WhackyNation

All Americans and particularly the liberals in the print and broadcast news media and the liberals on the faculties of colleges and universities should swallow their pride and become acquainted with what is called the “Petition Project,” which was organized and circulated by Dr. Arthur B. Robinson, a credible scientist who is president and research professor of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

Not long ago, Dr. Robinson sent a letter to thousands of scientists with university degrees in physical science at the equivalent of Bachelor of Science or greater. A short time ago, he reported that 31,072 of the scientists had signed the petition in agreement, more than 9,100 of them with PhDs.

I am repeating the petition here with the hope that all those who have supported the global-warming hoax and believed it to be legitimate will reconsider their position and withdraw their support of government and other campaigns designed to spend millions in tax money to combat the hoax.

“We urge the United States government to reject the global-warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate…. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Because additional signatories continue to come in daily, Dr. Robinson has posted the petition and new announcements on a special website, http://www.petitionproject.org/ In his Access to Energy newsletter, Dr. Robinson said this:

“The claim that only a few ‘skeptical’ scientists remain who reject the human-caused hypothesis is false. More than 31,000 are not a few, nor are 9,000, if one insists on PhD credentials.”

Since the hoaxers frequently point to the U.N. IPCC to back their claims, it is important to quote Dr. Robinson in that regard:

“Arrayed against this petition statement are the U.N.IPCC with its group of 600 scientists, Al Gore, and a relatively small number of mediocre “scientists” here and there across the American landscape who have suddenly found notoriety or grant money in the human-caused global-warming cause.

“Al Gore has made so many outright false statements about this issue — especially in his movie — that he is not worth considering. The only credible group is the U.N. 600. Yet, what has this group said? Actually — nothing. While the U.N. issues continual reports in the group’s name, the members of the group are never permitted to approve these texts.

“Meetings are held, reports are written, reports are edited to fit the U.N. agenda, and the edited reports are published. The ethics of science require that every putative and listed author of a scientific publication approve the exact publication being published. This is never the case at the IPCC, for the reason that not all of the 600 participants agree with the U.N. claims…. Many of the U.N. scientists have resigned as a result of U.N. misrepresentations.”

Hat Tip to Wally Wonders Why:

As citizens of the United States, you and I have the right to express our opinions about local, state, & federal legislation. What we don’t have is enough time to be very efficient at it. So, we often choose to belong to organizations, whose principles and concerns are reflective of our own. These organizations, in turn, hire staff members to spend much or all of their time on issues important to the members. Those employees function as an extension of our voices and are called lobbyists.

Lobbyists represent all manner of people and organizations. They represent big businesses and labor unions, liberals and conservatives, teachers and administrators, consumers and manufacturers, and so on. And each group called those in their opposite number “special interests”. And each group points at these “special interests” as being the source of all economic problems. It’s called demonizing the opposition and it’s far too common in our political arenas.

The implication is clear. What “we” want from government is appropriate and good for the country. What “they” want from the government is greedy and harmful for the country. The character of Ben Franklin in the stage play/movie “1776” put it best. His line is something like this, “Revolution in the third person, such as their revolution, is always wrong. But revolution in the first person, such as our revolution, is always good.” We cannot function in this simplistic atmosphere. The partisanship is killing our republic.

We need to recognize that all citizens have the right to participate in the processes of government and be heard through their lobbyists. We need to acknowledge that lobbyists are the voice of groups of citizens with the right to be heard. Whenever a candidate refers to “special interests”, we need to translate that into “other citizens”.

Having heard from both sides, we need to chart a course that is acceptable, though not preferable, to each side.

Speakers don’t bring to the floor critical bills without counting the votes.

What the hell did Speaker Nancy Pelosi do today?  It’s obvious she could not bring the hammer down in her own caucus to deliver votes.  What embarassing incompetence.

All the more reason to vote Republican this election and return the House to Republican control.

An Associated Press report of a promising expansion of Ellis Island would be great news for Americans, particularly those, like me, who are the sons and daughters of men and women who came through the immigration station gleefully many years ago — except for the major omission in the article.

The omission? The report makes no mention of the staggering immigration problem the nation is facing today. It ignores the economic jolt brought by the 20 million or more illegal immigrants, who have come into the U.S. in recent decades and who are siphoning off millions of your tax dollars and mine they don’t deserve.

According to the A.P., “A new center being created within the Ellis Island Immigration Museum will tell the history of arrivals before and after the peak immigration era in the United States of 1892 to 1954,” Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation officials said.

Stephen Briganti, president and chief executive of the foundation, said “The story of the migration to the U.S. goes back to the beginning of the country and comes up to the present. So there were a good number of people whose stories weren’t told at Ellis Island. The center will cover the entire gamut of the populating of America.”

Oh, yeah? How can Briganti make such a statement in the face of the swarm of illegal aliens who have entered the U.S. without bothering to come through Ellis Island, to apply for citizenship, and to make an effort to attend schools to learn to speak English? How will those millions be represented in the Ellis Island Museum?

Perhaps it is time for the U.S. to shut down the Ellis Island operation and open up new immigration stations at our border with Mexico and at other points in the nation. The immigration mess has been confounded by the Democratically controlled Congress’ failure to pass a strong, clear immigration law that would begin the needed process of sending all the illegal immigrants back where they came from.

So many of Briganti’s statements have a hollow ring because he has apparently ignored the real immigration story of recent years. For example, he was quoted as saying the new exhibits being mounted at Ellis Island are “an important story to tell because Ellis Island is a symbol of inclusion; it’s a symbol of diversity and that’s what this country is.”

No, Stephen, that’s not the current status of America’s immigration story. The truth is that we must make some important decisions regarding the illegals before the true story of immigration can be told. And those decisions include a congressional demand that the onetime quota system of immigrants be re-established and that all our borders and ports be strengthened to keep out illegal immigrants and send back those who have entered illegally.

The A.P. report is amazing for its naivete and omissions. For instance, it adds these sentences: “When the Peopling of America Center is completed in 2011, the full museum will be renamed Ellis Island: The National Museum of Immigration. Interactive exhibits will trace how waves of immigration changed U.S. towns and will allow visitors to trace their family’s history.”

Wrong! America’s cities and towns are being invaded by illegal foreigners who are draining our treasuries and want no part of having their family histories traced! Send them all home, damn it!

Peter Goldmark doesn’t like the economic policies of the Bush administration. He’s concerned about high fuel prices. He thinks wood products prices are too low. And he’s unhappy about record levels of foreclosures. How’s he going to address these problems? He’s running against incumbent Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland Why? Because Sutherland was Bush’s Washington campaign chair.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask Lori Matsukawa, one of the KING 5 moderators of a debate between the candidates. In his answer to her question about why he’s challenging a successful public official, those were his reasons. With reasoning like that, don’t expect a lot of progress, if Goldmark is elected Lands Commissioner.

As I’ve said so many times, good ideas are worth repeating. That goes for repeating good commentaries, too. This is one of my most cherished commentaries, mainly because it’s about a city I have admired so much and which has been so important in my career as a columnist, writer, speaker, and citizen.

I first delivered it on March 11, 1985, in a special television program from Seattle’s storied “roof top,” the magnificent Space Needle, which has become noted worldwide as the symbol of the Queen City and was the crowning glory of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.

What if we decided to build a dream city, one like no other in the world? First, we would borrow the seven hills of Rome — and give them colorful names, like Beacon, Queen Anne, Capitol, Magnolia, First Hill, and Admiral Bluff — names like that because they’re colorful and tease the imagination.

We would put the dream city right on the ocean, but protected by mountain ranges. And we would add spectacular bays, inlets, lagoons, estuaries, and fill the waters, both offshore and on, with lots and lots of fish of every conceivable kind, birds, and plenty of other wildlife.

Then we would borrow the most beautiful valleys of Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, Northern Italy, Japan, Greece, and so many other countries and plant them everywhere around our dream city.

Next we would look for the clearest, coolest, most picturesque lakes of the world and scatter them here and there in and around our dream city. For additional grandeur, we would also borrow the peaks, snows, and waterfalls of Asia, Alaska, the Amazon, and the Alps.

Let’s add some swirling, broad rivers with lots more fish and other wildlife of many varieties. Our dream city would have instant access to skiing, boating, fishing, hunting, water skiing, and all the rest.

Now we must add to our dream city special attributes, like three top-grade universities, many libraries, museums, and galleries — and garnish it all with a beautiful park system surrounded by many exotic trees, bushes, lawns, and playgrounds for the kids and their families.

Finally, let’s ring it all with mountain chains covered with snow, myriad trees, bushes, and flowers, being careful to fill the surrounding forests with a great many bears, wolves, coyotes, rabbits, and many other varieties of animals.

Now it’s time to give it an exotic name — something like “Seattle.” That’s it, exactly! Some dream, huh? Oh, well, call it a dream, because nobody would have believed it anyway.

In my many years as a music and arts critic for The Seattle Times, I found the most fascinating experience my conversations with prominent artists, such as Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, and many others in what was mistakenly categorized by Time magazine as “The Northwest School.” There never was such a thing as a “Northwest School,” of course. But I can discuss that in a future commentary.

What they often found intriguing was amazing to me — but later justified by study and understanding. For example, Mark and Paul frequently referred to the artistic merit of the splatter of a pigeon’s excrement on a road or sidewalk. They would go into ecstatic descriptions of the designs, swirls, and colors the pigeon managed through a most natural process.

In fact, Mark would grow rapturous over the many similar designs left by the variety of birds in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, which he had visited often. I wish I had thought to bring along my tape recorder on those occasions, but the sight of a recorder might have turned off all my artist friends.

Nevertheless, an even more intriguing aspect of those frequent conversations were the artists’ discussions of colors — what they were and how they were distinguished one from the other. They agreed on one point that was most deeply impressed in my mind. White and black, they insisted, were not colors; they were the absence of color.

At the time, I relegated the concept to discussions of art. But in the years thereafter, I was stricken by the application of the principles enunciated by my artist friends to life in general — and specifically to the explosive issue of race and racial prejudice.

We should adopt those principles to our daily lives. Since white and black are not colors, it follows that there are no white or black human beings on earth. What many have regarded as “pure white” Caucasians for centuries are not, in fact, white. Nor are those who have been called black actually black. To be more specific, “whites” are, for the most part, beige in skin color or of some variation of beige. And “blacks” are not truly black; their skin colors range from a dark brown to a pale brown.

By the same token, Asians’ skin is not yellow, nor are the natives of India actually brown.

My contention, therefore, is that the people of the world should understand that, while skin colors around the world vary in hues, they are basically much closer in color than racists insist. In that respect, we are much closer — or, rather, we should be — to one another than we have been. That recognition could end civil conflicts and wars and finally unite the people of the world as never before.

I sat in my chair glued to the set.  This wasn’t just the usual posturing.  It was a debate.  And an outstanding one.  Different styles, for sure, but ideas clashed and there was DIFFERENCE in opinion.  It was not Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dom.  It was clash of the Titans.

You guys on the Left are going to say Senator Obama ruled the night and my friends on the Right are going to say Senator McCain did.

Doesn’t matter.

What does matter is how rural voters in Ohio, Pensylvania, Virginia and Michigan thought.  The polls will be out in a few days.

But no matter what, the debates are hot.  This is better television than 24!  I really look forward to the next one.

Peter Goldmark, the environmentalists’ candidate for Commissioner of Public Lands, claims the mud slides in Lewis County during the December storm are proof that incumbent Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland is not doing his job. That might be reasonable, if the December storm in question hadn’t been worse than anything recorded in the last 100 years. If Goldmark is going to base his analysis on the slides that occurred in December, the only logical resolution to the problem of slides is not to log at all.

But wait, far more slides occurred in forested areas than in logged areas. So, it would appear there’s no way to avoid slides, caused by 100 year storms, and that logging wasn’t the primary source of the problem.

Further, the residents of Lewis County, where the storm was at its worst, gave Sutherland more votes than Goldmark. Apparently, they don’t think Sutherland is to blame for the slides that occurred in December.

In an era of growing government expenditures, Sutherland has found a way to trim his agency’s work force from 1728 in 2001 to 1400 now. And, at the same time, the agency has increased the income it produces for the state. On those grounds alone, Sutherland deserves to be re-elected.

The Democratic Party in Washington State must be painfully short of political issues in the present campaign! Why else would it file a suit to require Dino Rossi to list his party preference as “Republican” instead of “GOP Party” on election ballots and everywhere else?

According to the Seattle Times, “Democrats say the Iraq War and low approval ratings for President Bush have left the Republican Party a damaged brand and that Rossi is trying to distance himself by using GOP as his affiliation.” Has any political party ever posed a more ridiculous charge in any election?

The Democrats have cited an even more ridiculous poll by Elway in its lawsuit, which a court is bound to toss into the trash can. Elway polls have shown, the agency says, undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek, that many people don’t know that GOP and Republican mean the same thing.

The Times observed that one recent Elway poll “indicated Rossi did better among voters if he used the “GOP” label instead of “Republican.” Frankly, I think the Democrats’ action is an insult to voters everywhere, regardless of whether they favor the Republican or Democratic gubernatorial candidate.

The state’s Democratic Party chairman, Dwight Pelz, added his idiotic words to what must be regarded as the stupidest political action any party has conceived. He said: “There’s no question we were shocked by the Elway Poll,” adding that an internal poll by the party had a similar finding.

One must wonder whether the internal Democratic pollsters questioned a bunch of kindergarteners in arriving at their outlandish finding. “We believe the law is being broken,” Pelz added, “and we’re asking the court to step in and fix it.” He said the suit has been filed in King County Superior Court and that it names Secretary of State Sam Reed as the defendant.

Secretary Reed is a Republican — whoops! — I mean a member of the “GOP Party”! You see, one can hardly write about this ludicrous news without stumbling with laughter. As could have been expected, the state’s Republican Party chairman, Luke Esser, shook his head in disbelief as he questioned the Elway polls. He told the Times that the lawsuit was frivolous and that the Republican Party — whoops! again — “GOP Party” will step in to defend Rossi in court if necessary.”

Of course, I am predicting with assurance that no judge in the county’s Superior Court will permit the lawsuit to get beyond the filing action, because if he or she does let it spill over into a court action, he or she will be open to ridicule not only by other judges but by the entire public, as well.

The Times also ran a statement issued by Rossi’s campaign that called the lawsuit “an act of a desperate incumbent,” referring, of course, to his opponent in the present election, Governor Chris Gregoire. I’m wondering why Gregoire herself didn’t call a halt to the filing of the silly lawsuit.

Rossi told the newspaper that he has used the term “GOP” for years and isn’t trying to confuse voters. As the Times explained, “The phrase is often used by the news media when referring to Republicans, but it hasn’t served as an official party designation on an election ballot until now.”

Whenever officials from American cities meet — as they did just a few years ago in Seattle — their tales of woe are always centered on their lack of cash and their difficulty in drawing financial aid from the federal government. Sometimes I can sympathize with them, but I also have a large bone to pick with them.

For years they have been in a rut, playing the same tune. The familiar lyrics complain that the feds have chopped the funds the cities must have to survive. Maybe the words have changed from time to time, but the melody lingers on. And, frankly, it has become a national bore.

I often wonder why the men and women who become city leaders seem to have little imagination and a penchant to keep pursuing the same money woes year after year. With their tremendous political clout at home and across the nation, they could make Congress and the White House listen to reason.

They need something more important and enduring than federal handouts. For example, they desperately need a shift in the tax base from Washington, DC, to Home Town USA. Instead of sending all their tax money to the federal government and have just a little trickle back, that cash ought to stay home in the first place.

The White House and Congress seem determined to toss many major programs onto the laps of cities and their political leaders. Now, that would be fine and acceptable to everyone concerned if the feds developed the habit of returning the tax money, too, to help the local leaders run the programs.

That’s why I say that instead of singing the same old handout blues, the mayors and managers of America’s cities and towns should spend more of their time and effort to demanding that a serious, permanent revision be planned and executed in the tax base and made a permanent option.

Anything would be infinitely better than hearing that tired, old tune, “Uncle (Sam), Can You Spare a Dime?” What is so difficult about arranging a national change in the way we collect and use tax money? It seems to me that the simplest device politically and economically would be to keep the tax money at home to be used as the local populations decide.

Why don’t the leaders of all our cities begin a campaign to instruct their state congressional delegations to attack the tax laws to reverse the process of shipping the citizens’ tax money to Washington and, instead, re-directing that cash back into state and local coffers?

Is that concept so hard to embrace? It would be easy to accept once our citizens were made aware of what has happened in so many countries around the world that are now trapped in Socialist governments that drain their populations of their hard-earned incomes.

It seems to me that a “revolution” in managing tax money would be easy if our print and broadcast news media, along with our lawmakers in Congress and all our legislatures, would get on the same page concerning management of tax money.

Hat tip to Wally Wonders Why:

As a co-sponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 John McCain wrote on May 25, 2006:

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 1 90, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation.

If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

What was Obama doing besides taking in huge campaign donations from Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac and helping his convicted slum lord friend Tony Rezko? in South Chicago.  By the way, did you know that Rezko was one of the very first to give money in Obama back in 1995 when he launched his political career?  Yep, one of the three first campaign donations … and a thousand dollars at that.