – LINK
New AP Article on “Global Cooling Myth” Spins a Bad Study – UPDATED: Look where they put THIS ground station… – October 27, 2009 – LINK
Professors Paid to Plagiarize – UPDATE: Global warming scientists hacked emails show manipulation of data, hiding of other data and conspiring to attack/smear global warming skeptics! – November 19, 2009 – LINK
National Association of Scholars on the “ClimateGate” Scandal – November 28, 2009 – LINK
Examples of the “Climategate” Documents – UPDATE: BBC Had the emails and files for 6 weeks, sat on story. UPDATE II – They carried out their conspiracy threat; much of the raw data from CRU destroyed! – November 28, 2009 – LINK
Scientific American thinks you are stupid: The dissection of a blatant propaganda piece for global warming alarmism. – December 6, 2009 – LINK
The Roundup: IPCC Authors Now Admitting Fault – No Warming Since 1995 – Sea Levels Not Rising. Senator Inhofe: Possible criminal misuse of taxpayer research funds. – February 23, 2010 – LINK
OOPS AGAIN: IPCC scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits… – April 23, 2010 – LINK
UN IPCC Co-chair: climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth – November 18, 2010 – LINK
More Hadley Center Global Warming Horror Claims Debunked by Real Science – December 6, 2010 – LINK
ClimateGate One Year Later. Elite Media Still Lying – December 6, 2010 – LINK
More ClimateGate One Year Later – December 7, 2010 – LINK
IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT: Most global warming models are exaggerated, many scientists in it for the grant money or treat it like a religion – December 7, 2010 – LINK
How Global Warming Propaganda Works – December 8, 2010 – LINK
NASA’s global warming evidence page filled with lies, half truths and suspect data – December 10, 2010 – LINK
Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research: Halt economic growth, start government rationing. Global Warming Alarmists Party Fat in Cancun – December 21, 2010 – LINK
Global Warming Conference Delegates Sign Petitions to Ban Water and “Destabilize U.S. Economy” – February 15, 2011 – LINK
Global Warming Alarmist Quote of the Day – Former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart: No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.
AAUP Seeks to Limit Transparency Over Climate Science – September 19, 2011 – LINK
Senator Rubio: Obama was just saying what he really believed when he said that small business owners didn’t build their businesses.
Obama’s Press Secretary says that Obama hasn’t met with his Jobs Council in over six months because “He has a lot on his plate”. Indeed, like 106 fund raisers and if memory serves about two dozen golf outings.
Several Reagan statues have appeared in Poland. It makes you wonder what the Poles know that too many of our public school teachers don’t.
A new statue of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II that was unveiled in Gdansk, Poland, on Saturday, July 14, 2012. Both late leaders are highly revered in Poland for their role in helping to topple communism.
George Santayana said those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and the people of Poland have not forgotten:
Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.
The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime.
The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the two late leaders. It was inspired by an Associated Press photograph taken in 1987 on John Paul’s second pontifical visit to the U.S.
[…] Reagan and John Paul shared a conviction that communism was a moral evil, not just a bad economic system. And Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that led the anti-communist struggle in Poland, has often paid homage to both men and told the AP in a recent interview that he deeply respected Reagan.
“Reagan should have a monument in every city,” Walesa said.
The money for the statues (about $59,000 US dollars) was raised from former Solidarity members, “many of whom are today living on small pensions and could only afford the smallest of donations” according to the AP.
This is what bothers me about these two candidates. While Obama’s attacks are far less honest today, Mitt Romney is not innocent either and in the primary Romney’s attacks on the other GOP candidates were often sickeningly dishonest.
Interesting how the Democrat brings up the Swiftboat Vets Ads from when John Kerry ran for President as an example of a distraction. But he leaves out a fundamental truth – John Kerry made the three months he spent in Vietnam in the Navy a cornerstone of his campaign. At the convention Kerry had it military themed and he was saluting and the whole nine yards. The problem is that John Kerry misrepresented his service in his campaign and the people he served with and other veterans took issue with it. John Kerry, in a most unpatriotic way in the view of many war heroes, took the side of Jane Fonda when he came back and the North Vietnamese used John Kerry’s actions for great propaganda value.
With that said, the economy at the end of President Bush’s first term was doing rather well and national security and military policy was front and center which is another reason why the Swiftboat ads were no mere attempt at distraction. The economy today is a disaster and the Obama campaign wants to talk about anything but. And why the Obama Administration is declaring executive privilege to delay the release of documents relation to huge scandals such as “Fast & Furious” and is still hiding all sorts of documents form his past, all they want to talk about is how Mitt Romney had not released his tax returns from ten years ago? THAT is a distraction.
The simple truth is that most people are outraged at what Obama and the Democrats have done with our money and are not overly concerned with what Mitt Romney did with his own money ten years ago.
This is what happens when you punish success in some vein attempt at “getevenwithemism” so that the far left feels like it got it’s pound of flesh. But now those wealthy and productive will not be spending money in France, they will not have new investment in France, they will not be buying local goods and paying local taxes in France, they will not start new business in France. They passed this tax rate and they will take in less money as a result.
By the way, the same thing is happening in America – LINK.
The previous top tax bracket of 41 per cent on earnings over 72,000 euros is also set to increase to 45 per cent.
Sotheby’s Realty, the estate agent arm of the British auction house, said its French offices sold more than 100 properties over 1.7 million euros between April and June this year – a marked increase on the same period in 2011.
Alexander Kraft, head of Sotheby’s Realty, France, said: “The result of the presidential election has had a real impact on our sales.
“Now a large number of wealthy French families are leaving the country as a direct result of the proposals of the new government.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.
Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.
Discovery of the trouble at the flight school began when local police–not federal authorities–pulled over the owner of the school on a traffic violation and were able to determine that he was an illegal alien.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.
Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.
Discovery of the trouble at the flight school began when local police–not federal authorities–pulled over the owner of the school on a traffic violation and were able to determine that he was an illegal alien.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-Ala.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security, said he found the GAO’s findings “amazing.”
“We have cancer patients, Iraq War veterans and Nobel Prize winners all forced to undergo rigorous security checks before getting on an airplane,” said Rogers, “and at the same time, ten years after 9/11, there are foreign nationals in the United States trained to fly just like Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers did, and not all of them are necessarily getting a security background check.”
Stephen Lord, who is the GAO’s director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, testified about the matter Wednesday in Rogers’ subcommittee. Rogers asked him: “Isn’t it true that, based on your report, the Transportation Security Administration cannot assure the American people that foreign terrorists are not in this country learning how to fly airplanes, yes or no?”
The Mexican government has been working with the United States Department of Agriculture to increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps.
USDA has an agreement with Mexico to promote American food assistance programs, including food stamps, among Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.
“USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition assistance,” the USDA explains in a brief paragraph on their “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics With Nutrition Assistance” web page. “Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”
The partnership — which was signed by former USDA Secretary Ann M. Veneman and Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis Ernesto Derbez Bautista in 2004 — sees to it that the Mexican Embassy and Mexican consulates in America provide USDA nutrition assistance program information to Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals working in America and migrant communities in America. The information is specifically focused on eligibility criteria and access.
The goal, for USDA, is to get rid of what they see as enrollment obstacles and increase access among potentially eligible populations by working with arms of the Mexican government in America. Benefits are not guaranteed or provided under the program — the purpose is outreach and education.
Some of the materials the USDA encourages the Mexican government to use to educate and promote the benefit programs are available free online for order and download. A partial list of materials include English and Spanish brochures titled “Five Easy Steps To Snap Benefits,” “How To Get Food Help — A Consumer’s Guide to FNCS Programs,” “Ending Hunger Improving Nutrition Combating Obesity,” and posters with slogans like “Food Stamps Make America Stronger.”
When asked for details and to elaborate on the program, USDA stressed it was established in 2004 and not meant for illegal immigrants.
[Political Arena Editor Responds – That is what the Obama Administration said about Fast & Furious; the documentation revision for this program is dated Feb, 16, 2012.]
According to Obama and far left Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (the one who was caught lying about her heritage) people who own businesses and such are not entitled to the fruits of their labor because we had roads; therefore they didn’t do anything to deserve any profit form their work.
In 2008 I wrote a long series of articles about the mortgage collapse, who engineered it, who got paid and who is lying.
Related: House Oversight Committee: Members of Congress Received Special Favors from Mortgage Lenders – LINK
Our dear friend Michelle Malkin has put out a column that takes us through memory lane on who was getting paid by the big banks, who was peddling influence, and who was engaging in a pattern of government corruption that is becoming all too familiar. And what is below is only HALF of her column as the examples are almost unending….
Your guide to sleazy Democratic Party-backed banks
Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod and his hatchet people are still yammering about GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney’s overseas investments. It’s time for the Romney campaign to educate voters about all the shady financial institutions embraced by Democrats right here on American soil.
The fat-cat narrative attacks on Republicans won’t go away by making nice with the White House — or by relying on Beltway journalists to drop their double standards and vet the president’s own bad bank entanglements. Indeed, The New York Times admitted this week that their staff and other political journalists from every major media outlet submit their work to the White House for unprecedented review, editing and “veto power.”
Fortunately, the truth manipulators and message massagers haven’t gotten to this column yet. So, let’s talk sleazy Democratic Party-backed banks, shall we?
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Forget Switzerland. The mother and father of all financial industry outrages are rooted in Washington, D.C. And Obama Democrats are among the biggest winners of lavish, out-of-control compensation packages from fraud-plagued Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama confidante James Johnson raked in $21 million. Former Obama chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel “earned” at least $320,000 for a brief 14-month gig at Freddie Mac. And Clinton Fannie Mae head and Obama economic confidante Franklin Raines bagged some $90 million in pay and stock options earned during the government-sponsored institution’s Enron-style accounting scandal on the public dime.
Self-appointed banking policewoman and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has, uncharacteristically, kept her mouth shut about these wealthy barons.
Superior Bank. One of the Obamas’ oldest Chicago friends and wealthiest billionaire bundlers, former Obama national finance chairwoman Penny Pritzker, headed up this subprime lender. Even after it went under in 2001 and left 1,400 customers destitute, Pritzker was pushing to expand its toxic subprime loan business. Pritzker and her family escaped accountability by forking over $460 million over 15 years. Obama happily accepted the nearly $800 million in campaign and inaugural funding Pritzker drummed up for him. To protect her family’s multibillion dollar fortune, Pritzker’s enterprises park their money in the very same kind of offshore trusts her candidate is attacking Romney over.
Broadway Bank. In 2010, President and Mrs. Obama personally raised money for their Chicago friend and fundraiser Alexi Giannoulias, who ran unsuccessfully for Obama’s old Illinois Senate seat. As I reported then, Giannoulias’ Greek immigrant family founded Chicago-based Broadway Bank, a now-defunct financial institution that loaned tens of millions of dollars to convicted mafia felons and faced bankruptcy after decades of engaging in risky, high-flying behavior. It’s the place where Obama parked his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign funds. And it’s the same place where a mutual friend of Obama and Giannoulias — convicted Obama fundraiser and slumlord Tony Rezko — used to bounce nearly $500,000 in bad checks written to Las Vegas casinos.
Chicago’s former inspector general blasted Giannoulias and his family for tapping $70 million worth of dividends in 2007 and 2008 as the real estate crash loomed. Broadway Bank was sitting on an estimated $250 million in bad loans. The cost to taxpayers after the bank was shut down two years ago: an estimated $390 million.
ShoreBank. The “progressive” Chicago-based community development bank, a “green” financial institution whose mission was to “create economic equity and a healthy environment,” folded in August 2010. Obama personally had endorsed the politically connected bank and appeared in a video promoting its Kenyan microlending project. But it was a doomed social justice experiment. After regulators shut it down, Obama crony companies including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs took over the mess courtesy of taxpayer subsidies.
Countrywide/Bank of America. Earlier this month, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report on corruption-plagued Countrywide Financial Corp., which was bailed out by taxpayer-bailed-out Bank of America. The House investigation confirmed the notorious favor-trading scheme, which involved sweetheart home loan deals for members of Congress and their staff, top government officials and executives of doomed mortgage giant Fannie Mae.
“These relationships helped (Countrywide CEO and Democratic subprime loan king Angelo) Mozilo increase his own company’s profits while dumping the risk of bad loans on taxpayers,” according to the new report. Mozilo copped a $67.5 million plea to avert a high-stakes public trial in the heat of the 2010 midterm election season. Since then, Obama’s Justice Department has taken no action to prosecute Countrywide officials on federal bribery charges.
Among the influence-peddling operation’s most prominent beneficiaries: the aforementioned Obama top adviser Jim Johnson, who accepted more than $7 million in below-market-rate Countrywide loans, and former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, whose ill-fated 2010 re-election bid was personally endorsed by Obama. Obama stood by Dodd even as sordid details of his two discounted Countrywide loans and record Countrywide PAC donations mounted.
Bank of Democratic America, which raked in $45 billion in Obama-supported TARP bailout funds and billions more in secret emergency federal loans, footed the $50 million restitution payment bill for Mozilo and another Countrywide official. In 2008, BofA’s political action committee gave its biggest contributions to Obama, totaling $421,000. And as I noted in January, Bank of America supplied the Democrats with a $15 million revolving line of credit, along with an additional $17 million loan during the 2010 midterms.
Embarrassed by the party’s ties to shady Bank of America, progressives are now trying to rebrand the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C., where Obama will give his nomination acceptance address. They’re referring to it as “Panthers Stadium” instead.
There is out of touch and then there is OMGWTF out of touch. Just when you thought it was bad enough when Obama’s Energy Secretary testified to Congress that gas should be $8.00 a gallon….
As gas prices continue to soar around the country, Joe Kennedy III, the Democratic candidate for Rep. Barney Frank’s seat, wrote an online letter to supporters calling for an end to “cheap oil.”
“Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama — they’ve all talked about the same thing: the need to wean ourselves off our debilitating dependence on foreign oil,” Kennedy wrote.
“The cycle that allows cheap oil to trump tough choices has to stop,” he continued. “Forty years is enough.”
In the week before Kennedy posted, AAA Southern New England reported that the price of gas in Massachusetts had risen a further two cents. The Worchester Business Journal reported that at an average of $3.899 a gallon for regular unleaded gas, the price is currently 24 cents higher than it was one year before.
Kennedy is running against Sean Bielat, a former Marine who lost to 16-term Rep. Barney Frank by 10 points in the 2010 election.
“It’s kind of stunning that he’s so out of touch that he would say it that way,” Bielat Communications Director Sarah Rumpf told The Daily Caller. “Democrats, Republicans and independents — everybody is paying for higher gas right now.”
Though Kennedy has said that he is not running on his name — which represents a liberal political dynasty — critics have attacked him for not putting forth policy positions. His campaign website does not have an issues section.
Also see – Obama invested heavily with outsourcers, after accusing Romney of doing the same… – LINK
President Obama accused Mitt Romney of being responsible for shutting down this American Steel plant, saddling it with debt, and screwing the employees out of their pensions, but Mitt Romney left Bain Capital two years before this happened to run the Olympics. So who was in charge of Bain Capital when this happened? You guess it, Obama’s top campaign money bundler John Levine. Does it get any better than this?
Our friends Chuck Slowe and Jim Hoft have a great report on this. Be sure add their websites to your daily reading:
The Obama campaign blamed Governor Mitt Romney for the demise of GST Steel company in a video they released in May. The plant closed in 2001. Mitt left Bain in 1999.
[Political Arena Editor’s Note – I ripped this video to my hard drive just in case it vanishes from Obama’sYoutube Channel]
For some reason the Obama camp forgot to mention this…
Obama’s top bundler Jonathan Lavine was in charge of Bain during the BST layoffs.
Blaming Governor Romney for any issues surrounding the failure of GST is wrong and it is a blatant lie. Mitt Romney had been long gone when the company started to fail and subsequently closed it doors. When are the President and his campaign hacks going to get the story correct? When are they going to get back to their economy and its dreadful condition? Mr. President, you can run but you cannot hide.
It turns out that Jonathan Lavine, current Obama bundler, was actually in charge, at Bain, during that period, when the layoffs occurred. Oops, that isn’t right, is it? Yes, that story is the one that needs to be reported on. Sorry Mr. President, your lies are just getting to be more than many of us are able to handle.
And, Jonathan Lavine is not your average Obama Bain donor. Lavine is one of Barack Obama’s top bundlers. ABC reported:
While Democrats assail presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital business practices, Republicans note that President Obama has not been bashful about accepting cash from Bain executives or other high-profile figures in the corporate buyout business…
…One of Obama’s top campaign financiers – Jonathan Lavine – is also managing director at Bain, bundling between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions for the 2012 Obama Victory Fund, according to estimates released by the Obama campaign. The president has also relied on other leading figures in the private equity sector as hosts for high-dollar fundraisers and as members of his Jobs Council.
Maybe someday the liberal media will report on this.
See our other coverage on General Electric, Obama and Outsourcing. Also see – Obama’s Top Money Man Was In Charge of Bain Capital During GST Steel Layoffs – LINK.
President Obama has accused Mitt Romney of raking in profits from investing in companies that ship American jobs overseas, but according to his most recent financial disclosure, he and First Lady Michelle Obama have hundreds of thousands of dollars in a mutual fund that has large holdings in corporations that outsource jobs.
“(Romney) invested in companies that have been called ‘pioneers’ of outsourcing,” Obama said at a Saturday campaign event in Glen Allen, Va. “I don’t want a pioneer in outsourcing. I want some insourcing.”
But Obama’s own portfolio shows a willingness to invest in American corporations that have shifted employment overseas.
In his most recent financial disclosure from 2011, Obama and his wife reported having between $200,000 and $450,000 in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which invests in the largest U.S. corporations. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as of Sept. 30, 2011, the fund’s biggest holding was 8,272,039 shares of Apple Inc., then valued at $3.2 billion.
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas….
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
The mutual fund that the Obamas have invested in also held 94,582,281 million shares of General Electric, valued at $1.4 billion, as of the SEC filing. The multinational conglomorate has a long history of outsourcing – according to a new book cited by the New York Times, in 1989, “G.E. became the first U.S. company to outsource software work to India.” Obama also has close ties to GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, who was appointed as chairman of his outside panel of economic advisers last year.
In addition to Apple and GE, the Obamas’ fund listed 10,655,961 shares of International Business Machines, valued at $1.9 billion. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2009, “The technology giant has been steadily building its work force in India and other locations while reducing the number of workers based in the U.S. Foreign workers accounted for 71% of Big Blue’s nearly 400,000 employees at the start of the year, up from about 65% in 2006.”
The point in this is not to say outsourcing is wrong. Corporations are supposed to maximize profits for shareholders. But Obama’s own portfolio shows that despite his heated rhetoric, he makes investment decisions without regard to whether companies are outsourcing.
You can look at a full list of the fund’s holdings as of Sept. 30, 2011, here.
The President is running in large part on the bailout’s $30+ billion loss, uber-failed “success.” And the Press is acting as his stenographers. An epitome of this bailout nightmare mess is the electric absurdity that is the Chevrolet Volt. The Press is at every turn covering up – rather than covering – the serial failures of President Obama’s signature vehicle.
The Press has failed to mention at least five Volt fires, myopically focusing on the one the Obama Administration hand-selected for attention.
The Press has for the most part failed to mention how pathetic this “second-best sales month” actually is. And even when one Dinosaur does, the unwarranted enthusiasm is palpable.
The Press also fails to put this pathetic tally in perspective.
The Chevy Cruze is basically a Volt without the dead-weight, flammable 400-lb. electric battery. Which makes it $17,000, rather than the Volt’s $41,000.
Chevy in June sold 18,983 Cruzes – more than ten times the number of Volts. And that’s down 1/3 from last June’s 24,648.
But that feeble Volt tally has the Press all revved up.
According to multiple GM executives there is little or no profit being made on each Volt built at a present cost of around $40,000. Furthermore, the $700 million of development that went into the car has to be recouped.
Get that? GM makes “little or no profit” on the Volt.
Look, I get it, it’s fun. I just spent $1 million – of your money – advertising free air. On which my profit margin is just as good as GM’s is on the Volt.
(A)dd $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt’s Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for “retooling” its plants, and you’ve got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.
Speaking of those “tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives” – as of November of last year that tally all by itself was $250,000 per Volt sold.
And that excruciating pain is ongoing. Again, a Volt sold makes GM no money – but costs We the Taxpayers a $7,500 bribe – I mean “incentive.” Oh – and President Obama wants to jack that bribe to $10,000 per.
I guess it’s good news after all that Volt sales remain so anemic.
And with GM’s new 60-day return policy, it looks like you can buy a Volt and cash the $7,500 bribe check. Then return the Volt – and keep the $7,500 bribe cash. How’s that for Taxpayer coin stewardship?
In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.
Immigrant households’ use of welfare tends to be much higher than natives for food assistance programs and Medicaid. Their use of cash and housing programs tends to be similar to native households.
A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households with children is received on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. But even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants (no U.S.-born children) still had a welfare use rate of 56 percent in 2009.
Immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, even before the current recession. In 2001, 50 percent of all immigrant households with children used at least one welfare program, compared to 32 percent for natives.
Households with children with the highest welfare use rates are those headed by immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent), and Ecuador (70 percent). Those with the lowest use rates are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).
The states where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62 percent); Texas, California, and New York (61 percent); Pennsylvania (59 percent); Minnesota and Oregon (56 percent); and Colorado (55 percent).
We estimate that 52 percent of households with children headed by legal immigrants used at least one welfare program in 2009, compared to 71 percent for illegal immigrant households with children. Illegal immigrants generally receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children.
Illegal immigrant households with children primarily use food assistance and Medicaid, making almost no use of cash or housing assistance. In contrast, legal immigrant households tend to have relatively high use rates for every type of program.
High welfare use by immigrant-headed households with children is partly explained by the low education level of many immigrants. Of households headed by an immigrant who has not graduated high school, 80 percent access the welfare system, compared to 25 percent for those headed by an immigrant who has at least a bachelor’s degree.
An unwillingness to work is not the reason immigrant welfare use is high. The vast majority (95 percent) of immigrant households with children had at least one worker in 2009. But their low education levels mean that more than half of these working immigrant households with children still accessed the welfare system during 2009.
If we exclude the primary refugee-sending countries, the share of immigrant households with children using at least one welfare program is still 57 percent.
Welfare use tends to be high for both new arrivals and established residents. In 2009, 60 percent of households with children headed by an immigrant who arrived in 2000 or later used at least one welfare program; for households headed by immigrants who arrived before 2000 it was 55 percent.
For all households (those with and without children), the use rates were 37 percent for households headed by immigrants and 22 percent for those headed by natives.
Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using some welfare for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates because most immigrants have been in the United States for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some states provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically awarded American citizenship and are therefore eligible for all welfare programs at birth.
The eight major welfare programs examined in this report are SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low income elderly and disabled), TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food program), free/reduced school lunch, food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 