I mentioned this to people at work the other day, but haven’t seen another comment/post/blog about it, so I guess I’d better before I forget.

The president has an annoying habit of thumping his hands on the podium when he speaks. I don’t know if he’s always had it and I never noticed, or if having to say fairly nice things about the country brought it out of him… but recall the SOTU speech, and think of the pattern of hands… small gesture, fold, thump. gesture broadly, fold, thump. point, fold, thump. rinse. repeat.

Watch for yourself. I literally could not hear what he was saying for the last fifteen minutes or so. I think it was on purpose.

I hope his hands are sore from it now.

Nancy kept the House in session late on a Saturday in order to twist enough arms to get her nearly 2000 page POS passed.
Harry is planning to do the same to the Senate this weekend.

Does anyone still believe this health care fiasco is above board, proper, legal, and necessary?

BOHICA, America.

This is the kind of shit your hopey-changey vote earned you. I hope you’re proud.

I swear I just said this…

“If you like what you’re getting, keep it,” Obama said. “Nobody is forcing you to shift.”

Yet the legislation the Obama administration is working on with the Democratic-controlled Congress would make major changes in how Americans pay for health care. The goal is to slow cost increases and bring in nearly 50 million uninsured, and the consequences are bound to affect how employers design benefit plans.

So he lied?

Earlier this week, a preliminary analysis by Congressional Budget Office estimated that 10 million people would have to seek new insurance under a Democratic plan that a Senate committee is working on, because their employers would no longer offer coverage. Those workers and their families would shop for a plan through new insurance purchasing pools called exchanges. About 160 million to 170 million people now get employer coverage.

Why yes, yes he did.  But it’s Okay…

White House officials suggest the president’s rhetoric shouldn’t be taken literally: What Obama really means is that government isn’t about to barge in and force people to change insurance.

We already know his rhetoric is bullshit.  Thanks for confirming it.

Promises, Promises: Obama’s health plan guarantee

H/T Michelle Malkin

No, really… change (of the pocket variety), and not much more!

Folks irked by Obama coins that are simply stickers placed on 50-cent pieces

Hilarious… slap a sticker on a coin, get Montel Williams to promote it on an infomercial – shazam, CHANGE!  Believe it!

Figures. Obama Coins Turn Out to Be Cheap Stickers on 50¢ Pieces

It’s the perfect analogy for voting for the image, ignoring the substance (or lack, thereof).

Three years without having to suffer through another windbag, snake-oil salesman’s pitch from the dark prince of nighttime television infomercials…

Yay!

Judge Orders Kevin Trudeau to Pay More Than $37 Million for False Claims About Weight-Loss Book

A federal judge has ordered infomercial marketer Kevin Trudeau to pay more than $37 million for violating a 2004 stipulated order by misrepresenting the content of his book, “The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About.”

In August 2008, Judge Robert W. Gettleman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois had ordered Trudeau to pay more than $5 million and banned him, for three years, from producing or publishing infomercials for products in which he has an interest. The ruling confirmed an earlier contempt finding, the second such finding against Trudeau in the past four years.

I always thought this guy reminded me a little too much of another scam artist in need of indictment: Al Gore.

I think my mom even bought one of his books…

Their title, not mine… personally, I think Al Gore is at least a bit evil as well as a lot wrong.

I can’t wait for the DVD.

We all need this history lesson.

(This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Warner Music Group)

Let me be perfectly clear about the content of the video that is no longer displayed here… it was NOT a MUSIC VIDEO. Now which one of you liberal piss ants managed to register a BOGUS complaint to have this removed? Sheesh, I need to go back and read 1984 again to remember how this all works. Newspeak, is it?

The democrat talking point might be “we don’t need four more years of GWB”, but the real problem is Barrack Hussein Obama represents another term of JIMMY THE RACIST TERRORIST APPEASER CARTER.

Sorry, I should have prefaced that with “former president”. Maybe next time.

Thanks to Power Line for the link to the video.

Painting by numbers: NASA’s peculiar thermometer

Viewing the NASA 250-mile map for March below, what immediately grabs the attention is that NASA has essentially no data (gray areas) in most of Canada, most of Africa, the Greenland ice sheet, and most of Antarctica. This begs the question, how can one calculate an accurate “global temperature” while lacking any data from large contiguous regions of three continents?

With all the bullshit being slung about by the likes of big, fat, ugly Al Gore and his ilk… it’s really sad to discover such glaring discrepancies in the very science that’s supposed to be helping us figure this mess out. Who are we supposed to believe? How can anyone pretend that “the science is settled”, when they’re fucking LYING to us to blatantly?

Drill for the oil. Build the nuclear power plants. Give us our dignity back.

Clean up the environment… of course. Just quit making up new crying Indians to shame the ignorant into doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

And stop being the ignorant.

I’m guessing John Coleman doesn’t get invited to ride on Al Gore’s private jet…

Weather Channel Founder’s Forecast

Currently, John Coleman is a TV weatherman for KUSI News in San Diego. But Coleman is most famous for being founder of the Weather Channel. He has had a long career in predicting the weather, working for the first time as a TV weatherman during his freshman year in college in 1953. With this extensive background, we might take John Coleman seriously when he states bluntly that global warming “is the greatest scam in history.”

The really sad part is that even President Bush has recently started to support the global-warming fruitcakes.

Well, all of this is predicated on carbon being a dirty word. And the carbon we’re talking about is carbon dioxide. Now, it’s the last remaining cornerstone of global warming.

The hockey-stick chart, that ridiculous scientific fraud, got shot down. The pronouncements by NASA about global temperature averages going up have been corrected, and now we know the warmest U.S. decade was the 1930s not the ’90s.

Let’s not forget, the American north is being nailed with yet more snow right now… and it’s the end of April.

The forecast calls for 22 degrees and snow tonight for International Falls, MN; while not a record, it’s below the average for the month.

(source: The Weather Channel)

Despite the ramblings of alarmists, scientists who might just know better keep telling us there’s something else going on here. For some time, solar activity has been looked at as the real cause behind climate change, and now we learn cyclical wind patterns weren’t even computed into the arctic models… so are carbon credits are this decade’s version of dot-com stocks?

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

I may soon be glad I am living in a southern state…

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

Maybe Al Gore will roll some of his ill-gotten gains into extreme cold weather gear for the poor? Yeah, bet on that…

And then there’s this:

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let’s hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans — and most of the crops and animals we depend on — prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

I had an “anonymous” call registered on my phone today… the sort I normally ignore. I listened to the message before deleting it – it claimed to be from my credit-card issuing bank – and promptly forgot about it. When I got home, I had an email from the same bank. That one I read… and called the number.

I was asked about a couple of recent purchases (today and yesterday) from vendors I had never heard of. I told the nice fellow I had not made those purchases… and inquired about the last few I did make. He read me the list from the past 30 days, and we found three MORE false charges. Lovely.

The card was immediately canceled and a new one is being mailed to me. All of the false charges have been removed, and will be investigated. I also let them know about the only vendor I’ve dealt with recently that is “new” to me… I’ll hold off naming them until I hear more regarding the investigation. I will say it’s a company I only found because of a “too good to be true” deal on 120mm fans: free after rebate.

I have no idea if the company in question is at fault, either through a security leak, an unscrupulous employee, or outright criminal activity. I will say that in over ten years of dealing with credit cards online, I have never had a problem of this sort. Ever. I’m generally careful to the point of paranoia, with active virus scanning, spyware monitoring, root-kit checking, and both hardware and software firewalls. Everything is patched with all applicable security updates. Does that mean there’s nothing here? Well, nothing common… and I don’t hang out in places I’m likely to acquire anything “uncommon”.

So unless one of the major businesses I regularly deal with have been compromised (and that’s always a possibility), then the likely answer is this new, small company that was supposedly just trying to drum up some business is at fault – intentionally or otherwise. I’ll be contacting them immediately to let them know of my suspicions, and to expect a call from MC’s fraud detection / security department.

On the positive side: I have to commend the service that caught this activity. The charges were all to companies that seemed to be normal for my buying habits (computer related components, primarily). Granted they didn’t catch the first couple, but they did catch it within days, and took immediate action once they did. While I was a bit bothered by the bank representative’s poor command of the English language, it wasn’t so bad as to keep us from dealing with the issue, and he was very polite and helpful.

Will this change my mind regarding online shopping? Probably not – although it will make me wary of small, “new” online businesses, which is a shame. I am a definite proponent of small business, and anything that makes me not want to look to them for occasional purchases means I can’t or won’t support them as much as I’d like. That’s a shame.

I have officially changed my message filters to not only automatically mark all email from Panda Software as spam, but also to forward it to SPAM@UCE.GOV.

Panda software is in violation of CAN-SPAM

(4) PROHIBITION OF TRANSMISSION OF COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL AFTER OBJECTION.—
(A) IN GENERAL.—If a recipient makes a request using a mechanism provided pursuant to paragraph (3) not to receive some or any commercial electronic mail messages from such sender, then it is unlawful—
(i) for the sender to initiate the transmission to the recipient, more than 10 business days after the receipt of such request, of a commercial electronic mail
message that falls within the scope of the request;
(ii) for any person acting on behalf of the sender to initiate the transmission to the recipient, more than 10 business days after the receipt of such request,
of a commercial electronic mail message with actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that such message falls within the scope of the request;
(iii) for any person acting on behalf of the sender to assist in initiating the transmission to the recipient, through the provision or selection of addresses to which the message will be sent, of a commercial electronic mail message with actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that such message would violate clause (i) or (ii); or
(iv) for the sender, or any other person who knows that the recipient has made such a request, to sell, lease, exchange, or otherwise transfer or release the electronic mail address of the recipient (including through any transaction or other transfer involving mailing lists bearing the electronic mail address of
the recipient) for any purpose other than compliance with this Act or other provision of law.
(B) SUBSEQUENT AFFIRMATIVE CONSENT.—A prohibition in subparagraph (A) does not apply if there is affirmative consent by the recipient subsequent to the request under subparagraph (A).

in that they refuse to honor opt-out requests.

I’m sick of trying to be reasonable – it’s time to fight back. I’m obviously not alone, but I don’t see any kind of real effort to shut them down. Any ideas?

Looks like Al Gore’s little scam is already starting to show it’s corrupt underbelly.

FT.com / In depth – Industry caught in carbon ‘smokescreen’

â–  Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

â–  Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

â–  A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

â–  Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Remember folks, if it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit, it’s most likely bullshit.

Big Al Gore, the inventor of not only the internet, but also the “buy your way out of guilt by purchasing the made-up resource… carbon neutrality!”, has finally managed to pull in the full swing of the religious fanatics. The environment is changing – it always does – and mankind may be contributing to the process; I have no definitive answer, but refuse to buy into the fear-mongering.

The highlight of this article is not so much the additional fear-mongering being heaped on by the religious, but the fact that the “global warming awareness” seminar may be, well, snowed out. A religious person might think god was trying to send a message. Doesn’t seem to be the same message they’re shoving, though.

Interfaith group braves storm in climate change trek – Boston.com

“God has given us this Eden, and our behavior is making a mess of it,” said the Rev. Jim Antal, president of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ, the state’s largest Protestant denomination.

The religious walkers are part of Religious Witness for the Earth, a 6-year-old national interfaith environmental organization.

And then there’s this:

MINNEAPOLIS – A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.