It’s Thursday, July 19th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading of today’s order, Profiles in Stupidity, courtesy of CNS News and the House Minority Whip, a position which, based on the statements of the current occupant, must present few, if any, barriers to entry:

Steny Hoyer: Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance are the Two Most ‘Stimulative’ Things You Can Do

I’m beginning to sound dumber than Joe Biden, aren’t I?!?

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that food stamps and unemployment insurance are the two “most stimulative” things you can do for the economy. During a pen and pad briefing with reporters on Capitol Hill, Hoyer was asked if any Democrats are “reconsidering the wisdom” of letting the Bush tax cuts expire at year’s end for the top income earners given the still struggling U.S. economy.

“I haven’t talked to any who are of that mind,” said Hoyer. “If you talk to economists, they will tell you there are two things that are the most stimulative that you can do — one’s unemployment insurance, the other’s food stamps, okay?”

“Why is that?” he said. “Because those folks who receive those resources must spend them. And they’ll spend them almost upon receipt. Most economists with whom I talk believe that those with significant discretionary income, that that’s not the case.”

That’s because Hoyer only talks to Paul Krugman, John Keynes and Timmy Geithner; a dimwit, a dead-head and a tax-cheat.  Yeah….with the federal government’s amazing efficiency putting almost 30 cents of every tax dollar into the hands of government dependents, what could possibly be more stimulating?!?

We don’t know what amazes us more; a politician stupid or partisan enough to utter such tripe, or reporters so stupid or biased they failed to point out the obvious fallacies in his argument.  Either way, it doesn’t bode well for America such individuals could rise to such positions of power and prominence.

Speaking of things which don’t bode well for America, the WSJ offers its insight into….

The Coming Defense Crack-Up

The Commander in Chief smiles into a damaging sequester.

Some policy train wrecks in Washington are sudden. Then there’s the catastrophe playing out in slow motion known as defense sequestration.

Barring Presidential leadership (Uh oh!) soon, the Pentagon will be walloped with another deep and disproportionate funding cut—around 9% across the board, or nearly $50 billion a year for a decade. Under last year’s Budget Control Act, President Obama and Congress need to agree on new federal savings to stop these cuts from hitting on January 2.

Like an audience at a horror movie, nearly everyone paying attention is yelling “watch out!” into a political and media void. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey calls sequestration “an unacceptable risk” that will “increase the likelihood of conflict” in a world with a weaker America. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says it’s “unworkable” and “a disaster” that will “hollow out the force and inflict severe damage to our national defense.”

The Commander in Chief? Preoccupied by his re-election campaign since, oh, last summer, Mr. Obama is missing in action. Led by California’s Buck McKeon, the House of Representatives in May adopted a plan to offset the defense and other cuts due next year with reductions elsewhere in the budget. The White House promised a veto, and Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t schedule a Senate vote.

Democrat Carl Levin and Republicans John McCain and Kelly Ayotte are floating ideas to spare the Pentagon, but they can’t overcome Presidential obstruction. Despite bipartisan pleas, the White House budget office has refused even to answer questions from Congress about how the cuts would be applied across federal agencies.

Democratic leaders say sequestration hits defense and other programs equally by splitting the $1.2 trillion down the middle. Senator Reid says he “is not going to move off” this defense cliff, adding that “It’s a balanced approach to reduce the deficit that shares the pain as well as the responsibility.”

Not quite. If implemented, the Pentagon budget would be cut by another 9% (or $492 billion) over the next decade, on top of the $487 billion in cuts that are already planned. Defense accounts for the largest share of total sequestration, or 42.6%, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

A mere 14.8% would come from entitlement programs, which would be cut by $171 billion—or less than 1%. Social Security and Medicare are exempt, and cuts to Medicaid would be capped at 2%. Spending on entitlements is five times larger than defense, and growing. The rest of the cuts would be taken out of nondefense discretionary programs.

The Pentagon is the one part of the federal government that Mr. Obama has consistently tried to shrink. Coming into office, he squeezed $350 billion out of weapons programs, and he followed this year with $487 billion more over the next decade. The Administration’s proposed fiscal 2013 Pentagon budget is the first in 15 years to decline in nominal terms. The sequestration cuts would leave the defense budget some 30% smaller in 10 years.

Defense shouldn’t be immune from cuts, but Mr. Obama’s policy choices are turning America into an entitlement state with a shrinking military—in other words, Europe. The U.S. would be left with the smallest Navy since World War I, the smallest ground forces in 70 years, and at just over 2.5% of GDP the smallest defense budget since Pearl Harbor.

Sequestration compounds the damage because the cuts would be automatic and indiscriminate. The Pentagon now concedes that funding for the war in Afghanistan would be hit, contrary to past assurances. So would current operations in the Persian Gulf. Training programs, equipment maintenance and military benefits are affected too. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin says the law obliges it to send layoff warnings as soon as October to most of its 123,000 workers—the kind of manufacturing jobs Democrats claim to love.

After a decade of hard wars, the military has worn down its equipment and delayed upgrades and important maintenance. The end of the Iraq deployment and the withdrawal from Afghanistan offer an opportunity to modernize forces, which the Obama cuts will prevent. With China spending lavishly on its military and the Middle East unsettled, Americans may come to regret this as much as we did the rash cuts after previous wars.

Mr. Obama knows all this from his own Pentagon’s warnings, so why is he inviting a crack-up? The answer is that he wants to use GOP concerns about defense to bludgeon Republicans into accepting a huge tax increase. Republicans were unwise to accept the sequestration deal while leaving entitlements off the table, thus handing Mr. Obama more leverage.

But perhaps they never expected that a Commander in Chief who swore an oath to safeguard America’s national security would play such a dangerous game. It’s not the first time this President’s political cynicism has been underestimated.

Unwise?!?  They were dumber than dirt.  This is the type of hypocritical claptrap we’ve learned to expect from Dimocrats; the Republican House leadership setting the table for sequestration and the Pentagon quietly going along with it is what burns our backside.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Pete Groetzinger and Joseph Bast, writing at American Thinker, we learn the….

IPCC Admits Its Past Reports Were Junk

On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had “complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world’s science academies to provide advice to international bodies.”

Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story.  The IPCC is the world’s most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming.  Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as “proof” that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.

If the IPCC’s reports were flawed, as a many global warming “skeptics” have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made global warming movement — the environmental movement’s “mother of all environmental scares” — is undermined.  The Obama administration’s war on coal may be unnecessary.  Billions of dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted.  Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been squandered worldwide in campaigns to “fix” a problem that didn’t really exist.

The “recommendations” issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure.  Here are some of the findings of the IAC’s 2010 report.

The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22).  In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.

The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18).  Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18).  In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.

The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking.  “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote.  The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25).

Really?  Too political?  We were told by everyone — environmentalists, reporters, politicians, even celebrities — that the IPCC reports were science, not politics.  Now we are told that even the scientists involved in writing the reports — remember, they are all true believers in man-made global warming themselves — felt the summaries were “too political.”

Here is how the IAC described how the IPCC arrives at the “consensus of scientists”:

Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting.  Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).

How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the “true consensus of scientists”?

Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony “confidence intervals” and estimates of “certainty” in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34).  Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007.  Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as “80% confident.”  Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.

The IAC authors say it is “not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty” (p. 34), a huge understatement.  Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called “level of understanding scale,” which is more mush-mouth for “consensus.”

The IAC authors warn, also on page 34, that “conclusions will likely be stated so vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore statements of ‘very high confidence’ will have little substantive value.”  Yes, but that doesn’t keep the media and environmental activists from citing them over and over again as “proof” that global warming is man-made and a crisis…even if that’s not really what the reports’ authors are saying.

Finally, the IAC noted, “the lack of a conflict of interest and disclosure policy for IPCC leaders and Lead Authors was a concern raised by a number of individuals who were interviewed by the Committee or provided written input” as well as “the practice of scientists responsible for writing IPCC assessments reviewing their own work.  The Committee did not investigate the basis of these claims, which is beyond the mandate of this review” (p. 46).

Too bad, because these are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are environmental activists, not scientists at all.  That’s a structural problem with the IPCC that could dwarf the big problems already reported.

So on June 27, nearly two years after these bombshells fell (without so much as a raised eyebrow by the mainstream media in the U.S. — go ahead and try Googling it), the IPCC admits that it was all true and promises to do better for its next report.  Nothing to see here…keep on moving.

Well I say, hold on, there!  The news release means that the IAC report was right.  That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable.  Not just “possibly flawed” or “could have been improved,” but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.

It means that all of the “endorsements” of the climate consensus made by the world’s national academies of science — which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis — were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised.  It means that the EPA’s “endangerment finding” — its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health — was wrong and should be overturned.

And what of the next IPCC report, due out in 2013 and 2014?  The near-final drafts of that report have been circulating for months already.  They were written by scientists chosen by politicians rather than on the basis of merit; many of them were reviewing their own work and were free to ignore the questions and comments of people with whom they disagree.  Instead of “confidence,” we will get “level of understanding scales” that are just as meaningless.

And on this basis we should transform the world’s economy to run on breezes and sunbeams?

In 2010, we learned that much of what we thought we knew about global warming was compromised and probably false.  On June 27, the culprits confessed and promised to do better.  But where do we go to get our money back?

For now, the anthropogenic global warming scam is just about money.  But the lives of tens of millions unfortunates in the Third World sacrificed….for absolutely nothing….on the altar built by Rachel Carson and the modern Environmental movement demonstrates such blind devotion to ideological junk science can come at a much higher price.

On the Lighter Side….

Next up, the Education Section, and this gem from Best of the Web which suggest Team Tick-Tock must have a little Republican in ’em, as the only target they seem capable of hitting lately is their foot: 

Bummer Vacation

In a Bloomberg column, Peter Orszag, formerly President Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, inveighs against . . . summer vacation:

But this quaint notion of summers as a kids’ paradise is dangerously misleading, evidence from social research suggests.

After spending the summer away from the classroom, children return to school one month or more, on average, behind where they were when the previous year ended. Kids also tend to put on weight in the summer two to three times faster than they do during the school year.

To put it unkindly, the average child becomes dumber and fatter during the vacation.

Orszag floats the obvious solution: “lengthening the school year.” Mitt Romney must be hoping Obama runs with this one. It’d be a Republican talking point for young voters and teachers union members.

We’re not certain how putting together budgets that failed to gain a single vote from one’s own party qualifies Peter Orszag as an education expert, but if all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, we’d bet an Orszag deficit it won’t make little Johnny any smarter….or lighter.

Finally, we wrap things up with an article we must confess had us scratching our head….until we remembered they rescinded Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell:

Warhorse: The military’s ‘My Little Pony’ fan club

We know we’ll sleep better tonight knowing they’re….

….on that wall!

Magoo