Friday Randomness

So Oprah is making news about ending her show after next year. She said that the decision required a lot of thought and prayer. My question is...who is she praying to?

I think the far-right guys need to shut up over Obama bowing to the Japanese Prime Minister or Emperor or whatever he is. Being deferential and respectful on a global stage does not weaken America. Move on to something more substantial. You have enough to pick from.

This week the White House Office of Management and Budget announced that for fiscal year 2009, which just ended October 1st, the US government wasted $98 billion on "improper payments." That's their euphemism for money flushed down the toilet due to fraud, misdirected reimbursements, duplicate payments or money that was simply lost. That is 36% MORE than 2008. Remember, this is a president, who during the campaign, promised the US taxpayer greater transparency and accountability on every dollar spent. That is your money...gone. No answers, no apologies...and now they want a much bigger slice of the health care industry and carbon emission regulation and the automotive industry and the banking industry and on and on and on. It may simply be too late to get the horse back in the barn.


Global warming continues to be toward the top of Obama's agenda as he is mentioning it in the same breath with national security when he goes overseas. I read the following from the Gartman Letter and will retype it here as it echoes my thoughts on the matter:

On the arch-conservative but illogical nature of the global warm-ers: We have never hidden our antipathy toward those who believe in global warming, for we find their thesis illogical at worst, poorly based on ill-advised facts, and anti-progress. As we said last week, and as we have said for years, however, we do indeed believe in global climate change. The climate always changes. The world is malleable and its climate has always changed...radically...and it will continue to change into the future. Man's "imposition" on that change is minimal at best, made all but insignificant when compared to the effects of the sun, gravity, ocean drifts, tectonic plate shifts, et al.

However, what really bothers us are the egregious economic consequences of the demands being made by the likes of Al Gore and other global warming alarmists. The damage they shall wreak upon the US...and the global economy...is shocking, and none of it is good. According to the American Enterprise Institute, as reported in Newsweek magazine this week in George Will's column, the Waxman-Markey "global warming" legislation, the goal

is just slightly more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050. The last time this nation had that small an amount was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050. To meet the 83% reduction target in a nation of 420 million, per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person, which is one quarter the per capital emissions of 1910, a level probably last when the population was 45 million - in 1875.

Forcing the US to accept such nonsense is the very worst of the Luddite-like, anti-business posture of the Left. It is reactionary to the highest degree imaginable, and it is what we call the illogical arch-conservatism of the eco-Left that must be stopped before the very real damage can and will be done to the US and the global economy. What do these people smoke? And how often?