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The Stars Might Lie, But The Numbers Never Do (A Global Warming Review)

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As the House begins its final sprint to rush some sort of cap & trade (tax) legislation to a floor vote this coming week (HR 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill), it is worth taking stock of where things stand.  I received an email from an Obama supporter (who once confessed, in secret, that soon after his election they had the beginnings of “serious doubts” about his ability to do his job) that contained what I can only call a progressive’s campaign article from The Nation.  One statement summed up its whole, wordy call to arms to push forward with Obama’s fascist plans:

We also need to expand the agenda for reform. For example, if we are to make the investments vital to our future, as the president has called for, a sustained expansion of public investment is essential–and that will require a far bolder tax policy.

It goes on to blather with reassuring hubris about taxes on the “wealthy” and those evil businesses who dare provide people with private sector jobs, but because of its immediacy, this piece is going to focus on the problems with cap & trade.  And the root cause of cap & trade is the New Religion of global warming.  Now, as we’ve noted here before, the gist of implementing cap & trade as mitigation to global warming is intended to gain government and special interest control of natural resources and thereby gain power and control over American citizens once it is realized that the Earth may more likely be entering a serious cooling period.  Plainly put, it’s all about money, not science.  Science hasn’t been in this picture for decades. 

In response to my friend’s email, I sent back a link to an article that presents an overview of some initial reactions to Obama’s latest “climate report”.  A report that, it should be known, was produced by more than 30 scientists working across 13 government agencies.  A report that, according to a UK Guardian article, was:

 “finalized in late April, but Obama administration officials spent several weeks planning (its)  release, honing the language and graphics to make it accessible to non-scientists and to sharpen its core message:  America must take action on climate change.

As part of the PR surrounding the release of the report, the administration approached the San Francisco consulting firm, Resource Media, which specialises in environmental campaigning, to produce a shorter and more digestible brochure of today’s report for wider public distribution.”

Let’s pretend we have some common sense for a moment and consider this carefully.  If the report was so solid in its facts, why was there a need for the administration to spend “weeks” tweaking its message?  Why did the administration need to hire a PR firm whose sole reason d’etre is putting warm, fuzzy spins on the myth of global warming?

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and comes out of Chicago (or San Francisco), it ain’t worth the pot used to hold the water to cook it in, my friends.

The truth is that the “science” upon which the administration’s “report” is based is flawed.  As in skewed.  As in downright wacked.   And with its purpose being politically-motivated and, based on previous experience, very likely deliberately missing and/or excluding key points.  Another in a series of non-partisan scientific reports was released this month by the Nongovermental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).  Here are a few pertinent excerpts.  It is important to note these scientists didn’t need to use a PR firm to translate (spin) it for you so you can understand what they are saying (emphases mine).:

“The IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors were appointed by governments, and its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) have been subject to approval by member governments of the UN. The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all supported by government contracts, which pay not only for their research but for their IPCC activities. Most travel to and hotel accommodations at exotic locations for the drafting authors is paid with government funds.”

“The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (IPCCSAR, 1995) was completed in 1995 and published in 1996. Its SPM contained the memorable conclusion, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The SAR was again heavily criticized, this time for having undergone significant changes in the body of the report to make it ‘conform’ to the SPM—after it was finally approved by the scientists involved in writing the report. Not only was the report altered, but a key graph was also doctored to suggest a human influence. The evidence presented to support the SPM conclusion turned out to be completely spurious.

 There is voluminous materialavailable about these text changes, including a Wall StreetJournaleditorial article by Dr. Frederick Seitz (Seitz, 1996). This led to heated discussions between supporters of the IPCC and those who were aware of the altered text and graph, including an exchange of letters in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Singer et al., 1997).”

“The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-TAR 2001) was noteworthy for its use of spurious scientific papers to back up its SPM claim of “new and stronger evidence” of anthropogenic global warming. One of these was the so-called “hockeystick” paper, an analysis of proxy data, which claimed the twentieth century was the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The paper was later found to contain basic errors in its statistical analysis(McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003, 2005; Wegman et al., 2006). The IPCC also supported a paper that claimed pre-1940 warming was of human origin and caused by greenhouse gases. This work, too, contained fundamental errors in its statistical analysis. The SEPP response to TAR was a 2002 booklet, The Kyoto Protocol is Not Backed by Science (SEPP, 2002).”

“The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-AR4 2007) was published in 2007; the SPM of Working Group I was released in February; and the full report from this Working Group was released in May—after it had been changed, once again, to “conform” to the Summary. It is  significant that AR4 no longer makes use of the hockey-stick paper or the paper claiming pre-1940 human-caused warming.  Once again  controversy ensued, however, this time when the IPCC refused to publicly share comments submitted by peer-reviewers, then sent all the reviewers’ comments in hard copy to a library that was closed for renovation, and then finally, but only under pressure, posted them online. Inspection of those comments revealed that the authors had rejected more than half of all the reviewers’ comments in the crucial chapter attributing recent warming to human activities.

AR4 concluded that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (emphasis in the original). However, as the present report will show, it ignored available evidence against a human contribution to current warming and the substantial research of the past few years on the effects of solar activity on climate change.

Why have IPCC reports been marred by controversy and so frequently contradicted by subsequent research? Certainly its agenda to find evidence of a human role in climate change is a major reason; its organization as a government entity beholden to political agendas is another major reason; and the large professional and financial rewards that go to scientists and bureaucrats who are willing to bend scientific facts to match those agendas is yet a third major reason.

Another reason for the IPCC’s unreliability is the naive acceptance by policymakers of “peer-reviewed” literature as necessarily authoritative.It has become the case that refereeing standards for many climate change papers are inadequate, often because of the use of an “invisible college” of reviewers of like inclination to a paper’s authors (Wegman et al., 2006). Policy should be set upon a background of demonstrable science, not upon simple (and often mistaken) assertions that, because a paper was refereed, its conclusions must be accepted.”

Translation:  The IPCC is under pressure to conform to economically-motivated political interests.  In my neck of the woods, the conditions under which IPCC scientists “work” is called a conflict of interest.  Lots of folks call it the fox watching henhouse.  No matter what you call it, it is just flat-out wrong and those who would support and encourage any action taken on this kind of bad science must be viewed with nothing less than great suspicion.  For this kind of “science” is when you can rest assured that its supporters  have a vested interest in personal gain, not some lofty goal for the good of humankind. 

It was argued to me that it is merely a few rogue, “flat-earth” or “fringe”-type scientists who are running around trying to destroy Obama’s U.N.-backed (gods help us all) plans.  Nice try but, frankly, it’s as wrong as the early Darwinians believing in and perpetuating the “romantic” view of the Middle Ages being the time it became common knowledge the Earth is spherical, not flat, when they used the same “flat earth” slur against Christians.  The Darwinians gleefully stepped into a stinky “scientific belief” that was the unfortunate – and wrong – result of Washington Irving’s 1828 fictional account of Christopher Columbus’ attempt to sail to Japan in a ship too small to make such a journey.  Fact is that most of the educated world realized the Earth is a sphere by about 3 BCE and only China, despite her technological advancements, took until the 17th century to come to the same realization (and then only because of Jesuits holding high positions as astronomers at the Chinese court).

The bottom line of all this is that is is best argued that there does NOT exist a collective consensus among scientists about the effects of humans on global warming.  And because of that it is dangerous for people to rush to any actions that will have long-term soci-economic ramifications when such long-term socio-economic ramifications are harmful the the majority of Americans solely for the great gain of a few.  Some proof of the size of the disagreement about global warming that liberals simply cannot get their brain cell around can be found in “The Petition Project”.  As of the latest NIPCC report (see Appendix 4, that details the purpose and process by which signatures are collected), 31,478 American scientists have signed the following statement:

PetitionProjectForm-sm

The NIPCC report goes on to state that, “This is a remarkably strong statement of dissent from the perspective advanced by the IPCC, and it is similar to the perspective represented by the NIPCC and the current report. The fact that more than ten times as many scientists have signed it as are alleged to have “participated” in some way or another in the research, writing, and review of IPCC AR4 is very significant. These scientists, who include among their number 9,029 individuals with Ph.D.s, actually endorse the statement that appears above.”

To quote the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “the stars might lie, but the numbers never do.”  Emails are too easy to ignore, calls and/or faxes to your House Representative (both Washington and local offices) must go out starting tomorrow to tell them that no matter what Nancy Pelosi or President Obama demand, they work for you, the American people, and must vote against H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill.  Congress must know – in no uncertain terms – that rushing to tax ALL Americans on the basis of bad science is not only stupid, but putting already struggling American lives on the line solely for the sake of a greedy few will be the final straw that will cost them their job.

A Sign At The Times

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You know things are going terribly wrong when the New York Times decides to reach for ratings by swinging the blade of President Obama’s infamous campaign trail budget scalpel right at at the throats of the administration.

In a “scoop” piece posted the other day, it leaked a report about the advertising campaign underway to change public perceptions of global warming and therefore gain public acceptance of the administration’s wish to further enslave, then drown the country in its idiotic tax scheme of cap & trade.  The alleged research upon which the summary report is based is being done by an organization called “ecoAmerica” (among ecoAmerica’s advisors is Wes Boyd, from MoveOn.org, which speaks volumes about their credibility and real intent).  Here is a snippet of its published statement of purpose.  Pay close attention to the italicized words:

Our biggest environmental challenge is global warming.
Al Gore labels it a “planetary emergency” and won
an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for getting the word out.
Magazines, movies, corporations, NGO’s, universities
and state governments have been sounding the alarm
and taking steps to address the issue.

Yet, Pew’s annual survey on public policy released in
January 2008 reports that global warming declined
from 38% to 35% as a “top priority” for Americans
over the past year. We rank it 20 on a list of 21
priorities. This is not a good sign if you’re working
to accelerate and enhance environmental solutions.

If we want Americans to change their priorities,
we need to change ours. Too often we think of people
primarily as just a step on the way to public policy.
We need to make people themselves a priority.

That’s our mission at ecoAmerica. We work to restore
deep and comprehensive connections between mainstream
Americans and their natural world, and change
their personal and voting behaviors.

 

I’m all for treading lightly across our Mother Earth, but the only ones who are going to benefit from all of this nonsense are the environmental groups who are utterly dependent upon having some crisis or another as their reason d’etre and donations so they don’t have to get a real job, people like Al Gore, who pollute their way around the world spreading the false gospel of fear, a handful of businesses hand-picked by the administration to handle the logistics of cap & trade, and other countries around the world who will more than happy to take in American manufacturing jobs.

It’s all very sneaky and slimey.  But par for the course from our community organizer in chief.

The Secret Tax (Popping The Cap Off Global Warming)

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It’s fun to speculate sometimes.  It’s often called “dreaming”.  I’m sure that most every one of us has, at various times, fantasized about what we’d do if we won the lottery.

But in the world of science, speculation has only a very small place.  It is the spark, the germ, the seed that spurs action to collect actual data, evidence, by using rigorous control to avoid swaying results towards a specific conclusion.

Unfortunately, when money is in bed with science such objectivity too often goes flying out the window, almost as fast as Pelosi and Reid slam the door on Republicans when they schedule a budget planning meeting.  The evidence is gathered with a prevailing eye on what supports the initial speculation, since the spark, the germ, the seed was only about finding a way to make money.

That, boys and girls, is the story of global warming.  It is a tale filled with misadventures, missteps, and downright stupid mistakes, but all used to support only a way that someone can make lots and lots of money.  There isn’t anything the least bit altruistic about it.

In a minority report from the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, it is becoming more and more clear that the ideology of global warming is misguided at best, and at worst a means of global entrapment for the benefit of only a few.  That the United Nations remains a big proponent leads me to believe it is mostly the latter, for who has more vested interest in world domination than the U.N.?  And who has been Al Gore’s staunchest ally in leading the hue and cry against the dangers of global warming except the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

No one.  Until our President, Congress, and various members of the new administration bellied up to the old cap and trade bar and plunked down their money for a lottery ticket.  And though the numbers on their ticket don’t match the numbers displayed by those bouncing little ping-pong balls, they’re plotting and scheming to rig the machine to get the balls to drop in the order they desire.  They are, unfortunately, irritating our allies with their threats of economic penalties for those countries who won’t play along with their little get-rich scheme at the expense of the American taxpayers.  What it will also do is drive jobs overseas since the United States will no longer be competitive in the global market.  Something you might want to consider when you’re promising to “save or create 3.5 million jobs”, don’t you think?

It was a year ago that well-regarded scientists from around the world released what is called the “Manhattan Declaration”.  If you’ve never read it, it’s your lucky day for here it is in its entirety:

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change
“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently-observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change.  Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation, and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.

It’s pretty plain English to me.  And if you do some simple research, their case is well-documented and well-supported.  No one is saying that humans don’t need to start cleaning up their collective act, our trashing of Mother Earth can’t go on forever.  But to use “junk science” as a way to create a real climate change – a climate of fear – so that people willingly go along with the destruction of their economy is not only unfair, but as hypocritical as all the carbon disgorged by the jets that fly Al Gore and others to meet face-to-face (instead of using cost-effective internet live-meeting technology) to weep and wail about “global warming” aka “climate change” aka “climate extremes”.  Trust me, the latest round of nasty weather in the Midwest is perfectly normal and you don’t define warming by posting the last frost date for this year (used by gardeners) as coming later than the last frost date of last year.

The mainstream media isn’t thrilled about reporting this.  But just because the mainstream media thinks that supporting the administration in this lunatic delusion will somehow curry favor that will keep them operating doesn’t change the facts.  In the most simple of terms:  global warming is not a threat.  It does not need to be addressed at this time.  And it certainly doesn’t need to be addressed by the economic suicide of cap and trade.  Think about this:  Control carbon and you control the very air we breathe.

I’ll leave you with this sobering excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Politicians love cap and trade because they can claim to be taxing “polluters,” not workers. Hardly. Once the government creates a scarce new commodity — in this case the right to emit carbon — and then mandates that businesses buy it, the costs would inevitably be passed on to all consumers in the form of higher prices. Stating the obvious, Peter Orszag — now Mr. Obama’s budget director — told Congress last year that “Those price increases are essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program.”

That ought to put the frost on your cornflakes.

Baffle ‘Em With Bullshit

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Do you actually read the news?  I mean really read the news; not just looking at the pictures, skimming over to the gossip or entertainment sections so you can then get to the daily cartoons.  Read to the point you know about what’s going on in your town and in your country.

I talk to a lot of people and am often surprised at just how little they know about things that stand to change their very way of life.  So much is taken for granted yet there are times I can’t blame them for wanting to stick their heads in the sand and choose instead to obsess over the next American Idol.  Not only do current events sorely test those few lessons in civics through which most of us nodded so many years ago, the sheer number of them coming at us today is unprecendented.

But maybe that’s the way the new administration and those working behind the scenes of it planned it all along.  Baffle ’em with bullshit about crisis after crisis and then leverage the overwhelming despair to sneak in and steal everything of value.

Today is a day when there’s surely plenty of it.  First and most importantly, there’s the fundamental insanity of “rephrasing” the terms by which we measure what’s going on in the world around us.  That’s a really good way to get yourself in through the backdoor; just don’t let ’em know what you really mean.   The “war on terror” has now become the “ongoing struggle against terror” (courtesy of those alleged-as-nebulous ties to Bill Ayers, we presume?)  On a global level, it’s being referred to as an “overseas contingency operation”. 

Yeah, right.  Where I come from, it’s called fighting those who wish us dead.  In other words, it’s war.

There’s the ongoing saga of government bailouts and the endless AIG ping-pong blame game to take our minds off such insensibilities.   But in an unprecedented move, Treasury Secretary Geithner has proposed a sweeping set of regulations that could well spell the end of business as we know it.  He thinks we need an “independent” agency to monitor “major institutions” or payment systems whose failure “could” present a “destabilizing effect” on the economy.  The stated intention is to restrain companies whose size or complexity “could” threaten the financial systems’ stability, with the power to control all this to be spread among the Treasury, Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and SEC.  Color me an alarmist or color me practical, but there’s nothing to define any of this; much is being left up for “discussion” over the next few weeks.  What is there to discuss?  It’s all being directed at private businesses, where in a free market business operates according to Darwin’s theory – the survival of the fittest (there is a reason the dinosaurs went extinct).  I can easily imagine a government takeover of, say, Microsoft when some hacker unleashes the virus-to-end-all-viruses and manages to take down computers from coast to coast, businesses large and small, and portions of government operations.

This comes from the very same Tiny Tim who was unable to tell anyone just how much TARP money is left.  I can’t help but now wonder if that failure to pay all those taxes didn’t stem from simple stupidity after all. 

And did you know that the IRS is setting up a sort of clemency program, designed to get the wealthy to spill the beans about their oversees bankers?  The government made up rules that allow this sort of thing, but now we’re going to tell other countries that they can’t allow Americans to play by them. 

It isn’t going over very well.  The World Trade Organization is warning about the creeping protectionism now being displayed around the world, but the finger is being pointed at the United States and the European Union for starting the financial crisis.  Suggestions about replacing the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency with some mish-mash to be managed by the International Monetary Fund were given a semblance of credence by none other than, yes, Tiny Tim, when he told the Council on Foreign Relations “We’re actually quite open to that.”  Thereby setting off yet another panic in the financial sectors, both nationa and global.  Though it is reported that he’d not even read China’s proposal. 

I fear it is simply a precursor to the latest U.N. proposal for “climate change”, complete with a global shift to a “world economy”.  Though the proposal is still rather vague in terms of dollars, the scope should frighten anyone with a modicum of sense for it will affect absolutely everything from goods to the ability to provide services to utilities through mandates like cap and trade and a shift in the use of subsidies.  The Obama administration is for anything that uses the weasel words, “global warming”, and there is obviously no concern on their part that the “bank” for all of the monies that will involved will be none other than the inept U.N.

Anyone else getting the feeling that reading is somehow something just a bit too plebian for this administration?  Despite all the talk about transparency, they don’t want anyone else to read anything, either.  Fox cable news won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of the Treasury seeking documents related to the Troubled Asset Recovery Program.  Some 10,000 pages were finally received but, guess what?  The majority of them were redacted.  Thereby continuing to cloak the government’s role in the compensation agreements at AIG and Citigroup, etc.

Meantime, North Korea is preparing to launch what they are calling a satellite and the rest of the world is calling a missile test.  A test to see if whatever-you-choose-to-call-it is capable of reaching the United States.  Japan is preparing to intercept debris over the ocean and the U.S. has 2 warships deployed in southwestern Japan while the inevitable threat of sanctions is being made by allies.  Not that the North Korea contributes to the stability of the region, but this is not just a diplomatic nightmare.  It contains all the potential for the very same ugliness with which we are already heavily involved in the Middle East.  But at least the Middle Eastern leaders aren’t (yet) attempting to launch missiles at us.

But there are some missiles already hitting close to home.  My home.  Your home.  If the technology exists, someone will figure out how to make a buck with it.  And red-light cameras are the latest trick in the revenue-collecting arsenal.  Mississippi,  Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska and West Virginia all ban them, though about half the states authorize their use.  Now Chicago – surprise, surprise – is considering using them to not only catch people who run red lights, but to also check to see if they are driving an insured vehicle, since there is big money to be made collecting fines for driving without insurance.  Big money for government and for a Michigan-based company, InsureNet, who would charge up to 30% in collection fees for tying into the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, an information-sharing network that links some 35,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.  Though being sold as an adjunct check for drivers who break the law, there is nothing to stop a check of every single car passing through an intersection to see if they are insured.  In fact, that’s still on the table.  Maybe it’s just me, but I fail to see how this makes the roads safer.  Certainly driving is a huge act of faith – that other drivers will obey the rules of the road – but whether or not other drivers are insured has nothing to do with how they operate a vehicle.  The only thing being guaranteed is someone’s pockets are being lined.

And this is just the ones that come readily to mind.  There is legislation pending in the House for reparations to American slaves (worth a rant of its own since, among other things, it speaks to slaves not having been allowed to repatriate – to the very countries and the governments that sold them in the first place, and what about the same discriminations having been made towards women…heh); Senator Dodd is being stripped of more and more of his protective covering to reveal what a slimey mess he really is, national health care is being discussed despite a stern warning from Daniel Hannon (member of the British Parliment and former Obama supporter) last night to Sean Hannity about the dangers of it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  we’re being sold down a river.  De Nile ain’t just a river in Egypt but it’s not a place any of us can afford to swim in any longer.

Whatever Barry Wants, Harry Gets?

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I fear the Democratic majority in Congress is starting to feel the heat building up around them as the American people begin to see that all the campaign rhetoric was just that – rhetoric.  To understand that it is the administration’s intention to destroy this country.

And so in all due haste to do as much damage as possible before the Democrats rightly lose their Congressional majority in 2010’s mid-term elections, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now pulling out the final stops and making the decision to include a little procedural tactic called “reconciliation” in legislation intended to, this time, nationalize health care and institute cap and trade.  What this does is allow extremely limited time for debate about a bill, effectively preventing a fillibuster by the minority party and forcing something through to law. 

This is a budget-targeted procedure, and there are provisions to call for exceptions.  You know, those invaluable checks and balances upon which this country was founded and intended to operate.  It could be argued that the fiscal changes to the budget that would accompany nationalizing health care is an exception.  As could the “trickle down” effect of implenting cap and trade in the form of higher prices for everything (since what will be considered “dirty” energy production and therefore become a commodity to be traded for profit will impact the cost of everything from utilities to transportation costs of goods).

Some Democrats are actually – and rightly – concerned about this particular bit of high-handedness from the man who personally supersized the deficit through his heavy hand in crafting the TARP and stimulus packages.  Guess they’ve been reading those cards, letters, and emails from their out-of-change constituents.  There is hope that enough Democrats have begun to recover from their Kool-Aid stupor; however it needs to be a good number because should there be a tie vote, guess who gets to break it?  Yup.  The President’s own little shadow, Vice-President Biden.

We can only hope that his propensity for misspeaking will cause him to say the wrong thing when it would really make a positive difference.

But I’m not going to hold my breath.  It’s time to put pressure on those who work for us – particularly if they are of the Demon-crat persuasion – to stop this one in its tracks and tell Harry that this time he’s gone way, way too far.