Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) admits they lied on the war to win election

Don’t take my word for it. Take his. They knew what they were promising was beyond what they could deliver and they played it up to the Dem rank-and-file and anyone else who would listen. And they were counting on the people they were asking to vote for them to not know the difference:

I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.

Emphasis mine but the words are all Congressman Kanjorski’s, 28 August 2007.

And they’re doing it again, mind you.

Score!

(My apologies in advance for this comment, but the punster in me just can’t resist it.)

I scored with my wife today.

Minds outta the gutter, people, it’s our anniversary. Our 20th anniversary, to be precise, making it an even score of years since we pledged our oaths before God and man. I can still see her walking down that aisle on her father’s arm, the most radiant woman I’d ever known. The years since then have been both a blur and nearly unchanging – it seems she has always been here to me.

Here’s to the next score, my love. May we enjoy them together in health and happiness.

Senate Democrats trying to slip illegal alien amnesty past us again. Sound off!

Senator Inhofe has a post on his blog talking about an attempt being made to provide amnesty to illegal aliens in the agricultural sector via language inserted into a funding bill for our troops in Iraq.

Last week, several U.S. Senators inserted immigration measures into a crucial War Spending bill in an attempt to force the Senate to legalize illegal workers. If allowed to pass, one of these provisions would grant amnesty to between 1.35 and 3 million illegal workers, while containing no requirement that these immigrants prove they paid their taxes for the days they worked illegally.

Allowing this amnesty amendment to stall important, necessary war funds is a slap in the face to our men and women in uniform. That is why Senator Inhofe co-signed a letter to Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid calling for the amendment’s removal from the bill.

You can co-sign a letter to Senator Reid, too. Click the link on the story above or just do it right here. After you sign the letter you’re given a chance to send a similar invite to some of your friends, so do spread the word.

(Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin.)

Federal court rules US money discriminates against the blind

Back in November 2006 I wrote about a Judge who issued a ruling that the Treasury Dept. was discriminating against the blind by making US currency as it is today. Today, the appeals court that caught the case confirmed that ruing in a 2-1 decision.

The U.S. discriminates against blind people by printing paper money that makes it impossible for them to distinguish among the bills’ varying values, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The ruling upholds a decision by a lower court in 2006. It could force the Treasury Department to redesign its money. Suggested changes have ranged from making bills different sizes to printing them with raised markings.

The court’s decision included precisely the same example I made back in that previous post: that we require building design elements to accommodate people in wheelchairs even though they’re allowed the same access to the same stairs as everyone else. To contend that the blind are using the same money as anyone else and are, therefore, accommodated equally just rings false. I really cannot find sufficient argument to keep the paper money as it is and consider the issues that would bring to the blind as a “tough noogies” situation.

So the question, now, is what can we do to remedy the situation without making every dollar bill produced cost over a thousand dollars. The story talks about changing the size of the bills or printing raised images on them. As I explained in my previous post, changing the size simply doesn’t scale as well as it needs to. And making, for example, higher-denomination bills longer as they go up in value presents a problem when I hand you 1 bill with nothing to compare it to. The raised ink approach seems most viable and we can use the braille system to encode the denomination without having a learning curve on the part of the public.

One thing I am concerned about: the blind community needs to understand that there are limits to how accessible information can be made to people without sight. I want us to do the best we can at a reasonable cost but a spare-no-expense approach that inconveniences everyone to a great extent is just not a viable course of action. Let’s all see what Treasury comes up with and see where that goes.

Apathy is satisfying? What does low voter turnout portend?

I wrote a reference to an editorial in the Loudoun Times-Mirror a couple of days ago in which the editor correctly comdemned the tragically laughable 8% voter turnout in Leesburg’s elections on May 6th. Today’s Linked Up in Loudoun at LoudounExtra.com provides a link to the Leesburg Tomorrow blog where author Paradox13VA chides those of us thinking that 8% figure is a problem:

t is interesting that so many people hail the decline in turnout with wailing and gnashing of teeth, as a sign of the decline of our Democracy, when it may be evidence of the very success of our system. It is when people are not hot and bothered that they can not bother with voting. Low turnout may be as much a sign of satisfaction as apathy. In the case of Leesburg, one of the best run municipalities around, it seems much more likely that the voters saw no compelling issue at odds with the general happiness with the Town most felt, and as a result, declined to vote.

Playing devil’s advocate and siding with a contrarian position are all well and good, but this is a position that just can’t be taken seriously. It is to be taken as a reasonable course of action when one is satisfied with the work and decisions their elected officials are performing to sit out an election? And – what? – think that those people who aren’t satisfied (you know, the ones who are hot and bothered) won’t come out and vote for people who’d do things differently, thus upsetting that whole satisfying arrangement? That doesn’t seem “much more likely” at all. It seems daft.

“Oh, sure,” they’d say, “I think the Mayor and Council are doing such a great job I thought it more prudent to remain politically silent and just skip voting, thereby doing exactly nothing to help keep them in office.”

Occam’s Razor is pretty clearly leaning toward simple apathy. Apathy is bad enough. A notion that a citizen’s best course of action to keep the elected status quo is to stay away from the polls on election day would be plain old stupidity.

Senator Kennedy’s seizure caused by malignant brain tumor

Reports on Senator Ted Kennedy’s condition have now revealed that the Senator has a brain tumor, and it’s malignant.

“Preliminary results from a biopsy of the brain identified the cause of the seizure as a malignant glioma in the left parietal lobe,” his doctors said in a statement, adding that treatment would likely include “combinations of various forms of radiation and chemotherapy.”

This is just heartbreakingly bad news for the Kennedy family, although we’re in a better position today, medically, to do something about it than we were even just a decade or two ago. Hopefully, that and the prayers from family and friends will prevail. I’m neither friend nor family, but I add my prayers to the Almighty for the Senator’s recovery. Against this foe, we should all be united. May God see Senator Kennedy and his family through this.

How can they ignore the blatant lying?

Obama was either lying to people about his take on Iran last night or today because what he said in the 2 locations cannot be both correct. Power Line’s got it.

“Global Warming” and hurricanes not linked, study says

Ruh-roh.

Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday.

In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic.

Well, that’s not gonna make the AGW set happy, not at all. People like Al Gore and his acolytes have all frothed on about “scientific consensus” and how anyone not preaching the sermon of how it’s all Man’s fault is just a tool. Considering that Knutson has, in the past, been a proponent of AGW and has complained about the Bush Administration’s censoring of scientific reports, it’s going to be difficult to just dismiss him as a paid-off quack.

What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.

He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

Keep your eyes open for the retaliation, folks. Should be coming right up.

Of wizardry, bad reporting, and blaming the internet

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on a news story posted on the web site of WKMG Orlando regarding the termination of a substitute teacher, allegedly based on an accusation of “wizardry.” Such a story was bound to hit big on the internet and the reaction the school district got proved the point.

The school district is waving the “pity me” flag as rapidly as they can and both they and the over-smug members of the local media are blaming “the internet” for blowing a story all out of proportion.

In fact, assistant superintendent Renalia DuBose told the St. Petersburg Times, it wasn’t the magic trick at all. Rather, the district had written reports from the principal and a teacher at Rushe Middle School detailing Piculas’ use of profane language, his inability to control the class and his decision to put a student in charge — something the student’s parent complained about.

But those details got drowned out as the tale bounced from blog to blog. It was the wizardry angle, with all its Harry Potter imagery, that grabbed the spotlight.

We bloggers do not, as a rule, have the news gathering resources available to newspapers, TV news shows, and the like. We read what’s posted on the sites of agencies that do and – at least here at HoodaThunk? – write opinion and analysis on the news reported. I’ll tell you why “those details” (the profanity, the out-of-control classes, the poor decisions) “got drowned out” here at this site. Because not a single word of them was so much as hinted at by the story I linked. Here’s that story, copied in its entirety so it doesn’t suddenly go down a memory hole:

Fla. Teacher Accused Of Wizardry
Man Made Toothpick Vanish In Class

POSTED: 10:15 pm EDT May 5, 2008
UPDATED: 12:39 pm EDT May 7, 2008

LAND ‘O LAKES, Fla. — A substitute teacher in Pasco County has lost his job after being accused of wizardry.

IMAGES: More strange stories, images

Teacher Jim Piculas does a magic trick where a toothpick disappears and then reappears.

Piculas recently did the 30-second trick in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes.

Piculas said he then got a call from the supervisor of teachers, saying he’d been accused of wizardry.

“I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue, you can’t take any more assignments you need to come in right away,’” he said.

Piculas said he did not know of any other accusations that would have led to the action.

The teacher said he is concerned that the incident may prevent him from getting future jobs.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

And that’s the whole thing, folks. Being that I’m in Virginia and Orlando is in Florida (850+ miles, in case you’re interested), I’m a little outside of their broadcast range. So, the information I have available is just what they’ve put there. Parse the text of their report and you’ll find not a single mention of any of the problems they’ve quoted as the reasons for Piculas’s firing. So, no, the detail’s didn’t get “drowned out,” they were never reported.

So, who’s to blame for that? Did the school district decide to not comment on the story, and thereby allowed Channel 6 to run the story with just Piculas’s account or did the reporters simply not follow up to get the school district’s side of things? Excellent question, because one or the other of them now has a credibility problem. Either way, the story didn’t get morphed into something it was not by the blogs or “on the internet,” it got the legs it did here in the ‘sphere because that’s how it was reported, period.

Piculas, too, has become a person with 0 credibility if what the school district says is true because he certainly got the whole ball rolling to start with.

Still no apparent sunspot activity

Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That? continues his vigilance and analysis of sunspot activity and what that could mean for our global weather. Complete with graphs and whatnot, the short story here is that an expected cycle of sunspots hasn’t started and there are indications that the sun may be entering a period of decreased output. A commenter on that post, “kim”, says:

In the Svalgaard thread at climateaudit.org, Leif has stated that the sunspots during the Maunder Minimum were large, long-lasting, scant, and in the Southern Hemisphere. During the Dalton Minimum they were pretty much absent. This has got to have meaning, but apparently the big boys are investigating.

Both the Maunder Minimum and Dalton Minimum were periods of decreased sunspot activity that coincided with periods of global cooling, both occurring during the time frame of Little Ice Age which saw brutally cold winters and none-too-hot summers during the 16th to 19th centuries. If another minimum is beginning now, we could be looking at global cooling, not warming, and with a cause completely out of human control. The commenters on Watts’ blog seem to be fairly sober types with a “keep observing” attitude. I agree with that approach and I hope Mr. Watts will keep us all informed.