Are Democrats really Tax and Spend?

The Republicans certainly showed us that they are all about spending this past decade.   At least they didn't raise taxes.  Now we have the Democrats in power and they have been spending voraciously.  Will they live up to the moniker Tax and Spend Democrats?

The CBO has announced that for fiscal year 2010 the deficit will be $1.35 trillion dollars.  The deficit in 2009 was $1.4 trillion and that is before corrections.  We are running seriously in the red and with difficulties in selling our paper to foreign investors we MUST do something about it.  The recent announcement to freeze non-security discretionary spending is a drop in the bucket.  We need to either cut defense or reduce mandatory spending - entitlements - or both.  Or we can raise taxes.

The conventional wisdom may be starting to say that the Dems will raise taxes.  It is too difficult to cut defense in this environment of being committed to Iraq and Afghanistan.   No way are Dems going to open the Pandora's Box of reducing entitlements - those are Democratic voters.   Of course, higher taxes will slow growth and recovery efforts.  I guess it depends on who will see their taxes go up.

Sigh.

As a Whig, I would like to see entitlements brought under control.  We have to do it and everyone knows it.  We cannot continue to operate with the steadily increasing costs of entitlements that slowly push aside our ability to do other things with the National Government.  We are being forced to consider defense reductions as a result.  Guns and butter.   Too much butter.  Many entitlements belong at the state level.   Let's move them there.

Virginia considers Marijuana decriminalization

Virginia Legislature Considers Decriminalizing Marijuana

NORML is pleased to announce that House Bill 1134 (ViewHere), which seeks to amend marijuana possession and cultivation offenses, has been pre-filed for the 2010 legislative session. This measure amends present criminal marijuana penalties in several ways.

1. The bill would reduce minor marijuana possession penalties from a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail, to a civil infraction punishable by a fine-only.

2. The bill would create a rebuttable presumption that a person who grows no more than five marijuana plants grows marijuana for personal use and not for distribution, an offense punishable by a $500 civil penalty. Under present law, marijuana cultivation in any amount is classified as a felony offense, punishable by between 5 and 30 years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

3. The bill removes the two-year mandatory sentence for those found guilty of the distribution of less than one ounce of marijuana.  House Bill 1134 also removes the the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for those found guilty of the distribution of more than one ounce of marijuana.

4. The bill also raises the quantities necessary for punishment of possession with intent to distribute so as not to punish amounts that may be possessed for personal use.

Tea Partiers work to take over GOP machinery

The Tea Partiers have evidently found an outlet for the activism.  They are taking over the GOP party.  Specifically, they are taking over the machinery in the form of precinct leaders, often vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decides where the party spends money.  This is something we should keep an eye on as Whigs.

 In Power Push, Movement Sees Base in G.O.P.

Across the country, they are signing up to be Republican precinct leaders, a position so low-level that it often remains vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decide where the party spends money.

A new group called the National Precinct Alliance says it has a coordinator in nearly every state to recruit Tea Party activists to fill the positions and has already swelled the number of like-minded members inRepublican Party committees in Arizona and Nevada. Its mantra is this: take the precinct, take the state, take the party — and force it to nominate conservatives rather than people they see as liberals in Republican clothing.

...

 The precinct strategy, like the Tea Party movement itself, has spread via the Internet, on sites like Resistnet.com. ANational Tea Party Convention in Nashville next month will feature seminars on how to take over starting at the precinct level.

Advocates hold up the example of Las Vegas, where a group of about 30 people who had become friendly at Tea Party events last spring met to discuss how they could turn their crowds into political influence. One mentioned that there were about 500 open precinct committee positions in the local Republican Party.

They recruited other activists and flooded the committee — the Republican Party says it now has 780 committee people, up from about 300. In July, they approved a new executive committee, and Tony Warren, one of the organizers and a new precinct committeeman himself, said six out of seven executives are “constitutional conservatives,” in keeping with Tea Party ideology.

With the bulk of Nevada’s population in the Las Vegas area, the local committee was able to elect a conservative slate to the state party in December, including a state chairman who has said he wants to make the party “safe” for conservatives.

As recently as last spring, Mr. Warren said, “we didn’t even know how the darn party worked.”

Reform Ballot Access

Virginia has some funny rules concerning ballot access.  By law, there can only be 2 parties in the state, the Democrats and the Republicans.  All other "parties" running candidates have to get the each candidate on the ballot separately with signatures.  Each "party" must declare a Political Action Committee (PAC) to accept and spend donations.  This is certainly skewed to the two party system.  Perhaps that should be our first promise as 3rd party members - change this situation.

This was inspired by the following post:  Call to Reform Ballot Access

But the barriers faced by members of the Big Two are nothing compared to those faced by minor party and independent candidates, due to the fact that ballot access laws are generally structured to favor established political parties. In some states, minor party and independent petitioners are handcuffed by laws that prohibit people who have either voted in a party’s primary or registered as party member from signing ballot petitions. Democrats and Republicans have done such an effective job gaming the system against minor parties that no third party since 1920 has been able to place candidates on the ballot in half or more of congressional races in any given election cycle.

The ballot access barrier isn't the only tool that the Republican/Democratic duopoly has used to maintain its hold on political power, but it has been one of the most important and effective tools in their arsenal. And their control over the workings of the American political system has had an observable degrading effect on democracy in this country: what was once a relatively robust political system with viable minor parties has devolved into a dysfunctional mess plagued by low voter turnout, low turnover, and gridlock.

The brand new Modern Whig Party of Virginia

I have finished the initial version of the website for the MWP of Virginia.  It links to the mailing list and the forums through the Join page.  I have a History page with a description of the original Whigs in America.  There are a couple of Philosophy pages.  Come over and read all about it and don't forget to join up!  Whig Out!

More climate facts from an IPCC Expert Reviewer

Lee C. Gerhard, an IPCC Expert Reviewer, noted some facts about climate change that seems to undermine claims of an open and shut case:

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen. 

Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:
• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.
• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.
• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.
• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.
• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.
We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:
• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.
• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.
• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.
• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.
• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change. 

Contrary to many public statements:
• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.
• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.
• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years - extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.
• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.
• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century. 

The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.

 http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/fact_based_climate_debate/

The Dominoes are falling after Climategate

The following article describes developments in the aftermath of the release of emails and papers and data manipulation software from the CRU in England.  One of the developments is:

A story is beginning to take shape. This story broke into the world media Wednesday. An article in RIA Novosti, the Russian state-owned news service, states:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office inExeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The article reports that the IEA had taken a new look at the data used in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climatic Change (IPCC) reports. These reports, which became the basis for warnings of dramatic human-caused global warming that led to calls for extensive regulation and to the current climate change conference in Copenhagen, are based on world temperature estimates using measurements from thousands of reporting sites throughout the world.

Novosti reported that the data used for temperature measurements in Russia appeared to have been carefully chosen from the warmest reporting sites. If an average were taken over all Russian reporting sites, then there was little or no warming to report.

The article goes on to report on the release of data from the UK:

While the Novosti report has gotten the most attention, it’s not the only such report. The Climategate files forced the UK Meteorological Office to make at least part of their raw data available. One of the first was Willis Eschenbach, at Watts Up With That. Read the whole discussion and also Eschenbach’s answer to a critique published in the Economist for the details, but here is the “money shot”:

In this figure, the blue line is the raw data. The black line is the adjustments that had been applied to that data, and the red line is the result following the adjustments.

As you can see the adjustments are what causes the increase in the red line.  The blue line shows no warming at all.  Next is from the US:

The next domino was a study by Dr. Richard Keen of the University of Colorado that was reported at the Air Vent blog. In it, Dr. Keen compares the raw data from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) with data from the Global Climate historical network, the adjusted data as published in the IPCC report. Dr. Keen finds that the raw data does indeed show an upward trend of 0.69°C per century, which he believes is explained by the “Pacific Decadal Oscillator,” a well known long-term phenomenon.

The data used by the IPCC instead shows warming four times greater, 2.8°C per century, an adjustment of about 2°C.

All in all, these revelations result in this conclusion:

What can be said is this: We now have substantial evidence, from several independent sources, that the data used as the basis for the IPCC report has been adjusted in undocumented ways, and those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.

Until the data is re-examined, fully, openly, and transparently, it is impossible to conclude how much of a contribution to global climate change humans have made, or whether that contribution has been made by human-generated CO2. And without knowing that, attempts to “fix the problem,” through cap and trade or Copenhagen agreements, is misguided at best — and dangerous at worst.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-faster-and-faster-the-dominos-fall/