If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list (which is almost at the maximum anyway).

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 2 or 3 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

There was snow in all 48 continental states this week; I do not know when this happened last. One source said this is the first time ever.

Feds push for using cell phones to track people’s whereabouts in relation to crimes committed. The argument is, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Will there be the same uproar that we heard when Bush pushed for monitoring cell phone conversations between American citizens and terrorists?

Our president now claims to be agnostic when it comes to raising taxes on the middle class.

California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore resigns leadership post due to $14 billion tax increase deal which Schwarzenegger cut with the legislators.

Energy-generating wind turbines in Minnesota have stopped working because they are frozen. These turbines were made in California which apparently did not take inclimate weather into consideration.

In a related story, LED traffic lights are freezing over when it gets to cold. Conventional lights were hot enough to melt the snow which landed on hem. LED lights were installed to use less energy and to save the environment.

At least one billboard in Wyoming has a picture of Bush, with the question, “Miss me yet?”

Dennis Miller, comparing Obama’s use of the teleprompter to Sarah Palin scribbling notes on her hand: “If someone kicked out the electric wife on the Barrack Obama teleprompter, he would be more screwed than Burgess Meredith in the Twilight Zone episode where he breaks his reading glasses after the atomic war and he can’t read his books.” He then added, “People who live in glass intellects should not throw stones.”

Peggy Noonan observed, “Every time the administration says something about economic issues, what they say doesn’t sound true. It sounds like some kinda mix between rah rah and gobble-de-gook.”

George Will on Obama and bi-partisanship: “He has a very aggressive agenda from which he has not retracted one bit, so when he extends his hand, he says, ‘I only ask one thing of Republicans; that you quit being Republicans;’ and they respectfully decline.”

Dick Cheney: "If [the administration is] going to take credit for [Iraq's success], fair enough ... but it ought to come with a healthy dose of 'Thank you, George Bush' up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations with respect to prosecuting that war were just dead wrong," He added: "Obama and Biden campaigned from one end of the country to the other for two years criticizing our Iraq policy."

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change, after saying that global warming skeptics are like those who believe asbestos to be no worse than talcum powder, added, “I hope that they apply it (asbestos) to their faces every day.”

Democrat Jay Rockefeller of President Obama, “...he's beginning to not be believable to me."

Roland S. Martin, in an article where he tells Obama to go gangsta, advises: “If there are members of your own party who stand in the way, such as Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, then you also blast them and make them pay for acting so foolishly.”

After O’Reilly played the clip where White House press secretary Robert Gibbs mocked Sarah Palin by writing on his own hand, Jay Von Mohr emailed O’Reilly, saying, “I would like Robert Gibbs to write the following on his hand: ‘Fix the economy, fight terrorism.’ ”

Erick Ericson, of RedState.com, writes the following: We've always banned truthers at RedState. Increasingly, we have also banned a number of individuals who think Barack Obama is disqualified from being President because despite the Republican Governor of Hawaii confirming the legitimacy of the Democratic President's birth origin as a citizen of the United States these birthers ("birfers" because it sounds as crazy as they are) refuse to move on. Today I want to reaffirm and make it more definitive. If you think 9/11 was an inside job or you really want to debate whether or not Barack Obama is an American citizen eligible to be President, RedState is not a place for you.

“You picked the wrong day to mess with the eco-system, plastic-boy.” The hilarious Audi Superbowl commercial, sure to please greenies and non-greenies alike:

My favorite Glenn Beck show of the week; Beck is pretty goofy in this one, but it made me smile:

The Revolution will not be Televised is updated to Healthcare Reform will not be Televised (it should put a smile on your face):

In case you missed this, the Carly Florina Demon Sheep ad, which someone said, “This is what would happen if Salvador Dali made a tech commercial.”

Glenn Beck interviews Chuck Devote, woh appears to be Carly’s most serious competitor:

Diane Feinstein asks what are the chances of an attempted terrorist attack in the next several months; and she receives a strong affirmative that such attacks are expected for certain from several top officials:

Did you know that there are terrorists in Great Britain who live on the British welfare system? It is a long report (18 minutes), but quite disconcerting:

1) The reason that Palin gets so much flak from liberals and the liberal media is, she is popular and draws Obama-sized crowds. Take away her crowds and the media will stop taking pot shots at her and liberal pundits will slack off in their attacks of her.

2) Several people have made the point that, there is more at stake in the Middle East than Iran acquiring nuclear weapons; almost every Middle Eastern nation will strive to acquire nuclear weapons. That combined with Muslim theology spells a great deal of destruction for decades.

3) China does $100 billion worth of business with Iran and 15% of their oil comes from Iran; so they are not going to join in on any sanctions of Iran.

4) China is sending us signals that they may dump American dollars onto the market because we have sold weapons to Taiwan (which is in accordance with a long-standing agreement that we have with Taiwan). However, this is one threat which they will not carry out, because dumping American dollars, unless they want to flat out ruin the American dollar at any cost, would hurt them financially. They hold a considerable amount of debt of ours and we buy too much of their stuff.

5) Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera were discussing President Obama, and moderate liberal Rivera remarked about how totally perplexed he was the Obama was still holding on to his healthcare bill. Geraldo’s problem here is, he just does not understand Obama. He is an amateur ideologue who wants to have a legacy, and the healthcare bill is it. He is unable to pivot toward jobs, no matter how many times he says that; and unable to let go of the Democratic heathcare plan. There are a half-dozen ideas that the majority of the American people agree with on healthcare reform, and they can be written into a 10 page bill. However, Obama is a rigid ideologue. Geraldo does not get that yet.

6) One of the most disingenuous stances taken by the White House, and their cheering minions in the media is, George Bush prosecuted Richard Reed in a civilian court, so we are doing what Bush did (choosing first to Mirandize and then to prosecute the Christmas day bomber in a civilian court as a common criminal with full American rights). At what point in time did George Bush’s approach to anything become the preferred way of doing things in the Obama administration? I have never heard them say, “And here is another policy of Bush’s which we like and are therefore following it.” Furthermore, what exactly a military court could be and do was still be argued at that point in time; and the Supreme Court only handed down definitive boundaries in the past few years (the problem being is, we are dealing with an entirely different kind of war than in the past).

7) The Dow Jones has fallen below 10,000 this past week, which is a psychological barrier. Few people are confident as to which way the stock market is going to go (despite many media outlets proclaiming the recession to be over and proclaiming that we have turned a corner).

8) Obama has apologized from here to Timbuktu for American’s arrogance and wrong-headedness. Have you every heard President Obama apologize for himself, anything he has done, or anything his administration has done? Has he every admitted any error at all?

7 months is how long President Obama has gone without having a full news conference.

60% of voters feel that neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today.

61% of U.S. voters say Congress should scrap their plans and start all over again.

28% who think it is better to build on the health care plan that has been working its way through the House and Senate.

As someone else remarked, how are there 20% of self-identified conservatives who have a favorable opinion of socialism?

As has been remarked by some, part of the problem is, because of our educational system, very few young people actually understand what socialism is and what the results of its application have been.

Bill O’Reilly’s staff did a search on the alphabet media’s report of the TEA party movement, and found a total of 2 positive stories about this movement.

It would be so easy to do an Obama bit where he talks about the importance of the economy and how much he is concerned about jobs, and then for him to propose a one-time only $9.95 discount for any business who hires any person for any reason. “We figure we can do this whole program for about $1000. And it will create or save 20 million jobs (or so have said our best economists, from the left and the right.” Then he turns to the other teleprompter and says, “Now, let’s get those Republicans in here to discuss my $2 trillion healthcare bill. Oh, and one more thing, live,” and he takes a second to turn to the other teleprompter, “from New York” to which he motions with his hand for the teleprompter to be advanced, “It’s Saturday Night!”

Usually, I devote this column to something which has actually taken place, but let me suggest chess moves for Obama in relation to Iran: you get messages to the people of Iran via email and twitter notices to move away from any nuclear facilities. You move a lot of armed forces into Iraq and Afghanistan, on both sides of Iran. Set up several bases with excellent supply lines. Move ships and submarines into the area. Increase military enlistments and lower the requirements for military enlistments. Conduct several secret talks with Israel and offer up vague and unconvincing explanations for them. Be in touch with revolutionary elements in Iran, with the understand that, they will have American support only under 2 conditions: (1) a bill of rights must be a part of the new government, which must include freedom of religion; and (2) all nuclear sites must be shut down. We need to be prepared to arm the revolutionary elements of Iran as well.

If, in all of this, the little man president of Iran wants to talk, then there must be pre-conditions, which include full access to all nuclear sites and an immediate free and fair election, which is monitored.

Agnostic about where tax revenue might come from = “Remember those promises about not raising your taxes? Just words, just word.”

This is a question for anyone: Who pays John Podesta’s salary? What is his job?

61% of Americans want you to start from scratch on the healthcare bill. Are they too stupid to understand that you are right and they are wrong?

[This is a new column wherein I will offer up supporting evidence that President Obama has no idea how to govern]

President Obama is unable to pivot to the economy; and he is unable to let go of 2 very unpopular healthcare bills. He is unable to adapt to changing conditions.

Obama has no idea how to exploit the revolution brewing in Iran to the advantage of America. He still wants to use a combination of talks, carrots, sticks and U.N. resolutions with regard to Iran. He is unable to adapt to changing conditions.

Obama knows how to do one thing: talk, talk, talk; and he continues this approach, no matter what.

If you think this televised meeting between Obama and the Republicans is all about finding some common ground on the healthcare bill.

It is hard to decide if this should be put under Political chess or under this column: remember how many times President Obama has said jobs, jobs, jobs or, it is time to pivot to the economy? However, what is next on the horizon? A big meeting with the Republicans to move forward on healthcare. Here is what Obama has discovered: he came off looking pretty good against the Republicans in the last televised meeting, so he wants to do this again. He is not looking to actually find some common ground, nor is he willing to cast aside his own healthcare bill (actually that of the Senator or that of the House) to start afresh; he will, instead, try to find portions of this bill which sound like Republican ideas and tout those before the cameras. Furthermore, he is going to repeat how, this bill is not what he wanted, but he is going with it as a compromise, and the Republicans need to man up, be bi-partisan, and accept one of the existing bills as a bi-partisan end in itself.

I have said that Obama will talk conservative but act liberal. That he will speak about jobs but do something else. What is #1 on his agenda? Healthcare, and he still will not scrap the House or Senate bills and start over.

I have said repeatedly that the problem in the Obama administration is, they have no idea what they are doing. He is unable to let go of a very unpopular healthcare plan, which is going to sink the Democratic majority in both houses; and he is unable to start from scratch. Meanwhile, his press secretary mocks Sarah Palin, a private citizen.

Remember I suggested that the White House and Congress might reward the alphabet media for supporting them....well, I might be wrong, since there is no longer a Democrat super-majority in the Senate; but Dan Rather is begging Obama to help save the news:

Quite obviously, that Obama will blow his chances to push for a regime change in Iran, out of having no idea of how to do this; and for there to be a highly nuclearized Middle East in the next 10 years.

All polls show Obama’s approval rating continues to drop with respect to the issues

Let me ask you a question, and this does not matter whether you are a conservative or a liberal: which policies of the Bush administration did Obama keep and which did he discard? Although President Obama reset relations with Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, he has followed Bush almost entirely in Iraq and Afghanistan (except that Obama has stepped up the drone attacks). With regards to our economy, Obama has increased government involvement and government spending to a dizzying degree. He seized control of GM, FNMA, FHLMC; he is supporting large banks but shutting down small banks; and has spent billions upon billions of dollars in government spending in order to jump start our economy. Where is Obama’s greatest success? Iraq. Where does his policy differ the least from Bush? Iraq. Where has Obama intruded the least with the least amount of change? Iraq. So, now Joe Biden touts Iraq as a shining example of an Obama success story.

Do not forget that everything that Obama and Biden said and proposed concerning Iraq prior to their election to power was in opposition to Bush’s policy.

Everywhere that Obama has changed the Bush policies, the more he blames Bush and the more it is clear that his own policies are failing in these areas.

One of my cousins forwarded a Consumer Report article on the government healthcare bill (I believe they favor the House version), and Consumer Reports, rather than looking at the pluses and the minuses, and discussing what is good and bad in Democratic healthcare reform (can you not find some problem in 2000 pages?) presented government healthcare reform as one of the most wonderful things on the planet.

The attachment reads as follows, and the links found herein, are the actual links to the website. Consumer Reports logos are found throughout, and I do not doubt that this is a spin off of the Consumer Report site.

Dear James,

Did you know that you and your family could choose the exact same health care coverage that members of Congress get under the leading health reform proposal?

Or that preventive care that can keep you healthy – like getting an annual physical, mammogram or colonoscopy – wouldn’t cost you a dime out of pocket.

And no matter your age, a pre-existing condition or your family history, you can't be denied insurance coverage.

Read more and forward this email to your friends and family – too many people simply don't know how they will benefit from reform! Forwarding this message may be the most important thing you can do right now to keep reform on track.

Why don’t opponents want you to get these and other guaranteed benefits? Maybe they think that if you don’t know how health reform can help you, they can simply turn their back and walk away.

We think the more you know – and the more your friends and family know – the tougher it will be for our leaders to run from our problems, and the easier it will be to finish the job we sent them to Washington to do.

Please forward this email to all your friends and family so they can see what they would get from health reform.

No company can ever deny you health insurance or drop your coverage for a pre-existing condition or if you get really sick.

If you get cancer or other serious illness, there is no cap on the amount of needed care that your insurance will cover.

No threat of losing your life savings to pay for care. Insurance companies can’t stop paying your claims and leave you with a lot of medical bills.

Recommended preventive care will be covered without deductibles – checkups, colonoscopies, mammograms – no matter if you buy your own policy or get coverage through your job. Preventing illness before it becomes serious is the best way to save money!

Programs to increase the number of primary care doctors, with incentives for them to practice in rural areas, so you get quality care no matter where you live.

We’ll be telling you more about how the health reform bill will improve your life in the coming weeks – and how you can make sure our leaders don’t walk away. In the meantime, help us tell everyone how they would benefit from health reform by forwarding this email to your friends and family. They want to know this, too!

Click here to learn more about how health reform will provide you and your family decent, comprehensive, quality health care, no matter your age or your condition.

Sincerely,
Liz Foley
PrescriptionForChange.org,
A project of Consumers Union
101 Truman Avenue
Yonkers, NY 10703

Hi, Nancy,

Since you send very few forwards, I did read this. I have subscribed to consumer reports for over a decade, and, in most cases, I find them to be reasonable and objective. However, there are two areas in which I find them to be unbelievably biased:

When it comes to using CFL's, they do take the time to go through all of the steps which one should follow, should one of these bulbs break in your house, including leaving the room for 15-20 minutes. However, rather than express serious concern over the amount of mercury found in these bulbs, they treat this as just some every day, don't worry about it, occurrence...just like anything else that might happen ni your house that would cause you to leave the room for 15 minutes.

With regards to healthcare, for years, they have been very pro-government take charge. During these past few years, they have ratcheted up this stance considerably. For instance, if you read through this report you forwarded, it has none of the objectivity that Consumer Reports is known for. You don't have them exploring this or that negative scenario. They never speak of lasik surgery or plastic surgery, which the government has stayed out of, which has resulted in their costs going down over the years. However, wherever the government has become involved--it is involved in nearly half of the healthcare industry right now--prices have skyrocketed. Consumer Reports ignores this; it does not even give these facts any mention.

It ought to be pointed out, the same government which gave us cash for clunkers is trying to sell us healthcare. I have posted the numbers relevant to Cash For Clunkers in my Conservative Review, and I do not recall them off the top of my head, but it seems like this $3000-5000 rebate actually cost the taxpayers about $20,000, the paperwork related to this was onerous (call up any car dealership and ask them), and the end resutl was, cars got sold during the months of C4C, and then, the sale of cars dropped off the the following months. And the government touts this as a successful program! These are exactly the people I do not want managing my healthcare.

I read through your forward, and I have never seen a more biased opinion presented on government-run and/or regulated healthcare. We can get the exact same coverage that the members of Congress has; we can get all of these tests and checkups for free; everyone is going to be covered, and it is not going to cost hardly a thing. This makes me deeply distrust Consumer Reports.

It also makes me wonder how can a normal thinking adult, who has no doubt had dealings with the government in their lives, come to the conclusion that the government can become more involved in a 6th of our economy, and suddenly, it will become better, and more efficient, and more benevolent. I have faith in God. I do not have faith in government.

I personally spent 3 or 4 years of my life arguing with the government about a tax matter. I was completely right, it was a simple mistake that the government made, and they were completely wrong. It took 3 or 4 years for them to back off and admit to that. It is common knowledge you can call the IRS with a question, and get a varety of answers for the same question, depending upon the day that you call. Do I want that same government in charge of my health? I think not.

Certainly, you will counter with, well, what about those lousy insurance companies. So far, President Obama has spoken of 3 cases of problems that people have had with medical insurance (including that woman who wanted to be buried in an Obama tee shirt), and he distorted facts and left out pertinent infomration in his rendition of these facts. Now, if our president, with a littany of speech writers, cannot come up with some simple insurance cases which he can present honestly, then how much insurance abuse is there, really?

Furthermore, this who job requirement of health insurance and the health insurnace companies is as much a product of government tinkering as it is a matter of free enterprise. The reason that we have all of this in place is government; it wasn't like this 40 years ago, and you know this, Nancy. This is all a government-mandated system. But now, we are told this system is "broken" and more government is the solution? I just can't buy into this, even if Consumer Reports tells me it is the best thing ever.

your cousin,

gary

Hi, wendy,

You make some reasonable assumptions, but many of them are wrong. When it comes to the vets, by their service to our country, they earned their insurance. so they are not depending upon others to pay their insurance.

Now, you said, that you work in order to have insurance. Does that mean that if the government promised you insurance no matter what, that you might decide not to work? That is a problem in general with our society; when the government promises to pay people for being poor and nonproductive, it simplyl encourages more people to be unproductive. If I can sit at home and receive housing, food stamps, and hospitalization, and not have to work, why not? Or if all I have to do is carry a part time job, why not? I know MANY people who live like this, because I am a landlord. Personally, I have worked 2-4 jobs at the same time in order to afford what I want (which is fairly moderate). Working hard was the way I was raised. However, the more things are given away because people merely draw breath, the more people choose to do nothing. These free programs have a price in our society and in our productivity. See if you can find out how many people in your city get section 8 and see if this has increased faster than population growth. I can tell you...it did. Free unearned benefits guarantees more behavior like this. Non-productive behavior will increase.

Because I have catastrophic medical insurance only, and because I pay cash for EVERYTHING else, I m motivated to check prices, to monitor what doctors tell me, becuase it all comes out of my pocket. I also live a reasonably healthy lifestyle because if I don't, that is money out of my pocket.

Many of us oppose government-run healthcare because we do not like the government giving away free stuff simply because people draw breath (because free stuff is expensive); and because the government almost always does a lousy job. Btw, do you know any veterans with healthcare? It isn't all that good. But, unlike other medical plans, at least they earned it.

take care,

gary

Dear Gary,

Please help me understand your position on the government. Are you suggesting that our military ought to be disbanded for lack of performance? Should we stop paying our police and fire personnel and let each family take care of those matters for ourselves?

I happen to be retired and depend on Social Security and Medicare to stay alive since my employers which were all church agencies all but cancelled my retirement due to the "private" firms on Wall street's immoral and greedy behaviour with our pension funds. Should seniors like my wife and I join the tea part movement to protest government even though we benefit from those programs?

I am old enough to remember the days when our meat and food was not inspected and protected by government agencies. Our home was a stone'd throw from the Chicago Stock Yards which were a cesspool of un-regulated filth. (My grandfather was a butcher there and the "private" companies treated their employees worse than slaves. That was before "government" stepped in and enforced labor laws to protect low-ly workers. Alas, too late for grandpa-his health was ruined by those conditions)

Gary, I have to guess that you are a very young person-too young to remember the "glorious Hoover days" when the lack of almost any government regulations allowed those upright, unselfish corporations to rule unmercifully over the country.

God knows, our government is far from perfect. I have worked in over 80 countries throughout my life time and have yet to see a better one than we have in the good old USA! I am proud of my government issued passport, the U.S. Embassies and our GOVERNMENT military troops in those countries that I could always rely on and protect me.

I mourn and weep to hear fellow citizens rail against our president as they hope that he FAILS when we are engaged in two wars and fighting off a depression inherited by the previous administration of the eight years before he took office. For their sake, Rush L., Hannity,Beck and Ms. Palin et. al., I am glad they were not around during WW II, Americans would not tolerate such unpatriotic disloyalty in a time of war and national emergency. Republican and Democrats, we stood shoulder to shoulder in support of our government and it would be considered treason to mock it the way they do today.

I am sure you are a good, well meaning person and a loyal, proud American. All I ask is that you join us to work for a better America by helping to identify POSITIVE solutions rather than joining the chorus of condeming our government.

God Bless you and God Bless America.

Rev. Chuck (I left off his last name)

Wendy sent me a quick email, including Rev. Chuck’s comments, and added, “Amen”

Hi, Reverend Chuck,

You asked for my philosophy on government, so let me responds honestly and clearly:

I believe that I have the same opinion of government as did our founders: it is a necessary evil. The more the power is concentrated in one portion of government, the greater the potential for problems. The more power and money that they have, the more likely there will be graft and corruption, because men are men, and men are fallen; something which you know, having been a pastor.

I believe that the more that this government’s power is spread apart in terms of check and balances, the better. Having the states at odds with the federal government; having the counties at odds with the states; having the President disagreeing with the legislative branch, having the Supreme Court disagreeing with both of them, and then having party bickering within the two Congressional houses, is a wonderful, beautiful, marvelous thing.

My problem with government at this time is they control too much money and they spend too much money, both the states and the federal government. Politicians make unreasonable promises when they are campaigning, like a the promise of a virtual utopia if the government controls healthcare,

You and I, we have budgets, and we have means, and we have learned to live within these means. When the end of our money comes too far before the end of the month, you and I tighten our belts, figure out additional ways to save here or there, or how to further stretch a dollar. We have both found out, I am sure, that if you simply run up credit card after credit card, without an self-imposed limitations, our situation becomes worse, and not better.

Our government right now, beginning with Bush and continuing in spades with Obama, is spending far too much money. It is also trying to do too much, even though it cannot properly deal with what it has to deal with already.

Our government is busting at the seams to pay social security, medicare, and medicaid, resulting in a debt which could sink our nation. There will be a point at which, other governments will not want to loan us any more money, and no matter how well-intentioned our programs are, what do we do when we reach our debt ceiling? Should we continue to take out more and more credit cards so that Americans can get what they believe is rightfully theirs, regardless of the consequences? When we reach the absolute debt ceiling, do we go back to 90% tax rates, which will further cause our economy to spiral?

It is not rocket science. There is enough income coming in, if we simply went back to our 2006 or 2007 federal budgets. Why not do that and zero out the deficit overnight?

Why not do that, and then spend time determining what we need to do about social security, medicare and medicaid before these services bankrupt us?

You also mentioned Hoover. Let’s talk about Hoover. This man was a progressive just like Obama and just like Hillary Clinton. He almost flipped a coin to determine if he was going to run as a Democrat or a Republican (he chose Republican because the town drunk in his youth was a Democrat). However, he was very much in favor of heavy regulations and of a government controlled (guided) economy. What he did, did not work. He was much more like FDR than he was like his Republican predecessor Coolidge, who would not even openly endorse him. Coolidge was a conservative and Hoover was anything but.

When FDR took the reigns of government, he was Hoover, but on steroids and far more erratic (in his economic policies).

I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Great Depression, and it was not really much different from any other recession in the past; however, it was how it was handled that kept it going. I don’t blame FDR; I am sure that he meant well, and there were a lot of propaganda forces in he world at that time which caused many politicians to believe the Russia and China were great governmental experiments (back then, they did not know how many people were being slaughtered by their own government). So FDR, tried this big government program, and that big government program, he would change the spot price of gold at will; and the end result was, the 1929 stock market crash became the Great Depression. The stock market recovered to its former levels in the 1950's, after FDR was gone.

We have several success stories when it comes to dealing with recessions. Remember the 1920 recession when there was a dramatic fall in house values? What did Washington do to solve this problem? Nothing. Wilson was incapacitated as president at this time, the Congress could not act unilaterally; and his vice president was unable to act in his stead at that time, so, the government did absolutely nothing, the recession fixed itself. Had only Hoover and FDR been similarly incapacitated.

Reagan and Bush both inherited recessions (and the economy in Reagan’s time was a mess); and both solved their respective recessions with tax cuts.

As for the problems that Obama inherited; sure, he was the first president to ever inherent any problems. All the rest of them walked through that front door and everything was perfect. But Obama, he walked in the White House and there were problems, and I know this is true, because I hear it every day from him or someone else in his administration. I guarantee you, in his memoirs years from now, he will still be blaming Bush. Have you ever heard of any president who blamed his predecessor so much? I mean, besides FDR? He got so much mileage out of that, that you still agree with him, decades later.

Finally, let’s talk about the recent stock market crash, and how so many people lost wealth in their portfolios. You certainly recall the term toxic assets, right? These were assets which were simply not worth very much, and they devalued banks, investment portfolios and retirement portfolios. Most of these entities invest in safe investments, in case things go bad, and one of the most common safe investments is the home mortgage. They would purchase mortgage backed securities, and these made up the most stable part of an investment portfolio or mutual fund. However, it turned out that the mortgage backed securities were riddled with bad paper. What happened? The government happened. FNMA and FHLMC, two huge, gargantuan organizations, which most people do not really understand, exercise great control over the mortgage market because they buy mortgage loans and give money in exchange to the lending institutions, because lending institutions make money on making the initial loan, but not on servicing the debt (that is, they do not make money by holding onto a mortgage until it matures or is paid off). I am sure you have bought a house and that your loan was sold within a couple months of you taking out that mortgage. Anyway, these two institutions are giants; and their holdings make Enron look like a lemonade stand. What FNMA and FHLMC say determines what kind of people get loan and what kind do not. For decades, these institutions had high requirements and specific requirements, so that, in order to sell a mortgage to FNMA or FHLMC, your home buyer had to be golden, so to speak.

This changed at the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush administration. They independently lowered their requirements (independent of Clinton or Bush) so that most new buyers had to be breathing in order to get a home loan. Then there was pressure put on mortgage companies to make loans to people based upon their race; and government programs were devised in order to give these new potential homeowners money in order to buy these homes. Government, government and more government. Home prices were forced up, because of all the new demand, and millions of loans were made to people who should not have been given a loan.

The end result was, a great loss of value in all investment portfolios because the safest part of

the portfolio became worthless. Then, of course, the house prices crashed and mortgage default became the norm.

Without government and quasi-governmental institutions like FNMA and FHLMC, none of this would have happened.

President Bush tried to reform these institutions on numerous occasions, and it is easy to find YouTube video of Barney Frank and others testifying that there was nothing wrong with FNMA or FHLMC, and that Bush was out of his mind to try to reform this institutions.

FInally, you complain about the almost treasonous behavior of various radio personalities. Apart from Rush, I have heard all of the others commend Obama for keeping on Gates and for his continuation of the Bush policies in Iraq and his escalation of the war in Afghanistan. I am not quite sure of the treasonous behavior to which you are referring, but in war, Obama has more support from Republicans than he does from his own Democrats. Maybe you were thinking about Democrats but accidentally typing the names of conservative radio hosts?

I’d go into the comments made by Jack Murtha and Harry Reid and others during the Bush administration’s prosecution of these two wars, but I am worn out from writing, and I am sure you got tired of reading a long time ago.

My best to you and yours,

gary

My friends and family in California may not understand this, but many of us here in Texas believe that Texas is far too liberal for our blood. “But you don’t have a personal state income tax; you let people shoot burglars in other people’s front yards; everyone is Texas drives around with either a concealed weapon or a rifle prominently displayed in the window of your Ford 150's.” This is all good stuff, I agree, but it is not good enough.

Many Texans believe that, closely tied to freedom is the freedom to own property. We Texans know that we have to pay taxes, and that pisses us off, but we will pay our taxes. However, what has happened here as of late is, property taxes have shot through the roof; they have more than doubled over the past 10 years (even with the reduction of property values), in part to feed a school system which is steadily getting worse, despite their getting a lot more money. Many of us Texas don’t like this. We don’t like to feel as if we are renting our property from the government. When we buy a plot of land, we want to own it; we don’t want to pay rent on it to the government, and that is essentially what has happened here in Texas with our property taxes. Sure, people pay higher property taxes in some liberal states, but this is hand-over-the-heart Texas, where some of us would vote for having a hunting season on liberals, so we don’t want to pay $3000–$5000/year for a house we own free and clear. I know one family who pays the Texas government around $12,000/year to live in their own home.

Here is what’s going on politically. There’s Governor Rick Perry, George W’s former lieutenant governor (or whatever we call ‘em here) who has been governor for about 10 years and is considered the conservative in the race.

Running against him is Kay Bailey Hutchison, a conservative Republican Senator, and she is portrayed as the Washington outsider (although people from outside the state see her as a Texas conservative).

They are both running for governor, and the Democratic nominee will be Bill White, who was a reasonable mayor for Houston (even though he is a Democrat, he’s probably to the right of Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Then there is this nobody candidate, running in the Republican primary, Deborah Medina, who has not run for office before, but she wants to run the greatest state in the union, and she might actually win. I watch a little tv and I see nothing but ad after ad after ad of Rick Perry calling Kay Bailey a Washington insider; and Hutchison calling Perry a phoney conservative with too many lobbyists in his administration; and I have yet to see a single ad for Medina. Yet, here are the polls:

You know that I pay some attention to politics, and yet, I will admit, I have not seen a single ad for Medina, I missed the Texas primary debates, and I heard Medina talk for the first time a few minutes ago (she was on a radio interview with someone who had previously dismissed her as an unimportant candidate). I saw what she looked like for the first time while writing this article.

By osmosis, I knew enough about Medina to realize that she was much closer to my way of thinking than Perry and Hutchison and that she is able to actually run an organization.

At the top of her webpage is the statement: “We Texans...want the government out of our bedrooms, pockets, libraries, and lives.” Mike Blevins, Lubbock. This statement changes daily.

In Texas, no one can win unless they have 50% of the vote. Even though Perry and Hutchison have powerful political organizations, this election looks like it will come down to Perry and Medina as the top two candidates, neither having 50%; and Medina will take this election in the run-off. This will be a great victory for the citizens of Texas.

In another surprise election, Charlie Crist, former governor of Florida, is facing Marco Rubio in the Republican primary. Most of the time, Crist would have stood for this seat unchallenged. He was a popular governor and a centrist Republican. He can work with Democrats. However, conservatives in Florida know what Democrats want, and they don’t want someone who can work with that. So Marco Rubio steps up, as the people’s candidate, as the conservative alternative, and he is giving Crist a run for his money. Crist won’t even debate him.

There might be some of you reading this, thinking, but aren’t you conservative Republicans a bunch of racists? How can you support Rubio? I find this charge so insulting, that I should issue a warning that, if you actually believe this, you do not want to come to Texas during October and November, which will probably become hunting season for liberals. Sometimes you have to thin the herd for its own good.

To a conservative, this sort of background brings tears to our eyes. We love anyone who understands just how great American is, and who better than a man who comes from a humble background with immigrant parents who worked hard to achieve the American dream. Besides, Crist is far too tan.

Marco’s victory won’t be an upset. It is the natural result of people waking up, seeing what President Obama is doing, and deciding, no, that is not what we want for America; we don’t even want someone who will meet Obama halfway.

The elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts were great victories for the people of the United States, which affirmed the power of the TEA party movement. However, these two elections in Texas and Florida are much more indicative of how deep this movement goes. As one women at a townhall meeting announced, “You have awakened a sleeping giant.”

Literally hours after I wrote and posted this article, Deborah Medina stepped into it big time. When I wrote the article, I was certain she had a good chance to win the governorship. Then, when she was interviewed by Glenn Beck, she refused to unequivocally reject 9/11 truther doctrine (these are people who believe that our government somehow knew about or participated in the destruction of the twin towers on 9/11), and this sunk her candidacy, despite her sending out a press release an hour later saying that she does not believe that the government took part in the 9/11 attacks.

I know a couple of strong Medina supporters, and they were furious with Glenn Beck here. He simply asked the questions and Medina answered them. It is her answers which were problematic, not his questions. If she knew nothing about this theory beforehand (although, apparently she did, given her answers), then the proper response would have been, “I have been functioning here on planet earth for the past two decades; what is this theory you are talking about?” However, she knew about it, she indicated that not all of the evidence was out there yet, and that she was reserving stating her opinion.

I do not see her coming back from this. She may drop in the polls down to the single digits because of this answer.

It is a little sad, but we conservatives must not allow ourselves to be emotionally pulled in to any political candidate, and then get shocked when he or she turns out to have feet of clay. This is what happened with many people who voted for Obama. They believed the hype that he was selling; they believed that he would fundamentally change the way we do business in Washington, and that he was a transformational candidate. However, the hype all disappears when Obama is shown to be what he really is: an amateurish leader with no experience, an ideologue who is almost unable to understand conservative doctrine, and a typical thug Chicago politician who looks good and can speak well.

We conservatives need to look at our candidates carefully, and, even if the have the TEA party-approved label, to recognize that these are just people, and if you scratch the surface, you might not like what you see.

[I wrote this based upon a few things with Horowitz said, so these are roughly his thoughts and my interpretation of them]

Liberals tend to have this imaginary world that they can see in their mind’s eye—a world where there is world peace, no nuclear weapons, dictators who can be reasoned with, healthcare for all, and no one is every hungry and everyone has a safety net. Their agenda is to move us in that direction, even though these conditions have never been achieved at any point in time in any country, and that the end result of almost every liberal program is more taxation and unintended results, despite having the best of intentions.

Conservatives look around, recognize the nature of man, recognize the imperfections of this world, and try to make the best of things based upon what has already been. We are guided by the past and the actual outcomes of various approaches, as opposed to their intended outcomes. We believe that the more power is shared and the less it is concentrated, the better things are. The more personal responsibility is depended upon and the more governmental responsibility is required (e.g., balancing the budget, living up to the promises one makes), the better things will be. This does not mean that conservatives are against welfare and helping out the helpless; it simply means that, leaning too far in that direction actually encourages people not to be productive, and the liberal agenda with the greatest of intentions, ends up changing the behavior of man, who then becomes less and less responsible and more dependent upon government. The downward spiral of the Black family over the past 5 decades is but one example of a liberal agenda making things worse.

Only two things are infinite -- the expanding universe and Democrats' hostility to the District of Columbia's school choice program. Killing this small program, which currently benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large -- the Democrats' dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government.

Democrats, in their canine devotion to teachers unions, oppose empowering poor children to escape dependency on even terrible government schools. Unions and their poodles say school choice siphons money from public schools. But federal money funds D.C.'s program, so killing it denies education money to D.C. while increasing the number of pupils D.C. must support.

Most Democrats favor a "public option" -- a government health insurance program. They say there is insufficient competition among the 1,300 private providers of insurance, so people should not be dependent on those insurers. But tuition vouchers redeemable at private as well as public schools is a "private option" providing minimal competition with public schools. Government, with 89 percent of the pupils, dominates education grades K through 12. So, do Democrats favor vouchers to reduce American's dependence on government education? Of course not.

For congressional Democrats, however, expanding dependency on government is an end in itself. They began the Obama administration by expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It was created for children of the working poor but the expansion made millions of middle-class children eligible -- some in households earning $125,000. The aim was to swell the number of people who grow up assuming that dependency on government health care is normal.

Many Democrats favor -- as Barack Obama did in 2003 -- a "single-payer" health insurance system, which means universal dependency on government. The "public option" insurance proposal was to be a step toward that. So was the proposed "alternative" of making 55- to 64-year-olds eligible for Medicare. Both of these dependency multipliers will be revived.

As will the Democrats' drive for "cramdown" legislation that would empower government (courts) to shred mortgage contracts, thereby making borrowers eager to embrace dependency on judges. Soon, the two most important financial decisions most families make -- to get a mortgage and a college tuition loan -- will almost always be transactions with the government.

The government used TARP funds not for their stipulated purpose of buying the "toxic assets" of banks, but to pull auto companies and other economic entities into the spreading web of dependency. Servile -- because dependent -- banks were pliable during the farce of Chrysler's bankruptcy, but secured creditors resisted when settled law was disregarded. Nevertheless, those creditors received less per dollar than did an unsecured creditor, the United Auto Workers, which relishes dependency on government as an alternative to economic realism.

Democrats' "reforms" of the financial sector may aim to reduce financial institutions to dependent appendages of the government. By reducing banks to public utilities, credit, which is the lifeblood of capitalism, could be priced and allocated by government.

Many Democrats are untroubled by governments' rampant abuses of eminent-domain powers. Wealthy interests embrace dependency on collaborative governments that seize property from less wealthy people and transfer it to those wealthy interests who will pay more taxes to those governments.

Many Democrats, opposing the Supreme Court, advocate new campaign finance "reforms" that will further empower government to regulate the quantity, timing and content of speech about government. Otherwise voters will hear more such speech than government considers good for them. Such paternalism is American progressivism's oldest tradition.

A century ago, Herbert Croly published "The Promise of American Life," a book -- still in print -- that was prophetic about today's progressives. Contemplating with distaste America's "unregenerate citizens," he said "the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities." Therefore, Croly said, national life should be a "school" taught by the government: "The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?" Unregenerate Americans would be "saved many costly perversions" if "the official schoolmasters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate."

Subordination is dependency seen from above. Today, it is seen approvingly by progressives imposing, from above, their dependency agenda.

There is no school choice here; no voucher will enable Americans to escape from enveloping dependency on this "government as school." The dependency agenda is progressive education for children of all ages, meaning all ages treated as children.

Tomorrow, NBC (which is owned by General Electric) will begin broadcasting the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver, Canada. Only two events are scheduled for the opening day (alpine skiing and ski jumping), but even those events will be difficult to pull off. Why? There is no snow in Vancouver. And International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge knows exactly what is to blame: global warming. Rogge tells AFP: "Global warming of course is a worry, it is a worry for the entire world."

Considering that NBC/GE was a target of TARP bailout cash, received billions in loan guarantees from the Obama administration, and is actively lobbying for a global warming energy tax bill so that it can receive billions more in government green-energy subsidies on top of the millions it already receives, we are sure to hear lots from NBC announcers about how the lack of snow in Vancouver is just another reason Washington needs to act now to stop global warming.

But back in Washington, the global warming scare-monger crowd is singing a slightly different tune. Facing record snowfalls, Time is reporting: "Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change." But do not confuse this headline with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s column from two years ago claiming that global warming was causing "anemic winters" in the Washington region.

No snow, too much snow. It does not matter to the enviroleft crowd. For them, global warming always is to blame. That is the whole reason the movement made a deliberate decision earlier this decade to stop calling it "global warming" and start calling it "climate change." That way they could expand the universe of terrible things they could plausibly blame on global warming. One British citizen even maintains a comprehensive list of everything the enviroleft has tried to blame on global warming including: Atlantic ocean less salty, Atlantic ocean more salty, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning faster, fish bigger, fish shrinking, and (most importantly) beer better, beer worse.

The media are not the only ones complicit in the climate fear industry. The 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which is the most prestigious scientific body charged with determining what is and is not settled science) has also been found to be cooking the books. In just the past year, the IPCC's 2007 report has been exposed for overstating the science on glacier loss in the Himalayas, crop loss in Africa, Amazon rain forest depletion and damage from weather catastrophes.

Here is what we do know: the cap-and-trade system in Europe is completely failing to reduce carbon emissions; the cap-and-trade system proposed here in the United States would do nothing to affect global temperatures, but would do trillions of dollars of damage to the U.S. economy.

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: "A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again."

Just over a year into his tenure, America's 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington's ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons - from Mr Obama's decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president's inability to convince voters he can "feel their [economic] pain", to the apparent ungovernability of today's Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis - and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington - most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office - each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people - Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

Political scientists credit Ronald Reagan with having managed the best transition from campaigning to governing when he moved to the White House in 1981. While lacking in intellectual skills, Reagan was often a shrewd judge of character. Following his victory in a bitter primary campaign with George H.W. Bush in 1980, Reagan promptly hired his defeated opponent's campaign manager, James Baker, to be his first chief of staff. Understated but authoritative, Mr Baker is considered one of the most effective performers in that role, to which he brought a good managerial background and an ability to play honest broker.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama's brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans - like the president. And barring Richard Nixon's White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

"It is a very tightly knit group," says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. "This is a kind of 'we few' group . . . that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep."

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama's Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the selfeffacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

"Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House," says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama's widely praised post-election transition. "It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet."

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding - and unexpected - failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion - not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law - and with it would have become a historic president.

But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised voters he would be the "41st [Republican] vote" in the Senate - the one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their votes with precisely that motivation in mind.

"Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn't want," says Jim Morone, America's leading political scientist on healthcare reform. "Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master."

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration's position. "Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president," says an exasperated outside adviser.

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama's health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. "I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet," says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. "If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them."

In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama's closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as "f***ing retards" after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.

"We are treated as though we are children," says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama's campaign. "Our advice is never sought. We are only told: 'This is the message, please get it out.' I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president."

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama's November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president's side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama's "G2" visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama's inner circle had any background in China. "We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president," says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. "It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China."

Then there are the president's big strategic decisions. Of these, devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage it caused to unrelated initiatives. "The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory - the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then financial sector reform," says one close ally of Mr Obama. "But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?"

Insiders attribute Mr Obama's waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the "war on terror" - not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.

"Rahm said: 'We've got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the Afghanistan troop surge] and we can't risk a flock of f***ing Canadian geese causing them to crash,' " says an official who attended an Oval Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of Guantánamo.

An outside adviser adds: "I don't understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process - two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations - without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?"

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. "There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government," says one. "Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn't happening."

The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr Obama needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he should find a new chief of staff. Mr Emanuel has hinted that he might not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running for mayor of Chicago. Others say Mr Obama should bring in fresh blood. They point to Mr Clinton's decision to recruit David Gergen, a veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried over from his campaign.

But Mr Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and commenting for CNN, Mr Gergen says members of the inner circle meet two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr Obama trusts them. "These are important attributes," Mr Gergen says. His biggest doubt is whether Mr Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.

"There is an old joke," says Mr Gergen. "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don't think President Obama wants to make any changes."

David Axelrod, senior adviser A former journalist on the Chicago Tribune who quit to set up a political advertising firm, Mr Axelrod, 54, is Barack Obama's longest-standing mentor, from his days in Chicago politics. Always at the candidate's side during the election campaign, he is the chief defender of the Obama brand. Still a journalist at heart, he describes himself as having been "posted to Washington".

The most visible face of the White House for his sardonic daily briefings. Mr Gibbs, 38, is perhaps the least likely member of the circle - he is a career Democratic press officer from Alabama who quit John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign and shortly afterwards went to work for Senator Obama. A constant presence during the campaign, he is also seen as a keeper of the flame.

The best story about Mr Emanuel, 50, concerns the dead fish he delivered to a pollster who displeased him. The least honey-tongued politician in Washington, he is also one of the most effective. Friends say he is relentlessly energetic, critics that he has attention deficit disorder. He has enemies but even detractors concede he may well achieve his aim of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House of Representatives.

An old friend of the Obamas, having hired Michelle to work in Chicago politics in the early 1990s, Ms Jarrett, 53, is probably the first family's most intimate White House confidante. A former businessperson and aide to Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, she was briefly considered as a candidate to fill Mr Obama's Senate seat. She was part of the circle he consulted before running for president.

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, "The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty." To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

"The global warming movement as we have known it is dead," the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true - and even if we knew what to do - a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, "The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet." Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian - among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change - has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC - the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science - is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article "a mess."

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting - all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.

Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a

sinking ship, and they're bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain's Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri's resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it "cannot rely" on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: "Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead." That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

"I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper skepticism," says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. "Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed." In his view, it's time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.

And for those who are having such a hard time understanding what the TEA party movement is all about, two articles...

On April 15 at Dallas City Hall, I looked out over a sea of attendees at one of several national gatherings that launched the Tea Party movement.

As the throng dissipated that night, messages of liberty and fiscal responsibility still ringing sweetly in their ears, the shared question was: Will this ball keep rolling? Or will it simply wane into pleasant nostalgia, a fading memory of a one-day pushback against out-of-control government?

Almost a year later, the ball still rolls. The Tea Party movement is one of the most noteworthy grassroots uprisings in recent American political history. And one of the most misunderstood.

So as this year unfolds toward an election day that will show how much nationwide clout the movement can muster, let's review what Tea Party passions are - and what they are not.

The Tea Party movement is not a nascent third party. Most tea partiers know that splitting the voters looking for less spending and lower taxes is a guarantee of more domination by Democrats with no interest in either.

The Tea Party movement is not "anti-tax." It is against confiscatory taxes, outlandish taxes, excessive taxes - choose your adjective. But this "anti-tax" nonsense is the same kind of obnoxious slander as calling people who favor strong borders "anti-immigration."

The Tea Party movement is not driven by social conservatism. That doesn't mean you won't find plenty of tea partiers who are devout advocates of protecting the unborn and traditional marriage - it's just that the Tea Party engine is driven first and foremost by a desire to return government to its proper constitutional limits and run it with a lot less money. Anyone driven by that passion is welcome in any roomful of tea partiers, no matter what views they may hold about God and gays.

That is, by the way, part of why the movement is so strong. If it were to adopt some litmus tests for admittedly important social issues, it would see its ranks dwindle mightily. Electing people to bring back fiscal sanity in 2010 and 2012 will require the help of millions of voters who may be centrist, libertarian or even socially liberal. How do you think Scott Brown won in Massachusetts?

Finally, the Tea Party movement is not some subculture of bug-eyed lunatics. Any political movement is going to have some characters ranging from colorful to occasionally unhinged, but the insulting tone of much of the coverage of the movement would have you believe that these are fringe extremists who could snap at any moment.

Well, the truth is, they have snapped already. The sound we are hearing is the proverbial camel's back breaking after years of reckless spending, punitive taxation and usurpations of liberty that have crippled every citizen's opportunity to enjoy the full promise of what America is supposed to be about: freedom and opportunity, with the least government necessary to maintain an ordered society.

The people drifting toward the Tea Party movement are not extreme. They are, in fact, fighting extremism - the extremism that has brought us a government that takes far too much, spends far too much and runs our lives far too much.

At long last, people who might disagree on a number of other things are uniting in a fight for strong but limited government, run responsibly and frugally. It took Democrats and Republicans to create this mess, and entrenched members of both parties could soon find themselves back in the private sector if the enthusiasm of tea parties and town halls carries all the way to the November elections.

With participants from so many walks of life, and no rigid structure or leadership, it can be a challenge to define exactly what the Tea Party movement is. But I'll tell you one more thing that it is not: It is not going away.

The Democrats and their activist old media are running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the "Tea Party" movement. It can be quite entertaining to watch. They really have no idea what is happening right in front of their eyes. The media would have an easier time reading Mandarin Chinese than they would deciphering the signs at a Tea Party rally.

You could argue that they don't want to understand what they are seeing because that means they would have to admit that Democrats have lost the beloved grass roots that they claim to have had forever, and I would not disagree. But, for the moment, let's just say that they are really trying hard to figure this out and it's just not sinking in to their brilliant Ivy League minds.

Sunday on Meet the Press, Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton press secretary, took a stab at defining the Tea Party movement. "I'm not sure exactly where this is going..is it a third party, is it part of the Republican Party?"

On ABC's This Week, Al Hunt of Bloomberg News said, "I'm not sure exactly what the Tea Party movement is, I'm not sure the people who respond to the polls know what it is, and it remains to be seen whether it is an asset to the Republican Party."

Saturday on CNN, Don Lemon had political consultant David Gergen on and they wrestled over whether the movement was racist because they only saw one black person in the crowd at the Sarah Palin speech before the Tea Party Convention. They should've invited Kenneth Gladney on the show and asked him. Gladney was the man who was smacked around by SEIU thugs at a Tea Party rally in St. Louis. The activist old media doesn't know Gladney's story because he's a conservative minority Tea Party participant and they don't want that story. I met Gladney at a Tea Party rally in Las Vegas and found him to be a fine man with a fascinating story. I bought a couple flags from him that I proudly hang in my office. The activist old media might want to ask him what this movement is about - warning - be prepared, he will give you the right answer, but it will not be the answer you want to hear. I know, I asked him.

With that, let me tell you what the Tea Party movement wants. I will make it simple and straightforward and easy for all to understand - I will put it in all CAPS and type slowly:

The Democrats and its activist old media want to find "leaders" for the Tea Party movement. They feel that the only worthwhile political movement must have direction from a man (or woman-but mainly men). They saw the movements led by Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini and feel that there must be a dynamic personality for people to follow in order for it to be significant. That same game plan was followed in the 2008 presidential election: find a dynamic leader who fits with the values of larger, more intrusive government, and follow him.

They also want a "leader" of the Tea Party movement so that they can destroy that person. This is from the play book of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. Obviously, there is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks.

Once they have a fallible human target they can destroy that person, and thus destroy the movement. That's the game plan. They will not come out and say they want the destruction of the U.S. Constitution, so it's very important for the media, Democrats and the American left to get a name and face attached to the Tea Party movement.

Sarah Palin understands this perfectly when she spoke at the Tea Party Convention over the weekend and said that "this is about the people," and it's "bigger than any king or queen of the Tea Party movement." This movement needs no leader. With the Constitution as its guide, it is doing just fine, thank you.

While the media tries to marginalize the movement and make it seem insignificant, racist, divisive, angry, trivial, and mean--the Tea Party movement rolls on. Democrats will twist and turn on a roller-coaster ride of definitions before they ever find the answer. If they really want the answer, I'll give it to them again in case I wasn't clear:

Don't we all want that? Shouldn't we all want that? Occasionally you will hear Democrats talk about their love for the Constitution, but were that the case, they would join hands with the patriots of the Tea Party movement and demand that we begin the long road back to our founding documents. For the last 100 years we have made a strong left turn from those documents, and it's time to correct it.

Those at the Tea Party rallies may not all be Ivy League grads, or brilliant enough to be on those dazzling, luminous, Sunday talk shows, but they are smart enough to know which political party represents a return to the Constitution right now. It's that party they will support in 2010. It's that party they supported in elections in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey. If Democrats and their complicit old-media cronies are not smart enough to figure out which party that is, then they'll sit there at the round table on the Sunday shows this November and wonder what hit them and again, not get it right.

You've got to think that if they had Sunday shows in 1773, the British would've done the same thing.

In recent days, concurrent with the apocalyptic "Snowpocalypse" in Washington and the earthquake in Chicago, a deluge and a great shaking of another sort has been shaking the Chicago cabal of President Obama in Washington, D.C. It is awesome serendipity that such similar cataclysms are mirroring each other in this way!

Many leading reasonable Democrats are lashing out at the inner sanctum of Chicago chosen ones surrounding Obama. Steve Clemons, Edward Luce, ex-Governor Doug Wilder of Virginia and others are, for the first time, beginning to be honest about the administrative incompetence and unsuitability of, in particular, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod.

The reasons these people are remonstrating spring, of course, from a far different place than those of the majority who are opposing health care and apocalyptic spending. Many of these liberals are frustrated that their once-in-a-lifetime chance to push certain pet causes is slipping through their fingers. Nonetheless, any amount of honesty is precious and praiseworthy.

So many of us tried to warn of the danger of hiring someone with SO little administrative experience who was so entangled with the questionable mindset and tactics of the `Chicago Way' and far-left radicals. Perhaps, all Americans of good will can now agree about the destructiveness of this fearsome foursome and press for their ouster. How much further must we go to realize that the man in charge of hiring and organizing all of this is even more culpable than those he has appointed? I think a lot of Americans have already taken, or, are about to take, that short step to sanity in this election season of 2010.

[I must say that I am indebted for this potent title to Mark Steyn, among others who have used this term over the past year to indicate several groups of Obama-ites.]

That is, in the words of James Hudnall (Big Journalism), Big Government or Limited Government.

They want to rule. They are smart, we are dumb, so they will make the rules and we will follow them. They are masters, we are slaves, so we have to be whipped into compliance.

Never, never ever, forget that this Nation was founded by contrarians. My earliest American ancestors were kicked out of TWO countries. Now that is contrarian.

We are in a new world, the world of Flopping Aces, the ability to post one's opinion, the ability to choose what opinions one reads or hears.

China has gotten the point anyway. They are limiting internet use. It won't work. They will figure out how to diddle around with photograph bit streams and encode stuff. Any country which can establish a university to train hackers can hack in the other direction!

The old USSR did not get the point. They failed to control the fax warble (I know you can unplug a phone call; how do you interpret the fax warble to know whether it is subversive or not?)

I vividly remember how angry I was when the Congress abandoned Vietnam. But I had no means (except manually typed-out snail mail) to express my rage and hostility at what appeared to me to be very bad decisions.

Watch closely. The internet blog is a revolution on the same order as the printing press. The lesson of the University of Paris: one was required to produce a written copy of the text. Thus attendance was limited to the wealthy, who could hire scribes. After Gutenberg, Paris prohibited printed texts for the next century. Paris never caught up.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has crashed and burned. Why? Blog power. Inquiring minds got hold of the skewed data and bogus computer programs and ripped the whole thing to shreds. I don't really care what Steve Nye has to say; he is out of date on the science.

A recent Gallup poll is simply incredible. Thirty-six percent of Americans have a positive image of socialism, including 53 percent of Democrats. Just 17 percent of Republicans think socialism is good.

Now, socialism is the exact opposite of capitalism, which is our system in America. A socialist believes the government has a right to control and/or seize private property and regulate the distribution of goods and services.

That means the government has all the power. You have none. Can you say Fidel Castro? And 53 percent of Democrats think that's a positive thing? It's hard to believe.

Gallup boss Frank Newport says his company did not define socialism when it asked the question. Therefore Gallup believes that some of the respondents simply don't know what socialism is, and that is certainly possible.

In Western Europe, there are countries that have a hybrid kind of socialism: very high taxation, redistribution of wealth, but they don't seize private property outright. In Cuba, Venezuela and China, the government can seize anything and shoot you if you don't like it.

So let's be kind and say many Americans simply don't know what true socialism is.

Even so, the poll is disturbing because there is a trend right now by the Obama administration to expand the federal government and to redistribute wealth. Those are socialist tenets. No question about it.

Some Obama critics contend that he is a socialist, but we can find no evidence of that. Mr. Obama likes his property, and I don't believe he wants to seize my house.

However, there are people like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont who do, and those people are stalwarts in the Democratic Party.

It is long past time for Americans to wake up. The far left in this country wants to diminish personal power and impose social justice on the nation. They want to erode our personal freedoms in order to right what they consider wrongs brought about by capitalism.

"Talking Points" believes that will not happen, and the more exposure this quasi-socialism deal gets, the more Americans will reject it.

America was founded on hard work, personal responsibility and honest achievement. The feds are there to protect us from outside danger and to make sure the system does not embrace corruption.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) today released a report entitled "Stand and Deliver: Sex, health and young people in the 21st Century."

I'm guessing the title eludes to the critically acclaimed film "Stand and Deliver" starring Edward James Olmos in which he played a dedicated math teacher who challenges his erstwhile high school dropouts to learn calculus. In the movie, these misunderstood yet courageous young people come of age, metaphorically, as they realize their true potential.

As it happens, according to the Web site phrases.org, the phrase "stand and deliver. was used by 17th century highwaymen (robbers) in the UK, when holding up stagecoaches." It literally means, "Stop and give me your valuables."

Come to think of it, given the contents of this ghastly report, the title may be apropos after all because what the IPPF wants to do is hold our children up and steal their innocence, their childhoods and worst of all, their sexual morality.

First, some context: IPPF is the international umbrella for 180 Planned Parenthood organizations worldwide. Its political agenda includes population control through contraception and abortion, as well as the broad promotion of "sexual rights."

IPPF works closely the United Nations and other international groups to promote social and political change in support of their views on sexuality.

Those view include seven principles of "sexual rights" including that "Sexuality is an integral part of the personhood of every human being, for this reason a favourable (sic) environment in which everyone may enjoy all sexual rights as part of the process of development must be created" and "Sexuality, and pleasure deriving from it, is a central aspect of being human..."

The IPPF's new report on sexuality in young people - loosely defined but including anyone over the age of 10 - expands on these rights to include children.

The report says, "The evolving capacities of the child include his or her physiological ability to reproduce, his or her psychological ability to make informed decisions about counselling (sic) and health care, and his or her emotional and social ability to engage in sexual behaviours (sic) in accordance with the responsibilities and roles that this entails."

Among the recommendations the IPPF makes to governments across the globe is mandatory sexual education for children age 10 and older to include "the pleasures of sex."

Worse, the report specifically calls out organized religions, including the Catholic Church and the Muslim religion, for promoting sexual repression.

Young people's sexuality is still contentious for many religious institutions. Currently, many religious teachings deny the pleasurable and positive aspects of sex and limited guidelines for sexual education often focus on abstinence before marriage .

IPPF, clearly believing sexual freedom for young people outweighs any concerns about silly things such as.oh, say. thousands of years of religious doctrine, offers up this nugget of advice:

Each religion or faith must find a way of explaining and providing guidance on issues of sex and sexual relationships among young people, which supports rather than denies their experiences and needs. By highlighting strong values in faiths and religions, and overcoming stigma and stereotypes that religious conventions perpetuate, communities and leaders can help improve young people's access to sexual and reproductive health information and services, and so improve their health and well-being.

Huh? If you can get through the jargon, you understand that IPPF advocates government leaders usurp the rights of parents to instill their religious beliefs and values about sexual morality in their children in favor of improving "access to sexual and reproductive health information and services" for all young people.

Let's not forget those services are largely provided by Planned Parenthood. What a coincidence.

To be clear, this report is secular-progressive free-sex propaganda and anti-religious bigotry disguised as public health whitepaper, and most of us will read about this report and simply think, "This is nuts."

But it's not nearly as crazy as the stuff these folks want taught in your child's fifth grade classroom, and right now, they have the ear of the US Department of Education.

The Left has described Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that mandated pro-abortion laws nationwide, as everything from the "right to privacy" to the "right to choose." But to ensure school children are indoctrinated in their views the Left is moving one step further.

Redefining history, a proposed school textbook change in N.C. implies opposition to abortion is wrong and cites Roe vs. Wade as an example of the Supreme Court upholding rights "against oppressive government." It's time to take back the halls of academia, starting with state and local school boards.

Here’s the story from the Catholic News Agency; now, have you seen this story in your newspaper or on your media source?

'Special Report' Panel on President's Call to Hear GOP Suggestions for Health Care Reform

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward.

KATIE COURIC: So you are inviting Republicans here to the White House. Does that mean, Mr. President, you are willing to start at square one?

OBAMA: Well, I think that what I want to do is look at the Republican ideas that are out there.

BAIER: The president over the weekend in an interview with CBS saying he wants to restart the talks about health care reform legislation with Republicans at the table. Republicans are saying, sure, we are happy to come, but just scrap the bill that's currently there.

What is the next step with health care reform legislation? Let's bring in our panel, Brill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

BILL KRISTOL, EDITOR, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Obviously when the president invites you to the White House you go. They should politely go and tell him he should kill this terrible bill that the House and Senate - or two bills the House and Senate Democrats have put together and start over.

And they have got plenty of proposals. They have a nice one-page version of the bill that is published in our magazine, a lot of the best Republican ideas that would incrementally improve the health care system.

And Republicans should hold their ground and they shouldn't be apologetic, they shouldn't snipe at the president. This letter they sent today I think is silly: Is it really going to be bipartisan and transparent? You weren't bipartisan in the past when you said you were going to be bipartisan.

Forget all that. Just say we welcome a substantive debate. We have been engaged in substantive debate in health care, we Republicans, for a year, and we are perfectly happy to continue that debate. And Mr. President if you want to come to the position of small incremental, sensible reforms in the health care system, more than happy to work with you.

BAIER: Mara, let's talk about the motivation of the president and this White House on this issue. Take a listen to the health and human services secretary today speaking about what the president still wants out of health care reform legislation.

KATHLEEN SEBELIUS, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: The president remains committed to the notion that we have to have a comprehensive approach, because the pieces of the puzzle are too closely tied to one another. It's disingenuous to say we are for the insurance reforms and yet don't support a notion that everyone would have to come into the marketplace.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: I think it's sounds like a stalemate. I think this is real Kabuki theater. This is a political spectacle.

I think the White House would like to show the country that the Republican ideas either don't add up, or I think the problem is they don't even have the same goals. The Democrats want to cover everyone. The Republicans don't. The Republicans, I think, would be OK with some insurance reforms.

And I think in the end nothing will come of this, but, from the White House point of view they could show that they tried. They are trying to be bipartisan. They could even - I think this would be a smart thing - say, hey, we will take medical malpractice reform, we'll take buying coverage over state lines, in others works, take a couple Republican ideas, just take them.

But the problem is the Republicans, I think, have an easy task at this meeting. All they have to do is say your bill is unpopular. The people don't like it. We want to start over. And the president will say, well you don't even want to cover everyone. And...

BAIER: Is this dangerous politics after saying that he heard Massachusetts and Democrats heard Massachusetts. Is it dangerous politics to say oh, let's go back to health care reform?

LIASSON: It depends on what you heard from Massachusetts. Did you hear from Massachusetts that the entire country wants to you scrap health care reform? The Democrats do not think they heard that.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: If they didn't, they need hearing aids.

This, you're right, is entirely political theater. The president saw his first year agenda go down in flames. Energy, cap and trade, died in the Congress, and health care died in public opinion as seen in Massachusetts.

So what he did now and what he's doing now I think is smart, politically. He returns - the president returns to what he does best: campaign, perform. And he did really well in Baltimore where he was up against 160 Republican congressmen, you know, and he held his own. He did really well.

And I think if he can do that again on health care, what he can do is recast the issue as one in which he has got ideas, he tried to get health reform, and the Republicans are obstructionists. If he does that, he doesn't expect he's going to get compromise. He doesn't expect he is going to get the Republicans on board.

And if he accepts tort reform he is going to lose liberals in the House. He is going to lose the trial lawyers. It's not going to happen. This is not going to eventuate in a bill. The only purpose here is to put the Republicans on the defensive and to make it into a campaign issue for the upcoming election.

BAIER: For all of the talk about Republicans, the president's real problem with passing health care legislation was on the Democratic side of the issue.

KRAUTHAMMER: That's the point. For six months he had a huge majority in the House and the supermajority in the Senate. It was all in his hands. And the reason it took six months is because Democrats couldn't agree.

And at the end, it went - at the end there was a referendum in Massachusetts where the Republican opponent said you elect me, I will kill the bill. He wins, and that's over now.

KRISTOL: You're point, I think you implied this earlier - why did the president want to be discussing health care? I think it's a mistake. This is Rahm Emanuel's White House. They just want to keep on fighting.

What if the president said February 25th, let's have a big meeting on bank regulation, preventing the banking system from falling apart, and I want you Republicans to come to the table and work on that? That would be a different types of issue.

KRISTOL: That's an issue everyone agrees has to be addressed. That's an issue where it's much harder to be defending Citibank or Goldman Sachs. Why doesn't the president insist on debating that the next four or five months?

They can't help themselves. It's like the war on terror stuff. They sent Brendan out yesterday to fight the Republican leaders on exactly who said what when, and that's a losing issue for them. They should drop it and move on. But they just can't resist the fight.

LIASSON: I don't think they should necessarily drop health care. I agree with you, this meeting seems a little bit poorly chosen for the topic of the first big powwow. But there is a deadline out there, and that deadline is April, because in April reconciliation runs out.

They are either going to do this in April under reconciliation or they will not do it at all.

KRAUTHAMMER: But the reason that the meeting is going to happen is because the president and the White House cannot accept a loss. They can accept not having a bill, but they want to have a political success, and that's what he is trying to do.

He wants to do a Baltimore, a meeting with the Republicans, turn it around, shine, and have them as the fall guy. That's what's intended. It may not succeed, but that's what he's trying to do.

BAIER: And he is having a meeting tomorrow on the jobs bill with leadersf rom both parties.

KRISTOL: He was supposed to pivot to jobs, jobs, jobs. That's the number one priority. Instead he is debating terror on the Sunday shows and then the next two weeks it's going to be this silly health care reform meeting.

LIASSON: It sucked a lot of oxygen. That's why I think they either need to pass it, and they're going to have to use reconciliation to pass it, or not pass it. But just do one or the other and then move on.

BAIER: Iran's announcement that it will enrich its own nuclear fuel is the latest cause for international concern, of course. The panel will discuss that in three minutes.

ROBERT GATES, DEFENSE SECRETARY: I think basically their strategy is if they did anything at all would be to slow-roll us. And the reality is they are continuing to enrich.

I would say weeks not months, to see if we can't get another U.N. Security Council resolution. I think that's important because then it provides a legal platform for the EU and individual countries to then perhaps take even more far reaching steps.

HERVE MORIN, FRENCH DEFENSE MINISTER (via translator): We are certain, we are convinced that these programs are for military purposes.

BAIER: The French foreign minister accused Tehran of blackmail on this. There you saw the Defense Secretary Bob Gates in an interview with Greta Van Susteren you can see tonight "On the Record."

But the basic premise here is that Iran has announced it is moving forward with enrichment at 20 percent of nuclear fuel and it is essentially thumbing its nose at the world community. What about this as we get ahead for a big week of potential protests in Iran? We're back with the panel. Charles?

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, on the one hand, this is yet another slap at the administration, where we turn the other cheek, another insult, and another challenge.

However, this one, I think, is a real escalation. When they openly announce enrichment up to 20 percent, the French know that this is the excuse that it's for medical studies and the medical reactor is a fraud, because only the French and the Argentinians have the advanced technology to turn the enriched uranium into the fuel rods that that work in the Tehran reactor. Iran doesn't have that.

So it's enriching uranium. The only way to proceed after that is to enrich it even more highly into a bomb. So, that's why the French are saying it's blackmail, it's very serious.

There is a concept in proliferation of "breakout" where a country decides all of a sudden it's going to make a race to acquire a bomb, ignore the world, and think it will get away with it.

This is not quite an announcement of breakout, but it's the beginning of an announcement. It's saying we are now prepared to do enrichment and we dare the world to do anything. And up until now, there is not a shred of evidence that the Obama administration is going to do anything about it.

LIASSON: They are trying to get sanctions in place. The whole idea of engagement was to see, a, if engagement would work, which everybody knew it wouldn't.

LIASSON: OK, not everybody, but I would say the consensus was it was unlikely that Iran was going to say yes, I'd like to talk to you and give up my nukes.

LIASSON: Yes, but the idea of engagement was to try so you could show all our allies, including the Russians and the Chinese, that we've tried everything and now it's time for tough sanctions and we can't ask for tough sanctions unless we have tried engagement.

Now the problem is you still don't have China on board for this, as hard as the administration has tried. And now we're talking Gates, Secretary of State Clinton are talking about tough sanctions, that has to be the next step. And if it doesn't work we are getting closer to an Israeli nuclear (ph) strike.

BAIER: Bill, they are encouraged, they say, about Russia, but China is publicly again and again saying we are not signing on.

KRISTOL: I had breakfast with a western diplomat last week who is very much involved in these things. He is a liberal and believer of going to the U.N. first. You have got to get some U.N. sanctions which will lay the groundwork for some EU sanctions.

I said, what are you talking about? How long? He said that of course would take at least until the summer, maybe even late summer. And even then no one has confidence those sanction would actually stop the regime from moving ahead with its nuclear program.

I hope and pray that the administration is doing everything it can to help those who are just demonstrating this week covertly. I hope they are making sure they can't shut down Internet access within Tehran. Twitter ability within Iran and doing a lot technologically to help the dissidents, because this regime is tottering, I think.

That will make them more dangerous, not less, because I think they think going ahead full pell-mell with the nuclear program will strengthen them not weaken them. We are in a dangerous situation, a weak regime pushing ahead with a nuclear program. Is there anything more intrinsically unstable and dangerous?

So I really hope the administration is focused on huge demonstrations that are coming Thursday on the anniversary of the 1979 revolution.

BAIER: What about that, the criticism that this administration has faced that it hasn't stepped up enough to support those distanced publicly?

KRISTOL: I very much agree. President Obama whatever - you know, I have been critical of the Cairo speech and all this outreach. But what was the point of all of that if not to have the credibility around the world and in the Muslim world that he wishes them well and that he is not some horrible George W. Bush type of imperialist.

This is the moment on Wednesday, this week, before Thursday, before the demonstrations, to say: do not use force against your citizens, Mr. Khamenei. Do not use force against the citizens of Iran peacefully demonstrating for human rights.

And we here in the U.S. and we around the world have a joint statement with EU leaders saying standing with the demonstrators. This is a moment for the president to use all the moral capital he says he has been accumulating over the last year, all the goodwill, and use it for the demonstrators in Iran.

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, Israel is watching the breakout here. If it ever has a sense that it is a full breakout, it will attack. This is the beginning of something, the rolling out of a breakout.

But in terms of the revolution, or encouraging a revolution, which our only hope of stopping the nuclear issue, it's not as if it hasn't happened before. The model is with Reagan and Thatcher and Kohl did the Pope did in the '80s, which was overt support, covert support, rhetorical support, moral support.

And from the evidence of people who lived in that era who were on the dissident side, that made a huge difference in their efforts. It gave them courage. It gave them an ability to expand their efforts. It gave them legitimacy, and it gave them hope.

And that is extremely - in a revolution that hinges on a moment - there will be a moment in which the Revolutionary Guards will crack. If that happens, you have a revolution. If it doesn't, you don't. It happened in the Soviet Union. It happened under the Shah. It could happen here, and we ought to encourage the moment.

BAIER: Ten seconds, Mara - do you get any sense in the administration that there is a concession that there will be a nuclear Iran?

LIASSON: I think that they've thought that there might be a nuclear Iran and that containment might be the only plan b there is, yes, of course.

Obama to press the dictator button in 2010; that is, if the legislature cannot pass his cap and trade agenda, then he is going to mandate some provisions as President of the United States:

Along these same lines, most of us understand that a teen who is underage cannot give consent to having sex. Therefore, when it is obvious that an underage teen is having sex (for instance, she is pregnant), then we have a duty to report this crime. Planned parenthood faces this sort of thing regularly, and there are more newly released videos where Planned Parenthood ignores the criminal nature of this:

Recently passed climate change resolution in Utah; note that, this bill is actually filled with facts and things which make sense.

In case you don’t think that the so-called hate-speech laws can morph into 1984 thought police scenarios, read this article about what is going on in the Netherlands:

I am sure that you have heard that George W. Bush was the worst president for the environment ever. This would be except for the fact that more pollutants were removed from the air during his administration than any other:

Christopher Horner writes: So, now Keith Olberman tells us that the fifteen-year long "global warming" campaign all along meant "climate change" and that this in turn means that places supposed to get hotter get hotter and that places that are supposed to get colder - under global warming, er, climate change - get colder. We got that.

And his contextual example of the places that are getting colder is the U.S. this winter, well they were supposed to be getting colder, because they are. That's how we figure out what was supposed to happen under their theory: by watching whatever happens. That was precisely what was predicted. Or, at least, now, in the new weasel-wording of journalists, "consistent with" what they and expected.

The rest of this article, with numerous citations and locations of climate change stories over the years:

File this under, what a bunch of crap; Jake Tapper interviews Timothy Geithner:

RUSH: Chris Christie, New Jersey governor, has frozen spending. The state's budget is in shambles. He has sliced into the school surpluses, the New Jersey transit subsidies. The Democrats are furious. They're furious because he's doing exactly what he promised he would do. This is the common sense we've been waiting for. We weren't waiting for somebody to lower the seas; we were waiting for an elected official in an executive branch to lower the sea of red ink and to get some sensibility back to budgeting. We were waiting for a leader with guts to heal the spending sickness that grips bureaucrats and big spenders in legislature after legislature after legislature. This is the kind of thing the tea party people are demanding.

And this, my friends, I hope is just the beginning. Every state is going to have to face tough decisions and they're going to be state workers, many of them union workers, they're going to get laid off. They can't keep bailing them out from the federal government. It isn't gonna fly. Budgets are going to have to be balanced to avoid bankruptcy, and every time a state's governor takes the lead in returning fiscal sanity to his or her state, Barack Obama's going to be made to look that much weaker and that much more ineffective. Governor Chris Christie, there is time to save the country. This is what a rescue looks like. This is exactly what a rescue looks like. And, by the way, I have to point this out, ladies and gentlemen, because I'm a sharp observer of things. Christie's moves of all these budget freezes, during these recent snow emergencies, they told all nonessential federal and local government employees to stay home. Now, in Washington that totaled 240,000 people, a vast majority of them turned out to be nonessential. This is inescapable logic. So why do we have any nonessential government workers at any level? Two-hundred-forty-thousand for three straight days stayed home during the blizzards in Washington and they made the mistake of telling us all nonessential federal local government employees stay home, and look how many of them there are.

I got an idea to balance our budget. It's just taking right after the model here of Chris Christie. Do you realize, folks, how ridiculous and unsustainable and obscene it is that we have been presented a budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit, spending $3.4 trillion, $3.6 trillion? Three-point-six trillion with a $1.6 trillion deficit? One-point-six trillion? When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989 the federal budget was not even one trillion. It was close, but it wasn't even one trillion. Now, what was the federal budget in 2007? Which was a pretty good year, was it not? Unemployment was down, Social Security was working out just fine, it was $2.5 trillion. We could balance the budget right now if we would just reduce spending to what it was in 2007. Are you trying to tell me that we cannot forget what we have spent the following three years, just the past three years, the country will not function if we do that? This is so absurd, it is ridiculous that we are facing this. But at least Governor Christie is showing the way. The state's budget is in shambles. The liberals are squealing like stuck pigs, but he's doing exactly what people elected him to do.

"The governor also cut state subsidies to New Jersey Transit, saying it needs to become fiscally efficient. 'Revisit its rich union contracts,' Christie said. 'And they may also have to consider service reductions or fare increases.'" Ladies and gentlemen, is it wrong to love another man? Because I love Chris Christie. Taking on rich union contracts, this is what is going to have to be done at the state and city level to balance these budgets in the states and cities and counties. That's where all of this waste is, that's where all the stimulus money went that was spent last year. It went to bail out states to make sure that public employee union people were not laid off. But the day is coming. So the Obama budget has two-and-a-half trillion dollars of taxes, that's what they estimate, with $3.6, 3.8 trillion dollars of spending.

Thomas G. Donlan of Barron's, February 8th issue, page 47: tax revenues expected to reach two-and-a-half trillion dollars next year, pretty much what the government spent in 2007. So? 2007 was a good year, pretty good year. Three years ago, just three years ago before the liberals took Congress, this is the key, 2007 is when Pelosi and the Democrats took over the House to join the Democrats in the Senate, and you look at the explosion since 2007. They turned a manageable deficit into a $1.6 trillion nightmare. So we have a really solid idea here, a rallying cry that could unite the Republicans and the conservatives and the tea party and the independents and even some liberals, those who pay taxes. Just roll back spending to 2007 levels before Pelosi took over. Roll back spending to 2007 before Pelosi and the Democrats wrecked the US budget. In other words, roll back Pelosi. Say it together, folks, say it: Roll back Pelosi! Say it with me: roll back Pelosi. Because that's where the damage began, and it has been expanded by Obama and Democrat control of the Senate. It is obscene. Roll back Pelosi.

RUSH: Let's go back audio sound bite wise, this is a good reminder, ladies and gentlemen, because President Obama has hit an all-time low in his approval numbers now. He's down to 44% in a couple of polls, 46% in another, and where is the State-Controlled Media reporting this? They are ignoring Obama's plunge, and it is a plunge in the approval numbers. March 13th of 2006, however, Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room, a montage of discussion about President Bush's job approval numbers.

BLITZER: It's 4 p.m. here in Washington. So you're getting the first look right now at our brand-new poll. The president's job approval rating has taken a downward turn again, falling to only 36%. [break] This represents his lowest rating ever in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. [break] The president's poll numbers are pretty bad, pretty awful right now, rock bottom as far as the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. [break] The president's Iraq problem and his new low point in the polls. [break] His approval and policies now are at new lows. [break] The president's job approval number in this new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, rock bottom, the lowest it's ever been. [break] It's 5 p.m. here in Washington where President Bush takes a beating in our latest poll. His approval rating at a low ebb. [break] Our latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll just out in the past hour shows the president at an all-time low. [break] His job approval rating at a new low. [break] That's rock bottom as far as our poll is concerned. [break] It's 7 p.m. here in Washington. The war in Iraq comes home to roost for President Bush. Our latest poll numbers showing his approval rating at a new low. [break] Also: President Bush hits a new low in the polls. [break] Now back to our lead story: President Bush's approval rating now at an all-time low. [break] As we noted, a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows his job approval rating at a new low. [break] President Bush's approval rating at a new low, 36%.

RUSH: All of that on March 13th of 2006. Wolf Blitzer, it's 4 p.m., lead story, Bush poll numbers. It's 5 p.m., lead story, Bush poll numbers. It's 6 p.m., lead story, Bush poll numbers, it's 7 p.m., lead story, Bush poll numbers. Now back to our lead story, Bush's approval numbers at an all-time low. Now here's the coverage of Obama's new low in the polls as covered on CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer yesterday.

RUSH: That's right, nothing but crickets. They haven't reported it. Well, what was being reported by Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room yesterday and last night? Well, here's a montage.

BLITZER: Sarah Palin's tea party cheat sheet. Her political future may be in her hand. [break] Sarah Palin's sleight of hand at the weekend's tea party convention. [break] A most unusual cheat sheet. You might say Sarah Palin had tea partiers in the palm of her hand. [break] See all these papers? These are all notes and stuff I'm supposed to say, but I don't write it on my hand. [break] The answer is in the palm of her hand. Sarah Palin has a cheat sheet. [break] We'll look beyond the talking points on Sarah Palin's hand. I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in The Situation Room.

RUSH: No bias in the media, right? There's no advocacy in the media, and there's plenty of objectivity in the media. Are we all agreed on that? I have notes here, said Wolf, I got notes, I got more notes than Sarah Palin, but I don't write 'em on my hand. They're just beside themselves. You know, I wonder if he did write Bush's poll numbers on his hand, as often as he reported that back in March of 2006. Last night on The CBS Evening News, the perky Katie Couric played another portion of her pre-Super Bowl interview with President Obama. She said, "You've given more than 160 interviews, taking questions at 26 town meetings. What do you say to people who say, in spite of all of that exposure, people are not sure who you are or what you stand for?"

OBAMA: This is the Washington analysis that came up over the last couple months since my poll numbers went down. Nobody was saying that when my poll numbers were high, right? So I just take these kinds of things with a grain of salt.

RUSH: I really don't, suddenly the approval numbers don't matter now. He doesn't feel compelled to change his agenda or even admit that he was wrong. But it was all that mattered for Bush. It was all that mattered for Bush. But it doesn't matter at all to the State-Controlled Media or to Obama. Obama then went on to explain why all of this going on is still Bush's fault anyway, including his poll numbers.

OBAMA: The pundits, what they're trying to figure out is why these poll numbers drop, and if you're the average mom out -- working mom out there, your husband's just lost his job, you're seeing your hours cut back, your home value's lost a hundred thousand dollars in value, you're trying to figure out how to save for your kids' college education, your 401(k)'s just lost half its value, and suddenly somebody calls you on the phone in the middle of dinner and says, "So how's the president doing?" I think their answer is going to be pretty self-apparent. They're not going to be happy, and they shouldn't be.

RUSH: Well, so he's admitting that people are blaming him for it, and that's actually correct. Sort of a slip-up there on the part of President Obama.

RUSH: Now, this is early this morning at the New York Post. It's buried in a New York Post story. "Poll Shows Voters Abandoning Prez in Droves -- President Obama's overall approval rating has sunk to a new low -- and independent voters who propelled him to the White House have gotten downright sick of the job he's doing, according to a devastating poll released yesterday." This is the Marist poll where we told you his approval rate's down to 44%. We started the show today saying Wolf Blitzer and the mainstream media will not at all report his poll plummets when they were obsessed with Bush's. But what's buried in this story: McCain lost independents in 2008. And that was the first time a Democrat won them since they started exit polling in '72. McCain lost independents. They're now coming home, having seen what they voted for.

McCain was the one who was going to get the independents, right? McCain was the guy who was gonna cross the aisle. Remember we were all told that if we criticized Obama, the independents would get mad at us and run to the Democrats. "If we dared criticize Obama, we were done. The independents want bipartisanship! They want civility! They want everybody getting along. They don't want all of this acrimony." McCain came along and said, "I'm your guy. I'm the guy can move across the aisle. I can work with the Democrats to get things done." He was the first Republican to lose independents since 1972. That's Nixon's reelection. That includes the John Anderson and Perot races, when we had independent candidates. So tell me again, you Republicans, how we have to worry about losing independents to Democrats? We lose independents to Democrats when the country club, blue-blood, liberal Republicans run the show and implement their ideas. The era of McCain is over. The era of Reagan is alive.

RUSH: Blizzard in Washington. Blizzard in New York City. What's happening here, folks, I have it on good authority, what's causing all of this -- and this comes from our official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama Huntsville, UAH -- all of these storms and the chilly Florida winters are being caused by El Nino, you can count on it. Whenever you hear there's an El Nino you're going to get mudslides in California, you're going to get colder weather here in the South and Southeast, and you're going to get a lot of rain. Now, normally the rain would be going further north and the global warming models all predict that the cold weather would be going north and it's the exact opposite. All of this is much southerly, much more southerly than it ought to be. These two storms are merging here and they're El Nino storms, Mother Nature can't do anything about that, and it's just another nail in the coffin of the whole global warming thing, and each time, you know, every day like this, where is Algore? Where is the media asking Algore what's going on with this? I mean the IPCC has been destroyed credibility-wise. It doesn't mean that the leftist goons are giving up by any stretch, but nobody's had any curiosity to go out and try to find Algore and ask him to explain this or at least comment on it. I find that fascinating.

RUSH: Now, the National Guard is out in Washington, we have snowplows out all over from Chicago to Washington to New York. What is it that's powering these snowplows? What is it? It's the internal combustion engine. And of course it's either diesel or gasoline powering these snow blowers and the snowplows. I think we all need to have a good laugh here at the expense of the environmentalist wacko communists in New York, Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and every other snow-packed town or city whose houses are equipped with Ed Begley Jr. recommended solar panels. You got people relying on solar panels and windmills and all of these other green energy technologies. Imagine how frustrated these people are who say they're going to save the planet and they can't even save themselves. Their own technology could not get them to the grocery store during a situation like this. Their own technology would not enable them to feed themselves. They have to rely on snowplows powered by gas-guzzling combustion engines in order to get out of their driveways to drive or bike or go to a global warming protest in the middle of a blizzard. I just find this ironic, and, of course, you know me, my friends, I laugh at it.

If Congress wasn't shut down due to the weather today it could be declared National Combustion Engine Day, a tribute to one of the truly great inventions in the history of mankind. (interruption) No, no, no, Snerdley, I'm serious about this. You look at what's happened. If we relied on the green people, if we relied on the green Nazi police, if we relied on these people, we wouldn't be able to clear snow. What are we going to clear the snow with? And how about another shout-out to the blizzard first responders? Do you know who else is closed, if you want to really have a laugh, FEMA. The federal government's closed today, and along with it FEMA. The FEMA office in Washington is closed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is shut down, totally shut down. There are people nevertheless working 24/7 to clear the streets, to fix power lines, to get entire cities back to work. These are unsung heroes, and they are using the internal combustion engine and traditional energy sources in order to do their work. They never complain.

Liberals will soon be able to get back to work making life a little more difficult for every one of us while they impose higher taxes, more regulations, never-ending stream of condescension and scorn on everybody, yet they sit toasty warm inside their homes, not for anything they've done, and not for any contribution they've made. You know these guys that drive snowplows, they also drive to tea parties. These are the guys that love Sarah Palin, probably listening to me at this very moment as we give them a shout-out, unsung heroes, the people outside their homes clearing the streets so everybody, including the environmentalist wackos, can get wherever they have to go to feed themselves, to restock their shelves at the grocery store. Clearing the path so that the restocking trucks can get to the grocery store. Thank God for the internal combustion engine, my friends. Thank God for the hardworking Americans who make and drive 'em.

RUSH: I want you to listen to a couple sound bites. We're going to start here with number one, Mike, I changed my mind here on the fly. The left is clearly calling these snowstorms in the Drive-By Media the Snowpocalypse to make it sound like it's being caused by global warming. Snowpocalypse, and they've also called it Snowmageddon. I think Obama came up with that. So here's a montage of a bunch of Drive-By Media types.

RATIGAN: These Snowpocalypses that have been going through DC and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming.

RUSH: The Snowpocalypse. Is it not amazing? Is it not amazing, somebody comes up with the word and they all repeat it. That first quote was from Dylan Ratigan, who keeps being shuffled around to different time slots over at MSNBC. "Extreme weather events precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming." Global warming is causing these blizzards and record cold temperatures.

RUSH: I spoke too soon out there, ladies and gentlemen, in praising the snowplow operators. This just in. What is the term? Breaking news: "From Washington, DC, and neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland. They have just lived up to reputation as wimpy weather warriors. FoxNews.com is reporting that DC and Montgomery County, Maryland, have suspended snowplow operations as a blizzard bears down on the region." Now, remember, 25% of their snowplows were sitting idle anyway because they're in disrepair. So the government officials in DC and Montgomery County, Maryland, are failing to take advantage of the internal combustion engine and just giving up. They can't keep up with the blizzard. They'll deal with it after the blizzard hits.

RUSH: "Fifteen months ago Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of Robert Kennedy Sr. ... By the way, this is the Robert Kennedy Jr. "who flies around on private planes so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet." according to David Freddoso, the Washington, DC, Examiner. "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ... wrote a column last year on the lack of winter weather in Washington, DC. 'In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today's anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don't own a sled.'" Anyway, it goes on to say that global warming would mean no snow or cold in Washington, DC. Everywhere you look these people who have no credibility to begin with in the first place (other than having it bestowed on them by a sycophantic media), their credibility is falling apart.

RUSH: Now, listen to this. Joe Biden was on Larry King Alive last night. And Larry King, following right along with the questions they gave him, said (impression), "Are you optimistic about the jobs bill?"

BIDEN: By the spring I think people are gonna begin to have more confidence in the policies we've -- we've put in place. I think you're going to see net creation of jobs every month. Now, it's not going to be seven million jobs in the next six months. It's a depression for millions of Americans. But we took this job knowin' we were facing a gigantic hole we were going to fall into.

RUSH: Yeah, "We inherited it." You know, why don't they do something: Take the New Madrid Fault where I live -- and Obama, that's a New Madrid, Missouri, a short little stop at Cape Girardeau. There's an earthquake fault there. Been predicting the big one there just like the San Andreas for a long time. I think what Obama could do is maybe Obama and Biden have a joint, big, wallapaloozing ceremony in honor of President Bush and name the New Madrid Fault after him so it becomes "Bush's Fault." Because this seems to be the only thing these people have to say. Now, what Biden's talking about here, "The United States..." This is State-Controlled AP. "The United States is likely to average 95,000 more jobs each month this year, while personal savings will remain high as credit remains tight, according to a White House report released [today].

"The Council of Economic Advisers also trumpeted the $787 billion economic stimulus package, which it said has saved or created about 2 million jobs. In a message to Congress, President Barack Obama pointed out that the economy he inherited was losing 700,000 jobs each month but now says 95,000 jobs will be produced net every month starting this spring." Now, by this time I have a simple question. Who cares what Obama or his people say about the economy and what they predict in the future? They have been grossly wrong time and time again! Who cares what they predict? Here's the truth: The American left, the liberals, keep attacking the regulatory system that was in place before Obama was elected; when in fact it is mostly their regulatory system. They complain about inheriting deficits when in fact they pushed for even bigger deficits when Bush was president, including Senator Obama.

Senator Obama voted for every spending bill that came down the pike! He cannot distance himself from all of this. In fact, he and the Democrats were asking Bush to spend more. Look, it's the Democrats and their buddies that ran Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and we just did a Morning Update today on the sorry shape they're in. They are so in debt. They've been bailed out. There's no hope that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are ever going to get whole. The people that run Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, received tens of millions of dollars in bonuses -- and, meanwhile, Obama is out there complaining about everybody else getting bonuses. So what exactly...? I need to ask, what exactly did the Republicans do to reduce regulations? Honestly. What specifically did they do to eliminated some key regulation that would have prevented the housing collapse?

Specifics, please! They can sit around here and they can blame Bush and blame the Republicans all they want, but I want to know what the Republicans did. Because the truth of the matter is: They did it. The Community Reinvestment Act was hatched by Carter, it was expanded by Bill Clinton, it was used by ACORN and their allies to wreck the housing market by wrecking the mortgage market by demanding that mortgages be given to people who could no way pay 'em back. Ergo, the subprime mortgage crisis. It was called "affordable housing," and it was designed to wreck the whole system. AIG and the rest? I mean, I don't defend AIG, but they were trading loans (derivatives, if you will) that were based fundamentally on loans created by liberal policies. I'm really getting fed up with this notion that everything they inherited was Bush's fault.

They have doubled down on whatever was wrong! I want them to name whatever these regulations are the Republicans did that created this mess. Because my memory is that George Bush, a number of times, tried to stop some of this stuff going on with the subprime crisis. His poor regulator got up there and got beat up by Barney Frank and whoever, Chris Dodd, and the regulators just lost their teeth and kind of slinked away. I mean, the problem here, folks -- as it's always been, and I'm sure those of you who own and operate small businesses will agree with me -- is there are too many regulations. There are too many laws. You can't keep up with them, now. There's too much government interference. So here we have the left, Obama and his buddies with Biden out there on Larry King last night creating yet another lie that persists for decades: That deregulation caused this recession.

It was liberalism! It was socialism! It was big government and their liberal groups that caused all this. Deregulation? There wasn't any deregulation! That's their favorite ploy, though: "If you let the capitalist, free market system go wild, everything falls apart and only a precious few end up doing well and everybody else gets creamed because the precious few doing well are stealing from everybody else." It's absurd, it's nonsense, but this is their constant refrain. "Regulation," "reform" is always growing government, more regulations, more obstacles, more putting people behind an eight ball with more obstacles in their way so they can't possibly overcome them to be successful. We have inherited... If you want to talk about inheritance, we have inherited what Obama and his party and his friends have created, and even if we win these elections in November it is going to two or three... I don't know long. It's going to take a generation to fix all it is, the damage they have done in -- well, not just one year, because the Democrats took over the House in 2007.

You can track -- you can track -- when unemployment started track up. You can track when the GDP started to go down. You can track any number of things to the Democrats acquiring more and more power and finally President Obama in November of 2008. Take a look unemployment then. Take a look at unemployment in November 2008 and forward and you'll find that people in charge of knowing how to run a business, "Uh-oh. We in heap big doo-doo." So we have inherited, folks, what Obama and his party and his friends have created. Joe Biden.... Joe Biden was in the Senate for over 30 years. He was a big spending, free spending liberal. You will find no record at all of Biden demanding the government stop pushing banks make loans to people who couldn't afford them. Biden dares go on Larry King last night and say he inherited all this? He helped create it!

And any other Democrat in office for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, joins Biden as an architect of this disaster. Meanwhile, in case you don't know it, Obama still has not killed the Community Reinvestment Act. Obama still supports it. Obama still supports the very thing that caused the subprime mortgage crisis in the first place. ACORN still supports it. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, both of whom should be sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff, still support it. So let me challenge. They're not going to come on this program and debate me. I know they're not going to do that on health care. Let me challenge them again: Obama and the Democrats, eliminate the Community Reinvestment Act and all laws that compel banks to make loans to poor people who can't afford 'em. Let's get rid of some of these regulations, requirements that have led to this snafu and this big problem. But they're not going to do that because they want the snafu, they want the big problem, they want radical redistribution of wealth. They have targeted the US private sector, and they continue to do so each and every day, and now Obama's gone "agnostic" on middle-class tax cut.

(paraphrased) "Well, you can't say I'm for 'em now because they'll kill me for flip-flopping so I gotta act like I'm open to anything at this point," which is what he's doing, and he hopes to get away with that because of your perception of his superior intelligence. Corpse-man, 57 states, and then any time the guy speaks without a teleprompter, it's a roll of the dice. Job growth? This business of 95,000 jobs every month, net, starting this spring. Do you know why job growth is not lowering unemployment? There are a whole lot of people unemployed, not looking for jobs anymore. They're totally dispirited. A reduction in jobless claims doesn't mean these people are getting new jobs. It means they've dropped out of the system altogether. That's why you gotta look at the U6 unemployment figure, which puts it up 17, 18%. Not this 9.7%. So now they're on welfare, food stamps, what have you -- and, of course, I have a stack here with two different stories on how the food stamp stigma is gone. The welfare stigma is gone. It's just absolutely wonderful that all these programs exist for people who are unemployed. This is the purpose. They want all of us on food stamps. I'm not exaggerating. They want all of us depending primarily on government for whatever it is we have. That's who these people are. Make no mistake about it.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Just a quick note. Algore is correct about global warming. He's only off by six planets. According to photos from the Hubble, Pluto is warming up.

RUSH: Yeah, that's because of the blizzards here in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. According to noted global warming scientists here in America and at the IPCC. These massive snowstorms are not only causing global warming and are an indication of it here, but they're having a dramatic impact on the surface temperatures of what was a planet (no longer is) Pluto. It's getting bright red out there. I mean, we humans, if you think we're destroying just the

Earth (chuckles) you are wrong. We are destroying our solar system. It's all because of you. Your SUVs, your smokestacks, and all the rest of this gunk and garbage that you're putting into the atmosphere. You think it just stays here? (snorts) You seen Mars lately? You seen the storms on Jupiter? They found another eye up there! Saturn? Folks. Let's go to the audiotape. Dylan Ratigan yesterday afternoon, MSNBC.

RATIGAN: Rush Limbaugh taking me on by name today, even though I actually don't subscribe to either of the theories liberal or conservative. I was simply reporting a scientific fact: That some scientists say that higher air temperatures, when the air mass is warmer, it can retain more moisture and as a result these scientists believe that the warmer air mass -- which retains more moisture -- may subsequently offer more precipitation, something that would fall from the sky. These exact types of storms may reflect that. I honestly have no idea. I was simply reporting that that is part of the science. So to argue that the snow is evidence that there's not global warming borders on moronic.

RUSH: Well, not quite, Dylan. At least I'm glad you admit that you have no idea, but when you say you're only reporting what's part of the science, that's not true. There's no settled science on this. Are you people not aware of the hoax this has all become at East Anglia University, at the IPCC with the Himalayan glaciers? I'm going to tell you something, Dylan. What's happening with these snowstorms is exactly, according to my climate scientists -- I've got some, too, and it's settled as far as I'm concerned, Dylan. If these things continue, this is exactly what we're going to get with global cooling. Which, uh, shows you where we are. This equals global warming. Here is Morton Kondracke on Fox yesterday afternoon.

KONDRACKE: This has become theological. You know, those people who believe in global warming believe it as though it was a statement from God and vice-versa. Rush Limbaugh is convinced that it's human arrogance that even conceives that mankind could be creating global warming.

RUSH: He's right about that, but the other side does not believe it's a statement from God. They don't believe there is God! Global warming, liberalism, is their religion. Not progressivism. You, folks, I'm getting -- I'm getting pounded here by a couple people on this. Don't be fooled by this. This term "progressive," I know the history of it. It's nothing more than a mask, George Lakoff (rhymes with), the liberals come up with all kinds of lingo designed to disguise who they really are. They know the terms that hurt them. Progressive doesn't hurt them with the average, ordinary American. You can go out and do a poll: "Okay are you progressive, conservative, or liberal?" Progressive will end up higher than liberal. Because they think that sounds good. "Yeah, I'm progressive. I'm forward thinking. I'm an imaginative guy." Howard Fineman, MSNBC Countdown with Whoever. Question: "Is life on Earth going to be threatened because the people who recognized and warned about climate change didn't just go with that phrase, 'climate change,' instead chose 'global warming,' opening the opportunity for Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to kill us all?"

FINEMAN: Well, I do think that, uh, labels matter, and in retrospect simply focusing on warming was a mistake. Uh, just in terms of the politics and the salesmanship of what is undoubtedly a really, really big problem. But it's also now gotten all wrapped up in Obama and Gore and the whole big government idea.

RUSH: Let me ask: Howard, how in the world is something SCIENCE political? The very fact this is political ought to tell every one of you it's not science. Gee whiz! Yeah, they goofed up. They called it "global warming." I don't know how I'm going to kill us all, but "the politics and the salesmanship of what is undoubtedly a really, really big problem"? It's a hoax!

RUSH: We're going to go to Vancouver, Washington. This is Toni. Welcome, and great to have you here on the program.

CALLER: Oh, thank you, Rush! You know, I am just so excited to be able to have my voice heard on your powerful program.

CALLER: (giggling) Yeah, it is because let me tell you, I think I'm a middle class American. By today's standards I may be, you know, in a lower class than middle class. My husband and I this year had a combined income of just over $70,000. It was down about 20,000 this year. We live in a two -- our mortgage is 240 on a house that's now worth about 189 on today's market. And, you know, I'm not a politician, I'm not a college professor, I'm not a tax accountant. So I don't have anything probably real profound to say to you other than to speak my voice for the voice of other millions of people in my position in this country. I listen to you every day. I have a delivery route.

CALLER: It allows me to listen to you. I go home at night; my husband and I watch Fox News. So we try to keep ourselves informed. And I have to tell you, I have never in my adult life -- and I have lived through as many presidents in my adult life as you have because we're the same age and I have never -- been so -- in my life as I am this one.

RUSH: Join the club. I mean you're not alone out there, don't ever think you're alone.

CALLER: Oh, I know I'm not, Rush. And I thank you for stirring up the dust and getting so much of us mad, because America is pissed off right now. And he's going to hear our little tiny voices when it comes to election time. You know, I wish... Wouldn't this have been a great scene: To have a president come into office at a time when this country has been so economically devastated and tighten his belt and maybe not board Air Force One to take his wife to a Broadway play and maybe not gone off to Copenhagen twice for nothing at the expense of taxpayers dollars? Or how about just leaving the White House like it was and not spending our taxpayers dollars to tweak it to how he wants it. What about saying to America, "You know what? Because of how things are right now, I'm going to tighten my belt and I'm going to do this for you guys because you're having to tighten your belt." You know?

RUSH: I'm going to tell you something. You credited me with rousing people up. I didn't really do much. You're roused up on your own. I have never suggested that Obama cut back his lifestyle to show other people that he feels their pain. I have never mentioned that. You came up with that all on your own. I have laughed about the fact he flies off to Copenhagen and has it slapped down his throat that they're not going to get the Olympics, and I've laughed about him getting the Nobel Peace Prize (that I now rightfully should have won in 2007, not Gore and not the IPCC), and I've laughed about him taking his wife out to dinner in New York and so forth. But I've not suggested that he do anything in terms of his own austerity. I have laughed at him serving Kobe beef. You came up with that all on your own. My point in telling you this is that millions of people are doing the very same thing. They don't need to be riled up; they already are. They don't need to be agitated; they already are.

The service I provide is validating what you think and giving you information before you know that it comes down the pike. I'm flattered by your compliment, but don't sell yourself short on this. You and multiple millions of others have had it, for whatever reason. If it bugs you that he's not being austere in his own life while everybody else has to tighten their belts, fine and dandy. What bugs me more is this guy is single-handedly, along with his Democrat buddies up on Capitol Hill, making it worse on purpose! That's what frosts me: Making it worse on purpose while living the high life himself. The guy has no compassion. He has no emotional connection to people. You know, basically, Axelrod and these guys are salesmen. That's what Axelrod's been his whole life. He's been a salesman, political salesman. These guys have no experience in the real world governing, and we're seeing it now. They're trying to do what they did in the campaign: Trying to sell things. They're trying to continually sell things. They're not accomplishing anything. They're destroying. It really is a devastating thing to sit here and watch, frustrating as well. And people are P'd off, as you said.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for taking my call. Last night I was listening to the news and then I heard that the Social Security is now insolvent -- which is about seven, eight years sooner than what they had previously been predicting, I guess, based on our economic situation. You know, we all know the way that government's running Social Security is bigger an any Ponzi scheme that Madoff could have ever dreamed up and my question to you is: How do we get the Congress to produce legislation that will -- as painful as it might be -- put Social Security back on the road to -- to being solvent?

RUSH: Well, you remember that George W. Bush tried it. George Bush, immediately after his reelection in 2004, said he was going to use some of his political capital to reform Social Security. And he used the word "privatize," and it was a good plan. It was an excellent, excellent plan -- and it would not have touched current retirees. It would not have affected them at all, but the Democrats demagogued it. Basically what Bush... I don't remember the specifics, but a portion -- not all, a portion -- of the payroll taxes deducted each pay period from an employee's paycheck would be put into an investment fund where it would grow independently of whatever the Social Security lockbox did. See, the dirty little secret here is that the federal government has been living off Social Security for years.

Social Security was taking in more than it was paying out and they used that to make it look like the deficit was lower than it was. This has been going for decades, not just recently. Now you're right: We've reached the point where Social Security is spending, paying out, more than it's bringing in. The only way that this is going to be reformed is to do a number of things: Raise the retirement age -- and by the way, in order to get this done you're going to have to exempt from the reform changes to any of the current retirees. If you don't, they'll stop it. They will stop it dead in its tracks. Social Security, you've heard it referred to as the third rail, meaning: You touch that and you're dead. And it is. It still is. The Democrats don't want any reform whatsoever, and Obama clearly doesn't. He loves deficit spending. He loves debt!

He loves wrecking the engine that produced the golden goose. He loves killing the golden goose! But this is going to have to be reformed and everybody's been warning of this for 20 years and we've had these stopgap little "bipartisan" fixes, and all they've done is buy a little time toward the day of reckoning -- and at each one of these fixes the people that were engaged in the fix (or involved in it) are no longer around. Elected officials, I mean. They're no longer around. But it's going to have to be privatized. The Democrats were able to demagogue what Bush wanted and point to a falling stock market and say, "Do you want your Social Security money in that account? Look what's happening to the stock market! Do you want big-time Wall Street people making a profit on your Social Security contributions?"

They demagogued it all the way from here to hell just because of the word "privatization," and the reason they were successful on that is the word "security." Social Security. "Secure. You don't have to be worried about it. It's always going to be there." Then "privatization" came along. That permitted Democrats to suggest that it wasn't going to be secure anymore, and they demagogued Wall Street just as Obama is doing now. It's like the same old playbook. This is why, frankly, I get so damn frustrated, folks, with people not understanding what liberals are and what they believe and what they say and how they lie to people. The Democrats can't pay for any of their programs now! The people that have come along and tried to reform this get killed politically. They get destroyed. Yet the Democrats are taking this country off the cliff!

Liberal Democrats are taking the country off of the cliff. This young 15-year-old boy called us yesterday, "What can I do to secure my future?" Focus on grassroots. Get rid of every Democrat. The only way this country is going to be restored to the country you think it is and it always has been, is to get rid of Democrats in power. Get rid of them at the ballot box, get rid of them as a majority in any elected place -- and it's gonna take a while to depopulate the federal bureaucracy of all these career-appointed libs who are in there working against the expressed wishes of the elected representatives of the people if they're not oriented toward liberalism. It is a huge, huge fight -- and the future of the country as you and I have known it, is what hangs in the balance here.

RUSH: Did you see it snowed in Rome? "Rare Snowfall in Rome as Cold Snap Grips Italy." This is the biggest snowfall since 1986. I happened to be there during that snowfall. It was a listener trip when I was working at KFBK in Sacramento. We had a cheap travel agent that booked us in some dormitory of some nearby college, and we got over there, 14 inches of snow when we woke up the first day, and it was just freezing, cold as it could be. I saw that today and wasn't it just earlier this week when we were talking about global warming getting a real blow with all these snowstorms on the East Coast, the pro-global warming people said, "Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I mean, look, there's no snow and it's not even below 50 degrees up there for the winter Olympics."

"Snow, rain, and fog may replace gold, silver, and bronze this weekend at Whistler Mountain, site of the Alpine skiing events at the 2010 Winter Games. Olympic meteorologists at the venue predict inclement weather through Sunday, making it increasingly likely that the men's downhill on Saturday and the women's super combined on Sunday could be delayed," because of a blizzard. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Also, you know, it is amazing to watch, it really is amazing to watch all of these pro-global warming people who admit that it's all a political issue, trying to tell us that warm air creates more snow. So NewsBusters went out and compared temperatures during these recent snowstorms to the seasonal norms. In Washington, the normal average temperature December 18th and 19th is 39 degrees. The actual average temperature on those two days was 30 and 26 when they had some snow. February 5th and 6th, normal temperature, 36. The actual temperatures, 34 and 27. And February 10th, the average temperature is 37, it was 25, the actual temperature on that day.

So the temperatures are not warmer, causing all of this snow, ladies and gentlemen. And it's hilarious for me to watch all this. Global warming, they say, causes more snow, right? Well, then global cooling would cause less snow? I mean, different ways of saying the same thing, right? As one who is possessed with a tremendous amount of logic and critical thinking capability that would have to be true. But when there is less snow, the alarmists say that's because of global warming. When there is more snow, they say it's because of global warming. Now, you cannot have it both ways, otherwise you're contradicting yourself and proving that all you are is on a political mission. Now, we've heard from all the experts, all the members of Congress, all the experts in the media telling us that these record snowfalls are just proof of global warming. Well, let's go back to the audio sound bites. We have about seven of them here. March 21st, 2002, from the Senate floor. Not enough snow was falling back then and Robert Byrd said this proved global warming.

BYRD 2002: We need a climate change strategy badly. Look at the kind of winter we've had here in Washington. One snow, three inches? What can we expect for the spring and summer seasons? What's going to happen to our crops, our livestock, our economy? This is serious. I've lived a long time, 84 years. Something's going wrong out there. I don't need a scientist to tell me that. We had better do something about it.

RUSH: You gotta listen to this, folks. These are Democrats complaining global warming proved by no snow. No snow in Washington, 2002, proves global warming. Yesterday and the day before, all of this snow in Washington proves global warming. They both can't be right. Here's Barbara Boxer, October 29th, 2007, on the Senate floor.

BOXER 2007: He also remarked that the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70% of the snow pack will disappear. Now, no wonder we have people visiting our offices who are just already hurting from the recreation industry in this nation. They see what's happening. They see the handwriting on the wall. We have to act.

RUSH: The ski industry was visiting her office. By the way, do you know why we have Presidents Day? The ski industry. The ski industry lobbied for a three-day holiday during the height of ski season in February so that's one of the reasons why there's a Presidents Day. So almost three years ago, well, two and a half years ago, Barbara Boxer worried, not enough snow, ski industry complaining, global warming. Snowmobile association upset, too. April 22nd, 2008, in Washington, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota, on the Senate floor.

KLOBUCHAR 2008: I heard it from the head of our snowmobile association who testified at a forum that I had with our governor on climate change in January because they've seen decreasing snow levels. I hear about it from ice fishermen because they have seen that it takes longer for the ice to freeze and they can't put their fish house out.

RUSH: Oh, man, global warming as recently as 2007 because there's no ice and there's no snow. Now we have record snows and it proves global warming. Barbara Boxer, March 19th, 2009, environment public works economy hearing.

BOXER 2009: Looking at the United States of America, the IPCC clearly warned that unchecked global warming will lead to reduced snow pack in the western mountains, critically reducing access to water, which is our lifeblood.

RUSH: Lack of snow could threaten the water supply, lack of snow due to global warming. Di Fi, same theme, June 21st, 2005, on the Senate floor.

FEINSTEIN 2005: The Sierra Nevada snow pack is the largest source of water. The snow pack equals about half the storage capacity of all of California's man-made reservoirs. By the end of the century, the shrinking of the snow pack will eliminate the water source for 16 million people.

RUSH: Are you catching this, folks? This is out and out BS. These are full-fledged lies brought about by a political allegiance to a leftist scam and hoax called global warming. We may have snow in all 50 states by the time this weekend is over. In fact, it did snow in northern Florida. I think at an Air Force Base. They're getting 12 inches of global warming in Montgomery, Alabama. Twelve inches of global warming in Alabama! It's 'cause of global warming, ladies and gentlemen. And yet two years ago, five years ago, three years ago, the lack of snow was due to global warming. I'm playing all these just to illustrate for you that these people have no idea what they're talking about. They're simply pushing a political agenda. Barbara Boxer again, October 29th, 2007, Senate floor.

BOXER 2007: The potential consequences will be devastating for our families in the future and for the world. Now we're seeing the early warning signs. People can come down to this floor and say whatever they want. We've seen melting of snow, we have seen melting of permafrost, increased temperatures, warming of lakes, rivers, oceans, changes in the seasons.

RUSH: We've seen none of that. We haven't seen any changes in the seasons! Twenty-five years ago, 14 inches of snow, 26 years ago in Rome, it's happened again. Is that a trend? Is it an anomaly or is it just nature? Could it just be nature? Jay Inslee, representative, Democrat, Washington, on the House floor, ski industry again.

INSLEE 2005: The ski industry in the Cascade Mountains in Washington essentially was shut down this year. My son's on ski patrol and he worked for three days this year, there was no snow. And having no snow is consistent with what the models will predict will become a significant problem for us in the future.

RUSH: That's July 20th, 2005, no snow, global warming, oh, the models are telling us huge problems. Now record snowfalls, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, it's global warming. They cannot have it both ways. You can't say when there's less snow that's global warming and when there's more snow than normal that's global warming. They're trying to but it will not pass the smell test.

RUSH: Very seriously, ladies and gentlemen, this global warming hoax, this climate change stuff borders on criminal corruption, criminal political corruption. You think of all of the billions that have been spent ostensibly to protect things and people from global warming, and it's all been a scam, nothing more than a huge transfer of wealth. It is a giant scam. It is political corruption, what has happened. It's funny to listen to these people make fools of themselves and I love doing it, and it's not very hard. Just play their own words. I just got a note from a good friend: "Way to go, Rush, very smooth. You made 'em look foolish." I replied: "Easy. They are." But they're also dangerous. This is political criminal corruption, what is happening here, and just as they have ensnared the media to provide all kinds of propaganda for all the other political corruption that comes from liberalism, the Democrat Party, et al, they're doing it in global warming as well. Think of the money that need not have been spent on any of this. It's getting crazier and crazier.

RUSH: Let me ask you a question, folks. Who has done more damage to our way of life and that of free people around the world, the SDS Weather Underground -- Students for a Democratic Society, the sixties bunch, the Bill Ayers types -- or the man-made global warming weathermen? I would maintain to you that the man-made global warming weathermen from your local meteorologists (with some exceptions), to these idiots on cable TV, to everybody in the liberal Democrat Party who believes this and wants to advance it as a political issue has done more damage than even Bill Ayers wanted to do.

Florida school district was going to spend Stimulus money on Ipods. Since this story came out, I understand they have changed their minds:

Huffington Post on how Chicago thugs on the Obama team are sinking the White House:

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

The National Journal, which is a political journal (which, at first glance, seems to be pretty even-handed):

And I am hoping that most people see this as non-partisan: Citizens Against Government Waste:

This website reveals a lot of information about politicians and their relationship to money. You can find out, among other things, how many earmarks that Harry Reid has been responsible for in any given year; or how much an individual Congressman’s wealth has increased or decreased since taking office.

This is an outstanding website which tells the truth about Obama-care and about what the mainstream media is hiding from you:

Politico.com is a fairly neutral site (or, at the very worst, just a little left of center). They have very good informative videos at:

On Obama (if you have not visited this site, you need to check it out). He is selling a DVD on this site as well called Media Malpractice; I have not viewed it yet, except pieces which I have seen played on tv and on the internet. It looks pretty good to me.

Conservative Review
Issue #114	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	February 14, 2010