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When The Name Doesn’t Represent The Content….

I don’t like the title I just came up with, and I don’t feel all that comfortable being critical of bloggers who I also consider friends. But Bruce… Dan… The name of your blog is “Gay Patriot“. It’s been 4 days since the election, and you’ve written nothing about the success of the four pro same-sex marriage initiatives that were voted on on Tuesday.

I recognize the Romney loss is a very important topic for a site dedicated to defending Conservative ideals. But I would think that a blog with the term “Gay” in its title would have had something to say about the successful passage of the gay marriage amendments by now.

Mark Levin – Purist…. Confirmed!!!

For years, I’ve been railing on the GOP for its ideological purging of moderates from the party. Not that I need any confirmation from Mark Levin on this, but here’s a statement he made concerning the defeat of Mitt Romney in the Presidential race:

We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

Because of course all 57 million who voted for Romney share Levin’s hyperactive views of the world…. Not.

We are the alternative. We will resist. We’re not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We’re not good losers, you better believe we’re sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we’re called ‘purists.’ Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We’re purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists.

Mitt Romney got the nomination because the party favors the moderate?

No.

He got the nomination because he was the only moderate competing against, at one point, five Purist Conservatives, all splitting the Purist vote amongst one another. If you take the vote count for Romney vs the combined Gingrich and Santorum totals through the March 3’rd Washington primary, their combined popular vote totals beat Romney 2,099,585 to 1,854,670. Adding in the Perry / Bachmann votes increases the purest vote at that point to 2,143,976. Think of what that would mean if Romney were only facing one Purist candidate. In April you start to see the vote totals for the Purists slide as more and more Conservatives shift to the inevitable – Time to back the obvious winner of the process. But it’s clear Romney is not the choice of the majority of the party. He won because the Pruists offered too many choices and couldn’t get out of their own way.

But this is the Mighty Mark Levin, and the majority of the members of the GOP will accept his false narrative and rewrite of history without batting an eye.

And by saying “And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans” by constantly harping on the “pseudo-conservatives” (aka RINO’s) I would say that pretty much does establish that you are, indeed, purists.

And you wonder why I left the party in 2005.

My Thoughts On Last Night’s Elections. *Meme Alert*

I’ve come across some analysis of why Romney didn’t succeed in his bid to oust the current President. At Watts Up With That, they are following the FOX news planted meme that hurricane Sandy is the reason for Romneys loss.

Before I make my comment, note that I’m not a supporter of either party. I voted for Gary Johnson. I am not a Barrack Obama supporter. That said, my two cents.

One commentor wrote:

“We need to face the facts, it’s not 47% as Romney indicated, it’s over 50%. We’re finished…

You got the first part right. You and the GOP need to face facts. Many, probably a good 80% of those 47% don’t enjoy the fact they are getting assistance from the Government. They are taking assistance because they can’t find a job, or a combination of two part time jobs, that can pay at least some of the bills, keep a roof over their heads, and feed their families. By adopting this insulting 47% rhetoric, you insult a good chunk of the population who are honestly struggling and make them less likely to vote for you.

But, you might say, the GOP offered better solutions to create more jobs!

You offered solutions, but they weren’t believable. This country, and this party, have spent the last 30 plus years supporting free trade agreements that make it much much easier to export jobs overseas. Hell, part of the reason people still praise Nixon is that he helped open up the Chinese market, which resulted in many many businesses to move to China. How many times have we heard about businesses picking up and going to another country, and then have any number of the Conservatives explain that it’s a part of doing business. Why are Levi’s 501 jeans not made in America anymore? And Wall-Mart is great, except for many it is a reminder that they have no choice but to shop at the cheap store featuring mostly Chinese imports products that used to be made here in America, because they don’t have a good enough job or two jobs that pays enough to be able to afford to shop elsewhere. Now, one can’t blame the GOP exclusively for this of course, the Dems have their hand to play in this as well, but you guys chose a guy who for a good period of his professional life operated a business that actively shipped jobs overseas. So don’t blame 50 + percent of the country for not trusting your party when it comes to job creation.

This is a problem of reality overriding the preferred message. Earning more income from capital gains does not translate into bringing better, higher paying jobs back to this country, no matter who is in the oval office.

Commentor arthur4563 said this:

Since nobody asked, I’ll be glad to give my opinion of why the GOP has lost the last two Presidential elections. Both in 2008 and this year, their nominating system produced a Presidential nominee who did not have the wholehearted support of their own party – neither
McCain nor Romney had more than a quarter of the party’s support. And the reason this came about was because the GOP fielded almost a dozen prospective candidates, all of whom were conservatives except for one guy – in this case Romney – and the overwhelming conservative majority was split 10 or more ways, allowing a guy with less than 30% support from GOP party members to win a lot of winner-take-all primaries and get the nomination. The winner-take-all system is allowing this ridiculous situation to occur and those types of primaries should be banned. The GOP paid the price for using a non-democratic method of choosing their candidate. From my perspective, Gingrich was the only talent the GOP had…

You do realize Gingrich, during the primaries, was so great a candidate, he (along with a couple of others) managed the fun feat of not being properly registered to get on the ballot in his home state during the primaries. That’s called incompetence. The reason Romney won the primaries is that he is a very very good executive. The good ones don’t make stupid mistakes like Gingrich did. He seemed to be the only one who was doing this, running for office, because of a higher calling and not simply to stroke his ego or prove he was the ONE “True Conservative” , i.e. the most bad ass social conservative on the planet.

Here’s the deal as I see it. Did hurricane sandy make a difference in this race. It’s hard to say for sure. Mitts momentum did seem to be slowing before the storm hit. The storm quite possibly helped tip hurricane vulnerable states such as Virginia and possibly Florida in Obama’s favor. But go to the west. New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado were likely affected negatively due to the schizophrenic nature of Arizona and its “True Conservative” solutions to the immigration issue. As a group, Mitt only got, what, 29% of the Hispanic vote? And I’m already seeing several well known and well respected Conservative talking head berating those Latinos who didn’t vote for Obama as either illegals, complicit with law-breakers, or just stupid when it comes to their own best self interest.

That’s no way to win elections, or plant a seed that will contribute to positive electoral outcomes in the future.

I have more to say, but I must go work now.

What If Lucas Bought Disney????

Thank GOD Disney bought Lucasfilm and not the other way around!…. We could have seen re-edits like this, but on Disney movies! Can you imagine what it would be like when Bambi’s mother gets offed…. Oops…. Spoiler.

Prepair For The Storm After The Storm.

Republicans…. Get ready for an onslaught of Romney quotes saying he wants to do away with FEMA… That it’s “immoral”. Here is an exchange from one of the debates:

John King: “FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role,” Mr. King said. “How do you deal with something like that?”

Romney’s response: “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

“Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut – we should ask ourselves the opposite question,” Romney continued. “What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot …”

King interjected: “Including disaster relief, though?”

Romney replied: “We cannot – we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.”

Yes, I know the Dems are already pushing a version of the quote that has Romney saying FEMA is immoral, and that is not what Romney said. But what he and the party endorses, the cutting of FEMA to help balance the budget, is going to look pretty foolish in light of the tremendous damage we’re already seeing. And some in the party, along with TV and radio squawking heads, HAVE demanded that FEMA be completely abolished because of the cost and it’s not Constitutional. This one is coming back to bite you in a big big way!

U.S.S. Titanic Update!

So…. How was your Tuesday?

Yesterday was one of those hectic days.

Work was backed up due to Monday’s rain. I installed a heat exchanger on a heater, and that took longer than I thought it would. got home with just enough time to string the Taylor… Oh, if only I had only strung it!

While the strings were off, I decided to polish the thing. The fret board was very dull, so I spent some time polishing it several times…

Which then made me late for Acoustic highway practice! But, since the Taylor was so shiny and bright sounding, I was forgiven my tardiness.

So we had a great band practice, including the audition of a new member. We’re moving Chris from drums to guitar and becoming a five piece once again.

Then went to Spokeasy to join the mate for a beer, then played the Audies open mic.

Yes, the U.S.S. Titanic launched yet again! Thankfully, the time spent on guitar, though not as much as I’d like, is paying off. The more I play these scary open mics, the more confident I have become steering my ship and the better I am at avoiding massive guitaring mistakes, i.e. icebergs! Yeah, I still scrape the hull from time to time, but I still do that on bass, and I’ve been playing that for, what, 26 years!

First, and apology to those who read my facebook pledge to play a new original song or two. I didn’t play the intended original songs that I had in mind because, well, I never did have the time to arrange them yesterday. But I did play a couple of new songs, Paul Carrack’s “How Long” and the Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger”, both of which are very new to me on guitar. Except for going outside the venue for a couple of minutes to doodle and try and remember the chords to both song, both were unrehearsed shots in the dark Remember, no time to practice yesterday. I also played “Blackbird”, which came out much better than the last time I tried it. “don’t Dream It’s Over” was really cool, because a sax player joined me on stage for some killer accompaniment. That was SOOOO cool!!!! And then I let some other people play my guitar. I love to hear what a more skilled player sounds like on that instrument!

Then when I got home, I spent another hour looking at possible songs to learn that can give the sax player an even better opportunity to jam. I ended up stumbling upon a really cool acoustic version of Phil Collins’ “One More Night”, which has a tremendous sax solo at the end. Needless to say, I was up until l too late in the morning! But it was a heck of a night.

Is the tiredness today worth it?

You betcha!!!! I’m getting ever closer to being able to do a one hour show all by my lonesome! It’s my goal to be able to do that by the time March goosesteps into our lives and I turn 48. It’ll be kind of a birthday present to myself.

Now, for today. More work. A nap. And win the lottery… PLEASE!

PS. Here is the version of “One More Night” I plan to learn.

PPS. I’ve decided that the new working title of my solo album is going to be “Jealous Rage And icebergs!”, if only because I don’t think anyone has named an album that before.

Small Gaffe Allert.

Said by Jim Graves, the Democrat trying to unseat Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann:

“She’s spending millions on ridiculous attacks ads saying I am somehow responsible for TARP, the stimulus bill, the Affordable Care Act,” he says with a laugh. “But I wasn’t in Congress then—I was busy trying to keep my company afloat and make payroll. She was the one in Congress at the time. She’s attacking me as being a big spender, despite the fact that’s the opposite of what I am. I’m a business guy. I’m a spendthrift.”

Um… Yer doing it wrong. A “spendthrift” is someone who wastes money and spends it out of control. Let’s face it though, how can a word with thrift on the end of it not be about being thrifty. Stupid English language!

Unforced Errors Part 2… Hello Critics… Where Are You…..

Lets me get this straight. According to many in the media, and beyond, the attacks on 9/11 were Bush’s fault because there was some intelligence that something big was going to happen, and even thought there was no specificity at all about the attacks on the WTC, this is Bush’s failings. Bush and his team failed to connect the dots, as it were. Given the lack of actionable evidence concerning a specific target for the 9/11 attacks, one has to ask exactly what could have been done. That said, it’s not beyond the scope of things to say, in retrospect, it could have been handled better.

Fast forward eleven years. The current President and his Defense Department staff not only failed to provide any security to the embassy in Beghazi after they expressed concerns about a possible attack, but, after the attack actually did happen, resulting in the deaths of four Americans, the administration floats a bogus story about the attacks being the result of unrest over an anti-muslim video, knowingly lying about the real reason for the terrorist attacks on the embassy.

Yet, you don’t hear the same criticism about the current administration concerning this President and his administration.

Exactly how does that work?

Unforced Errors

Ann Althouse has posted a damning collection of information against the administration concerning the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi.  She features  some quotes from  Sen Graham from “Face The Nation”, laying out the case:

The intelligence community on the ground in Libya has told Senator Corker and myself that within twenty-four hours, they communicated up to Washington that this was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya on the same date said it was a terrorist attack. The video of the compound shows that there was nobody at the Benghazi consulate. There was never a group to riot. And the evidence is overwhelming, and the idea that it was spawned by a- a video and a riot would be– hold the administration blameless. They said it was a copycat of Cairo. It wasn’t a copycat. It was a sustained attack that lasted for six or eight hours, using heavy weapons which undercuts the idea that al– al Qaeda has been dismantled and on the run and it certainly undercuts the idea that our policy choices in Libya have not going after the militia, not helping the Libyans training the national army were good choices.”

It’s not just Susan Rice. The President of the United States said that it was the result of a video on David Letterman two days later. And the facts are very clear. There was never a riot. There was never a group of people around the embassy. It was a coordinated terrorist attack that took hours. Patrick Kennedy from the State Department briefed congressional staffers the day after the attack saying it was a terrorist attack. The next day after she was on your show, the– the counterterrorism deputy said it was a terrorist attack and the President after that went on national TV The View and David Letterman talking about we’re not sure if this was inspired by a video, a hateful video.

Some of you might dismiss this because Graham is a Republican. But Bob Woodward is also featured with quotes.

There are lots of unanswered questions. And I love documents, and they released some documents in this, and if you go and look at the original request for more security, they say our policy, our goal here is to shift from an emergency footing to normalize the security relationship.

Now, this is in March, six, seven months ago. Anyone looking at that what say, wait a minute, read the document in which they say, oh, the situation is incredibly unstable. Well, why are you trying to normalize your security in a situation that’s visibly unstable? You even acknowledge that.

So you’ve got a bad policy. And anyone looking at that would say, wait a minute; we are screwed up; we can’t normalize here.
So that’s the first problem. The second problem is, as soon as an ambassador is killed, the president should be more proactive and be out there. He can go, you know, five minutes in the White House briefing room and say this is really serious; we’re going to get to the bottom of it; we don’t have the answers. And all of this could have been nipped in the bud and it was not.

And when Chris Wallace asked about Susan Rice’s insistence that Benghazi was a video induced riot vs a terrorist attack, Woodward says this:

I don’t think we know exactly why she did that or what was going on. But the key… is, two weeks later, the president’s at the U.N. and citing this YouTube video, I guess half a dozen times. That, as we now know, had virtually nothing to do with what happened in Benghazi.

And as we now know, they knew this was not the case the day after the attacks happened.

So why on Earth would the President and his team continue following such a stunningly bad and damaging path on this, even after it became obvious that this was indeed a terrorist initiated attack?

It was indeed an error on Romney’s part to make the statement before the facts were known. By issuing his first statement, he looked very partisan. These are the people who are never shy about reminding us that politics is supposed to stop at the border. He didn’t get it right. But the Obama administration, in their zeal to try and make Romney look bad, ran with the anti-muslim video story and committed the worse error of responding to Romney instead of waiting to comment on the actual events and leaving politics out of the equation.

When it started to become clear that Benghazi was indeed a terrorist attack, the administration continued to run with the “video” story. Why? Because, in their isolated circle of advisers and in some of the media, it looked like that was working. Romeny seemed to be taking a hit from this.  But once the true nature of the attack permeated out into the regular media, they got caught in the trap they originally laid out for Romney. The administration became the Wiley Coyote of this story.

As Andrew Sullivan is so fond of saying….  Meep. Meep.

Climate Scientists Behaiving Badly… Blandely?

Haven’t done a climate post in a while. A couple of things caught my eye.

First, we have the ever entertaining William “The Wiki-Conqueror”  Connolley at it again.  This is a warmist was banned from editing Wikipedia because he was summarily deleting the profiles of people who didn’t tow the line on the alarmist version of climate science. The ban has since been lifted, but there was a stipulation. He was not allowed to make any changed to information on anyone who is still alive.

OK.

But people die. One such person was French Climatologist Marcel Leroux. He wrote a book critical of his peers called “Global Warming — Myth or Reality? : The Erring Ways of Climatology“. Connolley says the person was deleted because the page “just offensive“….

No, he doesn’t actually say that about Leroux’s Wiki page. He says this:

“But sometimes a page exists, about a real person or event, and there is doubt about whether the page is desirable or not”.

.

.

Do you see what I just did there?  I corrected the inaccurate information – I didn’t delete it. But people like Connolley fear and dissent  on the consensus. There can be no evidence that such a thing even exists. Which is why those that can’t get deleted from the web are labeled “deniers”, even if they are not deniers that CO2 has an effect of the atmosphere and can cause warming.

And speaking of consensus,  Kevin Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis section at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, is bummed. Apparently the next IPCC report is not going to be nearly as alarmist as the last one.

“There are more people, it’s more diffuse, it’s harder to gain a consensus – quite frankly I find the whole process very depressing. The science is solid, but with a larger group it’s harder to reach a consensus, and updates every six years are just too slow. After the fifth assessment, we should push on with a different format.”

Note that he does say the science is “solid”….  So what is he complaining about?

Translated – Our guys are no in control of the IPCC process this time, so we can’t control what will be considered “consensus”. Information will be included that we don’t like, that doesn’t support our doom and gloom narrative.

The IPCC has always been as much about political control as anything. Other people are at the head of the process, and the old guard doesn’t like it.

He’s also upset that, as a result of “Climategate”, the political world is no longer jumping through hoops, or no longer pretending to really, on issues of climate.  From the last link:

Professor Trenberth believes it had a big impact on public debates about climate science. ”It made an immense difference – the level of vitriol and hate we received,” he said. ”Not only do we have waves of attacks when we publish and it ends up on a denialist website, but it has affected politicians.”

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently had its climate change-related research budget slashed by a fifth, affecting Professor Trenberth’s peers, as a result of online campaigns against climate scientists, he said. He believes uncertainties in climate change models scientists rely upon is being falsely inflated as a general uncertainty about the status of climate science.

”With the links between weather and climate for instance – we know they are there, but the specific numbers need work,” Professor Trenberth said.

And, one more thing, those who want to link the “crazy weather” to global warming, please note this last sentence from Mr Trenberth:

”With the links between weather and climate for instance – we know they are there, but the specific numbers need work”.

Translated – There is no proof that firmly establishes a link between any of the so called “unprecedented” weather events we’ve seen in the last few years, there is still only the hypothesis. Thing is, the extreme weather events that we see on the news are, as it turns out, not statistically increasing in number. The mid west drought this year is pretty bad, but, I must remind you, there is a long LONG way to go before it even gets close to the drought that occurred in the 1930’s. And no, I’m not talking about the poor farming practices that led to the dust bowl. I’m talking about the meteorological drought.

There are cycles of drought, but this was one of the worst ever recorded. The decade started with dry years in 1930 and 1931 especially in the East. Then, 1934 recorded extremely dry conditions over almost 80 percent of the United States. Extreme drought conditions returned in 1936, 1939 and 1940.