The "Greenest" Substance

One of the more blatant dishonesties of the global warming crowd's misinformation campaign is its use of the term "carbon" as in "carbon emissions". Carbon is associated with materials like coal and oil (actually hydrogenated carbon) and the hysterics use the word to spread the impression of dark, dirty pollutants befouling the earth. Of course the alleged culprit in global warming is carbon dioxide, (CO2), a colorless, odorless gas vital for life on the planet. Present at an atmospheric concentration of less than a half percent, CO2 is remarkably efficient in its life giving properties.

This week, Barack Obama visited Alaska to push for more government aid to his party's "green" benefactors. He did this by distorting the historical record of receding glaciers. In today's WSJ, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore sets the record straight. He also comments on the essential nature of CO2.

Politicians want us to believe they are saving us from ruin; religious leaders want to reinforce original sin and the need for repentance; some business leaders want us to subsidize their expensive “green” technologies; and the climate activists want their money-machine to keep on giving.

This powerful convergence of interests ignores the fact that carbon dioxide is essential for all life on Earth, that plants could use a lot more of it, and that the real threat is a cooling of the climate, not the slight warming that has occurred over the past 300 years.

Servergate

David Feith writing for today's Wall Street Journal --

"One of the best lines of the U.S. presidential race so far comes from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. “It’s sad to think right now,” he joked in the first round of Republican presidential debates, “but probably the Russian and Chinese governments know more about Hillary Clinton’s email server than do the members of the United States Congress.”

...To most people, the digital world is an esoteric abstraction. So we generally have a hard time recognizing the severity of misdeeds committed in cyberspace. Consider the upstanding citizens who would never shoplift yet download pirated music and movies. Among other effects, such permissiveness gives an asymmetric advantage to anyone who wants to exploit it, from individuals like Mrs. Clinton to the hacker armies of China and Russia.

Tech lingo often makes things worse. Yes, Mrs. Clinton used a private server to handle her emails as secretary of state. But that description is anodyne compared with the less technical reality: Before assuming one of the most sensitive jobs in government, she devised a unique personal system to hide tens of thousands of public documents. Later, facing a congressional investigation, she deleted whatever she wanted, in effect tossing stolen goods into a backyard bonfire.

The destruction of evidence recalls the 18-and-a-half minutes of conversation excised from Richard Nixon’s Oval Office recordings, but the Clinton camp wants voters to think her email affair is much more complicated, and far less outrageous, than Nixon’s tape-tampering. Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri recently deflected questions by saying: “Now everybody’s an expert on wiping servers. I don’t know how all that works.” In other words: Nothing to see here but tech mumbo-jumbo."

(My emphasis)

Also, Kevin Williamson explains the difference between intentions and results. Leftists, pay heed.

"News item: There is a new cholesterol-control drug on the market, Repatha, which is enormously beneficial to people who suffer serious side effects from the statins commonly used to control cholesterol or who derive no benefit from statins. Some 17 million Britons are potential beneficiaries of the drug, but they will not be able to use it, because the United Kingdom’s version of Sarah Palin’s death panel — which bears the pleasingly Orwellian name NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — says it is too expensive. The United Kingdom’s single-payer health-care system is effectively a monopoly, and not an especially effective one: Cardiovascular-disease mortality rates in the United Kingdom are nearly 40 percent higher than in the United States. That’s not nice. And it isn’t what was supposed to happen.

...Politicians tell us what a policy is supposed to do, what it is intended to do, and they ask to be judged by their intentions. The so-called Affordable Care Act, we were assured, was intended to make health insurance a better value and to make health-care institutions give their customers better service at better prices. Never mind the unspoken premise that is the law’s foundation — “We can radically increase demand for health-care services while reducing costs and improving quality because politicians are magic!” — and its inescapable contradictions. “We meant well,” they say, and that is supposed to be enough.

It isn’t.

It falls largely to persnickety, unpleasant eat-your-spinach types, and to certain happy souls blessedly liberated from the romance of politics by events and experience, to document that what is supposed to happen and what happens are not the same thing. Britons and Canadians and Americans can go on all they like about their “right” to health care, but calling something a right does not make it any less scarce (indeed, it is absolutely meaningless to proclaim a “right” to any scarce good), and whether you choose an anything-goes free market or an Anglo-Soviet single-payer monopoly model, there is going to be rationing, normally through the instrument of price. The only question is whether you get to make that decision for yourself or whether an Orwellian NICE guy makes it for you."

Read it all and get treated to numerous Williamsonian gems like this metaphor :

"Every schemer fancies himself a chess grandmaster, and if you are wondering which of the chessmen you are in his grand conception of the universe, count on it being one of the little round-headed ones in the front row."

The Demos Problem

Bret Stephens goes to the root of the problem with the Donald Trump phenomenon (much like that of the twice!! elected Barack Obama) - the people who support him.

If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.

If you have reached physical maturity and still chuckle at Mr. Trump’s pubescent jokes about Rosie O’Donnell or Heidi Klum, you will never reach mental maturity. If you watched Mr. Trump mock fellow candidate Lindsey Graham’s low poll numbers and didn’t cringe at the lack of class, you are incapable of class. If you think we need to build new airports in Queens the way they build them in Qatar, you should be sent to join the millions of forced laborers who do construction in the Persian Gulf. It would serve you right.

Victor Davis Hanson analyzes the sensibility of those fueling Trumps's surge.

After nearly seven years of Obama, the public is worn out by sanctimoniousness — by all the Professor Gates/Trayvon Martin/Ferguson lectures on race by an abject racialist, by all the sermons on climate change by a global jet-setter, by all the community-organizing banality by one who always has preferred the private school and the tony neighborhood, by all the us-versus-the-1-percent warfare by one who feels at home on the golf course only with celebrities and stock hounds.

Stephens isn't buying it.

Since Mr. Trump joined the GOP presidential field and leaped to the top of the polls, several views have been offered to explain his popularity. He conveys a can-do image. He is the bluntest of the candidates in addressing public fears of cultural and economic dislocation. He toes no line, serves no PAC, abides no ideology, is beholden to no man. He addresses the broad disgust of everyday Americans with their failed political establishment.

And so forth and so on—a parade of semi-sophisticated theories that act as bathroom deodorizer to mask the stench of this candidacy. Mr. Trump is a loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians. These vulgarians comprise a significant percentage of the GOP base. The leader isn’t the problem. The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue.

The Endpoint Of Socialism

Kevin Williamson offers yet another warning to those misguided idealists* currently enamored with the radical leftist du jour, Bernie Sanders.

*An attempt at civility. A stronger term could be used to describe people who look at what collectivist government has done in countries like Venezuela, Greece, Puerto Rico, North Korea and Zimbabwe (among others) and say, "I wanna get me some of that!"

Using the example of Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro, Williamson points out a few of socialism's salient features --

Economic Calamity --

In fact, the Maduro regime is so terrified of public discourse that it has stopped publishing basic economic data, such as official figures for inflation (estimated to be well in excess of 100 percent), unemployment (high), and economic growth (currently about negative 7 percent, it is thought). Not that Venezuelans necessarily need the statistics to tell their heads what their bellies have already learned: The United Socialist party’s disastrous economic policies have led to acute shortages of everything: rice, beans, flour, oil, eggs, soap, even toilet paper. Venezuela is full of state-run stores that are there to provide the poor with life’s necessities at subsidized prices, but the shelves are empty. 

"Free" Inaccessible Health Care --

The price of free stuff ends up being terribly high. While Venezuela has endured food riots for years, the capital recently has been the scene of protests related to medical care. Venezuela has free universal health care — and a constitutional guarantee of access to it. That means exactly nothing in a country without enough doctors, medicine, or facilities. Chemotherapy is available in only three cities, with patients often traveling hours from the hinterlands to receive treatment. But the treatment has stopped. Juvenile cancer patients taken by their parents to the children’s hospital in the capital are being turned away because the treatments they need are no longer available. The scene is heartbreaking, but that’s the political mode of thinking: Declare a scarce good a “right” and the problem must be solved, regardless of whether that scarce good is any more plentiful than it was before.

Tyranny --

The New York Times tells the tale of Enzo Scarano, formerly the mayor of San Diego, a fast-growing city west of Caracas. There were protests against the Maduro regime in San Diego, and so the mayor was stripped of his office and thrown in jail for nearly a year. Now, he wants to run for national office, but has been disqualified by the Maduro government. 

 

...Maduro wants to lock up opposition leaders; the American Left wants to lock up homeschoolers and people who hold dissenting views on climate change.

Also, 8/26 - KW with some thoughts on ignorance and its exploitation by the political class.

...we feel inadequate when we are confronted with a question that is beyond our range, and the anxiety is so intense that we frequently ignore Abraham Lincoln’s advice that it’s “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

...Harry Reid lied about Mitt Romney and his taxes with impunity because the typical American voter — and certainly the typical knucklehead Harry Reid voter — couldn’t tell you what a private-equity firm does, but many of them resent the fact that private-equity managers make so much money doing whatever it is they do. You see variations on this with the issue of CEO pay: “The CEO of NastiCorp. makes 700 times the average employee’s income at his firm, heavens to Betsy!” as though the receptionists and parking-garage attendants and mail-room guys would be paid more simply because the chief executive were being paid less.

8/27 - And one more from KW as he psychoanalyzes Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP field. Typically witty and insightful.

8/28 - And yet one more - KW on HRC equating anti-abortion activists with terrorists. Keep 'em coming Kev.
 

Updating A Classic Photo

 

   The ever stylish Mrs. Clinton understands that orange is the new black.

Bernie Sanders - Staunch Advocate Of Capitalism

The blogger at Bookworm.com posts...

"My Progressive friends are flooding my Facebook feed with posters dedicated to what they perceive as the “wit and wisdom” of avowed socialist and Democrat Party candidate Bernie Sanders."

Sanders' banalities are easily refuted by basic economics and the indefatigable Bookworm patiently educates her ignorant friends. However, she doesn't directly respond to the following Sanders statement -

"America is not supposed to be a country where 99% of all new income goes to the top 1%."

Instead, Bookworm first questions the validity of the statistic and then she goes off on a broadside about crony capitalism. It's true that Sanders, in the tradition of the far left, may have pulled the stat out of his rear end, but that's beside the point. What Sanders calls "new income" is actually "new wealth". What makes it new is that is was recently created. And the creators are entrepreneurs and innovators.

Being a doctrinaire socialist, Sanders thinks in terms of income - in his mind, income is money that magically accrues to an undeserving few. And "new income", according to Bernie, "goes" to the top 1% when it actually "is earned" by the top 1% -  entrepreneurs and innovators creating wealth and improving our standard of living.

Because of his misunderstanding of how the real economy works, Sanders makes a point quite different from the one he thinks he's making. By citing his stat, Sanders is admitting that the one-percent is responsible for 99% of the new wealth created in this country. Just as any true capitalist would.

Above The Law

Former AG Michael Mukasey details laws "allegedly" broken by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as head of the State Department. He also goes on to admonish her for a lack of common sense and responsibility.

It is no answer to say, as Mrs. Clinton did at one time, that emails were not marked classified when sent or received. Of course they were not; there is no little creature sitting on the shoulders of public officials classifying words as they are uttered and sent. But the laws are concerned with the sensitivity of information, not the sensitivity of the markings on whatever may contain the information.

...Once you assume a public office, your communications about anything having to do with your job are not your personal business or property. They are the public’s business and the public’s property, and are to be treated as no different from communications of like sensitivity.
That something so obvious could have eluded Mrs. Clinton raises questions about her suitability both for the office she held and for the office she seeks.

Madame Secretary should be facing some serious jail time. Given that FBI stands for For Barack's Indulgence, she's probably our next president.

A recurring theme : Tim Geithner gets to lead the very department (Treasury) that should have prosecuted him for tax evasion; Lois Lerner abuses her power as an IRS administrator and gets off with a comfortable retirement at taxpayer expense; Another income tax scofflaw (to the tune of $4 million or so) and suspected arsonist Al Sharpton's race hucksterism causes riots and deaths and he is rewarded as one of Barack Obama's leading advisors; Harry Reid's list of corrupt dealings is as long as it is "allegedly" criminal. It goes on and on.

Of course, Obama opponents don't qualify for this Justice Department immunity. Just ask Dinesh D' Souza and Bob Menendez.

And once Hillary becomes president her hand picked AG gets to decide whether or not to charge her with a crime. That prospect alone will keep her in the race come hell or high water.

Update - 8/17 - The indispensable Andrew McCarthy writes of an upcoming federal case in which one of the participants in the 9/11/2012 Benghazi attack, Ahmed Abu Khatallah, is, according to McCarthy, "alleged to have participated in the mayhem and to have prevented “emergency responders” from stopping it."

This sets up all sorts of problems for Clinton as Khatallah's lawyers will press to have the government's evidence made available for their perusal. That evidence includes Clinton's e-mails.

 If Mrs. Clinton thinks FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) is a headache, wait until she sees what happens when a top government official’s reckless mass deletion of e-mails takes center stage in a terrorism prosecution of intense national interest. Federal criminal court is not the nightly news. There, mass deletion of files is not gently described as “emails a government official chose not to retain”; it is described as “destruction of evidence” and “obstruction of justice.”

Update - 8/19 - Video featuring CNN national security analyst Bob Baer.

Update 8/20 - Attorney David French presents the case against Hillary Clinton.