Tag Archives: Socialism

News

Number of states with white Christmas highest in 11 years

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

 Those humming the words to “White Christmas” got their wish big-time as snow covered more than half the lower 48 states as of mid-December, putting snowless winters on the pile of failed climate predictions.

More than half of the continental U.S. had snow cover as of Dec. 15, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the most in 11 years. That exposes as worthless the predictions of the climate scammers of snowless winters as far as the eye can see. In 2006, by comparison, snow covered just 12% of these states.

[…]We recall the prediction in 2000 by Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, that winter snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” and claiming, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Of course, we all remember that researchers with the CRU at East Anglia were responsible for omitting climate data with the purpose, according to uncovered email, to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.

The temperatures that have flatlined over the last 15 years can no longer be hidden, and neither can the whir of snowblowers all across America this Christmas, as state after state gets hit with bitter cold and snow.

Using computer models seemingly based on that old computer adage “garbage in, garbage out,” models that cannot even predict the past, the climate Chicken Littles are prone to predict snowless winters, glacier-free Himalayas and an ice-free North Pole. Polar bears would drown and Santa would have no place to land.

In his Dec. 10, 2007, “Earth has a fever” speech as he accepted his Nobel Prize, climate extremist Al Gore mentioned a prophecy of doom by U.S. climate scientist Wieslaw Maslowski.

Maslowski said the Arctic’s summer ice could “completely disappear” by 2013 due to global warming arising from carbon emissions. He was off by only a little. The Arctic had 920,000 square miles of ice more than it had in 2012, the largest year-to-year increase on record.

German scientists Carl-Otto Weiss and Horst-Joachim Luedecke of the European Institute for Climate and Energy reported recently that two naturally occurring cycles would combine to lower global temperatures this century and that temperature levels would decline to levels similar to the “little ice age” of 1870.

I’m not sure how the lefties are going to spin this news, but I’m pretty sure that the only solution to our ongoing “climate crisis” is going to be more government control of corporations and individuals. It always is.

News

EPA climate change expert defrauded government of nearly $1 million in salary and benefits

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From NBC News.

Excerpt:

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits  over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his lies were a “crime of massive proportion” that were “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.

[…]Until he retired in April after learning he was under federal investigation, Beale, an NYU grad with a masters from Princeton, was earning a salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, making him the highest paid official at the EPA. He earned more money than Gina McCarthy, the agency’s administrator and, for years, his immediate boss, according to agency documents.

In September, Beale, who served as a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000. Beale perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he did “absolutely no work,” as Kern, Beale’s lawyer, acknowledged in his court filing.

To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials — including McCarthy — that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.

“Due to recent events that you have probably read about, I am in Pakistan,” he wrote McCarthy in a Dec. 18, 2010 email. “Got the call Thurs and left Fri. Hope to be back for Christmas ….Ho, ho, ho.”

In fact, Beale had no relationship with the CIA at all. Sullivan, the EPA investigator, said he confirmed Beale didn’t even have a security clearance. He spent much of the time he was purportedly working for the CIA at his Northern Virginia home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod.

“He’s never been to Langley (the CIA’s Virginia headquarters),” said Sullivan. “The CIA has no record of him ever walking through the door.”

Nor was that Beale’s only deception, according to court documents. In 2008, Beale didn’t show up at the EPA for six months, telling his boss that he was part of a special multi-agency election-year project relating to “candidate security.” He billed the government $57,000 for five trips to California that were made purely “for personal reasons,” his lawyer acknowledged. (His parents lived there.) He also claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam. According to his lawyer’s filing, he didn’t have malaria and never served in Vietnam. He told the story to EPA officials so he could get special handicap parking at a garage near EPA headquarters.

To really eliminate this kind of fraud, waste and corruption, the best thing to do is to shrink government. If they didn’t have the money to pay people like Beale, then this wouldn’t have happened. The public sector is always spending other people’s money – taxpayer money. Never their own money. No public sector employee will be as careful about how they are spending taxpayer money as they would be if it were their own money, or their private company’s money. In the business world, if you do something like this, you go under. Fast. Because you have competitors who are happy to capitalize on your mistakes. No business can survive million dollar losses like this for long. The government can, because it just borrows more from your children.

News

New York Democrats object to having their wealth redistributed by Obamacare

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From the radically leftist New York Times, of all places. (H/T Just One Minute via Ari)

Here’s the problem:

Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.

They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market, historically among the most expensive in the country.

But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.

And here’s the yummy, yummy schadenfreude:

“I couldn’t sleep because of it,” said Barbara Meinwald, a solo practitioner lawyer in Manhattan.

Ms. Meinwald, 61, has been paying $10,000 a year for her insurance through the New York City Bar. A broker told her that a new temporary plan with fewer doctors would cost $5,000 more, after factoring in the cost of her medications.

Ms. Meinwald also looked on the state’s health insurance exchange. But she said she found that those plans did not have a good choice of doctors, and that it was hard to even find out who the doctors were, and which hospitals were covered. “It’s like you’re blindfolded and you’re told that you have to buy something,” she said.

[…]“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.

“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”

Man, I love the taste of the liberal tears on a cold Monday morning. It tastes like… victory (in 2014). What is the reality of it? Maybe if you stopped reading the New York Times, you would know the reality of it.

Well why are healthy people with $10,000 New York policies losing their coverage? Did those policies not provide free contraceptives? Not at all:

The predicament is similar to that of millions of Americans who discovered this fall that their existing policies were being canceled because of the Affordable Care Act.

[…]But while those policies, by and large, had been canceled because they did not meet the law’s requirements for minimum coverage, many of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.

Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers “smaller and disproportionately sicker,” and would drive up rates.

I must have written over a 100 posts warning people about the effects of Obamacare from 2009 to November of 2012, and no Democrats would listen to me. Well, now they know what conservatives knew before the 2012 election. And just wait until the employer mandate hits and drives 129 million people of their existing health care plans by the end of 2014. 

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