TrueNorth

The loyal opposition

GOP has a better plan - Opinion - USATODAY.com

President Obama asked Republicans for our ideas to improve this legislation, and — led by Reps. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Dave Camp, R-Mich. — we've offered a better way. According to a methodology developed by the president's nominee to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisors, Dr. Christina Romer, our alternative would create 6.2 million jobs — twice that of the Democrats' plan — at half the cost.

How? Through fast-acting tax relief that lets families, small businesses, home-buyers, and job-seekers keep more of what they earn. Unfortunately, Democrats defeated it and passed the inferior bill they wrote on their own, without any Republican input. That's right: Democratic leaders met with Republicans exactly zero times to negotiate this package — compared with four discussions I've had with the president.

Green chuckle of the day

Recycling 'could be adding to global warming' - Telegraph

Recycling could be adding to global warming rather than reducing it, a key government adviser on waste management has said.

Obama: One stupid decision after another

Kausfiles : Labor Payoff of the Day

Obama has issued a late Friday executive order requiring that when a government service contract expires--and there's a new contract to perform the same services at the same location--the new contractor has to keep the old workers. Why?

The Federal Government's procurement interests in economy and efficiency are served when the successor contractor hires the predecessor's employees. A carryover work force reduces disruption to the delivery of services during the period of transition between contractors and provides the Federal Government the benefits of an experienced and trained work force that is familiar with the Federal Government's personnel, facilities, and requirements.

But what if the contract got switched because the previous work force, you know, sucked? ... P.S.: For example, the Obama administration itself can be seen as having won a new contract to perform the same Federal services, at the same location, as the previous contractor, the Bush Administration. Did Obama keep all of Bush's employees in order to reduce "disruption" and enjoy "the benefits of an experienced and trained work force that is familiar with the Federal Governments ... facilities"? I don't think so! ... [via Shopfloor] 3:00 P.M.

Bush versus Obama

Conservative Unity - Yuval Levin - The Corner on National Review Online

When they manage to unify the entire House Republican caucus with David Brooks and Peggy Noonan, you know the Democrats have seriously botched something up.

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George W. Bush ran one of the most profligate administrations in American history, but with this insane "stimulus" package, the Obama administration has in less than 10 days surpassed it.  It looks like Obama is heading for a huge catastrophic fall, and he may take the United States with him.

Even the WaPo is making fun of ManBearPig

Dana Milbank - With Al Due Respect, We're Doomed

The lawmakers gazed in awe at the figure before them. The Goracle had seen the future, and he had come to tell them about it.

What the Goracle saw in the future was not good: temperature changes that "would bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fabric of life everywhere on the Earth -- and this is within this century, if we don't change."

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry (D-Mass.), appealed to hear more of the Goracle's premonitions. "Share with us, if you would, sort of the immediate vision that you see in this transformative process as we move to this new economy," he beseeched.

"Geothermal energy," the Goracle prophesied. "This has great potential; it is not very far off."

Another lawmaker asked about the future of nuclear power. "I have grown skeptical about the degree to which it will expand," the Goracle spoke.

A third asked the legislative future -- and here the Goracle spoke in riddle. "The road to Copenhagen has three steps to it," he said.

Disturbing

Via Peter Robinson on The Corner, this is a graph of the historical changes in the money supply, going back to before the Great Depression.  Recessions are the vertical grey bars.  Take a close look at the current recession (far right):

Official: James Hansen is a nut

James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic - Says Hansen ‘Embarrassed NASA’, ‘Was Never Muzzled’, & Models ‘Useless’ « Watts Up With That?

NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.

I'm fed up with Obama already

Krauthammer's Take - NRO Staff - The Corner on National Review Online

Conciliatory, but also apologetic and defensive, I thought needlessly. We heard him say that he we shouldn't paint Islam with a broad-brush. Who does? That's a straw man. Did the Bush administration do so?



Obama said "My job is to communicate from the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives."



Well, where is the American heartland which is arguing otherwise?



Look, if he wants — dare say, "I have Muslim relatives," as he did in the interview, "and I lived in an Muslim land," as he did in the interview, "and thus I have a special appreciation of Islam," that's OK.



But somehow he is implying that somehow the Obama era is a break with the American past. Somehow it is undoing a disrespect of Islam that had somehow occurred under the previous administration.



One week after 9/11, the president of the United States, George Bush, showed up in the Islamic center in Washington and declared Islam is peace and extended a hand of tolerance and generosity. There were no anti-Muslim riots in America. There was a spirit of generosity and tolerance.



And, in fact, over the last 20 years, the United States has been engaged in exactly five military engagements in the world, two in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait, all of them liberating Islamic peoples.



We have no need to apologize. Extend a hand, yes, but to imply that there was a disrespect of Islam in the last administration, I think is unfair and fictional.

This is scandalous...we are talking about the end of the world, after all

FOXNews.com - Scientists Not So Sure 'Doomsday Machine' Won't Destroy World - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted.

Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps even more than a second, a relative eternity in particle colliders, where most objects decay much faster.

True, I'm afraid

Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster: He expanded the state, and the idea that the state is incompetent - Reason Magazine

Bush's legacy is thus a bizarro version of Ronald Reagan's. Reagan entered office declaring that government was not the solution to our problems, it was the problem. Ironically, he demonstrated that government could do some important things right—he helped tame inflation and masterfully drew the Cold War to a nonviolent triumph for the Free World. By contrast, Bush has massively expanded the government along with the sense that government is incompetent.