Israeli doctors say Obama has a mental disorder

Subject: Israeli doctors say Obama has a mental disorder

>>> Date: August 26, 2014 3:40:25 PM EDT

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>>> This is rather frightening!

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>>> Subject: Israeli doctors say Obama has a mental disorder

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>>>   A very interesting story.  Well worth reading.  Takes about 5 minutes.

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>>>   This article tries to explain why Obama acts as he does.

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>>> Haberman and Vaknin are legitimate. Check them out on Google if you

wish.

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>>> Written by Dr. Michael A. Haberman, M.D.

>>> This Israeli doctor says Obama has a mental disorder. Labels him a

pathological narcissist and there is no greater insanity than electing one as President said Dr. Sam Vaknin who is an Israeli psychologist.

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>>> Dr. Vaknin States, "I must confess I was impressed by Obama from the

first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident, a wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words. Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history.

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>>> Never a politician in this land had such quasi "religious" impact on

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many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with Zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming. Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most important subjects.

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>>>         Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the "Malignant Self Love"

>>> believes

Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist. Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama's language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest friends suggest that the man is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

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>>> Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim

Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They gave them hope! They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to their doom.

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>>> When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don't know it

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it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse "Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations, "says Vaknin. "Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant two years old. Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia , a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. "She died of cancer in 1995."

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>>> One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological

narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image.

>>> He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his codependents.

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>>> Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to

>>> reach

their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and does not deserve their attention. If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The "present" vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

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>>> Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law

>>> Review

led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father.

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>>> Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography

>>> when he

was still a nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself? Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama's lack of interest in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month. A man who lives in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.

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>>> This election was like no other in the history of America . The

>>> issues

were insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world? I hate to sound alarmist, but one is a fool if one is not alarmed. Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They are simply self-serving and selfish. Obama evidences symptoms of pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined.

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>>> This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw.

>>> Pathological

narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them treacherous. Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks voted for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is racially driven. This is racism, pure and simple.

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>>> The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I

predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. Cultic mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads deeper in the sand and blame Obama's detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash among the whites. The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support.

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>>> I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions will

>>> increase to

levels never seen since the turbulent 1960's. Obama will set the clock back decades. America is the bastion of freedom. The peace of the world depends on the strength of America , and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Castrists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo terrorists, and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House. America is on the verge of destruction.

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>>> There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist

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president.

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>>> Michael A. Haberman, M.D.

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Doctors' War Stories From VA Hospitals

Hal Scherz wrote this opinion in the May 27 edition of WSJ:

Administrators limited operating time so that work stopped by 3 p.m.

By

Hal Scherz

May 27, 2014 7:26 p.m. ET

With the recent revelations about the disgraceful treatment of patients by the Veterans Affairs hospitals, the public is discovering what the majority of doctors in this country have long known: The VA health-care system is a disaster. Throwing more money at the system, or demanding the scalps of top bureaucrats—Washington's reflexive response to any problem of this sort—won't repair the mess. What's needed is a fundamental rethinking of how to provide medical care for America's veterans.

The federal government runs two giant health-care programs—Medicare and the VA system. Medicare is provided by private physicians and other providers. Its finances are a mess, but the care that seniors receive is by and large outstanding. The VA health-care system is run by a centrally controlled federal bureaucracy. Ultimately, that is the source of the poor care veterans receive.

The Phoenix VA Health Care Center. Associated Press

U.S. doctors are well aware of the problems with VA hospitals because many of us trained at them. There are 153 VA hospitals. Most of them are affiliated with the country's 155 medical schools, and they play an integral role in the education of young physicians. These physicians have borne witness to the abuses and mismanagement, and when they attempt to fight against the entrenched bureaucracy on behalf of their patients, they meet fierce resistance.

Most doctors have their personal VA stories. In my experience at VA hospitals in San Antonio and San Diego, patients were seen in clinics that were understaffed and overscheduled. Appointments for X-rays and other tests had to be scheduled months in advance, and longer for surgery. Hospital administrators limited operating time, making sure that work stopped by 3 p.m. Consequently, the physician in charge kept a list of patients who needed surgery and rationed the available slots to those with the most urgent problems.

Scott Barbour, an orthopedic surgeon and a friend, trained at the Miami VA hospital. In an attempt to get more patients onto the operating-room schedule, he enlisted fellow residents to clean the operating rooms between cases and transport patients from their rooms into the surgical suites. Instead of offering praise for their industriousness, the chief of surgery reprimanded the doctors and put a stop to their actions. From his perspective, they were not solving a problem but were making federal workers look bad, and creating more work for others, like nurses, who had to take care of more post-op patients.

At the VA hospital in St. Louis, urologist Michael Packer, a former partner of mine, had difficulty getting charts from the medical records department. He and another resident hunted them down themselves. It was easier for department workers to say that they couldn't find a chart than to go through the trouble of looking. Without these records, patients could not receive care, which was an unacceptable situation to these doctors. Not long after they began doing this, they were warned to stand down.

There are thousands of other stories just like these.

Opinion Video

Dr. Ben Carson discusses how private hospitals work, in contract to the government-run Veterans Administration. Photo credit: Getty Images.

In my experience, the best thing that a patient in the VA system could hope for was that the services he needed were unavailable. When that is the case, the VA outsources their care to doctors in the community, where their problems are promptly addressed. But these patients still need to return to the VA system for other services and get back on a long waiting list.

Proponents of the Affordable Care Act have long used the VA to showcase the benefits of federally planned and run health care. Doctors know otherwise—and it is no surprise that a majority of them have opposed a mammoth federal regulatory apparatus to control health care in this country. The systemic problems with the VA bureaucracy are a harbinger of things to come.

The best solution for veterans would be to wind down the VA hospitals. The men and women who have served in our armed forces should be supplied with a federally issued insurance card allowing them to receive their care in the community where it can be delivered better and more efficiently.

The veterans who receive their care at VA hospitals are the kindest and most grateful patients that I have had the privilege to care for in my career. Unfortunately, they are getting shortchanged. The time to repair this national embarrassment is long past.

Dr. Scherz is a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and serves on the faculty of Emory University Medical School.

The Slush Fund

Jay Cost and Jeffery H. Anderson wrote in The Weekly Standard:
May 12, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 33  

How Obamacare pays off insurers.

When the government provides medical care, it normally delegates the task. Under Medicare, Washington doesn’t employ doctors, nurses, and hospitals to treat the elderly. It has to coax them to participate. Similarly, Obamacare functions only if big insurance companies are willing to play ball with big government. Those driven by the profit motive must be won over by those driven by the power motive.

Money, however, is no object, since the bill for securing this alliance is sent to taxpayers. According to the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, more than $1 trillion will be funneled over the next decade from everyday Americans, through the IRS, to insurance companies. Less than 2 percent of that sum—$17 billion—will be paid out in 2014. But by 2018, taxpayers’ money will be flowing to health insurers at a rate of more than $100 billion a year and rising.

Nor is liberty an object. Once he became president, Barack Obama quickly discarded his campaign pledge not to impose an individual mandate, and the purchase of Obamacare-compliant insurance was required. For the first time in history, the federal government ordered citizens to buy a product from a private company as a condition of living in the United States.

Even though citizens were required to buy insurance starting in 2014, Obamacare’s authors expected it to take a few years for their government-created “marketplace”—the “exchanges”—to mature. This was partly because the penalty for noncompliance was low the first year. Insurers would be at risk if relatively young and healthy enrollees held off buying insurance while older and sicker enrollees complied right away.

To mitigate potential losses and thus keep insurers on board, Obamacare’s authors devised the “Three Rs”—risk adjustment, reinsurance, and risk corridors. These little-known provisions help entice insurers to sell Obamacare-compliant insurance by subsidizing and stabilizing the exchanges for the first few years.

Each of the Three Rs operates a bit differently. The risk-adjustment program redistributes money among insurers in the exchanges. Those with a relatively sick pool of enrollees receive money from those with a relatively healthy pool of enrollees. Risk adjustment is a permanent feature of the Obamacare apparatus.

Reinsurance amounts to a tax on most Americans’ health insurance, including employer-provided insurance, in the amount of $63 a head this year, tapering off until it disappears in 2017. The money flows to those insurers who spend a substantial amount on sick exchange customers, thereby allowing them to lower their premiums. The CBO estimates that “reinsurance payments scheduled for insurance provided in 2014 are large enough to have reduced exchange premiums this year by approximately 10 percent.” Most Americans don’t know they are effectively subsidizing Obamacare exchange plans through taxes on their own insurance. This is yet another way that Obamacare creates “winners” and “losers” in society, with many of the losers being middle class. 

Risk corridors are another temporary program designed to protect insurers and entice their participation. Any insurer that spends too much of its collected premiums on care or nonadministrative expenses receives money from the fund, while any that spends too little must pay in. The idea is that losses and gains are limited in the first three years of Obamacare.

Defenders of Obamacare rightly point out that Medicare Part D—created in 2003, mostly through Republican efforts—contained similar provisions. The purpose there, too, was to stabilize a new government-created market early on, inducing insurers to participate. But lately, the Obama administration has exploited the ambiguity inherent in the Three Rs to fund some of its extralegal revisions to the law, effectively buying off the insurance companies with taxpayer money.

Most of the administration’s lawless revisions to Obamacare have strained the crucial government-insurer alliance. For instance, when Obama unilaterally extended the deadline from February 15 to April 15 for buying Obamacare-compliant insurance penalty-free, he created uncertainty for insurers. They have to file their rates for 2015 before they know how costly the late enrollees will be in 2014. More important, Obama’s extralegal decision last fall to grandfather existing health plans meant that many healthy people would not be forced into the exchanges to pay the higher rates insurers counted on to subsidize coverage for the unhealthy people expected to buy policies.

Enter the Three Rs. This spring the administration finalized adjustments to two of the programs—reinsurance and risk corridors—to funnel more money to insurers. Put simply, the administration lowered the threshold at which insurers become eligible for reinsurance money, and it made more generous the formula by which insurers get paid under the risk corridors. Hans Leida, an actuary for the independent consulting firm Milliman, writes that the administration’s

transitional policy for canceled plans allowed certain individual and small group plans that did not comply with the ACA [Obamacare] to be renewed for one additional year. This change, announced long after health insurers filed their premium rates for 2014, could result in a less healthy population in the ACA-compliant market, since healthier individuals may be more likely to retain their noncompliant plans. If this occurs, there is an increased risk that the filed premium rates could be inadequate to cover the higher claim costs. To mitigate this concern, the government proposed changes to certain rules for 2014—namely, the federal reinsurance program, the risk corridor program, and the medical loss ratio (MLR) requirement.

Seth Chandler, a University of Houston law professor with a background in insurance law, writes, “It’s an extremely sneaky way of sending money to the insurance industry, resting, as it does, on arcane manipulations of mathematical formulae. And I have serious doubts that the changes are authorized by Congress.”

These changes are estimated to cost taxpayers a princely sum—$8 billion, according to the CBO. Whereas the risk corridors were once projected to generate $8 billion in revenue for the government, they are now projected to be budget-neutral. But money is fungible, and that revenue was being used to help offset the cost of Obamacare. This means that, effectively, the insurers have received an $8 billion tax break for which the general taxpayer will now be on
the hook. For comparison, the Fortune 500 showed that, the year before Obama took office, the nation’s 10 largest health insurers made $8 billion in combined profits. 

Considering how vehemently the administration has attacked the “greed” of insurers, it is astonishing that it has made Uncle Sam responsible for their bottom lines. Moreover, these changes were made for purely political reasons. The people whose plans were grandfathered received only a temporary reprieve to avert a short-term public-relations nightmare for the administration. That is a poor use of $8 billion of the public’s money.

What’s more, that sum could rise. What happens if insurers try to collect more money than is available through the risk corridor fund? Last year, the CBO answered that the American taxpayer would be on the hook: 

In contrast to the risk adjustment and reinsurance programs, payments and collections under the risk corridor program will not necessarily equal one another: If insurers’ costs exceed their expectations, on average, the risk corridor program will impose costs on the federal budget; if, however, insurers’ costs fall below their expectations, on average, the risk corridor program will generate savings for the federal budget.

The relevant authorities seem to agree that Obamacare contains no statutory requirement that the risk corridor program be budget-neutral. In a Federal Register entry dated March 11, 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stated, “The risk corridors program is not statutorily required to be budget neutral.” In a letter to HHS in mid-April, Barbara W. Klever of the American Academy of Actuaries wrote: “Although the parameters of the risk corridor design are symmetrical, the design does not guarantee budget neutrality.”

But there is disagreement about whether the administration has the legal authority to pay extra money to insurers (or even to pay insurers at all under the program) in the absence of a congressional appropriation. In a memorandum dated January 23, 2014, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) wrote that federal agencies are prohibited “from making payments in the absence of a valid appropriation,” and it wrote that the risk corridor language in Obama-care “would not appear to constitute an appropriation.” The CRS added that federal agencies “may not create a revolving fund absent specific authorizing legislation,” and “there does not appear to be sufficient statutory language to create a revolving fund.”

HHS asserts otherwise: “Regardless of the balance of payments and receipts, HHS will remit payments as required under .  .  . the Affordable Care Act”—with or without Congress.

In its most recent rule, the administration sidestepped this thorny issue. It promised to ensure that the program will be budget-neutral but did not say how this will be achieved. Instead, HHS now plans to prorate risk corridor payments for 2014 and 2015 if the money coming in turns out to be less than what is supposed to go out. It further promises that, as the program generates extra revenue in 2015 or 2016, insurers will be paid back anything they lost under proration. But what happens if the
program is still in the red in 2016? HHS promises to “establish in future guidance or rulemaking how we will calculate risk corridors payments.” That is, they’ll figure it out when they have to, and taxpayers better hold tight to their wallets.

Again, the objection here is not so much to the Three Rs in theory. The objection is to what they have become in practice—a slush fund for the administration. The president has made a series of legally dubious changes to the law for political reasons. He has adjusted the Three Rs to pacify and protect his insurance allies, at a projected cost of $8 billion to taxpayers. What’s to prevent him from making more changes to the law and using the open-ended nature of the risk corridor program to funnel even more money to insurers? The only thing that will stop him is his own calculation about what he can get away with politically. 

In response to these concerns, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has introduced in the Senate and Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.) has introduced in the House short, simple bills requiring Obamacare’s risk corridor program to be budget-neutral, drying up the slush fund. Every Democrat—let alone every Republican—should be willing to codify a promise the administration has already made.

All of this is disconcerting. Obama-care, as passed by Congress and signed by the president, was not only horribly constructed from a policy perspective; it was badly constructed politically. Yet, smart or dumb, it is the law. 

Now the president has unilaterally rewritten parts of the law, circumventing Congress. All of his extralegal alterations have followed a pattern: They have either (a) made it easier for Obamacare’s “winners” to sign up, or (b) delayed the point at which Obamacare’s “losers” will realize they’ve been hurt. And when his insurance allies stood to lose through his lawless actions, the president shuffled an estimated $8 billion their way to ensure their loyalty. The Three Rs made that possible.

The American separation of powers was devised to prevent such shenanigans. King George III had ignored the colonies’ legislatures and done what he pleased. So the Constitution tethered the president to the laws that Congress has passed and a president has signed. In his efforts to make Obamacare more salable, President Obama has undermined that document’s sacred division of power. His estimated $8 billion payoff to insurance companies is one sordid chapter in a longer and troubling story. 

Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. Jeffrey H. Anderson is executive director of the 2017 Project, which is working to advance a conservative reform agenda.

WSJ editorial:

The Real Buffett Rule

Obama's favorite tax adviser refines his soak-the-rich policy.

May 4, 2014 6:57 p.m. ET

Investors undertook their annual pilgrimage to Omaha this weekend to hear Warren Buffett opine on markets and the world. One surprise is that the Berkshire Hathaway CEO seems to have adapted his famous Buffett Rule of taxation when it applies to his own company.

Readers may recall the original Buffett Rule that President Obama offered as part of his re-election campaign that essentially posited a minimum tax rate for the rich of about 30%. Mr. Buffett heartily endorsed the idea and Mr. Obama hauled out St. Warren as a soak-the-rich cudgel to beat up Mitt Romney in countless speeches.

So it was fascinating to hear Mr. Buffett explain that his real tax rule is to pay as little as possible, both personally and at the corporate level. "I will not pay a dime more of individual taxes than I owe, and I won't pay a dime more of corporate taxes than we owe. And that's very simple," Mr. Buffett told Fortune magazine in an interview last week. "In my own case, I offered one time to match a voluntary payment that any Senators pay, and I offered to triple any voluntary payment that [Republican Senator] Mitch McConnell made, but they never took me up on it."

Warren Buffett Bloomberg News

The billionaire was even more explicit about his goal of reducing his company's tax payments. "I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate," he said. "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

Think about that one. Mr. Buffett says it makes no economic sense to build wind farms without a tax credit, which he gladly uses to reduce his company's tax payments to the Treasury. So political favors for the wind industry induce a leading U.S. company to misallocate its scarce investment dollars for an uneconomic purpose. Berkshire and its billionaire shareholder get a tax break and the feds get less revenue, which must be made up by raising tax rates on millions of other Americans who are much less well-heeled than Mr. Buffett.

This is precisely the kind of tax favoritism for the wealthy that Mr. Romney's tax reform would have reduced, and that other tax reformers want to stop. Too bad Mr. Buffett didn't share this rule with voters in 2012.

The Other Side of the Global Warming Story

Jay Lehe published in Hotchkiss Magazine

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. –

January 29, 2014

• Heartland Institute

Prepared for the Washington State Senate
Among my studies in physics, has been the study of climate, present, past and future, ever since the 1970s when the popular press was warning of an advancing ice age, and on into the 90s when global warming took over with unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence and mathematical models.  Models that are unable to calculate past temperatures when all the variables are known, or the future whether a year or 10 down the road. They continue to predict doom a century from now if mankind does not alter its proclivity to lighten man’s burden with inexpensive fossil fuel.
There are 117 mathematical models used by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess man’s impact on our climate.  They do not agree with one another to any reasonable extent.  If a single model could give a discrete answer with a high confidence level they would need only that one.  But 117 separate groups of climatologists and mathematicians have come up with 117 model guesstimates which do not agree with each other.  None has come close to calculating backwards in time what the temperature of the earth was when all the variables used in the equations are known as part of our historical record, nor have any models in existence the past 10 years been able to predict with reasonable accuracy what the earth temperature actually turned out to be 10 years forward.  None have predicted what we know now, that the temperature of the earth has been stable for the past 17 years. Yet with all this complete predictive failure, the IPCC chooses to take an average of these 117 models and say today in their latest report that their confidence in these average model predictions has increase from 90% to 95%. This would be laughable were governments of the world not continuing to bankrupt themselves by significantly increasing the cost of their energy through attempts to avoid fossil fuels while continuing to spend tens of billions of dollars on carbon emission reduction and failed attempts at using wind power and solar power. This is so though no where on earth have these so called renewable sources of energy ever replaced a single conventional power plant as their intermittent availability requires 100% conventional power plant backup.
Production of the equivalent of a standard 1000 megawatt power plant, fueled by either coal, gas or nuclear material requires 300 square miles of wind turbines or 175 square miles of either fields of photovoltaic cells or mirrors to collect the sun’s energy.  And yet the beat goes on to eliminate the aforementioned dependable energy sources while keeping wind and solar alive with massive government subsidies.
The subsidies will end eventually, perhaps in five to eight years, when our richness in inexpensive shale gas and oil will awake the public to the absurdity of subsidizing energy sources that the physical laws of the universe make impossible to harvest economically. The wind and solar farms will ultimately stand idle as monuments to the folly of the near religious faith in mathematical climate models. `
The media has promoted unwarranted fear and unmitigated arrogance as to man’s impact on his climate. I will attempt to set the record straight or at least level the playing field with some irrefutable scientific facts.
1 - While temperatures have fluctuated over the past 5000 years, today’s earth temperature is below the average for these past 5000 years.
2 - Temperature fluctuations during the current 300 year recovery from the Little Ice Age, which ended around the time Washington’s soldiers were freezing at Valley Forge, correlate almost perfectly with our sun’s changes in activity level.
3- The National Aeronautic and Space Agency (NASA) has determined that during the time the Earth was warming in the past century so was Mars, Pluto, Jupiter and the largest moon of Neptune.
4- We know that 200 million years ago when the dinosaurs walked the Earth, average Carbon Dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was 1800 parts per million, more than four times higher than today.
5- If greenhouse gases were responsible for increases in global temperature, then atmospheric physics shows that higher levels of our atmosphere would show greater warming than lower levels.  This was not found to be true during the 1978 to 1998 period of .3 degrees centigrade warming.
6- 900.000 years of ice core temperature records and carbon dioxide content records show that CO2 increases follow rather than lead increases in Earth temperature which is logical because the oceans are the primary source of CO2 and they hold more CO2 when cool than when warm, so warming causes the oceans to release more CO2.
7- The effect of additional CO2 in the atmosphere is limited because it only absorbs certain wave lengths of radiant energy.  As the radiation in that particular wave length band is used up, the amount left for absorption by more of the gas is reduced.
8- While we hear much about one or another melting glaciers, a recent study of 246 glaciers around the world  indicated a balance between those that are losing ice, gaining ice, and remaining in equilibrium.
9- It is amusing that the polar bear has become the symbol of global warming while its North American population has increased from 5000 in 1960 to more than 25,000 today.
Although the court of public opinion already weigh climate change as a very low economic priority, the media continues to uncritically accept and vigorously promote shrill global warming alarmism. The United States government budgets $6 billion a year for climate research supporting a growing industry of scientists and university labs that specialize in the subject of man caused climate change rather the search for evidence wherever it might lead.  It all adds up to a significant institutionalization of the impulse to treat carbon as a problem.
Climate change is not a scientific problem that found political support.  It is about eco-activists and politicians who found a scientific issue they feel can leverage them into power and control. The environment is a great way to advance a political agenda that favors central planning and an intrusive government.  What better way to control someone’s property than to subordinate one’s private property rights to environmental concerns.
While the most extreme environmental zealots may be relatively few in number, they have managed to gain undue influence by exploiting the gullibility of many ordinary and scientifically untrained people, willing to believe that the planet needs saving from man’s excesses.  Perhaps it is a psychological throwback to those earlier civilizations that offered human sacrifices to the gods, to assuage their sins and spare them from punishment in the form of drought, flood, famine or disease. There are certainly many parallels between modern environmentalism and religion.

Connecting the Dots in the IRS Scandal

Bradley A. Smith wrote in WSJ:

The 'smoking gun' in the targeting of conservative groups has been hiding in plain sight.

By

Bradley A. Smith

Feb. 26, 2014 7:47 p.m. ET

The mainstream press has justified its lack of coverage over the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups because there's been no "smoking gun" tying President Obama to the scandal. This betrays a remarkable, if not willful, failure to understand abuse of power. The political pressure on the IRS to delay or deny tax-exempt status for conservative groups has been obvious to anyone who cares to open his eyes. It did not come from a direct order from the White House, but it didn't have to.

First, some background: On Jan. 21, 2010, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Citizens United v. FEC upholding the right of corporations and unions to make independent expenditures in political races. Then, on March 26, relying on Citizens United, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the rights of persons (including corporations) to pool resources for political purposes. This allowed the creation of "super PACs" as well as corporate contributions to groups organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code that spend in political races.

The reaction to Citizens United was no secret. Various news outlets such as CNN noted that "Democrats fear the decision has given the traditionally pro-business GOP a powerful new advantage."

The 501(c)(4) groups in question are officially known as "social-welfare organizations." They have for decades been permitted to engage in political activity under IRS rules, so long as their primary purpose (generally understood to be more than 50% of their activity) wasn't political. They are permitted to lobby without limitation and are not required to disclose their donors. The groups span the political spectrum, from the National Rifle Association to Common Cause to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. If forced out of 501(c)(4) status, these nonprofit advocacy groups would have to reorganize as for-profit corporations and pay taxes on donations received, or reorganize as "political committees" under Section 527 of the IRS Code and be forced to disclose their donors.

Now consider the following events, all of which were either widely reported, publicly released by officeholders or revealed later in testimony to Congress. These are the dots the media refuse to connect:

• Jan. 27, 2010: President Obama criticizes Citizens United in his State of the Union address and asks Congress to "correct" the decision.

• Feb. 11, 2010: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) says he will introduce legislation known as the Disclose Act to place new restrictions on some political activity by corporations and force more public disclosure of contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations. Mr. Schumer says the bill is intended to "embarrass companies" out of exercising the rights recognized in Citizens United. "The deterrent effect should not be underestimated," he said.

• Soon after, in March 2010, Mr. Obama publicly criticizes conservative 501(c)(4) organizations engaging in politics. In his Aug. 21 radio address, he warns Americans about "shadowy groups with harmless sounding names" and a "corporate takeover of our democracy."

• Sept. 28, 2010: Mr. Obama publicly accuses conservative 501(c)(4) organizations of "posing as not-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups." Max Baucus, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, asks the IRS to investigate 501(c)(4)s, specifically citing Americans for Job Security, an advocacy group that says its role is to "put forth a pro-growth, pro-jobs message to the American people."

• Oct. 11, 2010: Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) asks the IRS to investigate the conservative 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS and "other organizations."

• April 2011: White House officials confirm that Mr. Obama is considering an executive order that would require all government contractors to disclose their donations to politically active organizations as part of their bids for government work. The proposal is later dropped amid opposition across the political spectrum.

• Feb. 16, 2012: Seven Democratic senators— Michael Bennet (Colo.), Al Franken (Minn.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Mr. Schumer, Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.)—write to the IRS asking for an investigation of conservative 501(c)(4) organizations.

• March 12, 2012: The same seven Democrats write another letter asking for further investigation of conservative 501(c)(4)s, claiming abuse of their tax status.

• July 27, 2012: Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) writes one of several letters to then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman seeking a probe of nine conservative groups, plus two liberal and one centrist organization. In 2013 testimony to the HouseOversight and Government Reform Committee, former IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller describes Sen. Levin as complaining "bitterly" to the IRS and demanding investigations.

• Aug. 31, 2012: In another letter to the IRS, Sen. Levin calls its failure to investigate and prosecute targeted organizations "unacceptable."

• Dec. 14, 2012: The liberal media outlet ProPublica receives Crossroads GPS's 2010 application for tax-exempt status from the IRS. Because the group's tax-exempt status had not been recognized, the application was confidential. ProPublica publishes the full application. It later reports that it received nine confidential pending applications from IRS agents, six of which it published. None of the applications was from a left-leaning organization.

• April 9, 2013: Sen. Whitehouse convenes the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism to examine nonprofits. He alleges that nonprofits are violating federal law by making false statements about their political activities and donors and using shell companies to donate to super PACs to hide donors' identities. He berates Patricia Haynes, then-deputy chief of Criminal Investigation at the IRS, for not prosecuting conservative nonprofits.

• May 10, 2013: Sen. Levin announces that the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold hearings on "the IRS's failure to enforce the law requiring that tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s be engaged exclusively in social welfare activities, not partisan politics." Three days later he postpones the hearings when Lois Lerner (then-director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division) reveals that the IRS had been targeting and delaying the applications of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

• Nov. 29, 2013: The IRS proposes new rules redefining "political activity" to include activities such as voter-registration drives and the production of nonpartisan legislative scorecards to restrict what the agency deems as excessive spending on campaigns by tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups. Even many liberal nonprofits argue that the rule goes too far in limiting their political activity—but the main target appears to be the conservative 501(c)(4)s that have so irritated Democrats.

• Feb. 13, 2014: The Hill newspaper reports that "Senate Democrats facing tough elections this year want the Internal Revenue Service to play a more aggressive role in regulating outside groups expected to spend millions of dollars on their races."

In 1170, King Henry II is said to have cried out, on hearing of the latest actions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four knights then murdered the archbishop. Many in the U.S. media still willfully refuse to see anything connecting the murder of the archbishop to any actions or abuse of power by the king.

Mr. Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics.

Are Critics Of Fed's QE Fighting Last War?

Editorial in Forbes, January 20, 2014, p. 11.

Interest Rates (Photo credit: 401(K) 2013)

If you had told any financial observer in 2008 that the Federal Reserve would expand its balance sheet fivefold in five years, you’d have encountered astonished disbelief, followed by the assertion that if ever such a thing unfolded a Weimar Republic-like hyperinflation would ensue. After all, in the inflation-beset 1970s and early 1980s, when the Consumer Price Index was roaring ahead at a 13% annual clip and interest rates were headed for the moon— short-term rates peaked at 21.5% and long-term Treasurys at 15.75%—the monetary base (currency plus bank reserves on deposit at the Fed) had increased 225% from 1970 to 1981, a 12-year period.
Contrast that to the 400% surge in the monetary base since 2008. While there are valid arguments that Washington has been changing the CPI to understate the rise in the cost of everyday products and services, there’s no gainsaying the fact that we are, thankfully, nowhere near the horrors of the 1970s.
What gives?
What gives is that we focused too much on the bloat of the monetary base and not nearly enough on the unprecedented suppression of both short- and long-term interest rates. Never before had our central bank knocked down the overnight cost of money to near 0%. And never before had it attempted to beat the longer-term cost of money to a fraction of its real price. (In the early 1960s the original Operation Twist–named after the dance made famous by Chubby Checker–was mercifully short-lived. It had been undertaken in a misbegotten effort to strengthen the dollar.)
Only a handful of economists, most notably FORBES columnist David Malpass, have pointed out that this monetary version of price controls is a form of credit allocation. The federal government easily got all the cash it wanted at ultracheap rates, i.e., deficits without tears. Big companies had no trouble accessing credit and putting their balance sheets in pristine order. But credit to small and new businesses dried up, a drought magnified enormously by bank regulators who told their charges to reduce risk and to document six ways to Sunday any loans to a nonbig borrower. Remember, small and new businesses are the source of most new jobs. Through its quantitative easings the Fed effectively sucked up much of the financial market’s short-term credit that normally would have gone to these businesses.
Malpass observes: “The U.S. private sector has been facing one of the tightest money/regulatory policies in history.”
The fact that the Fed has started to taper, albeit at a tepid pace, is good news. It will mean the beginning of rebuilding our warped credit markets.
There are two other, very obvious factors that explain why there has been no explosion in higher consumer prices. One is higher taxes and an ever more convoluted and corrupt tax code; the other is the chaotic uncertainty that ObamaCare has visited on business and the American people.
The suppression of interest rates has been mimicked by other countries, with equally distressing results. These have been magnified by even stupider regulations and higher levels of taxation than those we suffer.
(Make no mistake, the Fed’s undermining of the dollar since the early part of the last decade has wrought immense havoc. For instance, without a weak dollar there would never have been a housing bubble.)
Of course, since virtually no central banker today–not to mention political leaders or economists–understands monetary policy, an inflation disaster could still eventually unfold. For now, though, credit suppression of a kind we’ve never seen before and growth-crushing levels of taxation and regulation will keep us from enjoying vigorous, sustainable growth.
So don’t get too giddy over our “improving” economy. We’re not suffering pneumonia, but we’re still being worn down by a persistent flu.