Defeat the Debt’s self-defeating move

I had never heard of the Employment Policies Institute until last night, when they put up and anti-deficit ad during the Super Bowl.  It was a decent ad, using a dystopic version of the Pledge of Allegiance to emphasize the dangers of runaway government spending.

They may have gotten a lot of good publicity with that ad.  We’ll never know, however, because the ad was run again less than 1 minute later during the same set of commercials.

Now, just about everyone who watches the Super Bowl knows that ad space during the big game is expensive (roughly $2.5M this year), yet as far as I can remember, EPI – in the name of thrift – was the only advertiser to run the same exact ad twice.  That would have been a waste of money even if they didn’t run them nearly back-to-back (which, and readers can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, is a network decision).

Even worse, EPI made no mention of their actual anti-debt campaign (Defeat the Debt) during the ad.

So, while I certainly appreciated the EPI message against government spending, it would have gone a lot farther if they themselves had been frugal, stuck to airing the ad once, and held on to the $2.5M.

Or maybe I’m just bitter because the Jets weren’t on the field.

Cross-posted to VV

India announces IPCC rival

This is one decline that can’t be hidden anymore (Telegraph via WUWT):

(Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh) announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s “third ice cap”, and an “Indian IPCC” to use “climate science” to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.”There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report … [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses … they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

How dramatic is this?  Keep this in mind: not only does the head of the IPCC (for now) call India home, but India’s governing Congress Party hails from the left.  The alarmists are in serious trouble.

Cross-posted to VV

Welcome to immortality, Carly Fiorina

Tom Campbell has been driving limited-government supporters nuts for nearly two decades now.  In his latest incarnation, he’s running for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senator from California.  Carly Fiorina slams him – hard and deservedly so – for his tax-hiking history.

Sadly, it may all be lost in the “demon-sheep” brouhaha (Weekly Standard).  Personally, I thought it was pretty clever, except that Tom Campbell isn’t nearly manly enough to be a wolf in any disguise.

Hiding the Decline, Part VII

Only one thing woud lead me to bump the delightful success of the Virginia Health Care Personal Liberty Law.

You guessed it: more evidence of global warming alarmists fudging the data, from – of all places – Britain’s left-wing Guardian (h/t – as ever – Andrew Bolt):

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

Of course, being The Guardian, they try desperately to minimize the impact:

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

What the Guardian won’t tell you is that the “other studies” almost all depended upon this or other cludged-up reports for citations or evidence.  The studies were thus interdependent on one another – and now all suspect.

The global warming alarmists are hoping the world doesn’t notice.  Good luck with that.

Cross-posted to VV

Health Care Personal Liberty Law PASSES State Senate . . .

UPDATE: All three versions win by a vote of 23-17 (h/t Norm at TQ).

The five Democrats who crossed party lines were all Senators desperate to preserve reputations as ”conservative” Democrats – Edd Houck, Charles Colgan, Phil Puckett, John Miller, and Roscoe Reynolds.

I’m guessing this goes through the House of Delegates on greased skids.

The alarmist house of cards continues to fall

On the heels of the Himalayas humiliation, we now have the rainforest runaround (Times of London via From on High) . . .

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

. . . and the mountain miscue (Telegraph via FoH):

The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Yikes!  No wonder the IPCC chief is looking to writing harlequin romances as a new career (Mark Steyn).

Cross-posted to VV

Osama nukes the fridge

One can come up with a number of nouns for Osama bin Laden: terrorist, enemy, murderer, rebel, radical, jihadist, Wahabbist, etc.

However, today, as he attaches himself to global warming alarmism (WaPo), we can add a new one: laughingstock.

Seriously, we may look back at 29 January 2010 an “inflection point” in the WBK War.  Image and propaganda matter, and mistakes like this have an impact.

Bismark’s wisdom is validated once more.

Cross-posted to VV

Ford posts first profit since 2005

The last privately-owned American car company comes roaring back to life as its government-owned competitors continue to crash (Market Watch):

A strong performance in the long-ailing North American car market helped propel Ford Motor Co. to its first annual profit in four years, and the automaker said Thursday that there’s more to come.

. . .

In 2008, the company lost nearly $15 billion as industry sales were caught in a historic slide. The next year was even worse for most — and yet Ford handed in a profit of $2.7 billion.

The story doesn’t go into any explanation, but I suspect it had something to do with GM and Chrysler folks seeing the president guarantee their warrantees and run screaming to Ford.

Seriously, there’s been anecdotal evidence all year that the American people were rejecting the auto-bailout the only way they could – by going to Ford.  Kudos to them, and to Ford for resisting the financial drug of taxpayer money.

Cross-posted to VV

A genuine surprise out of Richmond

Truth be told, “surprise” doesn’t come close to describing what happened in the Virginia Senate Committee on Commerce & Labor.

SB 417, what I like to call the Virginia Health Care Personal Liberty Law, actually passed the committee on an 8-7 vote.  Two Democrats had to crossover to pass the bill: to everyone’s shock (according to Norm at TQ) – certainly to mine – Senators Colgan and Puckett actually did.

Next up is the Senate floor.  If Colgan and Puckett hold to their vote, that means a 20-20 tie the Lieutenant-Governor Bolling can break.

In other words, the Health Care Personal Liberty Law may actually be enacted!

The Manning Bowl

So it’s Peyton and company against Archie’s old team.  I don’t know how much that angle will be played up (as fewer and fewer fans remember Archie Manning these days), but it is interesting.

As for my team, well, they played a decent first half, and I’d like to think things might have been different had Shonn Greene not been hurt (Thomas Jones is more a bruiser than a speed guy), but credit the Colts’ offense for making the necessary adjustments.

Still, Sanchez has a year of experience under his belt (and he wasn’t bad yesterday, either), and with another receiver or two, the offense may be able to keep up whenever the opposing offense picks Ryan’s lock.