It’s Tuesday, February 21st, 2012….and please, check out the three must-see video clips featured on our home page (www.thedailygouge.com).  They can be accessed by clicking on the numbered boxes immediately below the Quote of the Day.  #’s 2 & 3 are particularly noteworthy, but all three are well worth the time to view.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in the “Onward Christian Soldiers” segment, the natives are growing restless:

Evangelical pastors join Catholic clergy in opposition to birth control rule

 

A group of evangelical pastors on Monday joined Roman Catholic clergy who oppose an Obama administration requirement that employees of religiously affiliated businesses receive birth control coverage. Speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said more than 2,500 pastors and evangelical leaders have signed a letter to President Obama asking him to reverse the mandate.

While most Protestants do not oppose contraception per se, the letter calls the mandate a violation of religious freedoms. “This is not a Catholic issue,” Perkins said. “We will not tolerate any denomination having their religious freedom infringed upon by the government.”

The signers also object to a requirement that contraceptive coverage include the morning-after pill and other drugs and devices that allow an egg to be fertilized….

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, promised to challenge the mandate both in court and in Congress. “We are not going to stand by and allow our God-given rights, protected by the Constitution, to be atrophied, neutered, confined and restricted,” he said.

THAT’S the issue!  This has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with THE CONSTITUTION.  We’ll give the FRC and SBC credit; they at least recognize if we don’t hang together, we’ll most certainly hang separately.

But remember, the contraceptive/abortifacient mandate is only the tip of Progressivism’s unconstitutional iceberg.  This is only the first battle in what promises to be a long and protracted conflict; we can only hope and pray America has the stomach and endurance for it.

In a related item, the WSJ‘s William McGurn observes yet another MSM double-standard:

Sex, Lies and Rick Santorum

The politics of the double standard on social issues.

 

When Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008, he declared that marriage is between a man and a woman. For the most part, his position was treated as a nonissue. Now Rick Santorum is campaigning for president. He too says that marriage is between a man and a woman. What a different reaction he gets.

There’s no mystery why. Mr. Santorum is attacked because everyone understands that he means what he says.

President Obama, by contrast, gets a pass because everyone understands—nudge nudge, wink wink—that he’s not telling the truth. The press understands that this is just one of those things a Democratic candidate has to say so he doesn’t rile up the great unwashed.

It’s arguably the most glaring double standard in American life today. It helps explain why candidates with social views that are fairly conventional among ordinary Americans—the citizens of 31 states including California have rejected same-sex marriage when put to a vote—find themselves depicted as extreme. It also speaks to why even some who share Mr. Santorum’s social views nonetheless fear that his outspokenness on these issues will only undermine his candidacy.

That has led some folks to suggest that Mr. Santorum simply drop these issues altogether. Their hope is that by concentrating his energies solely on Mr. Obama’s management of the economy and foreign affairs, Mr. Santorum might avoid dividing his party and America. However reasonable the argument may be on paper, it is simply not practical.

It’s not practical, first, because Mr. Santorum is running as what he is, a conviction politician. Having been dismissed for months by Republicans hostile to his social views, he is not likely to take their advice now. He appreciates that he did not get where he is today by trimming his sails.

Indeed, that’s one reason he has now overtaken Mitt Romney as the front-runner in Michigan. Mr. Romney is behind because Republican voters have yet to be persuaded he stands for anything. Mr. Santorum is ahead because even those who might not sign onto all his social particulars are hungry for a nominee who does not bend with the wind.

Dropping the social issues is also not practical for another reason: The media won’t let him. When Mr. Obama used a prayer breakfast earlier this month to suggest that the Gospel of Luke was a call for raising taxes on the wealthy, the press corps yawned. When Mr. Santorum complained about the “phony theology” behind the president’s worldview, suddenly it landed on every front page and lead every news show.

So what’s the answer? The answer is that when Mr. Santorum discusses these issues, he needs to fold them into his larger narrative about the free society. That narrative has to do with pointing out the dependency that comes with an expanding federal government, the importance of family, and the threat to freedom when, say, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or a Health and Human Services secretary can substitute their own opinions on these issues for the judgment of the American people….

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204909104577235471075318762.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Aye, there’s the rub!  For in Santorum’s sleep we know what dreams will come….and they all involve an ever expanding federal government.

Wake up and smell the coffee, Conservatives!  Based on Santorum’s voting record and every other piece of concrete evidence, Senator Sweater Vest is the Quaker State equivalent of George W. Bush: well to the right socially, but an unapologetic BIG GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVE.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: absent some unforeseen change of monumental proportions, we’re stuck on “None of the above”.

This isn’t about coming out on top in the majority of the Republican primaries; it’s about unseating the Anointed One and rescuing the Republic in November.

Speaking of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, Speed Mach forwarded the following by James Pethokoukis in AEI‘s, Enterprise Blog:

Who’s engaging in nostalgia economics?

 

Are Republican 2012ers offering voters a bridge to the past? Here’s Politico’s headline story today: “Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum sell nostalgia in Michigan.” The gist is that the two presidential candidates are playing on the state’s collective memory of its manufacturing powerhouse past to make the case that the GOP can provide a brighter tomorrow:

For Romney, that means waxing sentimental about his family’s storied Michigan history — reminding voters of an earlier moment when his dad, George Romney, was a titan in the booming auto industry and the governor of a prosperous state. Santorum lacks Romney’s ancestral ties to the Feb. 28 primary battleground but makes up for it by emphasizing his working-class roots and a campaign platform fixed on reviving the depressed U.S. manufacturing sector.

It’s one thing to run a campaign on theme of restoring some economic golden age. That’s Campaigning 101. But it’s quite another to actually make economic policy based on nostalgia economics. And that’s exactly what the Obamacrats are trying to do. Walter Russell Mead calls it the Blue Model – the pre-1980s economy where unions were dominant, and even just a high school education apparently guaranteed a lifetime job with a fat defined benefit pension and ever-expanding benefits. Big Government, Big Labor, and Business forming an Iron Triangle capable of producing an equitable, sustainable prosperity: ”Unionized workers, then a far larger percentage of laborers than is the case today, got steady raises in steady jobs. The government got a steady flow of tax revenues. Shareholders got reasonably steady dividends.”

Of course, that model collapsed in the private sector under the weight of global competition and technological change. The Blue Model has shown greater staying power in government, but even there it’s finally running out of other people’s money to spend. But President Obama is implicitly calling for a return to the Blue Model when he fondly recalls how much more equal society was in the 1970s. And his path back to the Blue Model is higher taxes, higher spending, and more regulation. Not going to happen. Again, here is Mead:

Voters simply will not be taxed to cover the costs of blue government, and in most cases they will vote out of office anyone who suggests otherwise. That, at base, is what the Tea Party movement is all about. Voters with insecure job tenure and, at best, defined-contribution rather than defined-benefit pensions simply refuse to pay higher taxes so that bureaucrats can enjoy lifetime tenure and secure pensions.

Second, voters will not accept the shoddy services that blue government provides. Government must respond to growing consumer demand for more user-friendly, customer-oriented approaches. The arrogant lifetime bureaucrat at the Department of Motor Vehicles is going to have to turn into the Starbucks barista offering service, and options, with a smile.

Third, government must reconcile itself to its declining ability to manage a post-blue economy with regulatory models and instincts rooted in the past. We need to be thinking about structural changes based on properly aligned incentive architecture, not regulatory systems based on command protocols.

The collapse of a social model is a complicated, drawn out and often painful affair. The blue model has been declining for thirty years, and the final bell has not yet tolled. But toll it will, and as the remaining supports of the system erode, slow decline and decay is increasingly likely to give way to headlong crash.

Unions would do well to recall the words of John Dunne: “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

And in the Environmental Moment, the WSJ carries the….

Concerned Scientists Reply on Global Warming

The authors of the Jan. 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed, (featured in The Daily Gouge) ‘No Need to Panic about Global Warming,’ respond to their critics.

 

Editor’s Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of “No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.

The interest generated by our Wall Street Journal op-ed of Jan. 27, “No Need to Panic about Global Warming,” is gratifying but so extensive that we will limit our response to the letter to the editor the Journal published on Feb. 1, 2012 by Kevin Trenberth and 37 other signatories, and to the Feb. 6 letter by Robert Byer, President of the American Physical Society. (We, of course, thank the writers of supportive letters.)

We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past.

In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. (Our note: You know, as required in private enterprise: actual, quantifiable RESULTS!) When predictions fail, we say the theory is “falsified” and we should look for the reasons for the failure.  Shown in the nearby graph is the measured annual temperature of the earth since 1989, just before the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also shown are the projections of the likely increase of temperature, as published in the Summaries of each of the four IPCC reports, the first in the year 1990 and the last in the year 2007.

These projections were based on IPCC computer models of how increased atmospheric CO2 should warm the earth. Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.

From the graph it appears that the projections exaggerate, substantially, the response of the earth’s temperature to CO2 which increased by about 11% from 1989 through 2011. Furthermore, when one examines the historical temperature record throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the data strongly suggest a much lower CO2 effect than almost all models calculate.

The Trenberth letter tells us that “computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean.” The ARGO system of diving buoys is providing increasingly reliable data on the temperature of the upper layers of the ocean, where much of any heat from global warming must reside. But much like the surface temperature shown in the graph, the heat content of the upper layers of the world’s oceans is not increasing nearly as fast as IPCC models predict, perhaps not increasing at all. Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of “missing heat” hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?

Given this dubious track record of prediction, it is entirely reasonable to ask for a second opinion. We have offered ours. With apologies for any immodesty, we all have enjoyed distinguished careers in climate science or in key science and engineering disciplines (such as physics, aeronautics, geology, biology, forecasting) on which climate science is based.

Trenberth et al. tell us that the managements of major national academies of science have said that “the science is clear, the world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible.” Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.

One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody’s word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don’t fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.

What are we to make of the letter’s claim: “Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record.” We don’t see any warming trend after the year 2000 in the graph. It is true that the years 2000-2010 were perhaps 0.2 C warmer than the preceding 10 years. But the record indicates that long before CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere began to increase, the earth began to warm in fits and starts at the end of the Little Ice Age—hundreds of years ago. This long term-trend is quite likely to produce several warm years in a row. The question is how much of the warming comes from CO2 and how much is due to other, both natural and anthropogenic, factors?

There have been many times in the past when there were warmer decades. It may have been warmer in medieval times, when the Vikings settled Greenland, and when wine was exported from England. Many proxy indicators show that the Medieval Warming was global in extent. And there were even warmer periods a few thousand years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum. The fact is that there are very powerful influences on the earth’s climate that have nothing to do with human-generated CO2. The graph strongly suggests that the IPCC has greatly underestimated the natural sources of warming (and cooling) and has greatly exaggerated the warming from CO2.

The Trenberth letter states: “Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused.” However, the claim of 97% support is deceptive. The surveys contained trivial polling questions that even we would agree with. Thus, these surveys find that large majorities agree that temperatures have increased since 1800 and that human activities have some impact.

But what is being disputed is the size and nature of the human contribution to global warming. To claim, as the Trenberth letter apparently does, that disputing this constitutes “extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert” is peculiar indeed.

One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people.

The continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate “extreme views” can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition. In our op-ed we mentioned the campaign circa 2003 to have Dr. Chris de Freitas removed not only from his position as editor of the journal Climate Research, but from his university job as well. Much of that campaign is documented in Climategate emails, where one of the signatories of the Trenberth et al. letter writes: “I believe that a boycott against publishing, reviewing for, or even citing articles from Climate Research [then edited by Dr. de Freitas] is certainly warranted, but perhaps the minimum action that should be taken.”

Or consider the resignation last year of Wolfgang Wagner, editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing. In a fulsome resignation editorial eerily reminiscent of past recantations by political and religious heretics, Mr. Wagner confessed to his “sin” of publishing a properly peer-reviewed paper by University of Alabama scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell containing the finding that IPCC models exaggerate the warming caused by increasing CO2.

The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world’s economy would “drive decades of economic growth.” This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.

The European experience with green technologies has also been discouraging. A study found that every new “green job” in Spain destroyed more than two existing jobs and diverted capital that would have created new jobs elsewhere in the economy. More recently, European governments have been cutting subsidies for expensive CO2-emissionless energy technologies, not what one would expect if such subsidies were stimulating otherwise languid economies. And as we pointed out in our op-ed, it is unlikely that there will be any environmental benefit from the reduced CO2 emissions associated with green technologies, which are based on the demonization of CO2.

Turning to the letter of the president of the American Physical Society (APS), Robert Byer, we read, “The statement [on climate] does not declare, as the signatories of the letter [our op-ed] suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible.” This seems to suggest that APS does not in fact consider the science on this key question to be settled.

Yet here is the critical paragraph from the statement that caused the resignation of Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever and many other long-time members of the APS: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” No reasonable person can read this and avoid the conclusion that APS is declaring the human impact “incontrovertible.” Otherwise there would be no logical link from “global warming” to the shrill call for mitigation.

The APS response to the concerns of its membership was better than that of any other scientific society, but it was not democratic. The management of APS took months to review the statement quoted above, and it eventually declared that not a word needed to be changed, though some 750 words were added to try to explain what the original 157 words really meant. APS members were permitted to send in comments but the comments were never made public.

In spite of the obstinacy of some in APS management, APS members of good will are supporting the establishment of a politics-free, climate physics study group within the Society. If successful, it will facilitate much needed discussion, debate, and independent research in the physics of climate.

In summary, science progresses by testing predictions against real world data obtained from direct observations and rigorous experiments. The stakes in the global-warming debate are much too high to ignore this observational evidence and declare the science settled. Though there are many more scientists who are extremely well qualified and have reached the same conclusions we have, we stress again that science is not a democratic exercise and our conclusions must be based on observational evidence.

The computer-model predictions of alarming global warming have seriously exaggerated the warming by CO2 and have underestimated other causes. Since CO2 is not a pollutant but a substantial benefit to agriculture, and since its warming potential has been greatly exaggerated, it is time for the world to rethink its frenzied pursuit of decarbonization at any cost.

What on earth could a layman, no matter how well schooled in the pseudo-science of anthropogenic global warming, add to THAT?!?

But since we’re on the subject of Junk Science, this just in:

Report: Smoke from wildfires kills over 300,000 per year worldwide

 

Smoke from burning forests and grasslands kills on average 339,000 people a year worldwide, an international research team said Sunday in the first systematic global health study of air pollution from wildfires. Every year, accidental and deliberate wildfires burn an area that, taken together, is larger than India. The dense plumes of fine particles and compounds released in the complex chemistry of combustion typically stay aloft for weeks and can travel hundreds of miles downwind. Smoke from fires in Central Siberia during 2003, for example, caused air pollution in the US.

To estimate the public health consequences, scientists led by fire researcher Fay Johnston from the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, studied the impact of the fine particulate matter released during such blazes between 1997 and 2006, using satellite data, computer models of wind patterns and mortality tables developed by the World Health Organization.

“I personally was surprised that the estimate of deaths was so high,” said Johnston, who presented the findings at a symposium Sunday during a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS) in Vancouver….

 

Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa were hit hardest by the ill effects of smoke from wildfires and deliberate burning for clearing land, the research team said. In Africa, about 157,000 people died annually as a consequence of smoke pollution, the scientists said. In Southeast Asia, 110,000 on average were killed every year by medical conditions related to inhalation of wildfire smoke. (Figures derived from….”satellite data, computer models of wind patterns and mortality tables developed by the World Health Organization”.)  😉

By comparison, public health experts estimate that urban air pollution generally kills about 800,000 people every year, and the indoor fumes from household fuels cause about 1.6 million deaths annually. (So why exactly is it Liberals keep trying to herd us all into these urban killing zones?!?)

The medical consequences of smoke from wildfires are likely to worsen in coming years, however, if predictions of long-term rising temperatures due to heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions come true, researchers at the AAAS meeting said. (Ah, yes….as detailed in the chart contained in the previous item!) Hotter and drier summers to come will result in longer fire seasons and more intense wildfire fires that may be harder to control, they said.

Researchers have estimated that for each additional degree centigrade in global mean temperature, there could be more storms and a five percent increase in the amount of lightning, which can ignite dry forests and savannahs.

How fortunate for the world reliable temperature data shows the opposite to be true.

Meanwhile, in a related item, the New Media Journal reports how….

Big Money Foundations Coordinate Campaign Against Keystone Pipeline

 

A Powerpoint presentation obtained by The Daily Caller shows that during a July 2008 meeting, the $789 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund proposed to coordinate and fund a dozen environmental and anti-corporate activist groups’ efforts to scuttle pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Canada to the United States.

The most recent incarnation of that pipeline plan, the Keystone XL project, was the subject of intense public controversy until the Obama administration rejected it in January.

The 2008 meeting consisted of presentations from Rockefeller Brothers Fund program officer Michael Northrop, Corporate Ethics International Executive Director Michael Marx, Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Susan Casey-Lefkowitz and the director of a Canadian activist group called the Pembina Institute.

Northrop’s presentation described the extraction of oil from Canada’s vast tar sands oil deposits as a threat to environmentalists’ efforts to curb global warming. He outlined a ”globally significant response” consisting of a “network of leading US and Canadian NGOs” engaged in a “coordinated campaign structure.”

TheDC made repeated requests for comments from Northrup, Marx and Casey-Lefkowitz. None of them responded.

The subject of U.S. interests raining money on environmental organizations north of the border is a front-burner issue in Canada. On Jan. 15, Alison Redford, the premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, told a Global News television host that she resents some Americans’ use of hidden money and secretive agendas to affect Canadian energy policy. “I don’t like the fact that there are people that would try to hijack this process for their own political ends,” Redford said. It’s not about the money. It’s about the transparency of the process.”

Concerns about that lack of transparency found their vent on Feb. 9 when Brian Jean, a Conservative member of the Canadian Parliament, called for legislation to ban deep-pocketed foreigners from bankrolling what he called Canada’s “radical” green movement.

In retrospect, Northrop’s proposal and others like it appear to be squarely in Jean’s crosshairs. Northrop’s presentation promised funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation in the amount of $7 million per year. Named in the presentation were 12 participating environmental pressure groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club.

And we’d be willing to bet not one of these Limousine Liberals worries about making a mortgage payment, stretching a food budget or filling up their tank with evermore expensive gas.

To borrow a phrase from Agent Smith in The Matrix, Progessivism is a disease….and Conservatism is the cure!

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in News of the Bizarre, as contributor Speed Mach observed, you can’t make this stuff up; coming soon to a town, city, county state and country near you:

Five-year-old boy lives as girl in youngest case of Gender Identity Disorder

A little boy who decided he was a girl trapped in a boy’s body has become one of the youngest-ever children to have his decision backed by the NHS – aged just four.

 

With his blonde pigtails and purple tutu, Zach Avery, now five, has been living as a girl for more than a year – after he first refused to live as a boy when he turned three. Little Zach was just three when he began refusing to live as a boy, instead choosing to wear pink dresses and ribbons in his long, blonde hair – because he has Gender Identity Disorder (GID).

And of course, Mummy and Daddy couldn’t JUST SAY NO.  Question: why is it societies which deem cold-blooded teenage murderers inherently incapable of recognizing the monstrous nature of their deeds consider four-year-old toddlers possessed of the judgment to determine their sexuality?

We don’t know which is worse: Britain’s National Health System issuing such a patently absurd diagnosis….or the parents swallowing it?

Magoo