LFTC - Letter From The Capitol

Education Bright Light

I find little to cheer about re education.  Here is one item to give good cheer....

ObamaCare: 100-Day Report Card

Two GOP senators, both doctors, grade ObamaCare's first 100 days: flunk!....

Dopey Feds: Gulf Spillover & Homeland Security Imbecilities

Read how Team Obama refused instant expert help, to protect unions & placate enviro-fools, and scream....

Prepare to Meet Thy Doom!

We are overdue for an Asteroid Catastrophe....

Federal Judge Drills Obama's Deepwater Drilling Ban

A federal judge blasted an agency order to halt deep Gulf drilling for 6 months....

America's $130 Trillion Future

America's official federal national debt is some $13TR, but America's real load may be $130TR....

Afghanistan: "There's Gold in Them Thar Hills!"

Afghanistan, graveyard of empires, has $1TR in buried mineral treasure too.  Which means....

America's Exploding Debt/Tax Bomb

By 2012 total US public debt will exceed US Gross Domestic Product, and there are more ominous signs...

Solar Storms: Coming Catastrophe?

NASA sees rising solar storm activity increasingly endangering vital global communications....

Market Crash Dive: Financial Doomsday Augury?

The recent monster market mini-crash exposes serious flaws in the world trading system.  Why we should expect more like it....

Greek Mythology & Reality in A.D. 2010

A Washington Post op-ed from two financial policy mavens offers us five myths about the Greek debt crisis, that Americans should understand....

Offshore Oil: "Drill, Britain, Drill!"

Good news overseas, bad news back home, on the offshore oil front....

Gulf Oil Spill Spillover

Offshore oil drilling will continue all around the world, even if the US curtails planned new drilling....

Energy expert Robert Bryce offers 7 cogent observations on the Gulf Oil spill....

Gulf Oil Spill: Aussie Augury

Bad news mounts re Gulf Oil spill....

Wall Street Wiseguys & Washington Wisdom

In a 16-minute video CNBC financial anchor Dylan Ratigan eviscerates the unholy trinity of hedge fund, insurance company & government players who colluded to reap huge insider profits, at the expense of outsiders unaware of clandestine collusion by those pushing complex financial instruments.  There is more shocking news....

Earth Day + 40: Running on Empty

Scientist Richard Lindzen sees climate change discredited as Earth Day turns 40.  It is, to me, no coincidence that Earth Day, which sparked a revolution that changed politics, comes on the anniversary date of another revolutionary who changed politics, Lenin.  Both revolutions championed government control over individuals.  Neither change was for the better.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, Economy, Climate Change, Conservative Politics

A Pet Swan for Al Gore

The Daily Telegraph reports on an obnoxious swan bedeviling Cambridge rowers.  Maybe Al Gore needs a pet....

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Climate Change, Conservative Politics

Iceland's Ash: Mother Nature's Message to Al Gore

Reuters reports that Iceland's volcanic tremors are increasing; the news agency offers scenarios as to how the Icelandic volcanic ash problem will play out....It can get a lot worse....

Taxes: Locking in American Decline

Mark Steyn at NRO details the key tax policies driving America into permanent economic decline.  Juxtapose the lopsided 75 percent share of income tax revenues collected from the top 10 percent of income filers with the number of taxpayers who pay zero taxes now 47 percent & soon to cross 50 percent, thus creating a permanent beneficiary class who benefit from spending now matter how high deficits soar, and America's grand run looks to be over.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Economy, Conservative Politics

Pick the Next Eco-Panic!

WSJ pundit Bret Stephens sees global warming cooling down, and offers readers a contest: pick the next eco-panic started by the Greens, and win a lunch in NYC with him!!  Enjoy a witty sally at Gore & Friends.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Climate Change, Conservative Politics

Subprime Mortgage Meltdown: How One Fund Manager Saw It Coming

Michael Barry made tons of money betting for several years that the sub-prime mortgage market would collapse in 2007.  He explains why he foresaw it, and asks why the Fed & top economists did not foresee it.  A bracing op-ed.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Economy, Conservative Politics

March 2010 Jobs Gain: What Does It Mean?

The Washington Post headlines that the jobless rate may climb as more unemployed re-enter the job-search market.  Long-term unemployment (over 6 months) has reached record levels.  But the WP, while citing Team Obama officials on the Sunday shows, ignored points made by critics that paint a fuller picture....

ObamaCare: Lethal Medicine for Jobs

Hudson scholar and former labor economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth debunks the job-creation claims made on behalf of ObamaCare.  Higher costs, fewer tax breaks, you get the picture.  MD Stanley Goldfarb explains why the newly-insured will not decrease their use of emergency room care.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, Economy, Conservative Politics

Fundamental Science: Europe Leads, America Secedes

So you don't care about the success of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, with a record-setting energy collision that was the strongest since the Big Bang?  Well, you should....

Arctic Ice Pack Above Normal in 2010!!

More bad news for Al Gore: Arctic ice comeback this year.  Polar bears win, Al Gore loses again.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Foreign Policy, UN, Economy, Climate Change, Conservative Politics

Will Inconvenient Icelandic Truth Put Global Warming on Ice?

Two volcanoes on Iceland are making signs of a major eruption.  Prior episodes at times had significant climate cooling impact, as in the late 18th century.  Al Gore may discover a Truly Inconvenient Truth.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Economy, Climate Change, Conservative Politics

Our ObamaCare Future

This short piece on Britain's National Health Service says it all: Under the current Labor Government cost is up 60 percent, output up 4 percent and doctors do what the government tells them in return for higher wages.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Economy, Conservative Politics

Eco-Terror: Piping Plovers, Sniping Bureaucrats

What do piping plovers have to do with the rich?  Try last weekend's storm and the Hamptons, Long Island.

Corporate Debt Bomb

Ready for the latest "bomb"?  The New York Times reports that corporate debt is on the brink....

The Future of YOUR Health Records?

The Telegraph UK reports that doctors in Britain say that the National Health Service is secretly uploading patient health data to a government database before people can exercise their legal right to opt out.  NHS is supposed to give people 12 weeks public notice.  There are 1.3M people in the database now, with 50M slated by 2011, to then make it the planet's largest health database.

Pensions: Prudent Private Investment, Reckless Public Investment

The New York Times reports that while private firms reduce the risk profile in their pension investments the public sector pension managers are making riskier investments, ISO higher returns needed to cover promises made but not yet funded that you--yes you, the taxpayer--are underwriting....

UK's "Green" Future: USA Next?

The Daily Mail Online reports on "spy chips" embedded in trash bins that monitor residential trash disposal to see if residents are meeting Green garbage disposal requirements.  Al Gore's pals will surely ship this across the pond to our shores soon.

Chile, Haiti: Handling Hell

WSJ pundit Bret Stephens credits Milton Friedman's economic nostrums for creating the enterprise & wealth that made Chile a first-world country, and an economic leader in Latin America.  Anne Applebaum sees rule of law and social cohesion enabling Chile to recover from the massive quake. As for Haiti....

Vancouver: West Tops East

Financial economist Mark Skousen sees a lesson for President Obama from America's best-ever Winter Olympics showing: private enterprise produces the best results.  David Brooks divines a cultural lesson in Norway's success--matching America's gold medal haul.  But Mother Russia is not so happy....

LFTC - Climate Change Climbdown

World weather agencies agreed to launch an independent review of climate data findings, after Climategate sparked an uproar; the UN climate data flaws are fundamental, a Daily Telegraph pundit writes.  The announcement came as another two feet of snow blanketed New York City, setting a February all-time mark treble the monthly average.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Foreign Policy, UN, Economy, Climate Change, Conservative Politics

LFTC - Climate Change: Warmists Walloped Anew!

Britain's climate office called for a full IPCC do-over.  Thomas Karl, the man nominated to be Team Obama's chief climate official at the Commerce Department has been accused of suppressing contrary data in the warming debate.  His alleged data suppression came during his 1998 - 2010 tenure as head of the National Climatic Data Center, the nation's top climate data archive. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) called for a Senate investigation of climate change fraud.

LFTC - Another Warmist "Study" Bites the Dust!

Another warmist study has been withdrawn: this one on allegedly rising sea levels.  The claim was 82 centimeters--32 inches--by the end of the 21st century.  Now it is: we do not know.  Thanks guys.  WSJ pundit L. Gordon Crovitz says that transparency must rule scientist claims in the Internet age....

LFTC - Climate Change Meltdown: Wilting Warmists

Begin with Rich Lowry's crisp NRO piece quoting Voltaire: "Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."  Next: the UN climate chief quit.  Below, reproduced from the Wall Street Journal, is a smashing post from James Taranto's Best of the Web, summarizing the growing magnitude of the global warmist collapse....

LFTC - Muslims: Down on in Laden, Fundamentalist Islam & Jews

This article on the latest Pes Global Attitudes Project gives highlights from Pew's latest global survey of Muslims.  Bascially, most Muslims dislike bin Laden, dislike throwback Islamic fundamentalism and dislike Jews.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, National Security, Terrorism, Foreign Policy, Conservative Politics

LFTC - Dallas: Snow Belts Sunbelt

Friday's record foot-plus snowfall in Dallas is the latest wintry gift to climate skeptics.  An Oklahoma U. student is photographing snow in each state; this week all 48 continental states sported snow cover (add Alaska, a given; Hawaii, not until an asteroid creates nuclear winter).  A generation ago writer Kirkpatrick Sale coined the terms Snowbelt & Sunbelt to describe migration of voters from the industrial northeast to the industrializing southwest.  Now Dallas, it seems, has joined the Snowbelt.

It gets better, with the case of the non-existent desert squirrels....

LFTC - Global Warming Daze

Best of the Web's James Taranto has a little fun at the expense of Warmists.  As Warmists whine that big snows are not a refutation of climate trends, Taranto reminds Warmists that they did not say such things when hot summers were making headlines in the late 1980s & 1990s.  Read on and enjoy....

LFTC - Global Debt Bomb Exploding?

It may seem churlish to publish a Forbes article on how burgeoning global debt may sink the United States economy, on the 201st calendar anniversary of Honest Abe's birthday.  One example of how bad things are: the US will accounts for 45 percent of all global borrowing in 2010--more than the 36 percent combined total for China, Japan, India, Germany, United Kingdom, France & Spain!  In a New York Post op-ed, historian Arthur Herman notes that China is now America's largest creditor.  China holds $789.6B of US debt, Japan $749B & Britain is next at a distant $277B: China's share of total US debt holdings is now 6.5 percent.  (Demography maven Joel Kotkin sees China also vulnerable in the way Japan was 25 years ago.)  Nor does what Bill Kristol aptly terms "crony capitalism" help: President Obama has no clue what real capitalism is.  It is entrepreneurial business, not cronyism in the corporate clubhouse by slick well-connected insiders.

Economist Michael Boskin warns that US debt, at 84 percent of GDP, is approaching the 90 percent magic mark: above that level history teaches, country economic fortunes sharply decline.  Much more on this, the article offers a chilling set of charts tracing sovereign debt defaults back 200 years.  Yes, Uncle Sam just might go bust.  Brother, can you spare a trillion?....

LFTC - The Green Police Are Watching You!

Jonah Goldberg at NRO writes of the "Gorewellian" Super Bowl Ad: Audi 2010 Green Car Super Bowl Ad (link is in his text), which shows enviro-police nabbing enviro-miscreants for piddling offenses in a supermarket and in several homes.  JG notes that the ad is pro-Green, yet what it depicts is petty police-state harassment of the citizenry.  The NRO editors see a "Climate Gotterdammerung" in recent revelations of faked science, phony scholarship, politicized pronouncements, etc. from the crowd that gave us the Copenhagen Cabonfest last December.

And BTW, a Senate global warming hearing in DC was canceled due to blizzard conditions.  (OK, this proves nothing, but Al Gore crowed to the skies every time in the last 20+ years that each hot day proved warming was underway...."Sauce for the goose....")

Bottom Line.  Combine the above with Old Man Winter's serial "Snowpocalyspes"--appropriately leaving the nation's capital with an all-time season-record snowfall--and more inconvenient truths are piling up in Al Gore's (Green, carbon-neutral) in-box.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Foreign Policy, UN, Economy, Climate Change, Conservative Politics

LFTC - Will US Energy Squeeze be Ended by Shale Oil Gusher?

Manhattan Institute energy maven Max Schulz sees a shale-oil bonanza saving US energy from OPEC's talons.  His best evidence that very recent technology change is for real--Exxon is investing $41B--yes, $4` billion--in American shale oil....

LFTC - Climate Change: The Latest UN Junk Science Hiccup

Historian Walter Russell Mead blogs on the latest junk science non-evidence presented by global warmists & swallowed hook, like & sinker by the UN whale: alarmist projections of African crop shrinkage utterly unsupported by factual finding.  Enjoy the gory details of the latest UN warmist meltdown.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Foreign Policy, UN, Economy, Climate Change

LFTC - Official Unemployment Rate 9.7 Percent, But Hold the Champagne

The unemployment numbers released Friday show that the magic 9/7 percent rate hides more than it reveals.  S Fox Business News anchor Stuart Varney noted, the reason the politically-significant number fell from toxic 10 percent to less toxic 9.7 is a dolorous one: 1.1M people stopped looking for work, and thus are no longer counted in the big-picture number.  But there is more, MUCH more in the numbers underneath....

LFTC - UN Global Warming Scandal: Schoolboy Sourcing

ANOTHER UN Global Warming Scandal: Schoolboy Sourcing!!  The Daily Telegraph UK reports that UN glacier melt data on the Andes, Alps & Africa was in part based upon two suspect sources: (a) a geography student's paper and (b) anecdotal accounts from mountaineers published in a popular climbers' magazine!

LFTC - Health Care: A Brit's US & UK Experience

British military officer Tim Wilson has real-life experience with US (happy) & UK (unhappy) health care.  To borrow from Will Shakespeare, "leave us not fly to ills we know not of..."  the "slings & arrows" of America's health system are painful, but less poisonous than those wielded by our UK (and other European) friends.

On Thursday Democrats shelved plans to push through a comprehensive overhaul of health care, just one day after the President declared in his State of the Union address that health care reform remains a top administration priority.

LFTC - UN Climate Panel Snow-Melts Down

Last week the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted "error" in the panel's 2007 finding that the Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035.  Specifically, the IPCC had said that the probability of them “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.  The UK Times Online reports the juicy details:

It emerged last week that the prediction was based not on a consensus among climate change experts but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. That scientist, Syed Hasnain, has now told The Times that he never made such a specific forecast in his interview with the New Scientist magazine.

“I have not made any prediction on date as I am not an astrologer but I did say they were shrinking fast,” he said. “I have never written 2035 in any of my research papers or reports.” Professor Hasnain works for The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the climate change panel.

Dr Pachauri has defended the panel’s work, while trying to distance himself from Professor Hasnain by saying that the latter was not working at the institute in 1999: “We slipped up on one number, I don’t think it takes anything away from the overwhelming scientific evidence of what’s happening with the climate of this Earth.”

Professor Hasnain confirmed that he had given an interview to Fred Pearce, of New Scientist, when he was still working for Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1999. “I said that small glaciers in the eastern and central Himalaya are declining at an alarming rate and in the next 40-50 years they may lose substantial mass,” he said. “That means they will shrink in area and mass. To which the journalist has assigned a date and reported it in his own way.” Mr Pearce was not immediately available for comment.

Despite the "error" the IPCC chief (predictably--it's the UN, after all) stands behind the UN's overall assertions re global warming.  The 2007 Himalayan scare-IPCC finding won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (shared with--who else?--Al Gore).  This WSJ editorial adds detail on how absurd the IPCC's 2007 "finding" was--and is.  Christopher Booker at UK Telegraph adds spice on "Glaciergate":

Until now it has been generally reported that the IPCC based its offending paragraph on an interview Dr Hasnain gave to the New Scientist in June 1999. This was a time when global warming researchers were busy making ever more extravagant claims in the run-up to the IPCC's 2001 report. It was in that year that Dr Michael Mann in America launched on the world his famous "hockey stick" graph, purporting to show that temperatures had risen faster in the late 20th century than ever before in the Earth's history. The graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, though it has since been comprehensively discredited.

In fact Dr Hasnain had first made his own controversial claim two months earlier, in a much longer interview with an Indian environmental magazine, Down to Earth, in April 1999. It was the wording of this interview which the IPCC was to quote almost exactly in its 2007 report.

Clearly the IPCC was aware that to cite a little Indian magazine as the reference for such a startling prediction would hardly seem sound scientific practice. But it discovered that Dr Hasnain's slightly later interview with New Scientist had been quoted in a 2005 report by the environmental campaigning group WWF. So it was this, rather oddly, which the IPCC cited as its authority – even though the words it quoted were taken directly from the earlier interview.

Booker notes the contemptible smearing of an Indian climate expert by the UN chief at the center of this latest climate humbug:

Last November, however, Dr Raina, the country's most senior glaciologist, published a report for the Indian government showing that the rate of retreat of Himalayan glaciers had not increased in the past 50 years and that the IPCC's predictions were recklessly alarmist. This provoked the furious reaction from Dr Pachauri that tarred Dr Raina's report as "arrogant" and "voodoo science". Only weeks later came the devastating revelation that the IPCC's own prediction had no scientific foundation.

Dr Pachauri's first response to these revelations was to claim that he had "absolutely no responsibility" for the blunder, that it was "the work of independent authors – they're responsible". But the IPCC's error was so blatant that last week Pachauri and other senior officials had to put out their remarkable statement, admitting that it had been due to a serious system failure.

Even more damaging now, however, will be the revelation that the source of that offending prediction was the man whom Dr Pachauri himself has been employing for two years as the head of his glaciology unit at TERI – and that TERI has won a share in two major research contracts based on a scare over the melting of Himalayan glaciers prominently promoted by the IPCC, using words drawn directly from Dr Hasnain.

The UN scientist now admits using unverified glacier data to put pressure on world leaders to act.  The Hindu reports that India & China will NOT sign the Copenhagen Accord.  (HT reports that all of four countries, only two of them major nations--Australia, Canada, Papua New Guinea and the Maldives--have signed Copenhagen to date.)  Bruce Chapman added thoughts on his Discovery Blog entry, "I'm melting, I'm melting!".

Bottom Line.  It's another gift for the climate skeptics (myself included), another raspberry for the UN (which earns raspberries regularly) and a double-raspberry for the Nobel Peaceniks, who decided that in addition to awarding the Peace Prize to dreamers, terrorists and totalitarians it was a good idea to reward climate alarmists.  For this year's Peace Prize, how about awarding it to the Himalayan glaciers, for deciding to stick around?

LFTC - Haiti: The Doomsday Clock Strikes Midnight

British physician and pundit Theodore Dalrymple offers a two-page summary of Haiti's desperation and its dismaying likely future.  Of the latter he writes, ignoring fashionable P.C.:

....No one can remain unmoved by the pictures of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake (the situation outside the capital remains unknown, but one can imagine). Everything that can be done should be done: the financial resources necessary are, comparatively speaking, tiny.

But because of the very problems that contributed so much to the disaster in the first place -- appalling infrastructure, absent administration -- such relief will be difficult to provide efficiently, without the absurdities of supplies accumulating where they are not useful, and not reaching the places where they're desperately needed. Terrible as the Haitian army was, and often harmful as its role was, its deliberate and total dissolution in 1994 may now be a severe handicap, an unintended consequence of a good intention. And after the immediate crisis has passed, what? International administration? Restoration of national sovereignty under a government incapable of governing? More aid that results in little but corruption and infighting?

Laissez-faire? The mind reels.

In ghastly conjunction with Haiti's unfolding agony, a Royal Caribbean luxury cruise liner carried on with docking elsewhere at Haitian beaches, for the amusement of its passengers.  The action has proven a PR disaster, as well it should be.  True, tourist revenue is routinely collected all across the world by countries riven with desperate poverty, but in the midst of a mega-catastrophe decency demands suspending business-as-usual.

Bottom Line.  Terribly and tragically, the mind indeed reels at Haiti's suffering, and worst of all, the even greater suffering likely to come, despite the best of foreign intentions.  A slow-motion train wreck fails to capture the immensity of the catastrophe now unfolding; more apposite is a slow-motion asteroid collision.