David Online

According to the latest Gallup Poll, just 14% of Americans have any confidence in the new Democratic led congress that swept into office just 6 months ago.

This 14% Congressional confidence rating is the all-time low for this measure, which Gallup initiated in 1973. The previous low point for Congress was 18% at several points in the period of time 1991 to 1994. Curiously, the Democrats also controlled congress at that time when another Bush was president.

The Democrats took control of Congress last November running on a campaign promise to end what Speaker Nancy Pelosi called “the culture of corruption” in the Republican Party.

House Democrats are now facing the embarassing indictment of Rep. William “Cold Cash” Jefferson (D-La). They have had to sanction the usurpation of the earmark approval process by House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wi). They have been unable to appease the wacko surrender wing of their party by ending the war in Iraq. They wasted weeks to pass a strictly symbolic non-binding resolution against the president’s planned “troop surge” in Iraq. Then wasted more time in an attempt to pass a resolution of no confidence against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; a measure that that failed to even muster the 60 votes needed to pass.

To win the House for the Democrats, Pelosi and company promised to “drain the swamp” after more than a decade of Republican rule. Pelosi promised to “break the link between lobbyists and legislation”; enact all the recommendations made by the September 11 Committee, raise the minimum wage to $7.25, cut the interest rates on student loans in half, roll back the Bush tax cuts, etc, etc, ad nauseam.

Aside from passing the minimum wage law which everyone, Democrat and Republican alike, voted for, the only other laws passed this year have been the naming of several government buildings and the most routine of federal spending.

In today’s Democratic Congress, the War in Iraq and pusillanimous investigations of the Bush adminstartion consume all their time and energy.

The only thing surprising to me about the 14% approval rating for Congress is who are these people. Even President Bush, whose approval ratings have been in the tank for some time now, has a rating 128% higher than Congress. So just where did Mr. Gallup find 14 out of 100 people who confidently believe Congress is doing a good job? Beats me.

“The United States, Israel and the European Union must end their policy of favoring Fatah over Hamas, or they will doom the Palestinian people to deepening conflict between the rival movements, former US President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.”

Far from encouraging Hamas’s move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

“That action was criminal,” said Jimmy Carter accepting another “human rights” award from the safety and comfort of faraway Ireland. The statement even led to some uneasy murmuring in the Irish human rights crowd at the wine and cheese event.

Except for the New York Times who refers to them as “militants” and Michael Moore who equates them to America’s Minutemen, Hamas is considered world-wide to be the most ruthless, murderous terrorist group. Needless to say, Carter’s praise for Hamas and their bold leadership was immediately condemned by nearly everyone on the planet.

There was one newspaper however, that agreed with and praised Jimmy Carter’s pro-Hamas comments. Kayhan, one of the most hard-line Iranian dailies and a strong supporter of Holocaust denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeated and endorsed Carter’s support of Hamas.

“The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in a Washington Post opinion column.

UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

“This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming,” the South Korean diplomat wrote.

 “It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought,” Ban said in the Washington daily.

“Ban’s comments follow the traditional UN script that whatever happens in the world, it is America’s fault. Of course global warming caused the conflict in Darfur. If political opportunism and regional politics were the cause, which they are, then Ban would not be able to implicitly blame America. America is to blame because America is the world’s largest emitter of greehouse gasses.

As Marlo Lewis says, “This morality tale is not only morally challenged, it is unscientific. A team of four researchers led by Martin Hoerling of NASA compared actual precipitation data with the rainfall simulations of 18 climate models used by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change summarizes the Hoerling team’s findings:

In the words of the four researchers, “the ensemble of greenhouse-gas-forced experiments, conducted as part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, fails to simulate the pattern or amplitude of the twentieth-century African drying, indicating that the drought conditions were likely of natural origin.” In fact, they say that for both of the regions studied,“the observed trend amplitudeexceeded that of the greenhouse gas signal by an order of magnitude,” and they state once again that they “therefore concluded that greenhouse gas forcing played little or no role in the 1950-99 observed African drying trends.” What is more, they say there is “considerable spread” among the 18 model projections, making their mean trend so small that they suggest that “natural variability will continue to be the primary driver of[Africa’s] low-frequency rainfall variations during the next century.”
 

In short, the Center concludes, “there is absolutely no evidence that the 20th-century drying of much of Africa was in any way related to CO2-induced global warming, nor is there any model-based reason for supposing it will be so related over the next century.”

Global warming is très chic, the latest fad of the in-crowd, the cause du jour of the rich and pampered Hollywood elite. Farm Aid, Band-Aid, Save Tibet, Save the Whales, Save the Children, Save the Queen, and now today, Save the Earth. Maybe tomorrow, we save the Universe.

Hollywood Terminator turned California Governator, Arnold Schwarznegger has become a born-again environmentalist. Two of his four his Hummers have now been converted to burn hydrogen. Global warming activist Laurie David “reviles owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers“, yet maintains a fossil fuel guzzling private jet for her personal travels. Al Gore uses more electricity in one month in one of four homes than the average person uses in one year.

Singer-songwriter Cheryl Crow tours the country with Laurie David in a bio-diesel bus on her Global Warming College Tour and announces her solution for deforestation. “I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. …I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required…”

Former President Bill Clinton travels to the Potomac School in Northern Virginia and speaks for an hour on topics that include climate change. America must engage in “relentless home improvement,” Mr. Clinton told the students, explaining that the environment will improve with more energy efficient houses and products. Then the former president “made a pitch for the use of sod on more roofs.”

Actor, Scientologist, and fellow Hollywood global warming activist John Travolta says, “It [global warming] is a very valid issue,” Travolta declared. “I’m wondering if we need to think about other planets and dome cities. Everyone can do their bit. But I don’t know if it’s not too late already. We have to think about alternative methods of fuel.” Hollywood John Travolta owns five private planes – a customized Boeing 707, three Gulfstream jets and a Lear jet. They are parked in front of his spacious home in central Florida. Last year Travolta clocked up 30,000 miles of flying and produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions – 160 times the average American’s tally.

The “Man-Made Global Warming Theory” is the only “science” that exempts itself from the scientific method. Real science uses theories to make predictions that can be tested, confirmed, and proved. Global warming activists cite with specificity and absolute authority what the temperature will be a hundred years from now. My local weatherman can’t even tell me for sure if it will rain tomorrow or not, but I’m supposed to believe without question what some global warming activist tells me the temperature will be in 2107 or even in 2050.

For hundreds of years, prediction and testing to confirm the predictions have been the keys to scientific proof. Today we are told to believe that “polls of scientists” are all the proof that is needed that global warming is man-made. The fact that earth’s temperatures have been rising and falling for millions of years appears to be of no consequence. The global warming scaremongers do not even attempt to explain those temperature changes. For the postulates of man-made global warming, climate history began in 1980.

Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” In 1975, both Time and Newsweek plastered warnings of “The Next Ice Age” on the covers of their magazines. In the 1970’s it was the “consensus” of scientists that a new ice age was on the horizon. If someone had mentioned global warming back then, he would have been labeled a “Global Cooling Denier” and cast aside as a crackpot. The next ice age was imminent. Everybody said so. Everybody was wrong.

Global warming has become a religion…an opiate for an alarmist crowd whose very being depends on fear. And like a religion, man-made global warming stems more from faith and belief than from scientific fact. For those who worship at the Alter of Global Warming, no preposterous claim is too preposterous. Sea levels rising 20 feet, the extinction of hundreds if not thousands of animals, malaria and disease rampant, world-wide famine, devastating hurricanes and storms, and the world thrown into violent chaos and war, scrapping and fighting for the few remaining drops of water left on earth; no apocalypse too great, too dire, too severe not to be believed. For the faithful and the proselytized, Al Gore and his fictional book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is as much a religious icon as is Moses when he descended from Mt. Sinai with two stone tablets known as the Ten Commandments. Thou shall not question global warming commands the Holy Scriptures of an Inconvenient Truth.

The hysteria behind global warming boggles the mind of intelligent critical thinking people. The global warming true believer never questions the absurd claims made by Al Gore and other global warming alarmists. If Gore says the seas will rise 20 feet and flood New York City and the state of Florida, then the seas will rise 20 feet. Even the IPCC, the U.N. sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a dubious outfit at best, in it’s most recent dire warning for the planet suggests the oceans may rise 23 inches – not 23 feet – over the next century. The salient fact that the seas have been rising at around a couple of millimeters a year for the last 12,000 years since the last Ice Age began to recede, appears not to be of much interest to global warming alarmists.

The inconvenient truth of global warming for Al Gore, the Prophet of Gloom and Doom, and his bubble-headed Hollywood cheering section is that global warming stopped in 1998. If there was such a thing as an “average” world temperature, then that temperature peaked in 1998 and has actually decreased since then. Granted the decrease is miniscule, so we’ll just stipulate that it’s unchanged. Realistically and scientifically however, there is no such thing as an “average” global temperature because as Danish physicist Bjarne Andreson pointed out, “the earth atmosphere is not a homogeneous system. It is not a glass lab jar in your high school physics lab.” Says Andreson; “It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of the Earth. A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate.”

An Inconvenient Truth is an interesting documentary…if your tastes in “documentaries” run along the lines of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Columbine. However, if your idea of a documentary is a presentation of facts put forth objectively without editorializing or insertion of fictional matter, then you might find An Inconvenient Truth inconveniently untruthful. Al Gore presents a graph that appears to correlate the rise in temperature with CO2 emissions. The graph compresses the time frame to make it appear that as the level of CO2 rose, the temperature rose with it. Uncompress the graph, however, and you see that the temperature rose first followed 5 to 80 years later by a rise in the CO2 levels. In other words, the rise in temperature comes before the rise in CO2 – not the other way around. This is a very inconvenient fact…very inconvenient indeed.

Al Gore states that the Snows of Kilimanjaro, the ice glacier, is melting. What a brilliant observation by Mr. Gore, considering Mt. Kilimanjaro has been melting since the mid 1800’s, long before Henry Ford Hummer invented the Hummer that emits the CO2 that supposedly melts the mountain. Situated in equatorial Africa, lying some 200 miles south of the equator, Kilimanjaro is melting. Not due to Henry Ford’s CO2 and Al Gore’s global warming, but because the rain forest at the base of the mountain has been significantly reduced by forest fires and further cleared the for agriculture. As any eighth grade science student could tell you, the absence of foliage causes less moisture to be pumped into the atmosphere, which leads to reduced cloud cover and precipitation, and subsequently, increased solar radiation and glacial evaporation.

An Inconvenient Truth has a cartoon of polar bear swimming in water barren of ice…ice melted by global warming. The implied message is the polar bear will die. Why Big Al didn’t film a real polar bear I don’t know. Maybe he couldn’t find one that was stressed out enough. What I do know is that Al Gore knows next to nothing about polar bears. The polar bear, as we know it today, has been around some 100,000 years. It was warmer in the 1930’s than it is now and the polar bear survived. It was warmer in the Medieval Warm Period than it is now and the polar bear survived. It was warmer 8,000 years ago than it is now and still the polar bear survived. The current polar bear population is alive and well and thriving according to the naturalists who study polar bears. As Hank Williams, Jr. sang, “A Country Boy Can Survive,” so will the polar bear. He’s survived a 100,000 years without man’s help; he’ll do fine today.

Al Gore says that because of global warming the polar ice caps are melting. The polar ice caps are also melting on the planet Mars. Why are they melting? It can’t be CO2 emissions because the Martian people have no carbon dioxide spewing factories, money-hungry capitalistic businesses, gas-guzzling Hummers, or pampered Hollywood types flying here and there in privately owned Gulfstream jets. Renegade scientists, most likely on the Bush/Cheney payroll, have postulated that perhaps it may be due to the sun. Ironically, there appears to be some evidence to support that claim. Some of these scientists have even gone so far as to suggest that the sun may also be warming Earth in addition to Mars. An Inconvenient Truth conveniently omits the Medieval Warming Period in its “hockey stick” presentation of temperature rise. Like the misleading propaganda graph Gore uses to correlate rising CO2 emissions and temperature, the “documentary” also conveniently compresses the rising temperature graph so that the period of global cooling between 1940 and 1975 is omitted as well. Why do global warming theorists feel they have to hide and suppress these facts?

Al Gore warns us that ice-covered Greenland may soon melt. A sloping ice cap covers all of Greenland except a narrow, rocky, and barren coastline. Greenland has no arable land and no permanent crops. And yet in the 10th century in the year 982, Viking explorer Eric the Red sailed to Greenland and established farming communities. These early colonies farmed Greenland with agriculture for 500 years. They farmed Greenland until the Little Ice Age descended into the fields of crops and drove the colonist’s back to Scandinavia. A thousand years ago Greenland was indeed green and the land was suitable for growing crops. Today archeologists have to excavate deep under the snow and ice to unearth the vestiges of those farms.

Former Vice-President Al Gore says the debate on Global Warming is over. I must have missed that debate, unless the debate is the one where Al Gore receives an Oscar for his portrayal of global warming in An Inconvenient Truth and anyone who questions global warming is compared to a “Holocaust Denier.” It makes the debate in global warming a little difficult when such noted scientists represent one side as Al Gore, Laurie David, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Martin Sheen and the other side is represented by “Holocaust Deniers.” If the debate on global warming is Over, as Al Gore adamantly stipulates, then why is it necessary for him to keep drilling that “fact” into our minds?

According to the Church of Global Warming, no one denies global warming except George Bush and a few crank scientists from MIT, Harvard, and NASA. That and maybe another few thousand other so called “crackpot” scientists from other universities and institutions. To question global warming is be cast in the same tar pit as a “Holocaust Denier.” The debate on global warming is over declares Al Gore. Gore says it is now the “consensus” of scientists worldwide that man-made global warming is an undisputed fact.

No disrespect intended Big Al, but consensus is an opinion… not a scientific fact. And even the consensus is far, far from universal. Al Gore says he has “researched” global warming since the 1980’s and the debate is over. If Al Gore had started researching in the 1970’s, he would have been preaching Global Cooling and the coming of the next Ice Age. Al Gore has researched man-made global warming and finds the evidence to be incontrovertible. Since Mr. Gore is not a scientist and earned only “C’s” in college science, I find his research somewhat dubious and quite frankly, to be nothing more substantial than what he has chosen to read. And, perhaps more importantly, what he has chosen not to read. My son did research at school for science projects, but that doesn’t make him an authority much less a scientist.

Al Gore says the “earth has a fever.” Over the past 100 years the temperature has risen 1.6 degrees Celsius. What Al Gore does not tell you is that most of that temperature increase occurred before 1940. The “earth has a fever” says Al Gore because it is now 1.6 degrees warmer than it was a century ago. Inherent in that statement is the supposition that in 1900 the temperature was “perfect.” Who says so? Aside from Al Gore, is there anyone willing to step forward and publicly state what the “perfect” average temperature is? There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that would contradict a statement that the “average” worldwide temperature today is not the perfect temperature. Al Gore believes it was 100 years ago. The good citizens of Denver who just came through a winter of record cold and snowstorms might disagree.

The fact of the matter is, no one knows for sure what causes global warming anymore than they know what causes global cooling. For millions of years, the earth has cooled and warmed. The climate is always changing. The only sure thing scientists can go by is what occurred before and to extrapolate from that, what changes may occur in the future. If we use what scientists know, or say they know about the past, then the trend for the near future is Global Cooling – not Global Warming.

Cindy Sheehan is calling it quits. She has tendered her resignation as the “face” of the anti-war movement. Barely two years after squatting in a sun-baked Crawford, Texas ditch outside the Bush ranch, Mother Sheehan is going home and try to repair the family relationships she sacrificed to call attention to her son’s death and end the war in Iraq. Sheehan said she has become disillusioned with the struggle which has ravaged her bank account, wrecked her marriage, and strained her relationship with her surviving children.

Cindy Sheehan was once the darling of the anti-war left. Homesteading a mosquito infested, mud-encrusted patch of dirt and weeds in Crawford, Texas, inappropritaely named “Camp Casey”, Sheehan and her followers garnered the attention of the usual gamut of leftist Democratic losers. America’s foremost race-baiter, Al Sharpton showed up to embrace Cindy and praise her courage. Black apologist and adulterer, the Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up to pray with Cindy. Hollywood’s too rich with too much time on their hands, wacky left-wing liberals like Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, and Sean Penn flew in to squat for a while in Cindy’s ditch before swatting the fleas off and boarding their personal jets to fly back home to air conditioning, running water, swimming pools, and dinner that night at Wolfgang Pucks.

For the past year, Cindy Sheehan has been drawing fewer and fewer crowds and fanatical followers. Things like that happen when you start cavorting with the likes of Hugo Chavez and earning the praise and endorsement of “former” Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard’s like David Duke. Things like that happen also when you start calling the president “a lying murderous bastard”, that “the biggest terrorist in the world is George Bush”, and that “our country has been overtaken by murderous thugs…gangsters who lust after fortunes and power.” Even those who strongly disagree with Bush on Iraq, presuming they are somewhat rational and possess at least a third grade education, won’t even say that publicly. But when you start including in your proclamations that “this country is not worth dying for”, “we are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now” and “my first born was murdered…for lies and for a PNAC neo-con agenda to benefit Israel”, you’re pretty much down to drawing crowds of conspiracy theorists, the clinically insane, and the mentally deficient.

Casey Sheehan was 21 years old when he joined the Army. He was a high school and college graduate. He was not a child going to war. He was an adult who made a brave and conscientious decision to join the armed forces. He was not drafted. He was not forced to join. Knowing full well that his unit was going to be sent to Iraq, Casey reenlisted for a second tour. Casey Sheehan’s view on the war in Iraq has not been reported, but one can surmise that if Casey thought it were an illegal war, a war with no purpose, he would not have reenlisted to go to Iraq. The fact is, however, Casey Sheehan did volunteer to go to Iraq and was killed after volunteering for a rescue mission in Sadr City.

Cindy Sheehan had her five minutes of fame. Parading before America’s mainstream media and attracting the attention of anti-war activists and anti-war Democrats who swooned before her, Sheehan shrilly proclaimed the death of her son Casey should be the determining factor on U.S. involvement in Iraq. Sheehan came to the conclusion the death of her son was more important than her marriage and her family. Divorced from her husband, estranged from her family, broke from people who took advantage of her, Cindy Sheehan is still the face and epitome of the anti-war left – a group divorced from reality, estranged from the danger of radical Islamism, and broke in American values.

Cindy Sheehan went to sleep believing she was the Homecoming Queen. She awoke yesterday to discover she was the class clown.