Top 10: Most Corrupt

Ta-Da! Our National Political Leadership!

There are others who could have qualified, and a Top 50 might have given a more accurate sense of today's political climate. But those named on this list have certainly earned the right to be there. Ed Morrissey points out that the paucity of Republicans merely reflects how few from the GOP are now in positions of power. Virtue in the weak sense: You can't misuse power you don't have, and if you don't have a place at the trough, it's hard to get your snout in there.

The list is in alphabetical order, not a ranking by the perfection of corruption:

Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians" for 2009

Our governing elite

I had a wonderful dream the other night. It was that every voter in the next election voted against every Congressional incumbent. A clean sweep, a new dawn. I was so sorry to wake up, I nearly wept. But Congress, where the job is to spend other people's money, is such an inherently corrupting institution that the new dawn would only have lasted a year or two anyway.

Recently, the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) analyzed the financial assets of US lawmakers based on required annual disclosures, and found that there are 237 millionaires in the US Congress.

Precisely the governing by a semi-permanent wealthy aristocracy that the Founders had in mind. Oh, wait...

How many of these Plutocrats feel enough noblesse oblige to return their salaries to the Treasury? Or pay for their own first class airline tickets? Or anything? On the other hand, when you work as long and hard for your money as, say, John Kerry has, it's natural to try to hang onto it. Just to show how high the bar is set, Kerry's getting kudos for flying commercial (eeewww!) to Copenhagen, instead of in a private jet.

It really is quite hopeless.

Byron

The Richest Members of the US Congress

1. Cynthia Marie Lummis (R-Wyo) $48.29 million
2. Bob Corker (R-Tenn) $52.35
3. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) $53.33
4. Alan Grayson (D-Fla) $54.45
5. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) $69.62
6. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif) $72.38
7. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) $74.74
8. Jay rockerfeller (D-WV) $94.31
9. Vernon Buchanan (R-Fla) $142.43
10. Jared Polis (D-Colo) $158.17
11. John Kerry (D-Mass) $208.80
12. Mark Warner (D-VA) $209.70
13. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc) $214.57
14. Jane Harman (D-Calif) $244.80
15. Darrell Issa (R-Calif) $251.03

Obama School/Sex Czar

If you are easily offended, do not click the link. If the the last word in the link below has no meaning for you, that might indicate that you really don't need to go there. You have been warned.

What you will find at the link is some detail about the sorts of things Obama's Safe School Czar's outfit GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) thinks is quite OK for kids. That this administration could appoint someone as Education Czar like Kevin Jennings, who thinks this material is appropriate for presentation to 14-yr-olds, is somewhere on the far, ragged edge of belief.

Bands of lunatics have taken over the asylum and are busy degrading what's left of the culture. Well, no, actually they haven't had to take over anything because they're being appointed by Obama. Did somebody say elections have consequences?

Do safe schools require an iron fisting?

What recession?

For feds, more get 6-figure salaries

The pay raises are astronomical, averaging 6.6% during one of the worst recessions in decades, while at the same time hiring like crazy... When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

We're talking about our Federal Government here, not Goldman-Sachs.

It makes you damned proud to be a taxpayer, doesn't it?

Be that as it may, just make sure you keep sending it in. If you don't, some of these Federal employees will come and take your house.

Byron

Legacy

Always the strategic thinkers, the Dems take the responsible long view.

It's called "leaving a little something for the grandchildren to remember us by."

Politico.com:

In a bold but risky year-end strategy, Democrats are preparing to raise the federal debt ceiling by as much as $1.8 trillion before New Year’s rather than have to face the issue again prior to the 2010 elections.

How to kill an economy with government borrowing. The only things going up will be interest rates on US Government bonds and the budget share to pay our Chinese bond holders.

But in for a dime, in for a dollar. Why doesn't the Obama-Pelosi-Reid brain trust stop fooling around and just eliminate the debt ceiling altogether? Crank up the presses and print all the money needed for everybody and everything, cradle to grave, erection to resurrection. The Chinese? Ha! The joke's on them, because they get paid in our worthless, inflated Funny Money. Stick that in your Kung Pao!

It's a plan!

What about domestic private investment? Not a problem! Capital markets were always unfair and icky, so we'll just take an overdue giant step into the future and do it a new way. It's a no brainer: Redefine the TARP mission so Tim "Turbo Tax" Geithner decides who gets investment funds and then doles them out. Enough with the chaos of capitalism -- Tim can do it better it with his computer programs. Rational planning! Why nobody thought of this approach before is beyond me...

It's Obamanomics!

Do I smell another Nobel Prize?

Byron

NPR and diversity

This move by taxpayer-funded NPR makes no sense. If NPR thinks Fox News is heavily biased to the Right (no evaluation I know of has found that to be true of the news operation), then wouldn't it be a good thing to have more voices from the Left on Fox, not fewer? What is NPR so afraid of here?

If NPR had a genuine interest in promoting ideological balance in the media, then it would move sharply Right, to counterbalance CBS, NBC, ABC, NYT, LA Times, Boston Globe, Wash Post, and the rest of the one-note liberal media combine. But,of course, NPR has no interest whatsoever in promoting ideological balance in the media. NPR would be happier if ideological balance was even further reduced by the disappearance of Fox. Or, better yet, if Fox would somehow become, like NPR, just another honker in the chorus of liberal megaphones.

The scandal here is not Fox, not by a long shot; the scandal is NPR getting my tax dollars. NPR can be a whore for the Democrat Party if it wants, but it shouldn't be on my dime.

The bit about NPR executives, of all people, becoming concerned that Fox was becoming more partisan is hilarious. NPR will never suffer such criticism -- how could it become any more partisan?

Byron


NPR reporter pressured over Fox role

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network’s top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network’s political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.
According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR’s executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network’s supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.

At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she’d seen no significant change in Fox’s programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.

Spot on

Below appeared as a comment from one "Jeff Kirk" at Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us.

I don't have any idea who Jeff Kirk is, but he's exactly right about this, and he states it very, very well. There is simply no question that existing climate models are very poorly specified -- that is, that they do not contain all the relevant factors, let alone in proper relation to each other. In addition, there are significant errors of measurement in the variables that are included. And these models are also recursive (contain feedback loops), which means that even very small inaccuracies of specification and measurement will be quickly amplified. Taking these models seriously as anything more than possibly suggestive cannot be justified. To compute future temperature changes to the tenth of a degree is the height of fantasy. To make claims about "settled science" and consensus is charlatanism of the worst kind. The people who do the modeling know this absolutely, and so what's been going on can only be an attempt to leave the public blinded by science, and to do that for reasons that have nothing to do with science other than to cause it harm.

Jeff Kirk:

I for one have always been skeptical of climate modeling, especially because it's so speculative. We can't accurately model the weather more than a few days out. We don't know all the inputs to climate and we surely don't know how they interrelate to each other.

All we do know is that climate, like weather, is a chaotic, complex system that feeds back on itself. Weather is described in complexity theory as being "sensitive to initial conditions". Small inputs can be amplified or squelched in a way that's inherently impossible to predict.

You can simulate complex systems but only to get a general sense of the range of possible behaviors, not to make specific predictions about how they WILL behave. The uncertainty in the models grows with each iteration until it's too great to be of any predictive value whatever.

I think if this were more widely known, the funding for climate modeling would dry up in a hurry, and that the CRU idiots know it. They've made unsupportable and very specific predictions about the climate, and the real world has refused to cooperate by obligingly growing warmer in a nice, steady fashion. This caused them to panic, trying everything they could to explain away the results, rather than to acknowledge that making such specific predictions based on computerized climate models is FUNDAMENTALLY UNSOUND. And now the chickens have come home to roost.

Amen.

Byron

Honest do-over?

Instapundit:

CLIMATEGATE UPDATE: British Meteorological Office to Re-Examine 160 Years Of Climate Data. “The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.” (Via SonicFrog).

Posted at 10:56 am by Glenn Reynolds

If this process is highly public and transparent, then good; if it isn't, then expect a whitewash.

And keep in mind that "the extent of the warming trend" is only one component of the issue. The public policy side hinges on whether any warming that's found is judged to be due to human activity (anthropogenic) via the release of greenhouse gases, or if it's due to natural cycles and causes (solar activity, clouds/water vapor, etc.).

The true believers badly want to find human causes, in order to justify all kinds of government mandates to reduce CO2 emissions, amounting to control of economic production by governments and by UN regulatory bodies. That's the link between global warming and the left/socialist agenda, and why the issue became so quickly and thoroughly politicized. The other major driver of global warming theology is profit-seeking by people like Al Gore, who envision making billions in the government-sanctioned CO2 trade. The combination of these pressures, plus the ambitions of some of its practitioners, led to the corruption of climate science. Once the science was corrupted, then global warming theology could acquire the apparent credibility needed to enter school curricula, influence legislation, etc.

Byron

Afghanistan Absurdity

Obama's Afghanistan speech was a travesty. Nothing about winning, just about fighting until a predetermined withdrawal date, with fewer resources than our commanders requested. Troops will be asked to sacrifice their lives for an absurdity like that? If Afghanistan is worth fighting, then it's worth winning. If it isn't worth winning, then it makes no sense to be fighting it. This is not a difference that can be split, and if you try, the results will be worse than bad. But splitting the difference is all Obama knows how to do; it's his guiding principle, the only arrow in his quiver.

It's a tragedy that our military should be saddled with someone this weak as its Commander in Chief. "Barack Obama, Commander in Chief." It's preposterous, and dangerous. Every adversary of the U.S. has either already taken Obama's measure or is in the process of doing so. If you are already struck by how little respect he is suddenly getting internationally, just wait another year or so. Obama, who wants to be a peacemaker, is stumbling into the age-old recipe for war.

Byron

Will Obama vote Nopenhagen?

Obama is scheduled to make an appearance at the UN's climate summit in Copenhagen on Dec 9, to announce planned CO2 reductions by the US. He's stopping on his way to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize. (He's receiving the coveted Nobel Recursion Prize, which is awarded for being awarded the most ludicrous Nobel Prize ever awarded so far. To get this prize, you have to beat out the previous winner, which was Al Gore, who in 2007 finally eclipsed Yassir Arafat's 1994 Peace Prize.)

But now that Gore has voted Nopenhagen, will Obama also find some reason not to show up? Does he really want to be associated with this imploding, fraudulent mess?

Maybe there will be a runway problem so he can't land. Or his pilot will nod off and overshoot.

Better yet, maybe our first Post-Modern President can find a way to vote Present by proxy. Such irony would also make him a hero of a whole generation of French cafe intellectuals, which only means they don't know how things work in the Illinois legislature.

Byron

More yet

Researcher: NASA hiding climate data

Still more data "corrections" to salvage Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory by making the warm temperatures of the 1930's disappear. By the catechism of AGW theology, the 1930s were cooler than today, not warmer like temperature records inconveniently show. So those temperature records have to be "corrected." Otherwise, it might look like temperature varies in natural cycles with causes other than human activity, and that, dammit, would just spoil everything.

In science, theory gets revised to fit the data. The AGW crowd likes to do it the other way around, which is how you can tell that what they're doing is not science.

Still to receive much notice are coming revelations about the placement of the temperature recording stations themselves, which gather the data to begin with. A large majority of those turn out to have been improperly placed in heat-island sites (extreme example: next to an air conditioner exhaust vent) that are guaranteed to show unrepresentative elevated temperatures. Stay tuned.

(Blinded by science: Should anyone be interested in the issues of measurement error and data aggregation in the context of absurd claims of precision by CRU and others, take a look here. The entire AGW enterprise appears to be a bottomless can of worms, hidden behind misleading "executive summaries" peddled by IPCC to politicians, environmental activists, and other non-scientists.)

Byron