The Right Wing Professor's Blog

Days after Fremont citizens overwhelmingly voted to ban employment and renting to illegal aliens, the League of Nebraska Municipalities, which contributed $25,000 to the anti-ordinance campaign, has decided, via its insurance arm, the League Association of Risk Management, not to retain Kris Kobach, the anti-illegal-immigration lawyer who offered to represent Fremont for free, and instead pay to retain the pricey Lincoln firm of Harding & Schultz. This is a clear conflict of interest; the League, having fought the ordinance, has no business selecting a law firm to 'defend' it in court.

The League of Nebraska Municipalities is funded by property tax dollars, via registration fees cities and towns pay, yet has consistently worked against the expressed wishes of Nebraska voters and taxpayers. Previously, it contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the campaign against the Nebaaska Civil Rights Initiative, which voters passed 58:42 two years ago. It's time this organization was reformed or defunded. And it's time Fremont dumped their City Council. which has consistently failed to represent voters on this issue.

So let's see; his budget director just quit. His chief-of-staff is floating trial balloons suggesting he might also quit. His hand-picked Afghan commander was just quoted slamming his administration, and may have to be fired. A federal judge struck down his drilling ban, specifically citing how his Interior Secretary lied about an expert panel's findings.

I'd say it's time for a cigarette.

Congratulations to the voters of Fremont, NE, for doing the work the US government is unwilling to do; enforce our immigration law. The upcoming lawsuits may be expensive, but they're also expensive for the ACLU.

As an immigrant myself, I'm proud to prove the citizenship I earned to anyone who legitimately asks. I can't imagine why any other citizen or legal resident would not be.

Facts Garbled As U.S. Tries To Take Charge Of Spill

Things are going so horribly wrong in the Gulf, even the usually obsequious NPR is turning on Teh 0, and his clownish point man for Gulf oil-spill pratfalls, 'Admiral' Thad Allen. In his briefing yesterday, Thad Allen was outstanding. Even a room full of normally clueless reporters spotted Allen was wrong in almost everything he said.

The head of the federal oil-spill response announced in a press conference Tuesday that a ship called the Development Driller II has now bored down 9,000 feet below the seafloor in its efforts to create a relief well. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said the drilling ship should be able to tap into the ruptured well in three to four weeks — that would be mid-July — a month ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, none of these statements appears to be true.

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

Texas's 'decision' to stay with the remnants of the Big 12 is a surprise only if you don't understand Texas. The Longhorns are nothing more than an empty 20 gallon hat on top of a $5,000 pair of cowboy boots. The PAC 10 offer was purely bluster. They have no interest in being in a conference where USC will outplay them and Berkeley will outclass them, and where there's no chance in hell they'll be able to grab an outlandish share of the revenues. Big fish in a small pond is their modus operandi. Now, in the guise of 'saving' the conference, they'll be able to take an even bigger fraction of the loot from hapless Kansas and KSU, win all their conference games without having to have extra time added on by the officials, and try to brag their way into an annual BCS slot on account of having beaten Oklahoma.

Nebraska, after a dozen years of putting up with it, decided we'd had enough of them. To the credit of our chancellor, a man for whom I otherwise have no love at all, we made the choice to be a smaller fish in a bigger pond. Colorado made the same choice. In a bigger pond, there's more room to grow.

Steinbeck, curiously, nailed Texas when he was describing Montana. Montana, he said, is what a small boy would imagine Texas to be, if he heard Texas described by a Texan.

Enjoy the SWC, Mark II, suckas. Hey, maybe you can invite TCU back in.

A Democrat congressman is walking down the street. A student with a camcorder approaches him to ask some questions. This is what happens next.

Congressman Etheridge is a thug, pure and simple. Granted, he looks like he's half drunk, but our rulers surely don't have the right to commit assault, battery, and unlawful detainment on constituents who merely ask them a simple question on camera.

Vote this asshole out, North Carolina.

Today, by decree of his highness teh 0, PBUH, we celebrate the birthday of King Kamehameha I, who established rule over the entire Hawai'ian islands by bloody conquest, and established an autocratic and theocratic reign during which violators of idiotic and arbitrary religious laws were punished with execution. Kind of like modern Saudi Arabia.

You know if Kamehameha were alive today, teh 0 would bow to him from the waist.

Teh 0, yesterday, in his notorious 'kick ass' interview

Most of the decisions that I make on a day-to-day basis, I make because I have gathered the best information possible in very difficult situations, and my job is to figure out how can I move the federal government, the private sector, all the various players who are involved, to perform some very, very difficult tasks?

Unfortunately, it appears he's getting the best scientific advice available, and then doing the exact opposite.

The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium -- something they actually oppose.

The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.

The complete dishonesty coupled with utter chaos within this administration makes Jimmy Carter's look like a model of managerial efficiency.

if crap were crude oil, today's Lincoln Journal Star would be the Deepwater Horizon.

First we have a spittle-flecked, anti-Semitic rant by one Evan Renfro, alleged doctoral student in our Political Science department (hard to believe it, but he just lowered my opinion of that department another peg). Mr. Renfro accuses Israel of being a theocracy. it is clear he doesn't know what a theocracy is. He calls the Turkish street thugs who attacked Israeli Commandos with steel poles and knives 'aid workers' and humanitarians. BWAHAHAHA!

The Lincoln Journal Star doesn't bother to mention, by the way, that Mr. Renfro is advisor to UNL's "Palestinian Solidarity Committee".

And then we have a credulous account of a Lincoln panel discussion on immigration, one of those curious leftist panel discussions where they all agree with each other. The reporter says:

The Arizona law would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime.

Hey, genius, it's already a crime for aliens not to carry immigration documents. Read US Code 8 section 1304.

Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d) of this section. Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.

Some newspaper!

---

More from Mr. Renfro's 'humanitarians'

This is the Israeli Navy. You are approaching an area which is under a naval blockade.

Shut up, go back to Auschwitz.

...

We’re helping the Arabs go against the US, don’t forget 9/11 guy.

This is priceless. A Lincoln Journal Star Community Columnist writes to defend African Americans against vicious stereotyping in the movie The Blind Side. Our columnist tells us the movie is full of

stereotypes of African-Americans...blacks are poor, blacks are lazy, blacks are stupid, their homes are "broken," their fathers and mothers are addicts, they live in the "ghetto," their only skill is athletics (in this case football), they don't care about their children, they are violent, they are intimidating, they can't help themselves out of poverty, white people have to save them.

and that's particularly bad, because...

Ultimately, "The Blind Side" reinforces the cultural myth that whites are the saviors of African-Americans. Whites love this myth because it makes us feel like heroes. We believe it because it relieves us from examining our own latent or overt racism.

The name of the White Knight riding to African-Americans' defense is Kay Siebler. Needless to say, Kay is a white woman, just like the protagonist in The Blind Side.

There's persuasive evidence liberalism is a psychological disorder caused by a defect in the brain's irony-detection faculty.

Uh uh we were working really hard on it from day one...uh uh even before day one...uh and we had lots and lots of meetings, meetings every day...and uh uh what we did failed completely but we were taking it really really seriously... uh uh and Steve Chu flew down there and asked if they'd considered using string theory to fix the problem...uh uh and we had the best science in the country working on it and in a few months they'll have an answer...uh uh and when Bobby Jindal asked us to build sand barriers we studied it for two weeks, and came to the conclusion it might work sometimes but not others...uh uh of course by that time the oil had come ashore...and uh uh of course it's all Bush's fault...

Mark Lakers, Democrat candidate for Governor, just got caught in major fundraising violation. It's well documented on the Leavenworth Street blog. Lakers, in his quarterly Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission filing, claimed several hundred thousand dollars in pledges from various well-heeled donors, often energy companies. Some of the alleged donors denied making pledges; some contacted Frank Daley, head of the NADC; Daley referred the case to Jon Bruning, the Attorney General; Associated Press contacted several of the other supposed donors, who also denied making pledges to Lakers. It appears the campaign lied about a large number of pledged donations, apparently to create momentum for the dead-in-the-water campaign. Lakers could be facing felony charges.

Instead of covering the story as a critical or even as an investigative reporter, Don Walton, ever a shameless shill for the Nebraska Democrat Party, decided to devote an entire column today to the Lakers campaign's weak defense that it's all a Republican campaign to get him.

Lincoln is a growing city, and deserves a decent daily newspaper. But no newspaper at all would be better than the Lincoln Journal Star. Walton, in particular, is so far beyond being an objective source of news or commentary he's almost comical.

After showing brief signs of stirring at the beginning of the year, the increase in solar activity that one would ordinarily predict seems to have stalled. The Sun has now been sunspot free for 12 consecutive days, a very unusual occurrence away from a solar minimum. Since there are no signs of any developing sunspots, it looks like that the monthly average sunspot number is going to come in at 10 - 11, values more typical of the depths of a solar minimum.

The Lincoln Journal Star just published a full description, including race, of an armed robbery suspect. The suspect is white.

Beggs said the suspect is a 25- to 33-year-old white male, about 6-foot-2, 180 pounds with blue eyes and a skinny face.

There is now absolutely no doubt that the LJS publishes such information only if the suspects are members of certain racial groups, and therefore is by definition racist.

---

For reference, recent instances where the LJS suppressed descriptions of robbery suspects. In all cases the robbers were described as 'black' by other local media outlets.

• The armed robbers' favorite newspaper
• Another couple of robberies, another couple of suppressed descriptions
  
• Suppressing the news, again
• Today's item of suppressed news...

One more very good thing about the MSM; the NY Times iPhone news app. Instead of making the reader page through the newspaper via browser links, with constant net.lags, it downloads the news content all at once on start up. One can do this before getting on a plane, for example. The screen is decent, with adjustable font size (their small font could go one size smaller, IMO). The navigation is simple and obvious. All in all, it's a better experience than reading the Times on a browser on a regular computer.

Too bad the content is still biased and left-leaning.

Lancaster District Court judge Steven Burns apparently thinks a slap on the wrist (not too hard!) is the way to deal with armed robbers. IMO, Justice Burns should be required to give room and board to Mr. Deunter Johnson for the duration of his probation, to make sure it's properly supervised.

No, you didn't just stumble onto the wrong blog. The Lincoln Journal-Star has an unusually good article this morning on the impact of "health reform" on Lincoln. In brief: Medicaid and Medicare rates are already so low doctors are reluctant to sign on new patients. Medicaid is as high as it is because the state subsidizes it more than it's required, something that is about to change next year, when we will hit a major budget shortfall. Soon, HCR will add 40,000 new patients in a city with approximately 80 primary care physicians, with various degrees of reluctance to take any new Medicaid patients. Moreover, without the 'doctor-fix', Medicare will soon be in worse shape than Medicaid.

The usual herd of Kool-aid drinking, reality-challenged liberal commenters hate it, of course.

This is a train wreck in slow motion, folks. Thanks, Ben Nelson!

Meanwhile, the Medicare actuary is now forecasting a 10 year increase in health care costs of $311 billion.

CONTESTANT: What was Barack Obama's first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener?

ALEX TREBEK: No, I'm sorry, the correct answer was "What was Barack Obama's mental state in college." Good guess, though!

(Shamelessly pilfered from Elmo)

I was crossing 10th street at 8:25 a.m. this morning, on a cross walk. There was oncoming traffic, a long way off. About half way across the three-lane street, I realized the car in the middle lane wasn't slowing down. Seeing a pedestrian in the cross walk ahead of him, he was flooring it. I turned to look him in the eye, and realized that this guy had no intention of slowing up. It still wasn't close -- heck, I didn't even have to scurry -- but it was pretty obvious that if I'd stood there, or fallen, or been old or lame, I would have been wiped out, for having had the effrontery to use a crosswalk within 100 yards of this thug, who had clearly taken exception to the very idea that a pedestrian might cross in front of him. He was doing at least 50 mph in a 30 mph zone.

The license plate was a personalized Cali. plate, DJGOMES. A google search tells me we have a cornerback Dejon Gomes, from Hayward, CA. I see he goes by the nickname DJ. Probably just a coincidence. After all, what kind of school would we be, if our 'scholar-athletes' were trying to kill our professors?

As a commenter on the previous thread has noted, the Lincoln Journal Star has inconspicuously amended its previous report that 40% of infants whose mothers get no pre-natal care in their first year die.

Leaders at Omaha's OneWorld Community Health Center misinterpreted federal data last week, telling senators almost 40 percent of all infants whose moms had no prenatal care died during their first year of life. It's actually closer to 4 percent. But that's still five times higher than the infant death rate for women who received any prenatal care at any time during their pregnancy, based on federal statistics.

And, somewhat more sinisterly, they've put the previous number down the Memory Hole; the original report has been changed, and it's now a downright lie.

Senators were shocked by one statistic presented at the noon meeting: a 4 percent death rate during the first year of life for those babies whose mothers had no prenatal care at all.

No, they were shocked by a 40% figure, a figure that was more than 10 times too high. The OWH still has the original number.

I received no reply to my two emails to Dr. Kris McVea, and there is no acknowledgement in this report of who raised the issue. And even so, the statistic, while now formally correct, is still misleading. Only a small part of the 4% infant mortality is due to a lack of prenatal care. The rest is due to other causes. Moreover, the population upon which this value is apparently based (Chicago women in the mid-1990s) is likely very different demographically from Nebraska's. Given the era and the population, and other details given in the Chicago study, it's likely a large part of the IMR they observed was due to low birth weight and premature births during the crack cocaine epidemic. So the 4% number is still bogus.

Some other points to ponder

• Is it really plausible that this very large error is a simple, honest mistake from someone who holds a Masters in Public Health as well as an M.D., and who works in a clinic providing prenatal care?
• Given that the OneWorld Community Health Clinic makes over $500,000 a year from the program whose discontinuance originally led to this issue, and would therefore benefit from a reinstitution of the program, does their leadership deserve the benefit of the doubt that this was a simple mistake?
• What responsibility does Brad Ashford have for arranging wildly fallacious testimony in favor of his legislative bill? And given his cavalier attitude to such blatant inaccuracy, what confidence should the citizens of Nebraska place in his future leadership?

Ashford: Gerard, I am not presenting any figures to the legislature. Dr. McVeigh gave us the data.The 40% figure is not critical to me. We have have been covering prenatal care for three decades. I am not interested in paying the increased cost of care for a baby who does not receive adequate prenatal care. No one I have talked to on this issue who has any experience in providing care to new borns has suggested that neonatal care is not critical.

The difference between 40% and 1% should be critical to you.

I agree with you that prenatal care is a reasonable state expenditure. It's not that it makes a huge difference in terms of the numbers of babies saved; it's that the expenditures for a single preemie or permanently damaged baby are enormous. When someone claims that 40% of babies without prenatal care are going to die, it doesn't take an MPH to smell that the numbers are phony. And that discredits all of science and medicine.

What I hate is the use of phony numbers and emotionalism to sell a policy that could and should be sold on its merits. And I hate what I perceive here that it's being used as a political wedge issue.

Gerry Harbison

Comment: Brad Ashford responded, on a Saturday night, and you have to give him credit for that. And I think he's sincere in wanting better prenatal care. But Jeez, how long are we going to elect representatives to whom the details don't matter?

Thanks. I don't know of any professional health care professional that does not believe that prenatal care is critical to the health of a  new born child. Thanks for your comment. Brad

Well, thanks for your reply , Senator Ashford, but that's not really responsive. I think one could make a strong case that a 1% decrease in IMR is worth considerable public investment. But you do agree that 40% and 1% are very different percentages, no? And you do agree that presenting estimates to the legislature that are in error by a factor of at least 10 is a serious problem?

Dear Senator Ashford: On Thursday, you reportedly hosted a legislative briefing by Dr. Kris McVea, of UNMC, at which the claim was made that the infantile mortality rate among children whose mothers had received no prenatal care was 40%. As a scientist who spends his life looking at data, this claim seemed extremely implausible to me; looking at the published data more carefully, it appears 40% is at least ten times larger than data in the peer reviewed literature would indicate. Dr. McVea has so far not responded to my email inquiries. I wonder if you could help at getting some backing for this claim. I'm sure you appreciate that if this claim cannot be substantiated, several other claims by Dr. McVea, such as the claim that 6 women sought abortions because of the withdrawal of prenatal care, might also come under scrutiny. Gerard S Harbison (Town)

In an attempt to nail down the provenance of this implausible claim that the infant mortality rate of women who lack any prenatal care is 40% (see my last post), early this morning I emailed Kris McVea, an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, who was heavily cited in the original Nancy Hicks/LJS story.

Dr. McVea:

The Lincoln Journal Star quotes a statistic, which it loosely attributes to you, that infant mortality among children with mothers who did not obtain any prenatal care is 40%. Since in my experience any numerical data quoted by the press is likely to be mangled, would you be able to confirm you actually made this claim or alternatively, that you did not? It seems to me the real IMR for this subgroup is more likely to be in the range 30/1000 to 40/1000, with about 1/4 of the mortality attributable to the absence of prenatal care itself, and the other 3/4 due to correlated factors.

Gerard S Harbison (Town, state)

...and I happen also to be a professor in the department of chemistry at UNL, though this inquiry is not of a professional nature.

Later this morning I found the OWH had also covered the story, and directly attributed the 40% claim to McVea. In my experience, while reporters are clueless about numbers, the chances of two reporters independently making the same mistake are rather low. i therefore emailed McVea again, at a different email address.

Dear Dr. McVea:

I emailed you earlier, but it's possible this is a better email address. I see, on checking the Omaha World Herald, that you indeed claimed a 40% IMR for kids whose mothers didn't have prenatal care, and you claimed there was a study showing this. Could you please provide a full citation for that study?

Gerard S. Harbison

(Town, state)

No reply yet. Stay posted.

Nancy Hicks, the 'reporter' from the LJS who covers the legislature, really outdid herself this afternoon. She reported without question that at a legislative briefing on the Pregnant Illegal Alien Welfare Bill, a claim was made that there is

a 40-percent death rate during the first year of life for those babies whose mothers had no prenatal care at all.

In case this seems a little high to you, let's do the math. 83% of Nebraska women receive prenatal care in the first trimester alone (84% nationally). Probably more women receive prenatal care later. But let's take that 17% as a floor. Let's suppose 40% of their babies died, and absolutely no other babies died (if only medicine were that good!). Then the infant mortality rate in Nebraska, defined as the number of babies dying in the first year, would be 40% of 17% = 6.8%.

What's the actual infant mortality rate in Nebraska? 6.3 per 1000 live births, or 0.63%. A factor of almost 11 lower.

That people in the journalistic profession are numerically illiterate is almost a given. But surely basic common sense would tell you this number is just ludicrously wrong?

Unless, of course, you have an agenda. And Nancy Hicks most certainly does.

---

I found some hard data for Chicago in the late 1990s, where the infant mortality rate (IMR) was already quite high (10.6/1000). It was 48.4/1000 for women who received no prenatal care at all. That would be consistent with the hypothesis that the actual rate is around 4% nationally, or a factor of 10 lower than reported. Of course, correlation does not equal causation; the subpopulation which had no prenatal care likely had other risk factors. That would be supported by the fact that it did not seem to make any difference to the IMR when women received prenatal care; those who received it in the first trimester had the same IMR as those who received it in the third. In fact, a later Kansas City study using a statistical analysis of risk called PPOR found that only 27% of the excess IMR was due to differences in maternal care, and maternal health/premature birth was the leading risk factor.

HHS in 2006 estimated that women who received no prenatal care had a five times higher IMR, though I suspect they may simply have used the earlier Chicago number. Since women who receive no prenatal care are a very small proportion of the population (between 1 and 2%) one can estimate that their IMR rate was about 5 times the national average, or somewhere around 30/1000.

---

So let's come to some very crude estimates. If the rate of IMR is 5 times higher among women who receive no prenatal care, and if 25% of the excess is due to differences in care as opposed to correlated factors - and both seem reasonable, back-of-the-envelope estimates - then provision of prenatal care might be expected to reduce the IMR in this subpopulation from 30 to 24 per thousand. So if the illegal immigrant population to be covered under the bill is around 1000, we'd be talking about saving around 6 infant deaths a year. I don't think that's insignificant, and anyone who argues against the bill needs to at least acknowledge those excess infant deaths. Of course, we have to also consider the possibility that some of these women will seek prenatal care and pay for it out-of-pocket or receive it from a charitable agency. But hysteria and inflated numbers don't help the debate, and they just make those who, from long experience, distrust the media on issues like this, distrust them even more.

A day after teh 0 signed the Democrat's bill for the destruction of the nation's health care system, Caterpillar announced that it would be taking a $100m earnings hit because the prescription drug benefits it provides to retirees will now be taxed.

"From our point of view, a tax increase like this cannot come at a worse time," said Jim Dugan, a Caterpillar spokesman.

The original tax exemption was designed to try to encourage companies to keep retirees off Medicare Part D, thus sparing the Medicare program from insolvency for a few more weeks. Needless to say, few expect companies to continue this policy.

"If you have health insurance today, you can keep it" -- it only took 24 hours for that lie to be exposed.

Caterpillar's stock Wednesday fell 35 cents to $62.06 a share in 4 p.m. trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Since US accounting rules require such impacts to be announced immediately, expect earnings this quarter to be significantly impacted. Eventually, of course, the companies will simply transfer the costs to employees and customers.

An unusually balanced article from msnbc, which describes how the growth of concealed carry laws has paralleled a decline in violent crime.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the concealed-carry movement gained steam, Americans were killed by others with guns at the rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population. In this decade, the rate has fallen to just over 4.07 per 100,000, a 28 percent drop. The decline follows a fivefold increase in the number of “shall-issue” and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006. The highest gun homicide rate is in Washington, D.C., which has had the nation’s strictest gun-control laws for years and bans concealed carry: 20.50 deaths per 100,000 population, five times the general rate. The lowest rate, 1.12, is in Utah, which has such a liberal concealed weapons policy that most American adults can get a permit to carry a gun in Utah without even visiting the state.

Nebraska, needless to say, is well behind the curve, with no 'castle doctrine' to protect law-abiding gun owners defending themselves from being prosecuted or even sued by the families of the maggots they kill.

I thought I'd share this little bloggy ray of sunshine with y'all. The horrors of AGW are already upon us, and there's nothing we can do!!! So let's not do anything.

I don't care. After 90 successive snow-covered days this winter -- and I still haven't been able to get into my veggie garden, on account of the mud -- I have to say I'm greatly disappointed in the climatic improvements I anticipated from increased carbon dioxide. Lincoln is still a zone 5 town, and anything you plant before April 1 -- even Alaska peas -- is destined for a short and sad life.

By the way, anytime you think you're feeling just too darn cheerful, a quick visit to Sharon Astyk's 'scienceblog' (BWAHAHAHA!) is a reliable downer. And if you want to mark yourself as an incurable poser, sprinkle your conversation with references to 'tipping points'.

Yesterday, it was revealed that Arne Duncan, now Secretary of Education and previously Chicago schools chief, kept a list of children of the politically well connected, who were allowed to override admission criteria and get into the more desirable Chicago public schools.

While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former schools chief Arne Duncan. Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the city's premier schools based on whom their parents know. But a list maintained over several years in Duncan's office and obtained by the Tribune lends further evidence to those charges. Duncan is now secretary of education under President Barack Obama. The log is a compilation of politicians and influential business people who interceded on behalf of children during Duncan's tenure. It includes 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard Daley's office, House Speaker Michael Madigan, his daughter Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun.

Ten years from now, if we don't repeal HCR, there will be a similar, federal list for expedited radiation therapy, hip replacements and MRIs. It's the Chicago way, and the Chicago mob is now running the country.

HT to dread of DC.

---

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass knows all about 'The Chicago Way'.

The comments section of the Lincoln Journal Star contains a lengthy diatribe by nutcase Ivy Harper, who's running for the First District seat, which includes a shot at Congressman Jeff Fortenberry. Ivy's using the pseudonym "Land Grant University Reform", but that's one she's used frequently in the past, and it's not hard to figure out who she is.

If I know this, how come the LJS Web editor, Victoria Ayotte, who reads this dreck all day, does not? Or are the LJS knowingly publishing pseudonymous political attacks on Republican incumbents by candidates for political office?

Enjoyable, by the way, to see how Nelson is taking fire from everyone, left and right, in the rest of the comments.

Of all teh dumb stories I've read recently, this has to be the dumbest. I don't know what's worst. A group of 'native American' mumbo jumbo artists traveling to New Zealand to apologize to some fish for a dam someone built in the 1940s. A once respectable newspaper writing about it as if it were anything other than a farce. Or the fact that no one bothered to save these poor, oppressed aboriginal peoples some airfare by pointing out that if you want to talk to chinook salmon, you can find them in the canned fish aisle of your local supermarket. They don't talk back, tho'.

Or, far better, look for chinook sorta fresh in the refrigerated section. Just remember, wild-caught only, grill fast and hot, and easy on the marinade. I like lightly steamed asparagus as a side dish, but I'm one of yar effete academics.

The Democrats' plan to 'deem' the Senate version of health reform passed while it passes amendments is sleazy and underhanded, but is it constitutional? Michael McConnell, no constitutional law slouch, says it is not. Bills are supposed to be passed by the Senate and House in the same form. By grafting the Senate Bill onto the House Bill and then separating it again for signature, he argues, the form of the bill is changed, and that therefore it has not been properly passed under Article 1, Section 7. He argues the Marshall Field precedent usually cited (that basically says the House and Senate are sole arbiters of their own procedures) may not apply when the constitutionality of the procedures themselves is in question.

How much worse will it be for the Democrats voting for the Slaughter Solution, which already looks dirty, if is found to be unconstitutional as well?

---

Incidentally, what a shame the administration got into a mudslinging match with the Supreme Court last week. Think that might make them more inclined to grant certiorari?

Since we were discussing a moron in the White House, here's teh 0's attempt to spell 'Syracuse', displayed for all to see on national TV. He likes basketball, it's just the names of major cities that confuse him.

Sound it out, Mr. President. Oh wait, that won't work either, will it?

As we are herded like lambs to the Slaughter (so to speak), towards the destruction of America's system of medical care by fiat of the House Rules Committee, because the Democrats are so disgusted by their own product they won't cast an open vote for it, Ben Nelson is desperately trying to dissemble his 60th and deciding vote that enable passage of the Senate bill. He writes in a letter in the Lincoln Journal Star today that:

my vote will be based on the final provisions in the bill

Your vote doesn't matter any more Senator, and it was cast for purely venal motives for the price of a Medicaid buyout for Nebraska that was such a national laughingstock we're going to lose it anyway.

It is wrong to think that I would vote for the health reform bill because I "bend to the winds of [my] political party."

That's true. There had better be a bribe in there too.

Nancy Hicks' piece on the death of the pregnant illegal alien health care bill is an exemplar. Hicks managed to do a piece featuring entirely the proponents of the bill, posing the opposition as entirely political rather than principled, and without quoting a single opponent, which would leave one wondering why the bill was withdrawn without enough support for a final vote.

Teh 0, once again showing why they refused to release college or law-school transcripts for him.

Well, a lot of those folks, your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000%, which means they could give you a RAISE!

As the strain on the unqualified imbecile mounts, the false patina of intellect is flaking off like poorly-applied paint.

---

It gets worse. To defend the infamous Louisiana Purchase -- the special payment to Louisiana in the 'health reform' bill that bought Mary landrieu's vote -- Obama invents a Hawaiian earthquake that never happened.

Sheesh; of all the 57 states, Obama should know Hawaii, the supposed state of his birth.

Not my title. But it's originally from the Grauniad, so you know it must be good, sound science.

Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write. The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

I'd just like to add that, based on an identification by their bumperstickers, they drive like jackasses too.

The 'census' is a sham designed to put a veneer of legitimacy on an entirely political process that hands out federal largesse based on political power. My 'race' is 'American'. My residence varies. The census started by counting some human beings less than others, and continued by handing over information about other citizens so they could be rounded up. Excuse me if I don't enthusiastically cooperate.

Don Walton exhibits it, in this morning's Journal Star, in defense of earmarks.

Posturing in Congress on earmarks now. It's an easy target because the word has been so loaded with negatives. Instead of earmarks, what if they were called community project appropriations? Or community improvement grants?

How about if we end them all? How about, if Nebraska needs some roads improved, or community projects done, we raise the revenue ourselves, and we do it at the state level, and avoid the fuss and muss of sending the tax money to Washington, to be returned to us as a favor to our local viceroy?

I know Walton probably slept through Am. Gov., but wasn't that the whole idea of federalism?

Over the years, I've heard an enormous amount of scientifically illiterate nonsense from climate 'skeptics', starting with 'volcanoes release more CO₂ in a year than all human activity combined', and descending from there. But sometimes you find scientific illiteracy in the most surprising places. Tony Watts describes how Jane Ferrigno, a scientist with the US Geological Survey, fergawdsake, claimed that the Antarctic had lost 20,000 km² of ice in the last 20 years, "an area bigger than Texas". In case anyone could accuse her of a slip of the tongue, she repeated it.
This is part of the transcript of the interview with Guy Raz, the NPR 'science reporter' who didn't spot the problem.

RAZ: Give us a sense of how much ice has been lost over the past, say, 10 years.
Ms. FERRIGNO: I think I'll go back 20 years, and in the last 20 years, I would say at least 20,000 square kilometers of ice has been lost, and that's comparable to an area somewhere between the state of Texas and the state of Alaska.
RAZ: So about the size of the state of Texas in terms of ice has been lost in the past 20 years.
Ms. FERRIGNO: Yeah, that's true.
RAZ: Can we measure the consequences, you know, here in North America? I mean, have we been able to see ocean levels rise as a result?
Ms. FERRIGNO: Well, this is a fairly small amount of ice when you consider the whole Antarctic continent consists of about 13 million square kilometers of ice.
RAZ: I mean, it sounds so dramatic, the size of Texas, right?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FERRIGNO: It is. It is very dramatic, and it is larger than the size of Texas, but when you consider the entire Antarctic ice sheet, it's still a fairly minimal amount. But the thing that we're really interested in seeing is that this is a sort of a red flag because if the warming continues, if the retreat continues, if the amount of ice on the continent starts to flow into the water, then there will be substantial impact to the sea level.

As Watts notes, 20,000 km² is less than the area of New Jersey, and less than 1/30 the area of Texas. Unbe-freaking-lievable that the USGS is employing someone who has such a fuzzy idea about land areas.

So we should believe what she publishes, because she's an 'expert', right?

Roger Pielke Jr. has a nice blog post which summarizes the just published Nature Geosciences paper on tropical cyclones. The high points:

Hurricane counts (with no adjustments for possible missing cases) show a significant increase from the late 1800s to present, but do not have a significant trend from the 1850s or 1860s to present. Other studies infer a substantial low-bias in early Atlantic tropical cyclone intensities (1851–1920), which, if corrected, would further reduce or possibly eliminate long-term increasing trends in basin-wide hurricane counts. Landfalling tropical storm and hurricane activity in the US shows no long-term increase (Fig. 2, orange series). Basin-wide major hurricane counts show a significant rising trend, but we judge these basin-wide data as unreliable for climate-trend estimation before aircraft reconnaissance in 1944.

And the money quote...

There is no conclusive evidence that any observed changes in tropical cyclone genesis, tracks, duration and surge flooding exceed the variability expected from natural causes. . . we cannot at this time conclusively identify anthropogenic signals in past tropical cyclone data.

It's just one of those jaw-dropping, ROFLMAO quotes one has gotten used to hearing from the climate science community.

Briefly; Siddall et al. recently published an estimate of sea-level rise by 2100. Using ice-core and fossil coral measurements, they estimated temperature effects on past sea-levels, and then used them to predict 2100 sea levels at 7 - 82 cm above current (wide enough limits for ya?) They said this corroborated the IPCC estimates of 18 cm - 59 cm, which it would have, kind-of, had rivals Vermeer and Rahmstorf (who had predicted much larger rises of 75 - 190 cm) not found two separate major errors in their paper.

In case you aren't au fait with normal science, a retraction is not a 'regular part' of the publication process. In most fields, if someone has to retract a paper, it's talked about for years. Many scientists manage to have long productive careers without ever having to retract anything.

As promised, here they are, just before today's snow covered them again. Poor pathetic things can't handle the soaring global temperatures. Maybe next year I'll plant Bougainvilleas.

Tomorrow we begin our twelfth week of continuous snow cover. And since we're forecast to get 5 inches of snow followed by below-freezing temperatures all the rest of the week, next Sunday it's highly likely we will enter our 13th week. If we can just stay cold another 2 weeks and change, we can break the all time record. I'm psyched!

Usually in February I post pictures of the first snowdrops. Indeed, under the snow we do have snowdrops, poor stunted little things, but I'm going to have to dig them out for a picture.

If we get much more anthropogenic global warming, we may all freeze to death.

---

< By the way, the National Weather Service has a nice page on snow cover records in Nebraska. Omaha has already beaten most of its all-time records for successive days with various depths of snow on the ground, but Lincoln has to stay snow-covered until March 9. After today's anemic little snow event, I'm not hopeful.

I've never understood what people see in Thomas Friedman, the NY Times columnist. To me, his writing usually seems 90% banality and 10% nonsense. But particularly bad was this week's column, which began by ridiculing global warming skeptics who cite this years' particularly snowy winter as evidence the AGW hypothesis is all wrong (because, you see, weather isn't climate) and then goes on to claim that extreme weather is evidence of global warming, or, as he calls it, 'global weirding', because weather is climate, when you're arguing for AGW.

One would have thought the utter illogic of this argument would be obvious even to a B.A. in 'Mediterranean Studies', a major that until five minutes ago I did not know existed. (But it sounds like fun. Field trip to the Riviera, anyone?)

Incidentally, Steven Goddard points out, on Tony Watts blog, that most General Circulation Models predict a decrease in snow cover from AGW. Instead, we've had more Northern Hemisphere snow cover this year than any year since 1978. Isn't that weird? What do we do with our models, class, when they predict results opposite from those that actually occur?

A hilarious opinion poll is reported in the New York Times. When asked if gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve in the armed forces, 7 in 10 Americans said they should, and 6 in 10 said they should be allowed to serve openly. However, when the wording was changed to ask if homosexuals should be allowed to serve, the corresponding numbers were 59 and 44%.

Which political party was more confused? Why, I'm writing about it here, so you know the answer. 79% of democrats said gays and lesbians should be able to serve openly, but only 43% of democrats said homosexuals should be able to serve openly. Do the math, and you can estimate that Republicans and Independents were not at all confused by the change of wording.

And they call the GOP the stupid party!
In fact, Republicans and independents are less likely than Democrats to support open service by gays and lesbians, but more likely than Democrats to support open service by homosexuals!

Shunning a health care system that every leftist in the US will assure you is far superior in every way to ours, the Prime Minister of Newfoundland is coming to the United States for heart surgery.

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. -- Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will undergo heart surgery later this week in the United States. ... Mr. Williams' decision to leave Canada for the surgery has raised eyebrows over his apparent shunning of Canada's health-care system. "It was never an option offered to him to have this procedure done in this province," said Ms. Dunderdale, refusing to answer whether the procedure could be done elsewhere in Canada.

Not one, but two negative stories about teh 0 this morning, both apparently emanating from the State Department. In one, the Times reveals that European leaders are angry that Obama decided to skip an EU meeting in Madrid in two weeks. The article notes that high-level State Department officials had been planning the meeting for some time, with the apparently understanding 0 would be attending. Evidently, someone in the White House decided at the last minute it would be politically foolish for Obama to be seen yet again jetting over to meet with the Yoo-ro-pee-uns, while everything's going to heck in a handbasket back here.

In the other piece, there is an interesting analysis of how US budget deficits might undermine our international standing. It's thoughtful and prescient, -- not at all the kind of thing the Times comes up with on its own. It makes you hearken back to the days when we ran a budget surplus and had unimpeachable international standing. I wonder if Mr. Sanger, the author of the piece, was perhaps fed a briefing document. Let's see, what US govt. department deals with such questions?

Now who the heck at State has a high enough position to be able to generate such stories, and has an interest in undermining the 0's administration from within?

Is Obama insane? Does he really think the problem is we just haven't heard him talk enough?

...and when I say 'talk' of course, I mean, read from the teleprompter.

Head faces left

My fellow Americans

Head faces right

I come here to night to tell you, the state of our union

Head faces left

is strong.

Wait for applause. Then face right...

The poor boy's neck must be aching. 68 minutes, that's got to be 400 or 500 neck swivels.

In a section headlined 'Anger and Hate', Don Walton says

here's a flavor of the anger and hate

he's been getting in opposition to health care reform:

"I truly believe that you are a paid member of the Ben Nelson's staff," wrote a reader.

WTF? Believing Don is a paid shill for Ben Nelson is angry and hateful? Personally, I believe he's an unpaid shill. Does that still count?

"You supposedly are working for Lee Enterprises and paid by them, but I would not be surprised to hear that you are receiving kickbacks from Nelson to protect his image."

I'd be a little surprised, but I wouldn't be knocked over.

"You most likely will be weeded out of your job."

More likely, the job will be weeded out. Newspapers that substitute opinion for news are rapidly going the way of the dinosaur.

"Your column should be on the comic page,"

I disagree with this. Some of the comics are actually worth reading.

This is a classic example of how the left interprets any criticism as hate, and particularly resents it when their biases are pointed out (although said bias is generally as transparent as the Emperor's clothes).

If you want to see real hate directed at a columnist, Don, Michelle Malkin periodically publishes her hate mail. Note the difference.

The LJS once again assists the cause of armed robbery in the city of Lincoln by suppressing a description of the perpetrators.

Leeks are an amazing vegetable. This year wasn't my best crop, but there were 6 of them remaining in late fall; they're best simply left in the ground. Then it snowed. And it snowed. And it snowed. And the temperature went down to -16 F. I gave up on them, almost.

This afternoon, at what seems to be the end of the anemic January thaw, I noticed that despite the awful weather, the ground is mostly unfrozen; snow is an excellent insulator. And, there, in the corner of my vegetable garden, stood the leeks, looking a little bedraggled and mired in mud, but intact — the frost never got deep enough to turn them to mush — and (when you peel off the outer layers) quite delicious.

So, fresh outdoor vegetables in Nebraska in late January. Beat that!

I was hoping to ignore today's holiday. I came into work as usual, wrote a fourth-year evaluation for a junior faculty member, made up some lecture notes, and went to the dentist for a modest amount of drilling. It was certainly not the most enjoyable day I've ever had. I also took a telephone call from a courteous Kentucky gentleman who wanted to know what had happened to my Martin Luther King plagiarism web page, and then discovered to my annoyance that despite my best efforts to ignore the whole danged thing this year, I was being badmouthed online by a couple of leftist dirtbags. Pardon the redundancy.

So, first of all, here's some background. Thirteen years ago, if my math's correct, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln tried to institute an academic holiday on Martin Luther King day. I was on the Academic Senate at the time, and objected, for two reasons. First of all, academically, it's an extremely inconvenient holiday. It falls in the second week of the semester, and shortens that week. We lose a day's instruction. Second of all, Martin Luther King, while he was a great civil rights leader, he was also, not to put it too delicately, an incorrigible plagiarist. His student papers as an undergraduate and graduate student are largely cut-and-paste edits of other people's work. His graduate thesis was cobbled together as little more than an assembly of unattributed quotations from theologians, philosophers, and most unforgivably of all, the Ph.D. thesis of a fellow graduate student. How can we celebrate an academic holiday in honor of a man who cheated his way through school? How can we fire students for plagiarism while honoring a far more copious plagiarist?

After losing an inquorate vote, I gave up. Not wishing this to be the last word at UNL about King's plagiarism, I put up a web page sketching out a small part of King's academic misappropriations. I discovered some years later that my web page was being cited by Michael Savage, a radio talk show host for whom I have no particular admiration; and linked to by various white supremacist groups. There was not much I could do about that. This year, my chair received a complaint from a 'concerned citizen' somewhere in the southwest, asking that I be fired -- not the first such communication, by the way. As I was responding to his complaint, I found out the very old server on which the page resided was no longer functioning. I rescued the files, but didn't resurrect the page.

Meanwhile, last year on MLK Day, I noticed a quote from King on the relationship between religion and science, on another blog, and out of pure devilment, googled the first four words. And, of course, I found the quote was almost entirely 'borrowed' from an earlier piece by Rabbi Hillel Silver, evidently a theologian of the 1930s. I posted a comment to that effect. This infuriated some 'documentary film maker' or other (digital camcorders are far too cheap these days, methinks, and every fool who's posted a YouTube video thinks he's a documentary filmmaker) who accused me of having deceptively edited Silver's piece to make the plagiarism look worse. He couldn't quite bring himself to deny the quote was plagiarized, though, although he weaseled that it was much more a gloss than a straight rip-off.Riiiiight. He said, falsely, that I hadn't indicated I'd edited Silver's words to highlight the plagiarism -- of course I had indicated every edit in the conventional way with an ellipsis. And this year, the other low-life, an anonymous yob who goes by the handle Abel Pharmboy (good grief!) resurrected Levenson's attacks.

It took me about five minutes to find another instance where King reproduced almost the entire section of Silver's essay that I originally drew attention to -- as a sermon he wrote while a student at Crozer Theological Seminary. It's on the MLK Papers Project website, no less. And if you go to that site, you can also find his thesis online. Take a careful look, and see, once you get to the body of the thesis, almost every paragraph has a substantial piece of text that is footnoted as being an exact, unattributed quote from someone else.

I was going to let this all drop. But these bozos have now annoyed me enough, I may put together a new and improved King plagiarism web page. The rage it induces from the Left is, after all, reason enough.

About nine months ago, I wrote a column in the Daily Nebraskan, noting the incestuous relationship between the Lincoln Journal Star and the University of Nebraska Lincoln. This relationship was first explained to me in Ya-Ya's, maybe Lincoln's best bar, by a drunken reporter from the LJS, about 15 years ago. Basically, he said, if you're the beat reporter for the LJS, covering UNL, and you report stories that are unfavorable to the University, the UNL News Department will cut you off. This means, the news releases that are 90% of the UNL reporter's livelihood will no longer be fed to you in advance, and you're suddenly stuck with, you know, actual reporting. So, of course, you're careful not to offend the university.

Michael Nelson, the editor of the LJS, was indignant, and sent a letter to the Daily Nebraskan castigating me for impugning the integrity of the LJS reporter covering UNL, Melissa Lee, even though I'd stressed to him I had not wished in any way to cast aspersions on her journalistic ethics in particular.

I see today that Melissa Lee has quit the LJS and is now working for UNL as a 'spokesperson', a well-earned reward for several years of favorable reporting. As they say in Arkansas, incest is best.

You'll have to indulge me here.

I grew up in Dublin, mostly. I lived there from 1964 through 1977, the coldest part of the last century. I used to walk home late at night from Boy Scout meetings; I stood out on the salt marshes bird-watching in the depth of winter. I remember it getting down to 28 F, maybe. The first winter I spent in the US, in Boston, I nearly froze to death on a 20 minute walk to a party, because I had no idea it could get so cold.

I see, according to Weather Underground, that tonight it got down to 17F in Dublin. More than the horrible winter we've had so far in Nebraska, that drives home to me how utterly frigid this winter has been, all across the Northern hemisphere. Palm trees grow in Dublin, mostly cabbage palms, but in sheltered locations, real palms. I grew a Camellia to maturity; as far as I know, until tonight, it was still alive. I used to grow passion flowers, outdoors, and South African lilies. None of them would survive 17 F.

I see the all time record low temperature for Dublin is 16 F. All I can say is, I don't remember that, or anything close to it. And regardless, we are approaching record low temperatures this year, over a huge swath of the world.

---

You're not imagining how miserable this winter is, part 2: snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere in December was the second-highest since they started keeping records in 1966.

As frigid temperatures encase the entire northern hemisphere, Joe Romm, high-priest of all the warmists, assures us that it all balances out. In the present case it's all balanced by a small patch of water in the tropical Pacific that's 3°C above normal.

Why do Joe's maps not show the extreme cold? Because they omit land temperatures, and most of the area of the earth above 30°N is land! And, of course, land is where people freeze to death. And he does have 'SST' (sea surface temperature) above the map, so he isn't actually lying. Take a lesson, folks; that's how the left does it. it's almost always 'deceive by omission'.

Prepare to be told this was the 3rd hottest January in the last bazillion years. You just gotta believe!

Nebraska Democrat part-time press secretary Don Walton begins the new year with yet another tedious whine about the incivility of contemporary discourse. People have been emailing him rude things about Benedict Nelson and Barack Obama.They had no doubt detected which side of the partisan divide Don is on. Perhaps that might have been because he was silent when Mike Johanns was being smeared, a couple of months ago as 'pro-rape'; when Alan Grayson was accusing Republicans of wanting seniors dead; and, of course, for all 8 years of 'Bushitler'.

It's pretty simple, folks. If you complain only when people are rude to you or your side, you're not a proponent of civility, you're a whiner. The only way you establish credibility in such matters is to be as vigilant about your own side as about the other.

RWP, having actually read some history, knows contemporary discourse is more the norm than the exception over American political history. Until a senator takes a cane to another senator on the floor of the Senate, he will remain unworried.

Barack Obama, way back last summer when cutting health care costs was something he cared about, cited the Mayo Clinic as an example of a state-of -the-art medical facility that also kept down costs. Well, it was revealed yesterday that the Mayo Clinic has found another way of reducing costs -- don't accept government health insurance! The Mayo's clinic in Arizona announced it would no longer be accepting Medicare patients.

The Mayo as a whole loses $840 million a year from the corrupt, underfunded and yet insolvent Medicare system, and has had enough; the facility in Glendale Arizona, which alone accounts for $120 million of the $840 million in Medicare loses, wants cash or some other form of insurance from seniors in future.

And the Democrats and AARP claim we can cut hundreds of billions of dollars more from Medicare without affecting benefits! Sure, if you're willing to drive 50 miles to find some offshore-medical-school-educated witch-doctor to treat you!

Meanwhile, our 'representative', Benedict Cornhustler Nelson, assures us the Senate health care bill...

protects Medicare... and reduces the deficit.

If you believe that, I have a nuclear waste storage site in Boyd County to sell you.