The national Republican Party machinery is busy producing the sort of change America deserves -- a surrender to world socialism on all fronts.

Yesterday's defeat of Republican Greg Davis by Democrat Travis Childers, running for US Representative in Mississippi's First District, indicates that Republicans are not only in trouble, but have no clue how to address it. Childers, a genuine conservative though a Democrat, captured 54% of the vote to Davis' 46%, a remarkable victory in a heavily Republican district. He'll probably vote with Republicans in Congress much of the time, but the "D" after his name helps secure committee chairmanships for the Democratic party leadership.

Republicans illustrated their utter cluelessness by announcing a national campaign theme of "Change You Deserve." The hilariously pitiable fact that the slogan is already an advertising slogan for a well-known anti-depressant just adds to the embarrassment. The Republican party needs to come to terms with the complete failure of Republicans to live up to their billing; not only did they not reduce the size or power of government, they sold out to the nest-feathering patronage system they said they were coming to upset. Simply issuing a slogan isn't going to do the trick.

What's called for is a pledge with teeth for all Republican office-holders to sign...

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Missouri Republicans proposed an amendment to the Missouri Constitution that would enable election officials to demand proof of citizenship in order to obtain the right to vote. Democrats, the minority in the Missouri legislature, are ratcheting up the class rhetoric, calling the measure "an assault on voting rights."

Missouri already passed a voter photo ID law back in 2006, but the Missouri Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, since the law often required citizens to pay to obtain a birth certificate. The US Supreme Court a few weeks ago upheld a similar law in Indiana, paving the way for voter photo ID laws all over the US. Eighty percent of Americans believe requiring photo ID to vote constitutes sound policy to protect the voting process from fraud.

First of all, let's state what this is really about: it's about Democrats getting felons and illegal aliens to vote Democratic. Democrats have been systematically using Hispanics from Mexico to bolster their electoral results in border states since at least 1996. They show up at illegal alien rallies with voter registration posters. They routinely submit falsified voter registration information to allow illegals, felons, and other ineligibles to vote Democratic.

Read more at Plumb Bob Blog...

So here's what scares me - that Fox has become the most "fair and balanced" when it comes to Clinton. I really feel like I am in Upside Down World now, but they have been pretty good. Just last night, I flipped over during a ball game, and Greta Van Susteren was on, talking abt FL and MI! She kept asking how in the world Obama thought he could disenfranchise two MAJOR states without repercussions?! Good question - I'd like to know that, too!

Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy, Commenter at You Can Call Me Uppity

I spent part of the morning reading what Hillary Clinton supporters are saying about Obama, which is where I happened across the video you'll see below. (I spent another part of the morning watching Charlie Wilson's War with Shel; if you haven't seen it yet, treat yourself, Aaron Sorkin scores nicely with an entertaining and thought-provoking script.) The video shows Neil Cavuto of Fox teaching young Obama "strategist" Flavia Colgan what it takes to function in the Big Leagues -- and demonstrating that his show is the Big Leagues. In it, Cavuto, merely by asking pointed questions, completely dismembers the arguments that Hillary Clinton ought to drop out of the Democratic primary race.

Read more at Plumb Bob Blog...

Gasoline is going to rise above $4/gallon this summer. Most of us are going to be angry because our budgets will be strained badly, and we'll go looking for culprits. I'm writing about this today to explain, in as simple terms as I can, that there are no culprits. The oil companies are not screwing us -- quite the contrary, they're making less and less from the sale of refined fuel, but continuing to refine it anyway. The government is hurting us a little, but not all that much. Environmentalists are hurting us by preventing us from building refineries, but new refineries wouldn't affect anything for another 10 years or so.

The price of gasoline is controlled by simple economics. I wish it weren't so, because like the rest of you, I want to know who I can smack to make the problem go away. But it's so, and the problem is not going to go away.

By the way, the current price of gasoline is not the highest it's ever been, in inflation-adjusted dollars. If the current price of gasoline is $3.80/gallon, the price of gasoline in 1979 reached as high as $4.10/gallon expressed as 2008 dollars. This is a rough calculation based on the price of gasoline in Texas from 1979 to 2008, using the data shown here. But it's still pretty high, and going higher.

Let's start by showing where the price of gasoline comes from. The graph below comes from the US Energy Information Administration, and shows that most of the cost of gasoline comes from the price of crude oil: 

 Read more at Plumb Bob Blog...

I wrote earlier this month about the fundamentalism Mormon sect whose ranch was raided by Texas authorities on suspicion of child abuse. Libertarians have been up in arms regarding what they regard as "police state tactics" on the part of Texas, holding more than 400 children separate from their parents on the basis of a single, anonymous phone call alleging that an underage girl was forced to bear children and needed the state's protection.

Developments in the story prompt me to come down on the side of the alarmists.

During the hearing regarding whether the children should remain in the state's custody pending further investigation, child psychologist and state witness Bruce Perry testified that the group's belief system is abusive.

Read more at Plumb Bob Blog....

Those making the claim that we need to cut development drastically to stop human-caused global climate change have been saying "the debate is over" about three, basic items for about 20 years:

• The earth is warming
• Man is causing it
• We have to cut back development to stop it

That there's no debate used to be almost true of the first point. It's never been true of the other two, though it was closer about 10 years ago: a growing number of scientists dispute how much man is the cause of the warming, pointing to factors like solar effects on clouding, ocean currents, and the earth's rhythmic cycles; and sensible people everywhere note that even the most drastic plans to cut back will not affect global temperature enough to matter, and we just have to get used to warmer weather. However, on the first point -- that the earth is warming -- there's been very little serious disagreement.

Until recently. Today, that's on the table, too. Two things have happened:

1. The earth's measured temperature stopped rising around 1998, and this year it fell dramatically. There hasn't been any warming for 10 years, so far as we can tell.
2. It's becoming apparent that much of the warming we've seen in the last 30 years has been because of bad measurements.

Read more at Plumb Bob Blog...

A Communist??? What is this, 1953? Are we the Un-American Activities Committee? First he was a Muslim, now he's a Communist? I know, I know, but please, bear with me...

I just naturally tend toward extremes, so I deliberately temper myself when I see something that strikes me as alarming. Consequently, I didn't say a word when Hot Air posted the picture from a Fox News broadcast that showed one of Barack Obama's campaign offices with a Cuban flag on the wall, with a stenciled image of revolutionary murderer Che` Guevara  on it. I just figured that office would be getting a call from the Mother Ship sometime soon. Not that Obama would be all that irritated by it, but I didn't figure it meant much besides some hard lefties were working for Obama.

I also pretty much ignored it when Politico reported that Obama had sat down with 60s radicals Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers in a local Chicago political meeting. Those are two very scary, unrepentant terrorists, but it was 1995, he met with them once, they actually had clout in the neighborhood (both teach at the University of Chicago now), and I figured there was not going to be any serious fallout to the Obama campaign. Yes, if it had been McCain and Rev. Bob Jones it would have been front-page news on the Times for 3 days at least, but the press flacks for the Democrats, we all know it, and that's that.

Then, I noticed this addition from Hot Air. See-Dubya there received links from readers: one showing a conference in 2002, where Obama and Ayers spoke together as two members on a panel discussing "Intellectuals in a Time of Crisis," the other showing Obama joining the Weatherman duo giving testimonials for Rashid Khalidi, an Israel-hating Columbia professor, in 2005. And Craig Kincaid at Accuracy In Media reports that Obama and Ayers both serve on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.

Showing up on the same panels a few times doesn't make Obama and the Weathermen friends or associates, though the Woods Fund contact suggests they're at least acquaintances. Sitting on the same panels does, however, suggest that Obama thinks like those two on more than one issue, which is why their paths are crossing. (I suppose it's not theoretically impossible that Obama was called to balance other views, but balance isn't often among the stated values of gatherings that invite ex-Weathermen, so I regard this as unlikely.)

But in the light of the incidents above, I'm now paying closer attention to a several articles I've run across, which appear to be both accurate and relevant:

Read more at Plumb Bob Blog...

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration of the US Department of Commerce (NOAA) announced last Thursday that a team of scientists studying the economic impact of hurricanes over the past century have discovered that the rise in hurricane damages are due entirely to increases in population, wealth, and infrastructure, not any increase in the frequency or destructiveness of hurricanes.

A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes.

 

“We found that although some decades were quieter and less damaging in the U.S. and others had more land-falling hurricanes and more damage, the economic costs of land-falling hurricanes have steadily increased over time,” said Chris Landsea, one of the researchers as well as the science and operations officer at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. “There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.”

You can find the actual paper here.

Question: did you read about this in the newspaper, or hear about it on TV news? If not, why not?

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I was reading a New York Times article discussing efforts within the Democratic party to avoid a bitterly contentious convention, when I came across this comment regarding Al Gore's role in settling disputes:

Several allies said that because of Mr. Gore’s bruising defeat in 2000 presidential voting in Florida, he would have the credibility with Democrats to carry the message that the will of the people should be respected.

The sad irony here is that the Florida 2000 vote illustrated the precise opposite of what the Democrats claim. Gore took deliberate, cynical action to destroy the public's confidence in the voting process in a vain attempt to change the outcome of an election he knew he had lost. I can think of no action more dismissive of the will of the people than to attempt deliberately to change the outcome of an election that's been settled. His efforts to discard absentee ballots of military personnel over technicalities that had never been a problem in previous elections (the lack of a certified post office on board ship, for example) further illustrates his cynicism. And yet, this cynical effort earns him credence as a defender of the people's will among Democrats. This is an example of a cultural phenomenon I've come to call the screeching inversion. The short version of the screeching inversion is that the most immature among us get to pretend that they're moral paragons, while the most mature are treated as moral pariahs, simply because the immature screech louder and a lot more often. Thus, in a morally deteriorating society, evil gets tagged as good, and good, evil.

Here's how it works:

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