This is a suscinct article written by Matt Patterson that puts the global warming hysteria into some historical perspective. Agree with him?

Make no mistake — the earth has warmed. Unfortunately for the climate-change catastrophists, warming periods have occurred throughout recorded history, long before the Industrial Revolution and SUVs began spitting man-made carbon into the atmosphere. And as might be expected, these warm periods have invariably proven a blessing for humanity. Consider:

Around the 3rd century B.C., the planet emerged from a long cold spell. The warm period which followed lasted about 700 years, and since it coincided with the rise of Pax Romana, it is known as the Roman Warming.

In the 5th century A.D., the earth’s climate became cooler. Cold and drought pushed the tribes of northern Europe south against the Roman frontier. Rome was sacked, and the Dark Ages commenced. And it was a dark age, both metaphorically and literally — the sun’s light dimmed and gave little warmth; harvest seasons grew shorter and yielded less. Life expectancy and literacy plummeted. The plague appeared and decimated whole populations.

Then, inexplicably, about 900 A.D. things began to warm. This warming trend would last almost 400 years, a well documented era known as the Medieval Warm Period. Once again, as temperatures rose harvests and populations grew. Vineyards made their way into Northern Europe, including Britain. Art and science flourished in what we now know as the Renaissance.

Then around 1300 A.D. things cooled drastically. This cold spell would last almost 500 years, a severe climate event known as the Little Ice Age. Millions died in famine as glaciers advanced all over the world. The plague returned. In Greenland, the Norse colony that had been established during the Medieval Warming froze and starved. Arctic pack ice descended south, pushing Inuit peoples to the shores of Scotland. People ice skated on the Thames; they walked from Staten Island to Manhattan over a frozen New York Harbor. The year 1816 was remembered as the year without a summer, with some portions of the Northern Hemisphere seeing snowfall in June.

But around 1850 the planet began to warm up yet again. Glaciers retreated. Temperatures rose. This is the warming period which we are still enjoying today. And once again, the warmth brought bounty: The last 150 years have seen an explosion in life expectancy, population, and scientific progress like never before.

Of course, even before the appearance of humans, the earth alternated throughout its history between extremes of heat and cold: 700 million years ago the planet was covered entirely in ice; 55 million years ago, a swampy greenhouse.

Why? What drives these ancient cycles? There are a lot of theories. The waxing and waning of solar output; cosmic rays and their role in cloud formation; the earth moving through plumes of galactic dust as it travels up and down through the arm of the Milky Way; plate tectonics redirecting the ocean currents; vulcanism. Perhaps it is a combination of all of these things. Perhaps it is something as yet undiscovered. One thing for sure that it’s not: SUVs.

Why, then, do otherwise sensible people believe that we are both causing the current warming and that the warmth is a bad thing? To me it seems some grotesque combination of narcissism and self-loathing, a mentality that says at once “I am so important that my behavior is causing this” and “I am so inherently tainted that it must be bad.”

For these self-hating humans who want us to cut our carbs (carbons, not carbohydrates), I say relax and enjoy the warmth while it lasts.

Because it won’t. No matter what we do, the ice and the cold and the dark will come again. That should be our worry.

TobyLaura.com

This is a photo of the U.S. President bowing down before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Neville Chamberlain was known as the Symbol of Appeasement and I feel that this moment by B. Hussein Obama was another appeasing moment.

*Update* It looks like Rush is onto the same idea.

TobyLaura.com

Here are a couple funny bumper stickers I came across.

I’m all for a great society, but unfortunately, I disagree with Obama’s vision on how to pay for it all. I don’t feel socialism is the answer; nor do I feel that the U.S. taxpayers will want to afford a socialist agenda. Free healthcare, college tuition, and affordable energy are fine ideas, but at what cost? Canada and Europe have forms of socialism, but they pay a high cost out of each of their paychecks. Can we afford that here? Sure. Do we want to? I don’t think we do.

The wealthy already pay all the taxes. The next time you hear a politician or journalist talk about “sticking it” to the wealthiest 1%, try this fact on for size:

The “wealthy,” like a cop and a nurse, already pay most all of the income taxes in this country, so it will take huge tax increases to pay for the future plans that Obama has. Only we, the taxpayer, can decide if that high cost is worth it. Are 70% tax rates what this country was founded on? Are huge tax rates what built the U.S. economy into the world-dominating giant that it is today? No. Capitalism and low tax rates are what made the U.S. the world leader in almost everything. However, the U.S. doesn’t come close to ranking near the top in education, yet we spend more than any other country on each child’s education, proving that simply throwing government (taxpayer) money at something doesn’t make it work. Are we about to do the same thing to the rest of our economy with Obama? We’ll see what he ends up getting away with.

TobyLaura.com

This post goes hand in hand with my last post about James Carville. Carville has proven to be political in his desire to see Bush fail. Rush, on the other hand, has proven to be historical in his desire to have B. Hussein Obama’s policies fail. Here is the full transcript, but below is an excerpt of an excellent monologue as Rush explains why it is acceptable to desire socialist ideas to fail. Since no one wants to talk to Rush but simply take his comments out of context, here’s Rush:

The Federalist Papers and the constitutional convention debates are rife with arguments about the separation of powers.  Now, stick with me on this, because this is a fundamental point to try to explain, especially to those of you who are new to the program, what it is that guides me.  The whole theory of the separation of powers, meaning legislative branch, judicial branch, executive branch, was ingeniously based on human nature.  Our Founding Fathers had studied history, and they knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.  So we divide power.  We divide power between the states and the federal government.  We divide power within the federal government.  And we further divide power among three separate branches of government.  We give each branch a different set of powers and incentives to protect their own prerogatives so they can keep an eye on each other.  These are called checks and balances.  And the liberals love talking about checks and balances very much.

The underlying assumption of this whole system is that the country functions better if everyone is of a skeptical bent of mind.  That’s what keeps the next guy honest.  The whole reason that we have divided government instead of a king is that the issue is not about one government official succeeding.  This country was not founded on the principle that the president is a king and above all the king must succeed.  In fact, the system is designed to ensure that the president fails when he is wrong.  That’s the whole purpose of checks and balances.  The whole purpose of dividing power, is to ensure the president fails when he’s wrong.  The Framers wanted the country to succeed, just as I do.  If they wanted the president to succeed, they would not have saddled him with Congress, they wouldn’t have saddled him with the courts, they wouldn’t have saddled him with the free press, and they wouldn’t have made him face reelection every four years.  They would have made him a king who no one could oppose.  

If our nation was all about a single individual succeeding simply because that individual must succeed regardless, we wouldn’t have the form of government that we do.  Now, conflating the president and the country — and by that I mean, assuming that the president is always the country, assuming that the president always has the country’s best interests at heart, such as the founders did, turns a functioning democracy into a robotic cult.  I fear that that’s what we have right now.  We have a cult of fear and celebrity, robotic cult, that is epitomized in Warren Buffett, it’s epitomized by Jack Welch, it’s epitomized by Barton Biggs and Jim Cramer and anybody else who knows what they see is devastatingly wrong, is horribly wrong, but because there is a fear to oppose because the assumption is that Obama is the country, that Obama equals the best interests of the country simply because he’s Obama, that’s what gives you a cult.  The worst part of it is that many of these people who are making hay over this Limbaugh-wants-Obama-to-fail garbage know full well, ladies and gentlemen, that what I just told you is the case.  

This is not an honest debate going on here, as we have demonstrated in the first hour of the program with the Warren Buffett sound bites and the Barton Biggs sound bites and the Jim Cramer sound bites.  It’s not an honest debate.  What’s happening here is the most cynical kind of down and dirty politics by people who not only wanted George W. Bush to fail, but worked night and day to ensure that he failed.  I say to you again, if the Founders wanted a situation where the government was about one official succeeding, then George Washington would have accepted the role he was he offered as king.  But we have separation of powers.  We have division of powers.  All of this is designed to ensure that a president fails when he is wrong.  The Framers wanted the country to succeed.  Let me add to this, Byron York today writing at the DCExaminer.com: “‘Why The Founding Fathers Would Want Obama’s Plans to Fail’ — James Madison was not specifically contemplating Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, when he wrote Federalist No. 63. But reading the document — one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the US Constitution — it’s clear Madison knew their type. And he knew they would come along again and again in American history, if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history.  Obama and Pelosi, along with their most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current economic mess, as a ‘great opportunity,’ as the president put it last Saturday. They are the types, after a long period out of power, to attempt to use that ‘great opportunity’ to push through far-reaching changes in national policy that had only a tangential connection, if at all, to the crisis at hand. And they are the types the Founding Fathers wanted to stop.

“In the Federalist Papers, written 221 years ago, Madison addressed the need for a Senate to accompany the more populist House of Representatives. An upper body, he wrote, ‘may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.’  For the times when a political leader would attempt to capitalize on those errors and delusions, the Founders prescribed the Senate, with its members elected to terms three times the length of those in the House, originally chosen not by the people but by the state legislatures. From Federalist 63: ‘There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?'”

Let me translate this for you.  There are going to be times demagogues are going to come along, there are going to be times that people who are power hungry, who are going to take advantage of a crisis, to say they’ve got all the solutions, and they’re going to ram all these things through.  The solutions have nothing to do with the crisis.  They’re just selfish desires of the demagogue.  The people, because of the crisis, are going to go along with it, even though in rational moments they would reject it all.  We need an element to stop this.  We need an element to protect the people from the kind of leaders who would abuse them, mislead them, and, ergo, one of those devices was the United States Senate.  “Of course the economy is in crisis. But if Obama had his way, everything would be treated as if it were a crisis. Health care is a crisis. The environment is a crisis. Education is a crisis. In truth, those other areas are not crises, and the Senate’s job is to delay action on them until Obama’s power to stir popular passions fades.”

So you see, ladies and gentlemen, all I want and all we want is success for every American. If there’s any worship on this program, it is not of a single man, it is of our Constitution and our other founding documents, and the Founding Fathers who gave them to us. Certainly not of a mortal human being today. I just wanted to go through this to explain it because I know for a fact the tune-in factor — our cume, which is the total audience (they actually showed it to me yesterday) — is literally geometric in its increase. As such, the people listening here who haven’t heard before who come to the program with all of these erroneous misconceptions that they’ve been filled with by the critics of this program for all these 20 years.

TobyLaura.com

Carville Wanted Bush to Fail

The press never reported that Democratic strategist James Carville said he wanted President Bush to fail before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But a feeding frenzy ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail.

By Bill Sammon

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.”

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.

“We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I’m wanting them to turn against him,” Greenberg admitted.

The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: “They don’t want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails.”

Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: “Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!”

The press followed Carville’s orders, never reporting his or Greenberg’s desire for Bush to fail. The omission was understandable at first, as reporters were consumed with chronicling the new war on terror. But months and even years later, the mainstream media chose to never resurrect those controversial sentiments, voiced by the Democratic Party’s top strategists, that Bush should fail.

That omission stands in stark contrast to the feeding frenzy that ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail. The press devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the remark, suggesting that Limbaugh and, by extension, conservative Republicans, were unpatriotic.

“The most influential Republican in the United States today, Mr. Rush Limbaugh, said he did not want President Obama to succeed,” Carville railed on CNN recently. “He is the daddy of this Republican Congress.”

Limbaugh, a staunch conservative, emphasized that he is rooting for the failure of Obama’s liberal policies.

“The difference between Carville and his ilk and me is that I care about what happens to my country,” Limbaugh told Fox on Wednesday. “I am not saying what I say for political advantage. I oppose actions, such as Obama’s socialist agenda, that hurt my country.

“I deal in principles, not polls,” Limbaugh added. “Carville and people like him live and breathe political exploitation. This is all a game to them. It’s not a game to me. I am concerned about the well-being and survival of our nation. When has Carville ever advocated anything that would benefit the country at the expense of his party?”

Carville told Politico that focusing on Limbaugh is a deliberate strategy aimed at undermining Republicans.

“The television cameras just can’t stay away from him,” he said. “Our strategy depends on him keeping talking, and I think we’re going to succeed.”

Greenberg added: “He’s driving the Republican reluctance to deal with Obama, which Americans want.”

In 2006, 51 percent of Democrats wanted Bush to fail, according to a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll.

TobyLaura.com

Speaking of Glenn Beck, here is a funny YouTube video of his. (By the way, he had to search far and wide to find a singer willing to sing his version of the new National Anthem. They were unwilling to poke fun at “The One, the messiah, B. Hussein Obama. No one thought twice about making fun of G.W. but . . . ) Catch the Russian subtitles?

I wonder if any of your kids are being taught this at school? I wonder how many Americans think we are a democracy? I wonder if you know that democracies fail and have in the past? Brush up on your history with this short video and then ask yourself where we are headed under the new big spender: B. Hussein Obama.

(Just remember: this is an internet video and is not gospel. Like Glenn Beck says, to stay informed, you must do your own research and take things, especially from the internet, with a grain of salt.)

TobyLaura.com