Nightly Ramble: The “Keep It Under Your Hat” Edition

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the “Keep it under your hat” edition.

• Earth day: Ah, yes… we’ve not heard much about Earth Day, this year, have we? Certainly not as much as we have in previous years.  It is today, you know. I  suppose it not being front and center is due to two situations: First, Democrats are in charge, and to call attention to the plight of Gaia as OwlGore is wont to do, would only show the electorate that the Democrats really aren’t doing all that much about ‘saving the earth’ either.  Secondly, even the Enviro-whackjobs are started to see that the whole thing was a scam from the get go. They’re not quite ready to let go of their anti-human paranoia, but neither are they willing to continue making fools of themselves, either. Me? I’m celebrating Earth day by toddling down to the gas station,  and filling up my SUV, so I can drive to a steak house I frequent.
• Save the earth from the Environmentalists: And no, I’m not joking with that graphic. John Tierny writes in of all places, the ever more rapidly going broke New York Times, that…
  

  In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

  Well, now. Ain’t that a kick in OwlGore’s butt?

• Global Cooling:  You do know, don’t you, that we’re in a period of Global cooling?  Of course Science has no clue as to why. Interesting, though that this should come up when we were told that the earth was heating, soon to become as fried as Perez Hilton’s brain on a Saturday night.  The bottom line, here, folks is the Chicken Littles who have been telling us the sky is falling, haven’t a bloody clue… That understanding is something you’d think would be a requirement to accepting their incredible call to completely change our lifestyles and don Doc Martins. but it’s always treated like we’re supposed to accept blindly the judgements of our supposed betters, like we were the bailouts and the huge spending increases. By the way, how’s that one working out?
• Save the Globe:  You can understand why John Kerry wants to use the power of government to save the Boston Globe, being as they’ve been in his pocket conststantly.  Are you getting the message on this stuff, yet?
• Good info: So, now the memos come out that report, correctly, that good info came from the waterboarding sessions.  I’m with Steve Plunk, who says at OTB:
  

  Accepting these techniques is a far cry from “yay torture”. It’s a rough world out there and the stakes are high. Sometimes too high to maintain a moral standard that makes everyone happy.I imagine the administration officials who debated these techniques did so in a somber manner understanding how serious of an issue it is. Grown ups get serious in serious times.

  Just so. And I’ll repeat Boortz’ quote from yesterday, in that context:

  If someone has the information that could save thousands of lives — OK .. just one life — and if you had a reasonable expectation that you could get that information from this guy by pulling out his fingernails or (gasp!) pouring water on his face … and if you didn’t do it … then you are every bit as worthless as he is.

  Amen and Amen. The anti-‘torture’ crowd is trying to have this thing both ways, too. They were the oens screaming ‘what the hell happened to our intel gathering?’ after 9/11, and they’d be the ones screaming the loudest had we had any further attacks on our country.  And of course now we see Obama flip-flopping on proescuting the folks who got us the information that saved all those lives, as David reported last night.  It’s as bald faced a flip-flop as we’ve ever seen, here at BitsBlog, but I don’t imagine it’ll be the last from this administration.

• What did Congress know and when did they know it? Fred Thompson notes that Congress, according to the reports the WH released, knew all about what was going on, at each step of the game, including the Democrat party leadership. So why are they getting a pass now?  Fred says let’s get them to testify under oat to what they aproved of. Bet this move to procecute disappears if this issue is forced.
• Bye Bye, Ellen Moran: Obama’s comms secratary is changing jobs… going to work for Gary Locke.  No clue why. Nor is there any word on who is taking the position yet. Guess they’re running out of tax cheats, so it’s taking longer.
• Boo freakin’ hoo: I’m telling you, gang, if this pirate gets off with a wrist slap… and I predict he will…it’ll be the best argument for exempting pirates and other terrorists from our criminal ‘justice’ system, that anyone’s ever made.
•  Unemployment by the numbers: Jim Lindgren at Volokh runs the numbers, and concludes that the states with the highest taxes and most unionized workers are the ones with the most unemployment.  Yet, what do we see Obama doing? Pushing card check, and raising taxes. Yep… hot on the trail of ‘recovery’, this guy.