What it looks like. Health insurance is not health care, and vice versa.
[Update a few minutes later]
And contrary to earlier reports, California insurance rates are set to skyrocket next year.
It will be quite amusing if Democrats are running scared enough a year from now that they repeal the legislative atrocity with a veto-proof margin.
Dambisa Moyo responds.
…can’t convince Jay Carney any more.
What a hack.
The media can’t claim that they weren’t warned:
Let’s consider some examples of the many unheeded warnings that free speech would be endangered should Barack Obama become president. The initial threat to launch criminal prosecutions over the Ayers ad set off a flurry of brief but pointed predictions. Michelle Malkin, one of the first and most energetic to cover these controversies, warned, “The Obama campaign is giving a glimpse of the future for conservative free speech.” Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey suggested that ”bullying people through the Department of Justice as a candidate will cause reasonable people to wonder what will happen if Obama gets elected.” The editors of National Review decried ”a desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through the prospect of a criminal investigation – a demand that provides a disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice Department.”
The controversy over my appearance on the Milt Rosenberg show meant there were now two incidents to discuss, so the warnings grew a bit sharper and more detailed. Writing at NRO’s Media Blog, Guy Benson said, “This tendency to lash out and engage in baseless name-calling not only smacks of desperation; it also may foreshadow an Obama presidency’s strategy in handling unfavorable media reports and sources.” Powerline’s John Hinderaker’s remarks seem pertinent today: “If Obama is elected President, will he appoint an Attorney General who will carry out politically-motivated prosecutions like the one he is now demanding? I suppose we can’t know for sure, but why wouldn’t he? If he demands criminal prosecution of free speech that opposes his political interests when he’s a candidate, why wouldn’t he order it as President?” Meanwhile, five years before controversies over the AP, James Rosen, and Sharyl Attkisson, Ed Morrissey suggested that, for their own sake, national media ought to stop ignoring Obama’s assaults on the press: “Maybe other journalists should take heed. If Obama becomes president and they commit the crime of Journalism in the First Degree, how will these same people react with the full weight of the federal government behind them? If they stoop to character assassination now, what will they do when they have much more powerful tools at their disposal?”
They didn’t want to know, or believe it, any more than with the Clintons. He was their guy.
And speaking of warnings, the Republicans who voted to confirm Eric Holder should be particularly ashamed:
I became aware of Holder’s 1995 investigation of Rich after Holder’s confirmation-hearing testimony, but wrote about it before the vote on his nomination. This demonstration that Holder had given misleading testimony to Congress in the 2001 pardon investigation and the 2009 confirmation hearing, simply added to the Rich pardon itself and the remaining mountain of reasons to reject his nomination. Yet, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to confirm him, 75-21. Joining 54 Democrats were 19 Republicans – Alexander (Tenn.), Bennett (Utah), Bond (Mo.), Chambliss (Ga.), Collins (Maine), Corker (Tenn.), Graham (S.C.), Grassley (Iowa), Gregg (N.H.), Hatch (Utah), Isakson (Ga.), Kyl (Ariz.), Lugar (Ind.), McCain (Ariz.), Murkowski (Alaska), Sessions (Ala.), Snowe (Maine), Specter (Pa.), and Voinovich (Ohio).
What a waste of oxygen those “Republicans” were.
Continues to fall apart: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/27/the-97-consensus-paper-is-starting-to-fall-apart/
#Protip: this isn’t how science is done. It’s how propaganda is done.
Another tale from the annals of educational malpractice.
Jen Rubin has a novel proposal for the White House. The problem is, they can’t handle the truth. Or they’re afraid that we will.
This kind of thing drives me up the wall:
The sitcom’s premise involved a 2,000-year-old genie being rescued by a handsome astronaut, who rubs her bottle after crash landing his shuttle on a beach.
It was a frickin’ capsule, not a “shuttle.”
A prediction of 2013 as a “year without summer.”
Nobody tell Al Gore.
[Update a while later]
To the horror of the warm mongers, global cooling is here:
The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.
Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.
The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.
Reality continues to refuse to conform to the narrative.
Jeff Foust has a roundup of the current news.
As I write in the book, I think that this is by far the most likely means that anyone will get to Mars:
Unfortunately, when it comes to space, Congress has been pretty much indifferent to missions, or mission success, or “getting the job done.” Its focus remains on “safety,” and in this regard, price is no object. In fact, if one really believes that the reason for Ares/Orion was safety, and the program was expected to cost several tens of billions, and it would fly (perhaps) a dozen astronauts per year, then rather than the suggested value of fifty million dollars for the life of an astronaut, NASA was implicitly pricing an astronaut’s life to be in the range of a billion dollars.
As another example, if it were really important to get someone to Mars, we’d be considering one-way trips, which cost much less, and for which there would be no shortage of volunteers.18 It wouldn’t have to be a suicide mission—one could take along equipment to grow food, and live off the land. But it would be very high risk, and perhaps as high or higher than the early American settlements, such as Roanoke and Jamestown. But one never hears serious discussion of such issues, at least in the halls of Congress, which is a good indication that we are not serious about exploring, developing, or settling space, and any pretense at seriousness ends once the sole-source cost-plus contracts have been awarded to the favored contractors of the big rockets.
For these reasons, I personally think it unlikely that the federal government will be sending humans anywhere beyond LEO any time soon. But I do think that there is a reasonable prospect for private actors to do so — Elon Musk has stated multiple times that this is the goal of SpaceX, and why he founded the company. In fact, he recently announced his plans to send 80,000 people to Mars to establish a settlement, within a couple decades, at a cost of half a million per ticket.
And I think that would be the best way to do it. Given that there is no political pressure for sustainable operations or settlement, it would be a mistake to count on the government doing it — it would just be a Mars version of Apollo, with little to show for it ultimately.