All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

Nancy Pelosi: 1800 waivers for Obamacare were given to small firms – like McDonald’s

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From Guy Benson at TownHall. Nancy Pelosi thinks that the waivers for Obamacare were only given to small companies… some of them very, very, small companies.

Excerpt:

The spin:

[Nancy Pelosi speaking]: “They’re small. I couldn’t speak to all 1,800 of them, but some of the lists that I have seen have been very, very small companies. They will not have a big impact on the economy of our country.”

Flashback I:

Nearly a million workers won’t get a consumer protection in the U.S. health reform law meant to cap insurance costs because the government exempted their employers. Thirty companies and organizations, including McDonald’s and Jack in the Box, won’t be required to raise the minimum annual benefit included in low-cost health plans, which are often used to cover part-time or low-wage employees.
Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.
And more:
UPDATE – Obama: Bring back Speaker Pelosi!

President Obama on Saturday said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was a great House Speaker and that she will get that job back after the 2012 elections.  “I am biased, but I think Nancy was one of the best Speakers of the House this country ever had,” Obama said after Pelosi had introduced him at the National Italian American Foundation gala.  “She was no doubt the best Italian American Speaker of the House we ever had. And I believe that she will be the best Speaker of the House again in 2013.”

The Weekly Standard notes that over half of the Obamacare waivers were given to big unions – the same big unions that spent millions to get Obama elected.

Excerpt:

Not surprisingly, it helps to be a Democratic ally when seeking a waiver. The Republican Policy Committee reports that over half of the workers that have been exempted so far belong to unions:

The plans newly approved for waivers cover more than 160,000 people, bringing to nearly 3.1 million the number of individuals in plans exempted from the health law’s requirements.  Of the participants receiving waivers, more than half – over 1.55 million – are in union plans, raising questions of why such a disproportionate share of union members are receiving waivers from the law’s requirements.  The percentage of participants receiving waivers that come from unions also continues to rise – the number was 48% in April, and 45% in March.

Unions already received a generous concession in the health care bill. Their generous “cadilac” insurance plans were exempted from being taxed until 2018, adding about $120 billion to the bill’s cost over ten years.

This is the woman who treated the national debt like her own personal credit card and rang up 5.34 trillion in purchases over the four years that she was Speaker of the House.

Videos

Mitt Romney flip-flop videos: flat tax, abortion, health care, public sector unions, global warming

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Most of the other Republican candidates are supporting flat taxes. But what does Mitt Romney support?

Human Events explains.

Excerpt:

In a full page Boston Globe advertisement in 1996, Romney attacked Steve Forbes’ flat tax proposal as being unfair and a “tax cut for fat cats!”

In the ad, he took an entirely populist theme saying among other things that the Forbes flat tax will drop taxes on the super-rich while stiffing the middle class.

The ad said, “0% Forbes tax on Kennedy’s, Rockefellers, and Forbes down and gone,” and on the other side said, “Forbes tax on you up and up!”

The Club for Growth noted Romney’s opposition to the flat tax in it’s white paper:

His strident opposition to the flat tax is most curious and difficult to explain since Romney wasn’t a political candidate at the time. In 1996, he ran a series of newspaper ads in Boston, New Hampshire, and Iowa denouncing the 17% flat tax proposed by then presidential candidate Steve Forbes as a “tax cut for fat cats.”   In 2007, Romney continued to oppose the flat tax with harsh language, calling the tax “unfair.”

That’s Romney’s actual view on tax reform. Whatever he says during an election campaign cannot be believed, because the man will say anything to get elected. Don’t believe me? Watch the videos below.

This short video shows a few of Romney’s biggest flip flops.

Note: I don’t support John Huntsman, but that’s a good look at Romney’s flip-flops.

Another one on global warming:

Another one on health care:

And another one on public sector unions:

Why is this man getting 20% of the vote in the Republican primary? He is not a serious candidate. Stop judging on appearances and make a right judgment.

Read more about Mitt Romney’s horrible policies in Massachusetts in this post.

News

Berkeley warmist Richard Muller accused of “hiding the decline” by team member

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From UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree  centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.

But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of  trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no  scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.

Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

[…]Prof Muller also wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It was here, under the headline ‘The case against global warming scepticism’, that he proclaimed ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’.

This, too, went around the world, with The Economist, among many others, stating there was now ‘little room for doubt’.

Such claims left Prof Curry horrified.

‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’

In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

[…][Guelph University professor]Prof McKittrick added: ‘The fact is that many of the people who are in a position to provide informed criticism of this work are currently bound by confidentiality agreements.

‘For the Berkeley team to have chosen this particular moment to launch a major international publicity blitz is a highly unethical sabotage of the peer review  process.’

In Prof Curry’s view, two of the papers were not ready to be  published, in part because they did not properly address the arguments of climate sceptics.

As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the  statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’

Should I be surprised that the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, etc. would publish alarmist propaganda before doing their homework? Every single one of them trumpets the fact that this man is a “global warming skeptic”.  The truth is, of course, that he is nothing of the kind.

The San Francisco Chronicle explains. (H/T Junk Science)

Excerpt:

Although Muller estimates 2 in 3 odds that humans are causing global warming, “the fact that the original conclusion of Mann et al. is ‘plausible’ is damning with faint praise,” he said. “Theories are plausible; discoveries are supposed to be proven.”

Can these mainstream media journalists check anything before swallowing hoaxes hook, line and sinker?

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