This is the best summary of the CRU scandal. It addresses the fact that they have abandoned SCIENCE completely

"Global Warming" SCAM - A Further Look

The Market Ticker

Saturday, November 21. 2009

Posted by Karl Denninger in Corruption at 12:29

"Global Warming" SCAM - A Further Look

Ok, having spent a fair bit of tme sifting through the files referenced in my original Ticker on this subject, I have some additional observations.

Please note - in my "past life" I ran an ISP, and am a qualified expert in these matters.  I write spam filtering software commercially and have since 1995, being the author of the first ISP-centered spam interdiction package.  As such when it comes to issues like Internet mail transport I can easily speak to what is supposed to be present - and what is not.

Further, I want to note that my interest in this has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying claim - "Is Man-Made Global Warming Real?"  Rather, my interest in this is whether or not the alleged scientific process has been followed - or subverted.

There is one axiom that I believe we can all agree on:

The climate is always in flux - that is, it is always changing.  It has done so over the millions of years in the past, and will in the millions of years in the future.

Science is the process by which we take a question and:

• Form a hypothesis.

• Design an experiment to test that hypothesis.

• Perform the experiment and collect the data thus generated.

• Analyze the resulting data.

• Form a conclusion from the data thus collected.

That's "The Scientific Method."

To the extent that method is corrupted on purpose one does not have science.  To the extent that it is corrupted out of necessity (e.g. missing data that one requires, and thus one "guesses") this is accepted provided one discloses one's guess and how it was derived - that is, provided there is no material concealment.

In the "Big Science World" the check and balance on concealment - and outright fraud - is peer review and post-publication duplication.  To be able to duplicate the results claimed, however, the algorithms, code, methods and data sets must be made publicly available so that anyone who desires to do so can validate the claimed experimental results. 

In the spirit of science, I will note that I fully expect others to try to validate (or dispute) my observations below.  As such you can find the original archive at Wikileaks should you decide you would like to do so, and I encourage all other independent investigation.

Now, on to the observations, after spending an evening and morning with the data (and no, I haven't gone through it all yet - there's a hell of a lot here folks.)

There are apparently 1073 emails, each with a sequence number but those numbers are not sequential.  That is, there are a lot of sequence numbers missing.  However, the dates in the files appear to be ordinal (that is, increasing from earliest to latest) with the last entry being November 12th of this year.

This strongly implies this is a partial data set intercept of email from some point.  The same person does not appear as a "to" or "from" in each email (although there is a lot of commonality), which belies the general idea that this was someone's "saved storage" - at least at first blush.

The intercept, wherever it happened, does not appear to have been done at the system or transport level.  Specifically, the "Received:" and "Message-ID:" lines that are part of all internet-transported email are missing.  This strongly implies that wherever these emails came from, they were saved/stored by one or more user(s) and were not an automated process that was maintaining archival (or forensic) logs.

The emails themselves, however, look authentic.  That is, the formatting is consistent with character mode operation in many of the messages (Unix) and Windows or MAC format programs in others.  The quoting is consistent - and correct for the time period in question.  Attachments are missing, again implying that this is someone's "saved copy" and NOT from a system-level stream.  The early emails contain a fairly significant number of messages that are consistent with the user being on a character-mode terminal (e.g. ELM, MUTT or similar on a Unix system), including the quoting and line formatting.  The message content shift toward "desktop email programs" - that is, appearing to be more and more programs such as Eudora, Thunderbird, Outlook and the like is also apparent as time goes on.

My conclusions on the email data set itself are that this is very likely to be either (1) someone's "private email" storage of things they wanted to save, or (2) it was a working directory of someone who was in the process of putting forward a response to an FOI request or internal inquiry of some sort.  The messages are not the entire email stream to or from any specific set of users, but rather are a set selected in some fashion - either by the person saving them as "important" or by someone collating messages for the purpose of responding to some sort of request.  The majority of the messages themselves are what appear to be ordinary and reasonable discourse between scientists and researchers with an occasional "revealing glance" at the various defensive (and offensive!) approaches to those who question their premise and conclusions.  Wikileaks concurs with the latter assessment.

In short, I see nothing in that data set that implies that the messages have been tampered with, but there is also no reasonable way to prove their provenance as the necessary information to do so (routing and message-id information) is missing.  A well-place FOI request should resolve that problem, if anyone is particularly interested in doing so.

The data sets included in the archive are also interesting.  Again, a reasonably-detailed look through them shows nothing implying that they have been tampered with, and they include data and computer code (source program code) from a wide variety of time periods.  It appears authentic.

Comments within, however, disclose an extraordinary amount of extrapolation and "curve fitting" - that is, fitting results to data, not the other way around as it should be that appears to have been going on in the process of so-called "analysis."  Worse, there are plenty of comments that make clear that the researchers are literally making things up as they go along - much of the data sets are claimed to be incomplete, inaccurate in terms of their time frames .vs. what is claimed in the headers and titles, and containing junk values.

There is some real trouble here, in that if you're not sure what you've got (that is, you're not sure what the data is!) or worse, you're knowingly missing pieces that you need to perform an analysis, what are you "analyzing"? 

Worse, there are comments in the files that make clear that there are observations that are outside of what has been published - and worse, some of those observations are ten times outside the alleged "resolution" of claimed results.  Uh, that's a major problem, and goes back to what I have repeatedly said about so-called "climate science" for a very long time, specifically (from Musings):

It is, however, entirely possible that we will find that indeed man is responsible for some of the warming that is taking place, but that this contribution is extremely small - say, 5%. That is, if the global temperature is due to rise by 10 degrees F in the next 100 years, we are responsible for only 0.5F of that rise! Thus, were we to completely cut off CO2 emissions, we'd STILL see a 9.5F rise in temperature. Obviously, if this is the case, then the data does not support taking any sort of drastic action at this time.

The problem with the current political-speak coming from these so-called "scientists" is that it contains no real data and no ranges of uncertainty on their alleged measurements.

That's not science folks - its politics - and we must, as a nation and people, refuse to be cowed by bald claims without the presence of facts behind them.

I have long argued that the major problem with so-called "published papers" on global warming is that it is rare to see find measurement uncertainties reported in the alleged findings, and competing studies have cited wildly different values for the same thing (e.g. atmospheric CO2 emitted by man per year.)

I believe we can now deduce why those uncertainties are missing - they are not being carried through the computational process as is required for any scientific calculation and this omission is in fact intentional.

This is, quite literally, first-semester college physics (or chemistry, or any other "hard" science.)  If you turn in an answer to the question "How long is that ruler?" that reads "12 inches" you get a zero.

The scientist says "12 inches +/- 0.1 inch", reflecting the limits of his measurement.  The carrying through of uncertainties is essential to hard science, as only from that process can one compute the statistical bands of probability that the result reported is actually the result in the real world.

Uncertainties in measurement are additive - that is, if I measure two rulers and each is reported as "12 inches +/- 0.1 inch" then the total length of the two rulers is 24 inches +/- 0.2 inch - because it is possible that both errors were on the same side.

When one performs complex mathematical functions on input data uncertainties must also be carried through the mathematical functions. Without that we know nothing about the quality of the result - it is entirely possible, given data with enough noise in it, to produce what looks like a perfectly valid answer but have it be absolute trash and of no value at all.

The only way to know if that is possible is for all measurements to be reported with their uncertainties attached, and for all uncertainties to be carried through all computational processes.

It is quite clear, from the data sets I have looked at, that this is simply not being done.  Instead computations are being "fudged" to fit data to expected previously claimed results and/or data sets simply discarded or modified that do not fit with either previously-published numbers or desired outcomes.  Here's just one example from the comments in the files:

ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently - I have no memory of this at all - we're not doing observed rain days! It's all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I'm going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
OH F**K THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.

This, by the way, is exactly the (intentional) "error" that was made by the "ratings agencies" and banks when it came to securitized debt that had "less than fully-verified income and assets" as a component.  Uncertainties on the reported income and assets were never determined from experimental sampling and carried through the computational process.  If they had been then the outcomes that we have actually seen would have been predicted within the range of possible outcomes for this debt.  Instead, the issued securities were rated "AAA" because the agencies did not apply an uncertainty to each of the alleged reported numbers.  That's what happens when you ignore the scientific method - you put garbage into a computation, you get garbage back out and it is impossible for an outside observer to detect that you did so because you refuse to give him the uncertainties associated with your claimed "measurements"!

Some of the guys working on this stuff appear to be genuinely trying to clean up other people's trash.  But trash in produces trash out, and if you can't successfully defend the statistical integrity of the data going into your computational models you have nothing.

This leaves me with one final question: since we have emails now apparently documenting an attempt to "paper over" temperature decreases in recent years, and we also have claims of "lost" data, one wonders - was the data really lost, or was it intentionally deleted or withheld from other researchers who asked for it, as providing it would show that measurement uncertainties were not carried through computationally - and if they were, the claimed results in the so-called "peer reviewed" paper would be impossible to validate?

Without hard proof of whatever answer is propounded to that question we as the people of this planet must insist on a full stop for all purported "climate amelioration" efforts, as there is every possibility that the entirety of this so-called science in fact proves exactly nothing, except that the so-called "researchers" have added much CO2 to the atmosphere producing the electricity required to power their computers!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and from the released set of data that proof is, quite simply, not present and accounted for.

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All material herein Copyright 2007/2009 Karl Denninger. All rights reserved.

How Do You Solve This Problem Without Sarah? from Hotair.com

 

posted at 4:46 pm on November 18, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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Newsweek advertised its cover story on the release of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” by asking, “How do you solve a problem like Sarah?” This headline was informed by the same journalistic standards that led the Washington Post to publish a book review by someone who admits she didn’t read the book – and then prompted MSNBC to invite this person on the air as an expert on the book she didn’t read. Newsweek apparently couldn’t be bothered to watch “The Sound of Music” all the way through, because Maria is the hero of the piece. The nuns singing “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” are singing about suppressing the very spirit that will help Maria save her family from totalitarian oppression. Considering Palin’s indestructible good cheer, if she runs for office again, I wouldn’t be surprised if she used “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” as a campaign song… and thanked Newsweek for the suggestion.

The media has treated Palin’s book like the mirrored scroll from “Kung Fu Panda”: every reviewer sees themselves reflected in its pages. Imagine a mainstream news magazine trying to portray any liberal woman as a lightweight, by using a photo of her in running shorts to tease its review of her major new book. Running a book review by someone who admits to skipping the last third of the book is not an insult to Sarah Palin, who was not writing for an audience of lazy media hacks. It’s an insult to the audience… including liberal readers of the Washington Post with the intellectual clarity to desire an understanding of those who eagerly devoured every single page. Palin is a phenomenon, and honest liberals would be well-advised to read her work and understand her appeal, just as conservatives should read “Dreams From My Father” to understand the mind of Bill Ayers.

The careless, sloppy disdain of the Left’s reaction to “Going Rogue” is almost as strong an argument for Palin’s politics as anything contained within its pages. The absolute lack of care and competence from the government that ran up a $12 trillion national debt is astonishing. Months of dithering over Afghanistan strategy, with American troops under fire, ends with a painfully unqualified Commander-in-Chief wailing that he wants a new set of options. The politicization of national defense ends in the absurd spectacle of a civilian trial for illegal enemy combatants… subcontracting national security to trial lawyers, and a randomly-selected pool of 12 people who never heard of 9/11.

The lunatic environmentalist movement, which is poised to push the American economy into a full-bore depression with its cap-and-trade bill, is headed by a man who admitted on national television that he thinks the Earth’s core is hotter than the surface of a white dwarf star. The same elite that despises Sarah Palin as an ignorant chillbilly spent the last twenty years telling us this man is a genius.

The national debt is piling up like sales of Palin’s book, and the elite don’t understand how either of them got so huge. Taxpayers are trapped on a Willy Wonka boat, hurtling through psychedelic clouds of uncontrolled spending, while the President sits in the back and mumbles nonsense rhymes about imaginary jobs created in non-existent Congressional districts. The people lining up to buy Palin’s book are not the authors of this careless, carnivorous government… but they are expected to pay for it. The assertion that someone who connects with them, and understands their beliefs, is unwelcome on the national stage is just the latest variation of “Shut up and pay your taxes.” No one should accept that attitude from a government as incompetent as the journalists who fawn over it.

The argument over whether Sarah Palin is “qualified” for the presidency is the opposite of the question conservatives should be asking. What we need to know is whether any other aspiring candidate has the essential qualifications Palin brings to the table.

The tax-and-spend engine of collectivist government is locked into overdrive, and it’s going to blow very soon – perhaps within the term of Barack Obama’s successor, if dramatic steps are not taken. There’s very little point in supporting a presidential candidate who won’t take those dramatic steps, and that means we need someone who can connect with ordinary people, including moderates and independents, and persuade them to lend their support. Pandering to the uncommitted is tantamount to taking the bridge of a sinking ship, but refusing to touch the wheel. The challenges ahead require not just a victory, but a mandate, and you can’t get a mandate by trying to appear inoffensive to moderates, in the hope they’ll reluctantly bring up the rear of your campaign once you’re already winning.

Most voters are not ideologues. They don’t follow politics obsessively, and they probably haven’t given much thought to a coherent philosophy of government… but they respond to one when they see it. It takes provocative energy to reach them through the media filter, and convince them to spare a little time from their busy lives to entertain reasoned arguments. Attempts to persuade them without inspiring them are like winning cases presented in dry whispers before an empty courtroom. A platform of small discounts on our $12 trillion government will not make enough of a difference to be worth the effort. There was never a good time for Democrat Lite politicians, but they have become a mistake we can no longer afford.

It’s an ironic twist of democracy that small, passionate groups cannot get Presidents elected, without appeals to the broader electorate… but they can lock in outrageous spending programs, by savagely resisting attempts to cancel or reform them. The single-minded energy that repels voters is irresistible to politicians. The focused appetite of those on the receiving end of government billions will always be more influential than the diffuse annoyance of taxpayers… unless a reformist President continues to inspire, and persuade, after assuming the office. Maintaining that kind of connection with the voters requires conviction, courage, confidence, and boundless good cheer. It’s a job for someone who can take a beating, and never lose faith in the American people… long after a sizable chunk of them have put that faith to the test.

I hope many candidates step forward with these qualifications, especially since Sarah Palin hasn’t declared any intention to run for office again. Even if she does, it would be best to have a spirited competition between worthy nominees. Neither Republicans, nor the republic, have been well-served by “inevitable” candidates. Taming a berserk government will be a matter of politics, as much as policy, requiring both intelligent plans and the spirit to implement them. Some of the qualifications we should be looking for are difficult to quantify as bullet points on a resume. Those people standing in the freezing cold, happily awaiting the signature of an author who ignores every attempt to pronounce her dead, on a book the entire media establishment told them to ignore, might have an idea where to find what we need.

The question before conservatives is not whether Sarah Palin can win. The question is: at this desperate hour, what’s the point of winning without someone like her?

A quote from Hugh Mackenzie Research Associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in the Toronto Star October 26, 2009

“Then there's the right-wing's childish fantasy that if you lower tax rates, government revenue will actually increase. We can all pay less tax, and government will get more revenue.

Try that one on a 4-year-old. It defies logic. Here's the reality: Data from the OECD demonstrate that, since 1995, tax revenue in Canada has dropped from 36 per cent of GDP to 33 per cent of GDP. That may not sound like much, but it represents a loss of nearly $50 billion a year in public revenue. And we wonder why Canada plunged into a $50 billion deficit magically overnight.

“

Needless to say this garbage does not reflect  truth in Ontario as recently as the Mike Harris tax cuts starting in 1996.  Revenue grew every year through the Eves government from 48 Billion to 66 Billion.

How the Star can print this nonsense baffles me.

How the press lies by misleading emphasis

 

Arctic meltdown above average again

By RANDY BOSWELL, Canwest News ServiceSeptember 10, 2009 4:06 AM

The Arctic sea ice has retreated to the third-lowest level in recorded history - the fourth time in the past five years that the annual summer meltdown has been far greater than average.

Since satellite measurements began in 1979, the summer thaw has left an average of about 7 million square kilometres of the polar ice cover by mid-September.

But the ice has already diminished this year to less than 5.3 million square kilometres, with a week or two of melting left to go.

"While this year's minimum ice extent will probably not reach the record low of 2007, it remains well below normal," the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre reports in its latest summary of Arctic ice conditions.

The all-time biggest retreat was recorded in 2007 at 4.13 million square kilometres, and the 2008 retreat fell just short of that record.

The disappearing Arctic ice was named the No. 1 weather story of 2007 by Environment Canada, and ranked No. 2 last year.

The consistently severe retreats in recent years have prompted dire warnings from some scientists, who say ice-free Arctic summers may be just years away. That phenomenon, they say, would accelerate global warming and threaten the survival of polar bears.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

 

Note that yesterday the area of ice in the arctic was 605,000 square kilometers greater than the same day in 2008.  It was 913,282 square kilometers greater than 2007.  It would appear that there is a MAJOR trend developing for MORE ice, not LESS.

The Difference Between a True Conservative and a True Liberal

 

The true conservative will give you the shirt off his back.

 

A true liberal will give you a shirt off someone else’s back!

Why I am supporting Randy Hillier

This is the first time I have ever done anything like this.  With the current economic times (brought to us by the political elite of all parties over the last few decades) I have to try to do something for my children and grandchildren.

I've looked at all the options for Ontario and Randy is the ONLY one I could vote for.  First, he has to win the nomination for leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party.  To do this he needs a lot of votes in the leadership contest in June.  It costs $10 to join the party and as long as this is paid on, or before May 14, 2009, you and any family members over the age of 14 who have joined can go vote.

This is the only true democratic system you will ever get in the provincial and federal systems in Canada.  After the leaders are chosen, that's it for a while.

I asked Randy, “if the ballot for leader had a 'None of the Above' option how many votes would it get”?  His answer was 'A MAJORITY'.  I agreed but pointed out that that is what he is.  He IS 'None of the Above'!  He is not a career politician.  He's just a citizen who finally started to fight back.  It actually won't take that many more of us to dump the current political class.  It is terrifying how few there actually are (mere thousands out of 13,000,000) who have complete control of us and our families.       

Check Randy's background on his website link below.  If he sounds like he shares your fears and hopes, join now and VOTE for him in June.  It's a lot less painful than continuing on the way we’re going.

I've met Randy.  What you see is what you get!.  He is 'just folks'.  He's a union member (IBEW) who sees both the good and bad of that system.  He's a land owner who realizes how badly our rights are being trampled.  He's a new MPP who knows how broken the current government system is.  He is NOT afraid to deal with difficult issues.  He won't run and hide.

Please help get him elected on behalf of all our children and grandchildren!

Bill MacLean

http://www.hillierforleader.com

Law vs. Moral Values

by Walter E. Williams
"A civilized society's first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions and moral values. Behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. The failure to fully transmit values and traditions to subsequent generations represents one of the failings of the so-called greatest generation.
Behavior accepted as the norm today would have been seen as despicable yesteryear. There are television debt relief advertisements that promise to help debtors to pay back only half of what they owe. Foul language is spoken by children in front of and sometimes to teachers and other adults. When I was a youngster, it was unthinkable to use foul language to an adult; it would have meant a smack across the face. Back then, parents and teachers didn't have child-raising "experts" to tell them that "time out" is a means of discipline. Baby showers are held for unwed mothers. Yesteryear, such an acceptance of illegitimacy would have been unthinkable.
To see men sitting whilst a woman or elderly person was standing on a crowded bus or trolley car used to be unthinkable. It was common decency for a man to give up his seat. Today, in some cities there are ordinances requiring public conveyances to set aside seats posted "Senior Citizen Seating." Laws have replaced common decency. Years ago, a young lady who allowed a guy to have his hand in her rear pocket as they strolled down the street would have been seen as a slut. Children addressing adults by first names was unacceptable.
You might be tempted to charge, "Williams, you're a prude!" I'd ask you whether high rates of illegitimacy make a positive contribution to a civilized society. If not, how would you propose that illegitimacy be controlled? In years past, it was controlled through social sanctions like disgrace and shunning. Is foul language to or in the presence of teachers conducive to an atmosphere of discipline and respect necessary for effective education? If not, how would you propose it be controlled? Years ago, simply sassing a teacher would have meant a trip to the vice principal's office for an attitude adjustment administered with a paddle. Years ago, the lowest of lowdown men would not say the kind of things often said to or in front of women today. Gentlemanly behavior protected women from coarse behavior. Today, we expect sexual harassment laws to restrain coarse behavior.
During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn't lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the '60s and '70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and '50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today's pathology on poverty and discrimination.
Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we've become."
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/04/29/law_vs_moral_values

The Dangerous Good Old Boys of the GOP (Sounds Like Canada’s progressives!)

Posted By Adam Graham On April 30, 2009 @ 12:01 am In Politics, US News | 79 Comments

Since the election, the debate has raged. Who is responsible for the 2008 election debacle and the defeat of the Republican Party?

So far this question has centered on various groups’ attempts to reenact the [1] scapegoat scene from Leviticus and cast all the sins of the Republican Party onto cultural conservatives and release their concerns into the wilderness.

The battle has been as entertaining as it has been misguided and pointless. Is there a war between economic conservatives and social conservatives? As someone actively involved in both social and fiscal issues, I’ve seen a lot of crossover between the two sides in terms of people who show up. This crossover is quite common. A leading economic conservative group, Club for Growth, often backed the same candidates as socially conservative groups like National Right to Life, Government Is Not God-PAC, and Focus on the Family Action. Newt Gingrich has begun to go around with slides showing that the most socially conservative members of Congress were also the most fiscally conservative.

I’m going to suggest an alternate conclusion. I’m going to reject the conventional wisdom that the election was lost because of the party grassroots and go out on a limb and suggest that maybe the problem is not the party’s activists. Perhaps (and I know this is shocking) the people who led the party over the cliff are the ones to blame.

The GOP doesn’t have a religious problem, a gay rights problem, or an abortion problem. It fundamentally has a good old boy problem. Let us tell the story of a primary, and we don’t have to name names, because the story is the same across the country.

A vacancy occurs in Congress. Who’s going to fill it? The GOP establishment has its favorite son, an amiable fellow who thinks he’d be one heck of a congressman. And then there are other candidates, probably three or four, who lay hold to the label of true conservatism. They fight it out. Leaders of many right-of-center groups endorse the good old boy. The good old boy is hailed for his electability. He may have his flaws, but he can win, we’re assured. So voters nominate and then elect Congressman Good Old Boy.

Congressman Good Old Boy doesn’t give a lick about issues like right to life or limited government. Sure, he may personally believe in some of these things, but they have nothing to do with why he got into politics. The congressman’s focus is on getting re-elected, so he works his darnedest to bring home tens of millions of dollars in earmarks and to impress a cross-section of special interest groups.

Congressman Good Old Boy is focused on appropriating money, doling out favors, defending the party establishment, and getting re-elected. Rinse, lather, and repeat a hundred times, and you have the story of two-thirds of the Republicans in Congress.

The problem the Republican Party faces is twofold. First is the division between the GOP’s leadership and its membership. Scott Rasmussen has defined a divide in polling between the mainstream (or “populist”) mood and [2] the political class. This is the basic divide within the GOP.

Republican Party activists, however, are there because of issues such as limited government, abortion, gun rights, tax reform, school choice, property rights, etc. The GOP’s leadership showed little appetite for rocking the established order and bringing about fundamental reform during its last 11 years in control of Congress.

Because of the Republican Party’s lack of interest in the ideas that brought passion and energy to the party’s base, many activists began to step away, give less money, not volunteer, and stay home on election day. Conservatives have had cause to be angry after [3] the broken promises that Bush made in 2004.

The general public was also seeing something. In 1994, voters had kicked out-of-touch big-spending Democrats to the curb. However, Republicans became the same scandal-plagued party of government that they’d defeated. Republicans had met the enemy and they were it. The public decided they’d had enough, and Karl Rove’s permanent majority came crashing down.

The instigators of post-election recriminations are a funny lot. They describe themselves as fiscal conservatives and libertarians, but you rarely see them lay out any spending they want to see cut. Nor do you hear them extolling fundamental tax reform. And while they claim to be reformers, their offerings collectively make Bambi look like Rambo.

Where are the great mass movements to make the agendas of David Frum’s  The Conservative Comeback or Ross Douthat’s Grand New Party come to fruition? Lackluster ideas do not inspire great political movements. The irony is that the attacks on members of the grassroots coalition let the real perpetrators of Republican ruin off the hook. Is it a coincidence that four Republican senators who supported TARP were narrowly defeated, while another TARP supporter was forced into a runoff? And this Frankenstein monster of a program has become everything that stalwart conservatives warned it would be back in September, even while the establishment urged us to swallow the “crap sandwich.”

Republicans didn’t lose because we had people at the grassroots of the party with strong viewpoints. Republicans lost because we had hypocritical leadership that gave lip service to ideas but was ultimately focused on its own power. The greatest danger to a GOP resurgence is not those folks who are motivated to political actions by their beliefs, but rather the way-too-powerful good old boys who stalk the halls of Congress and statehouses across America. They continue on, as if trying to repeat the strategy of the amiable Republicans who spent an entire generation as an irrelevant congressional minority from 1955-1994.

The bottom line is that the attempt to pit activists against one another in a blame game is little more than a distraction. We can point fingers all we want, but as long as we continue to put up power-hungry posers, the American people will continue to give us exactly what we deserve: defeat.

---

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-good-old-boy-party/

URLs in this post:
[1] scapegoat scene from Leviticus: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2016:21,%2022&version=48
[2] the political class: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/ideology/55_of_americans_are_populist_7_supp
ort_the_political_class

[3] the broken promises that Bush made in 2004: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57466-2004Sep2.html

The Good Old Days and Why Did We Let Them Go??

Years ago I started to notice that a good wage was becoming insufficient to raise a family.  I went back to the boxes of old statements that my wife insisted on keeping and rebuilt a model of our circumstances.  I was living and working in Montreal.  I was a product specialist for a US based multinational.  I was earning good salary and commissions ($30,000).  My wife had stopped work as a nurse as soon as I got the job.  She had become pregnant before the company insurance plan kicked in so we had to pay all the costs ourselves.  There was no medicare in those days.  She got the top OBGYN in Montreal.  He delivered my first son at Catherine Booth Hospital (A large woman’s hospital in NDG).  He was a bit early and showed some jaundice.  They kept him and my wife in the hospital in a private room for 7 days.  The total cost for everything including doctor’s visits was $350.  Of that, the anesthetist took the largest chunk.  I’ve always maintained that I own him lock stock and barrel since I paid for him.  My second son born the next year belongs to the government of Canada.

Other major costs were cars and housing.  We bought our first house in Beaconsfield.  It was a 4 level custom built split surrounded by tall evergreens.  It was very close to the main commuter highway.  We paid $24,250 for the house.  Since the aggregate tax rate on my income was 14%  the house cost us 91% of my annual take home pay.  Since I travelled a lot, I felt my wife needed a car so we went out and purchased a brand new Datsun 510 station wagon.  It was about the size and shape of the Jetta wagon she drives today.  It cost new $2820 or 11% of my annual take home pay.  So, back then on a middle class salary, a family of four with a stay at home mom could by a four bedroom house and a new station wagon for ONE year’ take home pay. 

Today, a similar house and location would be $450,000.  The car would be $25,000.   The $475,000 after tax would require an annual income of $850,000. 

It is easy to see from these simple examples why us older boomers talk so fondly of the good old times.  You know, we had pretty much all the infrastructure then (1970’s) that we have now.  We even had a world class military.  Mom’s could stay home and raise children with values and morals.  Health care was reasonably priced and very responsive.  I once got an earache New Years eve.  I went to the home of a local GP and he gave me a shot of penicillin in rear and sent me back to the party. $15 and 30 minutes.  I’d be happy to pay $150 for the same service today!

It seems as though the malignant nanny state will consume us all if we don’t find a treatment soon.  They wouldn’t dare tell young families today how good we had it before they infected our nation.  There would be a revolution!

There is one more RIGHT we all need, THE RIGHT to WORK, it will fix a lot of what ails us.

As we reflect on the financial mess we find ourselves in a common thread is starting to appear.  Unrestrained labor costs have devastated our major industries.  They have caused manufacturers to shop their labor costs around the globe.  This has led to enormous job losses in manufacturing.  Restrictive union agreements have even prevented manufacturers from replacing labor with ingenuity and automation.  At least consumers have benefitted from the lower cost of goods from abroad.  The market used the portability of labor to mitigate the effects of coercive labor contracts.  Unfortunately an ever larger proportion of our labor is less portable and thus potentially less competitive.  In order to have an efficient market we will have to introduce a local mechanism for competition.  This is the Strict Right to Work regime.

It is not as unusual a concept as you might believe.  In fact, it is the way we have always done it until the evolution of the large union.  In fact, the majority of jobs are still negotiated in this way.  A position is advertised and applicants present themselves and their qualifications.  As part of the negotiation working conditions and compensation are discussed.  Inevitably the candidate and the employer come to the best deal for both.  Virtually all non union jobs work this way now.  I propose that this be extended to as a right to ALL jobs, union or non-union.  Just as it is unconstitutional to deny a candidate based on race, gender, religion etc., it would be unconstitutional to prohibit the free negotiation between any parties.

This approach is essential to provide the most efficient services to be purchased by governments (for the people).  It is fascinating that all levels of government are obligated to provide for open tendering for purchases of goods and services.  None of them use this process for the acquisition of labor other than at the non-union level.  The pre-established pay rate tables are  equally anti competitive.  As ever greater portions of our economy are consumed by the levels of government it is absolutely necessary that we reestablish these competitive principles.

We tend to forget that we are in competition with other countries for goods and services.  We are all richer for our ability to access the efforts and ingenuity of the whole world’s economies.  We all should pursue the most effective ways to achieve our goals.