All one needs to know about President Obama’s “bipartisan” health care summit — and his intentions — is succinctly summarized on their own website (which they tried to scrub, but which thanks to Google caching was all for naught).

[Via Michelle Malkin] White House: Where’s the GOP health care plan? Where’s the GOP healthcare plan?
GOP: Um, it’s linked right on your White House website.
White House: D’oh.

Thanks to the Save Jersey blog for the graphic that says it all. Snicker:

Background here from Daniel Foster who notes: “Ironically, this is perhaps the most exposure the Republican plan has so far received, and all it took was the Democrats saying that it didn’t exist.”

Other ideas? Who needs them? Insurance across state lines? Tort reform? Ha. With just those compromises President Obama could have had his health care bill 12 months ago.

But this isn’t about cost savings, it’s about tipping the political scales to the Europeanization of America; about getting all of middle-class America sucking on the government teet; about reducing individuality and independence, and increasing 1920′s style Wilsonian-Marxist “progressivism,” and dependence. It’s about power, and keeping it by forcing Americans to “mother may I” one-seventh of the economy. Next up, energy consumption in the guise of “saving” the planet via carbon rationing. After that, the food police, and executive pay police, and 401k police, like that Audi commercial on steroids.

So just shut up already and eat what these politicos are forcing down your throat. These fields of bureaucrats and egg-head academic “experts” know what’s best for you, not you,  and certainly not the collective decisions of 300 million consumers via the free market.

And they dared call George W. Bush suffering from “imperial hubris”! Sheesh.

[ABC NEWS] ABC News Thomas Giusto and Lindsey Ellerson report:

Conservative author Jason Mattera launched a relentless revolt today against President Obama and the leftist agenda, mocking Obama loyalists during remarks made at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

… Not only did Mattera hit Obama for his acknowledged drug use as a youth, but he went on to ridicule feminism, diversity and homosexuals.

“The allegiance to political correctness on the college campus goes a long way toward explaining how young people in their heart of hearts actually believe that a scrawny street agitator turned presidential candidate could save mankind, renew our faith in American politics, stop glaciers from melting, curb racism, end all wars, tackle terrorism, provide us health care, pay for our college tuition, and oh while he’s at it, Barack promises to send a government unicorn down to the sky to fly us up to the left’s world where people dance across the streets of government owned gold, eating FDA approved candy canes, and where MSNBC is programmed on every channel,” chided Mattera.  “Buyers remorse is setting in, heck even the slutty Obama girl said her crush has faded.”

Read the entire article and you’ll have no doubt that Mattera’s shtick seems obnoxious (albeit no different than a conservative Keith Olbermann).

But more curious is that I’ve read this a couple times in a row and I’ve yet to find the part where Mattera allegedly “went on to ridicule feminism, diversity and homosexuals.” Huh?

All he’s doing is pointing out that Obama proclaimed himself as the chosen one — saying at his own nomination that we’d remember it as the moment “that the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” — and now, just one year later, people are finding it’s just not so.

He’s not a messiah. He’s not even half as deft as he thinks he is. He’s just the latest reincarnation of disproven, ineffective, stale, Marxist-Wilsonian socialist ideas. For thee, not for me! ‘If ONLY evil corporations would stop pursuing profits,’ summarized Obama in his $7 million NYT’s best-selling book, et cetera, and so on. It is to laugh. Obama is everything the far left has stood for and failed at for decades, and makes Jimmy Carter look like Barry Goldwater.

But for pointing this out, albeit crudely, says ABC News, Mattera MUST BE a gay-hating, misogynist racist. Ah, yes, THAT media bias…

Paging Eric Alterman!

Pretty funny, Crowder, as these things go.

I promise to be more hopey, changey, and such this year… that’s a peace prize!

Here’s Charles Krauthammer on how the liberal masses have reacted to their lost Senate seat in Massachusetts:

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

On the contrary, after 29 healthcare speeches by The Great One, and perpetual 24-hour cable news puppets reciting the promises of socialized medicine, the American people understand enough — and they’re not too keen on waiting months for MRIs, CTs or specialists needed to fight life-threatening illnesses. That’s not “free” health care. That’s rationing.

“If you make less than $250,000 your taxes will not go up. Not one dime.” — Barack Obama.

Not one dime, that is, as long as you’re not married. If you’re married the ObamaCare bill would hit couples making as little as $25,000 each. From the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON – Some married couples would pay thousands of dollars more for the same health insurance coverage as unmarried people living together, under the health insurance overhaul plan pending in Congress.

The built-in “marriage penalty” in both House and Senate healthcare bills has received scant attention. But for scores of low-income and middle-income couples, it could mean a hike of $2,000 or more in annual insurance premiums the moment they say “I do.”

… For an unmarried couple with income of $25,000 each, combined premiums would be capped at $3,076 per year, under the House bill. If the couple gets married, with a combined income of $50,000, their annual premium cap jumps to $5,160 — a “penalty” of $2,084.

What’s the point of taking off our shoes at airport security if the screenings can’t pick up a myriad of explosives and detonators?

According to reports the “underwear bomb” worn by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a military-grade plastic explosive called Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, and neither that nor the detonator would have been caught by standard metal detectors. Airports in the United States have a smattering of “sniffer” booths or occasional bomb-sniffing dogs that would have caught such explosives, but for the most part it would be pure luck if an explosive-laden terrorist was sent to the proper “sniffer” line.

So now we know that the vast majority of security we’ve undergone for the past 8 years has been a facade, designed to make us feel better about flying. At the end of the day it’s really vigilant passengers and malfunctioning bombs that have saved lives. While Abdulmutallab and “shoebomber” Richard Reid have both been categorized as bungling nincompoops it’s just a matter of time before one of these bombs works as designed and kills a slew of people.

Meanwhile, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab clearly received aid. If the presence of military explosives wasn’t enough to show that, at least one eye-witness claims that another man coaxed Amsterdam security officials into allowing Abdulmutallab get on the plane even though he had no passport. Abdulmutallab has since told federal authorities that there are others like him in Yemen preparing to bomb airliners. Well, that’s a no-brainer, or at least it should be. But don’t tell that to the Obama administration, which just this month sent another 6 Guantanamo detainees back to Yemen! (Of the 200 remaining detainees, 91 of them are from Yemen). Many released detainees have since returned to their terrorist roots. Indeed, Said Ali al-Shihri was released in 2007, and although Saudi, has since become the “deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch.”

Not very reassuring, is it?

And yet here’s our Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, telling us everything is fine. She’s already retracted what was a carefully worded statement that “once the incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork,” which is like saying everything went according to plan after the fox ate all the chickens, or, after all the animals left the proverbial barn. What a joke she’s become. She now agrees, after much legitimate criticism, that the system failed. No kidding? We need an overpaid bureaucrat to tell us that?

And while we’re on topic, what’s the point of all these different agency no-fly lists if they’re all so big and uncoordinated that a guy like Abdulmutallab — no passport, on at least one watch list, buys a one-way ticket, has no luggage, his own father attempts to warn authorities about him — can get on an airplane?

But we’ll just keep taking our shoes off…

Oh, and can we go back to calling it The War on Terror again? Because apparently al Qaeda didn’t get the memo or know that Obama pressed a “reset” button.

Best summary yet. This is from the UK’s Christopher Monckton. Note his point about “an unelected government.” He’s not kidding either. And worse, right now, assisting this unelected body who champion worldwide regulation and taxation of carbon, are scores of international corporations proposing a $10 trillion treaty and “one-world” climate tax. Were something like this ever to take place, no other issue in your lifetime could potentially affect your future livelihood, standard of living, career and way of life.

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

Here’s Robert Tracinski on Climategate.

These e-mails show, among many other things, private admissions of doubt or scientific weakness in the global warming theory. In acknowledging that global temperatures have actually declined for the past decade, one scientist asks, “where the heck is global warming?… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” They still can’t account for it; see a new article in Der Spiegel: “Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out.” I don’t know where these people got their scientific education, but where I come from, if your theory can’t predict or explain the observed facts, it’s wrong.More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the “trick” consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature “proxies” from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward “hockey stick” slope.

Confirming the earlier scandal about cherry-picked data, the e-mails show CRU scientists conspiring to evade legal requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, for their underlying data. It’s a basic rule of science that you don’t just get to report your results and ask other people to take you on faith. You also have to report your data and your specific method of analysis, so that others can check it and, yes, even criticize it. Yet that is precisely what the CRU scientists have refused.

But what stood out most for me was extensive evidence of the hijacking of the “peer review” process to enforce global warming dogma. Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing.

And that is precisely what we find.

In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to “rid themselves of this troublesome editor”-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II’s knights. Michael Mann replies:

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”

You can also see from these e-mails the scientists’ panic at any dissent appearing in the scientific literature. When another article by a skeptic was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Michael Mann complains, “It’s one thing to lose Climate Research. We can’t afford to lose GRL.” Another CRU scientist, Tom Wigley, suggests that they target another troublesome editor: “If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.” That’s exactly what they did, and a later e-mail boasts that “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/new editorial leadership there.”

Not content to block out all dissent from scientific journals, the CRU scientists also conspired to secure friendly reviewers who could be counted on to rubber-stamp their own work. Phil Jones suggests such a list to Kevin Trenberth, with the assurance that “All of them know the sorts of things to say…without any prompting.”

So it’s no surprise when another e-mail refers to an attempt to keep inconvenient scientific findings out of a UN report: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Think of all of this the next time you hear someone invoke the authority of peer review-or of the UN’s IPCC reports-as backing for claims about global warming.

This scandal goes beyond scientific journals and into other media used to promote the global warming dogma. For example, RealClimate.org has been billed as an objective website at which global warming activists and skeptics can engage in an impartial debate. But in the CRU e-mails, the global warming establishment boasts that RealClimate is in their pocket.

I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through…. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

[T]hink of RC as a resource that is at your disposal…. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don’t get to use the RC comments as a megaphone.

And anyone doubting that the mainstream media is in on it, too, should check out New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s toadying apologia for the CRU e-mails, masquerading as a news report.

The picture that emerges is simple. In any discussion of global warming, either in the scientific literature or in the mainstream media, the outcome is always predetermined. Just as the temperature graphs produced by the CRU are always tricked out to show an upward-sloping “hockey stick,” every discussion of global warming has to show that it is occurring and that humans are responsible. And any data or any scientific paper that tends to disprove that conclusion is smeared as “unscientific” precisely because it threatens the established dogma.

For more than a decade, we’ve been told that there is a scientific “consensus” that humans are causing global warming, that “the debate is over” and all “legitimate” scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this “consensus” really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It’s the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being “confused” by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

Potentially trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are at stake with any Congressional push to regulate or tax carbon emissions. Shouldn’t the science be not just sound but as true a law as gravity itself? Of course, it’s beyond that too. Even if  climate change were occurring (it isn’t), and even if it were antropogenic, or man-made (it’s not), the final question would be one of cost effectiveness — as noted even by Greenish lefties like Bjorn Lomborg, why spend trillions of dollars to combat global warming when the next volcanic eruption would undercut any possible influence by man, and when such money could give every man, woman and child on the planet clean drinking water, not to mention any other number of problems worth solving.

The proponents of global warming have always seemed incredibly desperate to “act now,” and so averse to any other considerate or debate. Their “cure” has always — especially in terms of economics — seemed far worse than the “problem” itself. Every so often we’d get a peek as to why that was — first termed “global warming,” then “climate change,” wasn’t so much about really solving a climate problem as social and economic engineering. Such as some media outlets got hold of a letter from NASA’s James Hansen asking President Barack Obama to use the threat of climate change to redistribute wealth. A recently leaked United Nations document urged similarly.

Now, with the theft and publishing of more than 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England, the reasons for this “act now before it’s too late,” Day After Tomorrow nonsense are clear. The data, which has never been subject to peer review outside of cherry picked proponents, is simply fudged or fabricated.

[WSJ] The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the “peer-review” process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges from critics outside this clique are dismissed and disparaged.

This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: “Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.” Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted in a March 2003 email, after the journal “Climate Research” published a paper not to Mr. Mann’s liking, that “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature’. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal!”

Mr. Mann went on to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.” In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.

A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:

“This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science. The proof for this is circular. It’s the best, we’re told, because it’s the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature. The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim.

[Politico] During a round of network television interviews conducted during Obama’s visit to China, the president was asked about those who find it offensive that Mohammed will receive all the rights normally accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime.

“I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

So let me get this straight. The primary rationale, we were told for years, to try Guantanamo detainees in our civilian federal court system was to improve our image and standing around the world. Indeed, back in January 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder said the following: “We will carry out our constitutional duties within the framework set forth by the founders and with the humility to recognize that congressional oversight and judicial review are necessary.”

Aside from the fact that this statement and many others like it from Democrats were both insulting to our military (who for 250 years of precedent had run effective and lawful tribunals during the Revolution, Civil War, and World Wars I and II) and factually inaccurate (military tribunals have both congressional oversight and judicial review), we now find that in just 48 hours the president and attorney general have created exactly what they claimed they wished to avoid via tribunals — the notion of a kangaroo court.

Obama’s statement above is sure to feed the perception around the world that Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) cannot possibly receive a fair trial (and won’t his defense team demand a change of venue on day 1?). Similarly, Holder said the following:

“These are cases that have to be won. I don’t expect that we’ll have a contrary result [other than guilty].”

Brilliant! Holder additionally called it the “trial of the century.” The attorney general and president of the United States both confidently all but guaranteeing conviction and death penalty… How do you think that will play out on Al Jazeera? Won’t it sound like a stacked deck? The script already written? You better believe it. There’s no reset button for Islamic extremists.

Aren’t Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder graduates of law school? If so, how could they make the fundamental gaffe of prejudicing the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM)?

The next problem is a total lack of consistency. After bashing military tribunals for so long, Holder now says that other Guantanamo detainees, such as the USS Cole bombers, will be tried in a tribunal, not in federal court! That, of course, is the better place to try them, but no doubt people will ask — including the defense lawyers — why a federal trial is good enough for the brains behind 9-11 but not good enough for his subordinate.

SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah, nor do I. But here’s my concern. Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: [ACM: LONG PAUSE] I don’t know. I’d have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I’ve made —

SEN. GRAHAM: We’re making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I’ll answer it for you. The answer is no.

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Well, I think —

SEN. GRAHAM: … The Ghailani case — he was indicted for the Cole bombing before 9/11. And I didn’t object to it going into federal court. But I’m telling you right now. We’re making history and we’re making bad history.

Indeed. It’s been said that the 2006 Military Tribunals Act passed bipartisianly in Congress, was crafted almost for the sole purpose of trying KSM. That’s out the window now.