 Newt & Callista Gingrich _It's so difficult to pick just one, but the two best candidates are surely: 1. His supposed reversal of support for ObamaCare and the individual mandate.2. His supposed reversal of support for Global Warming, Cap-and-Trade and Agenda for the 21st Century.Both would be incredible turnarounds of ideology. Both would require a life-changing epiphany because of the magnitude and breadth of the revelations necessary. Where was his epiphany? What revelations made him completely reverse his positions and beliefs? He has never offered explanations. He cloaks himself in conservative rhetoric and hopes you aren't remembering or paying close attention. That's my explanation: Newt is in chameleon mode. He is desperately changing his colors and positions to hide his true nature. He is camouflaging himself to win the conservative base of the Republican Party. He certainly knows how to sound conservative. Unfortunately, he is not conservative -- he is a right wing progressive. He is a Big Government Republican. He is, in fact, a true believer in globalism and the New World Order (as first described officially by another Republican progressive, George Herbert Walker Bush, the elder).But the full extent of Gingrich's embrace of the whole environmental ploy and the Agenda for the 21st Century had escaped me until the following article brought out a fact that I had completely missed during Gingrich's stint as Speaker of the House. Yeah, I was around then. I'm getting some mileage on this old frame.... Look: If you consider yourself to be a true conservative -- especially if you claim to be a true Constitutionally-limited small government Tea Party conservative -- and this doesn't make you run away from Newt Gingrich as fast as you can, then I have a revelation for you: You are not a conservative; you are actually a progressive. You have met your enemy, and he is yourself. Read: Gingrich Co-Sponsored Global Warming Bill That Also Called For International Agreement on Population GrowthBill Cochrane
Still too large a carbon footprint, but we're making progress!
High utilization, popular infrastructure transportation system brought to you by your D.O.T.
I dunno.... I cracked up...Am I the only one who's never read this?
OMG. If you thought my assessment of the macro-economic conditions was pessimistic, you should read: 2012 the Most Frightening Year in Living MemoryI tend to agree with Mr. Sandbrook; however, I wouldn't have stated it so starkly.Bill Cochrane
Listen up, Progressives! It's a simple concept.
Why is it that less than 60% of eligible voters actually vote even in presidential elections? Why is it that less than 40% of eligible voters actually vote in mid-term elections? I've heard all the excuses.... "My vote doesn't make any difference." "It doesn't matter anyway." "All politicians are corrupt." "All politicians are alike." "I just don't have the time." "My faith says I shouldn't get involved in secular politics." "It doesn't matter, the government will do what it wants." "I'm just tired of all the bickering...." All of these are FALSE. Totally and completely false. If the people in this nation would pay attention to what their elected officials are doing and simply hold them accountable at the ballot box when they do not agree with what those elected officials have done, there would be a revolutionary change in this nation. I firmly believe the nation would be restored. The majority of the American people are good, principled, and just. They will do the right thing and make the right choices -- but they must DO something and they must MAKE the choices -- not sit idly by no matter what...I ran across the following article by Charles Krauthammer. You know him. He's an eloquent, witty, and sagacious columnist who appears in many newspapers, columns, TV, and radio programs. Most times he "nails it". Sometimes I disagree with him. But he is always thought-provoking. And that is especially true in the following piece. I would not have thought about this issue in the way he comes at it. I could not have expressed the importance of getting involved and making a difference in politics half -- no, not a quarter -- as effectively as Charles has done here. I hope he doesn't mind my repeating his article here, just to make certain that YOU have read it. Please do read it! Bill Cochrane Are We Alone in the Universe?Huge excitement last week. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.
Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is probably gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.
And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.
That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?
It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”
How many of them should there be? The Drake Equation (1961) tries to quantify the number of advanced civilizations in just our own galaxy. To simplify slightly, it’s the number of stars in the galaxy . . .
multiplied by the fraction that form planets . . .
multiplied by the average number of planets in the habitable zone . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that give birth to life . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that develop intelligence . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that produce interstellar communications . . .
multiplied by the fraction of the planet’s lifetime during which such civilizations survive.
Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.
In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.
This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.
Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-madtyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are only the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.
And forget the psychopaths: Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens — born 200,000 years ago — discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.
Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.
There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.
Charles Krauthammer
The NC House passed a bill to freeze the higher gasoline tax enacted by the previous Democrat-controlled state legislature, but the NC Senate ran out of time and recessed the 2011 session without taking it up. Result: NC which already has one of the highest gasoline tax rates in the country will now be among the top 10% of states with the highest taxes on gas. In January, an automatic tax increase will take effect in combination with the effects of the phase-out of ethanol subsidies. The matter is explained well by the Charlotte Observer here. Ending ethanol subsidies is a good thing for many reasons, which are outside the focus of this blog entry. But the NC State Legislature must do something during their 2012 session to roll back and reform the NC Gas Tax. NC cannot remain competitive if it continues to impose among the highest tax rates in the nation. Businesses and people will move to more competitive states. Just look what has happened to high-tax, "progressive" states all through the rust-belt and left-coast. Bill Cochrane
Our Senator Burr is making news again..... Is he standing up for our individual rights against the onslaught of Big Government? No. Is he speaking out against any of the outrageous statements coming out of the Leftist Democrats like Boxer ( "Republicans want to kill 8,100 people")? No. Is he effectively communicating the Republican Party Platform in the communications battleground? No. Nothing like any of these. He's endorsing Romney for president.Well, they're both progressives. Birds of a feather. I'm looking even more for someone else to vote for in next year's primaries. Both Burr and Hagan have to go. I don't give a dime for the difference.Bill Cochrane
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