HolyCoast: December 2010

Friday, December 31, 2010

Amazing Grace

A little 2010 palate cleanser from Andrew Malcolm at Top of the Ticket - Amazing Grace.

Thanks, Andrew...I needed that.

What Shivers in Vegas, Freezes in Vegas

It's going to be cold on The Strip tonight:

It’s going to be a chilly start to 2011: 28 degrees in Las Vegas at midnight, if the National Weather Service’s prediction is correct.

Las Vegas set a record today with the coldest high temperature ever recorded in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve: just 38 degrees. The temperature was well below the old record for the coldest high, 45 degrees set in 1975, the National Weather Service said.

The last time the high temperature reached only the 30s was during a snowstorm on Dec. 17, 2008, when the high was 39 degrees.

Overnight temperatures aren’t expected to reach record lows, but “we’re definitely going to be looking at very cold temperatures for an extended period,” weather service meteorologist Larry Jensen said.

Two years ago we went to Vegas on Dec. 28th and when we got there it was 31 degrees. It did warm up to the low 50's, but that was the coldest I'd ever been in a town where I'd also enjoyed a high of 114 one summer day.

Fresno, Zimbabwe

Investor's Business Daily takes a look at the man-made disaster that's turning some of the most productive farmland in the country into a new dust bowl:

Environmentalism: Fresno, Calif., stands as the de facto capital of California's mighty Central Valley, the breadbasket of America. So why is that city preoccupied with winning a $1 million prize to stave off hunger?

Local newspapers and Fresno County officials are trying to rally Facebook users to vote for Fresno in a corporate contest sponsored by Wal-Mart for $1 million in charity food donations for the hungry. Fresno, a city of 505,000, has taken the national lead because 24.1% of Fresno's families are going hungry.

Civic spirit is good, but something big is wrong here. Fresno is the agricultural capital of America. More food per acre in more variety can be grown in the fertile Central Valley surrounding this community than on any other land in America — perhaps in the world.

Yet far from being a paradise, Fresno is starting to resemble Zimbabwe or 1930s Ukraine, a victim of a famine machine that is entirely man-made, not by red communists this time, but by greens.

State and federal officials, driven by the agenda of environmental extremists, have made it extremely difficult for the valley's farms, introducing costly environmental regulations and cutting off critical water supplies to save the Delta smelt, a bait fish. It's all driving the economy to collapse.

In the southwest part of the Central Valley, water allotments as low as 10% of normal have created a visible dust bowl. The knock-on effect can be seen in cities like Fresno, where November's unemployment among the packers, cannery workers and professional fields that make agriculture productive stands at 16.9%.

Other Central Valley cities such as Hanford-Corcoran, Merced, Modesto, Stockton and Visalia-Porterville have similar jobless numbers, the highest in the country. The Wal-Mart Foundation notes that "24.1% of families in this community (Fresno) cannot afford regular meals compared to a national average of 9.2%."

That's right — a community that supplies a quarter of America's fruit and vegetables is begging for food.

Every time I drive through the Central Valley I see the protest signs put up by local farmers against the politicians and environwackos who have driven this area to disaster. It's so totally unnecessary, but we don't have politicians in power who are willing to do what it would take to fix it. They're all afraid of the courts or how the media will portray them.

Planned Parenthood Drops Corpus Christi Affiliate

Apparently they are actually helping women with parenthood as opposed to abortions (from Beltway Confidential):

Planned Parenthood is severing ties with its Corpus Christi, Texas affiliate because it doesn’t perform abortions.

CEO Amanda Stukenberg told the Corpus Christi Caller Times that the nation’s largest abortion provider wants all its affiliates to do abortions to "standardize its operations."

Buit the Corpus Christi affiliate, which will be renamed Family Planning of the Coastal Bend on Jan. 1, focuses on preventing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. It also runs a model program for men encouraging them to share responsibility for family planning: 20 percent of the affiliate’s patients are men.

"We have never provided abortions," Stukenberg told the local newspaper, adding that several local doctors already perform the procedure. "We don’t need to duplicate services."

But being successful at Planned Parenthood’s supposedly main goal of preventing unplanned parenthood is apparently not good enough.

"Planned Parenthood’s mission is to see more babies born dead. It’s a heartbreaking reality in a season that should be filled with joy," says Bradley Mattes, executive director for the Life Issues Institute.

"Planned Parenthood is only for ‘choice’ if the choice is abortion," Mattes added.

I'll be in the Corpus Christi area next week. There's a lot of good people down there.

DC Airports Consider Dropping the TSA

It's time to go back to private contractors for airport security and even the DC airports are considering a change:

Some of the nation's biggest airports are responding to recent public outrage over security screening by weighing whether they should hire private firms such as Covenant to replace the Transportation Security Administration. Sixteen airports, including San Francisco and Kansas City International Airport, have made the switch since 2002. One Orlando airport has approved the change but needs to select a contractor, and several others are seriously considering it.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which governs Dulles International and Reagan National airports, is studying the option, spokeswoman Tara Hamilton said.

For airports, the change isn't about money. At issue, airport managers and security experts say, is the unwieldy size and bureaucracy of the federal aviation security system. Private firms may be able to do the job more efficiently and with a personal touch, they argue.

Isn't the "personal touch" part of the problem? A lot of people have been getting very personal touches from the TSA and they're not happy about it.

Service and efficiency rarely improve when the government gets involved. That's certainly been true with the TSA. Private contractors, who know they can be fired if they do a poor job or get too many passenger complaints, will be far more motivated than the TSA to keep the security procedures as unobtrusive as possible. It's time to bring them back.

2011 - The Year The States Go Bust

It's not looking good in California or many other states and it probably won't get better in 2011:

The budget crises that have nearly paralyzed states such as California and Illinois are likely to get worse — not better, in 2011 — despite the massive cuts that have already been made.

Kept on life support for the past two years by $160 billion in emergency funding from the stimulus package, state governments now face the prospect of making ends meet without any help. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called the situation a “day of reckoning” in a recent interview with “60 Minutes” — and that’s after trimming a full quarter of his state’s budget in one year.

“State and local government employees and other special interests have been allowed to gorge themselves over the years at the expense of taxpayers,” Tad DeHaven of the CATO Institute told The Daily Caller via e-mail. “Their privileged status has been exposed by the economic downturn … I think that in the back of the minds of many state and local policymakers, they think they’ll get federal bailout of some sort.”

All signs from Washington, however, indicate that no bailouts will be forthcoming. Not only will the stimulus spigot be turned off, but the two-year Build America Bonds program is also shutting down, making debt more expensive for states and municipalities. “Hopefully, the end of [Build America Bonds] will inhibit the ability of states to borrow,” said DeHaven. “The states need fewer liabilities, not more.”

Yesterday I spent some time talking with Silvio Canto Jr. on his BlogTalkRadio show about the situation in California. You can listen to that discussion here. Bottom line - California didn't do itself any favors by picking a governor who thinks extending tax hikes and taking away tax breaks for job creators will fix the problem.

Was 2010 a Warm Year?

The global warming crowd is touting 2010 as the "warmest year of the century", though it has pretty good competition from 1934 and 1998. Regardless of which year wins the title, does it reflect a globe that's dangerously warming as they often and hysterically warn us? Not if you look at the last 10,000 years. This headline says it all:

Only 9,099 Of Last 10,500 Years Warmer Than 2010

You can look at the post in the link for the details of how they came up with those numbers. 2010 is merely a blip on the global temperature scale.

New Year's Eve Tornado Kills Three in Arkansas

Although rare in December, tornadoes can occur anytime of the year and this one struck a small town in Arkansas:

Emergency workers in Washington County, Arkansas have confirmed three people are dead after a possible tornado touchdown in the small town of Cincinnati in northwestern Arkansas.

The emergency workers are working to free several people trapped in buildings hit by the storm.

Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport is closed now because of debris on the runway.

The initial report is that a brick home, a mobile home and a barn have been destroyed. Local reports say a weather service crew is headed to the scene to investigate.

This has been a severe weather week around the country.

UPDATE: The storms have continued into Missouri:

Severe weather moved through southwest Missouri early Friday morning causing damage in numerous locations.

The National Weather Service has confirmed one fatality and one injury in northwest Dent county on County Road 2050 where a trailer was destroyed.

The most numerous reports are coming from Fort Leonard Wood where officials report that a tornado caused damage and injuries on the base. Information is limited due to apparent communications issues at the base. The Laclede County Office of Emergency Management posted on their Facebook page: "Laclede County Emergency Operations Center Staff assisting Ft. Wood EOC staff with communications relay due to tornado damage on Fort Leonard Wood." Reports into The National Weather Service from law enforcement state that three homes were damaged at Fort Leonard Wood.

Great Moments in Environmental Forecasts

Fox News has eight botched environmental forecasts brought to you by the environmental wackos. Here are the forecasts and you can see the actual results in the article:

1. Within a few years "children just aren't going to know what snow is." Snowfall will be "a very rare and exciting event." Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.

2. "[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers." Michael Oppenheimer, published in "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press, 1990.

3. "Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000." Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1972.

4. "Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010." Associated Press, May 15, 1989.

5. "By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half." Life magazine, January 1970.

6. "If present trends continue, the world will be ... eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age." Kenneth E.F. Watt, in "Earth Day," 1970.

7. "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.

8. "In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970

Actual results for each item are here.

And let's not forget that environmental activist and actor Ted Danson who in 1988 warned us all that the oceans would be dead in 10 years unless we changed our evil ways. I think I'll have a tuna sandwich today in his honor.

Brits May Have Coldest Winter in 1,000 Years

Global Warming, O Global Warming, Wherefore Are Thou Global Warming?

BRITAIN’S winter is the coldest since 1683 and close to being the chilliest in nearly 1,000 years.

Latest figures reveal that the average temperature since December 1 has been a perishing -1C.

That makes it the second coldest since records began in 1659.

The chilliest on record was 1683/84, when the average was -1.17C and the River Thames froze over for two months.

But with January and February to come, experts believe we could suffer the most freezing cold winter in the last 1,000 years.

Meanwhile, back in the colonies:

NOW IT'S SNOWING -- IN PHOENIX...

Enjoy the warming, folks.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Political Video of the Day

Liberal blogger Ezra Klein thinks the Constitution has no binding authority on anything because it's over 100 years old and hard to understand:

There's a college education wasted.

Don't miss Iowahawk's take on the issue.

Pastor Abruptly Leaves Megachurch Ministry, But You Won't Find a Scandal

You'll just find a guy who found himself becoming bigger than the ministry and he didn't like it:

He pastored a 4,000-member church in California. He was a sought-after speaker at major conferences, wrote two best-sellers and launched a DVD teaching series.

Then he abruptly resigned and left the country.

But in Francis Chan’s unexpected journey there apparently is no hidden scandal, no money trail, and no ‘other’ woman.

“I just want to disappear for a while,” he said in late September as he prepared to leave Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley, California for an undisclosed location in Asia.

Before selling his house and packing up his wife and three children, Chan was becoming “Christian famous” in Evangelical circles.

“Even in my own church I heard the words, ‘Francis Chan’ more than I heard the words, ‘Holy Spirit’,” he said.

That was a big part of the reason he walked away at the peak of his professional career.

“I think there has been too much emphasis on me. I want to be used by God, but I think we have this desire to make heroes out of people rather than following God and the Holy Spirit.”

He quotes the apostle Paul, who told his followers “I didn’t die for you.”

In his world of big conference crowds, multiple services each week, and instant access to social media, the notion of pastoral care had begun to change. His fame was straining his work as a pastor.

“When there is a large constituency, there’s a lot of voices,” he said. “It makes you arrogant or it makes you want to shoot yourself. When thousands of people tell you what they think, how can I be quick to listen, like the Bible says? I don’t want to be a jerk and tune everyone out. At the same time you, can’t love every single person and answer them.”

So after lots of prayer and soul searching, Chan decided it was best to leave the church, country, and Internet behind to focus on serving others one-on-one.

Read the rest of the story at the link. I think a lot of people are expecting some sort of scandal to pop up, but after reading the piece I think this guy just decided to re-prioritize his ministry. Nothing wrong with that.

TSA Video of the Day

From Fox Sports, have a Super Bowl ring and avoid the TSA hassles:

Peaceniks Still Try to Keep ROTC Off University Campuses

You only have to read the last paragraph of this moron's column to know what the newest argument will be to keep ROTC off of college campuses now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell has been shot down:

ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace. If a school such as Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge front portal: Harvard, a Pentagon Annex.

"Intellectual purity?" Will your "intellectual purity" protect you from losing your head...literally...when the radical Islamists come after you? You might find your "intellectual purity" rolling down the street after being separated from the rest of your body.

Birther Buffoon Wants GOP Nomination

Delusional:

Andy Martin, a political gadfly who ran for President Obama's former Senate seat in 2010, announced Wednesday in New Hampshire that he will run for the Republican nomination for president on a "birther" platform.

Speaking on WTPL radio, Martin cited the stated intention of Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie to settle questions about whether Obama was born in the state as one motivating factor.

As one of the first candidates to announce his candidacy for the White House, Martin said he will force a broader discussion of the issue.

"I'm going to have a tremendous impact on the presidential election, not because I'm the frontrunner. Clearly I'm not," he said. "But I'll be driving the agenda in the Republican Party."

Uh...no. Given that this is the first time I've ever heard of this guy, I'd say it's doubtful he'll be driving anything but his beat-up car back to wherever he came from.

The Ronald Reagan Float

The Tournament of Roses Parade will feature a special float honoring the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth. Here's some video:

There will also be a float created by a member of the Los Angeles County Fire Department honoring the 9/11 first responders. It will feature an item not covered in flowers or seeds - something that required a variance from the Rose Parade directors. That item is a fire hydrant that was recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center.

On the Radio

I'll be on Silvio Canto Jr.'s BlogTalkRadio show at 10 am PST today to talk a bit about the mess in California. You can listen in here beginning at 10.

Great Moments in Union Labor

Municipal union workers don't serve their cities, they serve their unions:

These garbage men really stink.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

"They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important," said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department -- and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan -- at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches "didn't want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation," Halloran said. "They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file."

Bloomberg should take a page from Reagan and fire the whole bunch of them. Start over with people who understand their job is to serve the citizens of New York City and not their own back pockets.

The Truth About the Media and The Tea Party

Cracked.com sums it up nicely:

The way we heard it:

“The Tea Party is just a swarm of redneck doofuses, not only unworthy of serious consideration from the rest of us but 100 percent deserving of scrotum-based epithets. Because they’re just that ridiculous.”

And Christine O’Donnell was the new Queen of the Crazies. It didn’t take long for us to find out that she was personally bankrupt, a dabbler in witchcraft and not all that knowledgeable about this holy document she swore she was building her candidacy around. Plus, everything that came out of her mouth was pure hilarious moonshine. Which was probably why she stopped giving her mouth a national platform six weeks before the election. But that didn’t stop the media from talking about her, because O’Donnell so perfectly represented everything else about the Tea Party.

There were blatant racists and blatant Obama-to-Hitler-comparison-makers. All year we saw misspelled signs and angry, red-faced Colonials. People like Anderson Cooper and President Obama showed how seriously they were taking the party by calling them “tea-baggers.” And nobody blamed them, because all year long, the media gave us a picture of the Tea Party that made it perfectly clear: This is a joke.

But the truth is …

It wasn’t a joke.

For all those wackjob birthers captured on film wearing frilly lady blouses and triangle hats, there were thousands of ordinary people just living their lives, being regular, and not liking how their Republican Party had turned out. And even though Tea Party members tend to skew toward older, middle-class white guys, their overall demographics aren’t that far from the rest of the country. Of course, regular people are about as riveting as dry toast, so they didn’t get much screen time. Which is why it came as such a shock to everyone when 32 percent of Tea Party-affiliated candidates won their elections.

By focusing in on the a–clowns the media painted a picture that not only wasn’t accurate, but pretty much made constructive political discourse impossible. They didn’t just fail to do their job — they did the opposite of their job, and they’ve been doing it for years….

So when we watched coverage of O’Donnell and the Tea Party this year, we were only getting the bonkers half of the picture. Now that CNN is teaming up with the Tea Party Express to host the Republican debates next year, we’ll probably see a lot fewer costumed revolutionaries. But everyone will just assume the Tea Party cleaned up its act, when in reality it will be CNN.

I doubt if even today CNN really understands the movement. They may be teaming with the Tea Party simply because it will help draw viewers to their debates.

By the way, the cable news network that DIDN'T make fun of the Tea Party crushed their opposition in the ratings. Perhaps THAT'S why CNN is suddenly making nice.

Think That Northeastern Blizzard Was Bad? Just Wait.

This guy seems to think we're heading into a very cold period lasting perhaps 25 years:

British meteorologist Piers Corbyn appeared on Fox and Friends to not only celebrate his accurate prediction of a bone-chillingly cold winter, but to also share his disgust with what he believes to be the “failed science” behind global warming. Despite it often being mentioned that the consensus in the scientific community is that global warming is undisputedly occurring, Corbyn proudly goes against the grain and advocates for his hypothesis of the coming global cooling.

Predicting in November that winter in Europe would be “exceptionally cold and snowy, like Hell frozen over at times,” Corbyn suggested we should sooner prepare for another Ice Age than worry about global warming. Corbyn believed global warming “is complete nonsense, it’s fiction, it comes from a cult ideology. There’s no science in there, no facts to back [it] up.” Furthermore, he disputed the underlying assumption of most scientists, arguing that higher carbon dioxide levels does not actually have the effect of increasing temperature, and instead global warming supporters “fiddle the facts to justify political attacks.”

Regardless of the politics behind the scientific debate, what everyone should be upset about is if Corbyn’s next prediction is accurate, that the “northeast and east USA [will] suffer the most horrendous blizzards for decades.” He even tweeted out his warning saying “you ain’t seen nothing yet” this winter.

So far he's a lot more accurate than the global warmists who have been telling us we'll all forget what snow is in the next few years.

U.S. Extends Tax Cuts, California Extends Tax Hikes

California decided to go the suicidal route when it returned Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown and Barbara "Dumb-as-a-Box-of-Rocks" Boxer to power, and when it voted to make it easier for the legislature to sneak tax hikes into budget bills. It was foolish and we're all going to pay for it.

Moonbeam is proposing a budget balancing "solution" that will simply keep most of the problem spending in place and strangle the very people with the best chance to grow the economy:

Gov.-elect Jerry Brown is laying the groundwork for a budget plan that would couple deep cuts to state services, including university systems and welfare programs, with a request that voters extend temporary tax hikes on vehicles, income and sales that are set to expire next year.

The blueprint Brown will unveil when he takes office early next month also is expected to take aim at several tax breaks and subsidies that have been fiercely guarded by the business lobby in Sacramento, according to people involved in budget discussions with the incoming administration.

Among the breaks are multibillion-dollar incentives for redevelopment projects and hundreds of millions of dollars of "enterprise zone" credits meant to encourage investment in blighted neighborhoods. Also targeted is a recent change to state business tax formulas that has saved corporate California roughly $1 billion.

The combination of austere spending and extended tax hikes is designed to confront both parties and their allied interest groups with painful choices that Brown says are necessary to truly resolve the state's massive budget problems. He intends to take swift action, using the political capital of a new governor to confront a deficit that could easily subsume his governorship.

In a symbolic gesture to garner the trust of a skeptical public, Brown has already pledged to cut his own office budget by 25%.

So, while Congress is doing the right thing and extending the Bush tax cuts, Brown is asking voters to extend various tax hikes which were hiked in previous years to "fix" the problems that are still going on. They clearly didn't work then, and won't work now.

You have to understand that in California there's no such thing as a "temporary tax hike". They're marketed to the voters as temporary to make them more palatable, but the Democrats who propose them are counting on voters becoming complacent after paying the temporary tax for a couple of years. After they become used to the extra taxes they're less likely to object to an extension of those taxes.

Just say no to Moonbeam and his tax hikes.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Today's Quick Hit Headlines

Some quick hits on today's headlines:

All 91 lanes open after mudslide
That's one mighty big freeway.

Union Fights Rumors Of Worker Slow-Down During Blizzard Clean-Up...
With NYC unions it's really hard to tell when they slow down.

Some Travelers Won't Get Out Until Next YEAR...
Enjoying your New York vacation?

White House Plans to Push 'Global Warming' Policy, GOP Vows Fight...
Maybe they can get some of those people stuck in NYC to help.

Plane Passenger Punched Teen Who Refused to Switch Off iPhone...
The kid now has a black i.

Man's penis amputated after misdiagnosis...
He was Jewish. Now he's non-denominational.

PGA Producer dings Obama's excessive golfing...
The problem isn't how much he golfs, but how much he golfs without getting any better.

Political Video of the Day

Here's something to get the old blogging blood going again:

The Great Tumbleweed Migration

While driving south today we witnessed one of nature's most majestic wonders - the great migration of the San Joaquin Valley Tumbleweeds. The vast herds on the western side of the valley were migrating en masse to the east side aided not in small part by a 40 mph tailwind.

However, as in all great migrations not every member safely competes the trip. Fording the wide I-5 took its toll on the herd. There were many casualties.

Tumbleweed scavengers will eat well tonight.