Scandals: Pick one to your liking...

Currently there is Fast & Furious.  Likely as big as Watergate eventually.  But there are other scandals that the "most open administration" in history is involved in.

Yesterday saw the start of a potential Solyndra scandal.  Notice how green, solar, or Solyndra was not mentioned last night?  Well, the FBI invaded Solyndra looking for items in a sealed search warrant.  Sealed warrants are wrong, but it is pretty obvious they are looking for favoritism in awarding the $535 Million loan guarantees (and subsequent re-negotiation) for Solyndra.  From Mar 2009 to April 2011 at least 20 visits to the White House were made by Solyndra executives and influencers like George Kaiser, a campaign funds bundler and large donor for Obama and a backer of Solyndra.  In the week before the loan was made about 5 visits were made. 

Then there is PigFord.  If you are black and claim to just want to be a farmer, or your daddy was a farmer, you can claim $75,000 in reparations for injustice done to you by the Department of Agriculture over many years.  As much as 80% of claims by 94,000 farmers could be fraudulent in this case where Congress appropriated $1.5 Billion to make amends.  Of course lawyers will see most of the money.

And how about Black Panther Voter Intimidation?  Big mean looking guys with bats standing around voting places to keep out the wrong kind of voters.  Eric Holder's DOJ simply let the charges drop.  Amazing.

And let's not forget voter fraud, with ACORN convictions, stuffed ballot boxes and rigged voting machines.  ACORN may be dead, but its children live on in most states under different names.  It is still dangerous.

Agenda 21: The Ultimate Land Grab

If you don't know what Agenda 21 is, you owe it to yourself to do some research.  There is lots of information available on the web. For scary reading, look at the United Nations web sites.

Private property rights in California are being subjected to Agenda 21, a United Nation's declaration on the collective society's right to control private property.  Agenda 21 is being worked into all phases of land planning by zealous planners.  If you value your private property rights (land, possessions, thoughts, money) start with this simple video:
Youtube: Agenda 21 in California

Fast & Furious: Napolitano Too?...and 27 Crimes

Last week Dennis Burke resigned.  He was the US Attorney for the Phoenix District who ran F&F. No explanation was given; could it be to protect his friends? 

One friend is Janet Napolitano, Head of Homeland Security.  Burke worked for Napolitano when she was Clinton's Attorney General.  Then he became her chief deputy in 1998 when she was elected Arizona's Attorney General. In 2002, when she became AZ Governor, he followed as chief of staff, then followed again to DHS until 2009, when he struck out on his own as a US Attorney.   DHS was read into F&F on numerous occasions and it appears Burke sent weekly updates to DHS.  And the White House asks us to believe there was no discussion of F&F between any of them?

See here:  Did-napolitano-know-about-fast-and-furious?

More Crime Scenes:  One source I saw says that F&F guns have been found at 27 crime scenes.  I can't confirm that.  But on Sept 14, Sharly Atkinson at So far, we know over two hundred guns ended up in the hands of Mexican cartels.
Fast-Furious-Mexico-crime-scenes

Jobs Speech: Jobs or Campaigning? Oops!

President Obama got one thing right tonight...he finished his so-called jobs speech in time for the NFL season kickoff.

Other than that, it sounds a lot like the last three years of speeches:
- Pass the bill now, pass the bill now (but wait until next week when we finish writing it)
- Tax the rich (because I like class warfare)
- Let's spend another $447 Billion on something, anything (this fulfills my budget pledge to reduce spending 'cause it's only half of the Stimulus spending)
- Everyone pull together (as long as you do it the way my government says...I'll be the cheerleader)
- I'll work to reduce regulations (oh, don't mind the 75 major new regulations in the past 3 years that cost  business $75 Billion)
- How about we rebuild schools? (but we'll have to start next summer because 95% of school construction/revamp occurs in the summer)
etc., etc.

Even for a campaign speech, this is all getting tiresome.  Too bad for the country.

BANANAS: More bans on everything

When I was trying to bring more gas into California, we often refered to the anti-everything folks as BANANAS = Ban Absolutely Anything Anywhere Near Anything.  This was a good methaphor for attacks on industry, but seems to apply well to other bans, which are proliferating these days.

California July 2012:  Ban on Foie Gras becomes effective.  The French Laundry restaurant manager in Yountville says "We are resigned to the ban..."

California:  Ongoing efforts to ban lead containing ammunition.  Now in effect in condor areas.  No good science on this has been put forward.

Chicago:  Foie Gras ban from 2006 to 2008.  Finally the butter loving palettes prevailed.

New York City:  Mayor Bloomberg loves to ban stuff:  Transfats, salt, sugar drinks, knives, guns, common sense, clergy and fireman at 9/11 ceremonies...

California:  Fish and Game is trying to ban fishing on private property by creating burdensome regulations for lake owners and fish hatcheries and requiring a fishing license for using private property lakes.

Fast & Furious: Grenades and Indians; and Watergate?

F&F style investigations are proliferating. 

GrenadeGate:  A guy arrested in Mexico for making grenades for sale to the Sinaloa Cartel was released by ATF in Arizona in July 2010.  Why?  Original WSJ:     ATF: Let's_release_man_giving_grenades_to_cartels

IndianaGate:  And some folks in Indiana seem to have been used/released in a similar way as the Phoenix straw purchasers.

And further to practicing the time-honored coverup methods, ATF is moving F&F cases from Phoenix to Los Angeles and Dallas.

On another tack:  How many news outlets are now comparing F&F to Watergate?  I Googled the terms and came up with dozens of hits:
Investors Business Daily:  Fast-And-Furious-Scandal-A-Watergate-For-Obama
US Daily Review:  Fast-and-furious-obamas-watergate
Brit Hume on Daily Caller:  Hume-obama-handling-of-fast-and-furious-reminiscent-of-scandal-plagued-nixon-doj
Canada Free Press:  Watergate Article
Big Government:  AWR Hawkins:  Which-was-worse-watergate-or-operation-fast-and-furious?

Admittedly, many hits are for blogs, but many of those are fairly respectable and widely read blogs.

Climate: Sun or CO2?

A friend sent me a provocative link about new research reported in Nature from CERN:  New-evidence-debunks-manmade-global-warming.  It quotes two Financial Post articles by Lawrence Solomon, although it has been well and truly cherry picked to prove a point.  So I looked into it a little further, and came up with...maybe-it-is  or  maybe-it-isn't.

First, I think Solomon’s missive that “The science is now all-but-settled on global warming” as stated in the article seems a little premature.   However, it appears that a good case can be made that nucleation by cosmic rays is a real phenomenon but not necessarily that it is a very important contributor.

A little more searching finds some info on the CERN CLOUD experiment.  Here is official CERN announcement: CLOUD_SI_press-briefing_29JUL11  Note that they say more work must be done to identify vapors in the lower atmosphere that also contribute to nucleation.

Here are Solomon’s Financial Post articles: 

Part 1:  Lawrence-solomon-science-now-settled   Be sure to click on the Hidden Graph link.

Part 2:  Lawrence-solomon-our-cosmic-climate/#more-8257

I find it interesting that many people have been proposing to inject salt particles or sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere to promote cloud formation, and thus reflect sunlight in order to reduce temperature rise.  And of course volcanoes inject lots of ammonia into the atmosphere.  So the nucleating vapors used here are similar.

BUT, refer to this link contained in a comment to Solomon’s articles:   http://mediamatters.org/research/201108310023    Now, I know this is from Media Matters, whose main goal is usually to make the conservative media look stupid, but the quotes from reputable people and Jasper Kirkby, the main scientist behind the research, provide a strong caution about how to interpret this new research. 

I think what has happened here is that the press has flown off into the sun, and both sides have had their wings singed by their overarching ambition to prove the other guy irrefutably wrong.  As  Pat Robertson says in the video, “Don’t get stampeded by the latest theory.”

The science battle may be getting closer to being won, but the political battle has a long way to go.  Let’s keep watching.