Author: Doug Santo

The United States should demand that the UN immediately cut its air travel in half to help save the planet.

“…This year’s United Nations climate summit will have a carbon footprint equivalent to the yearly electricity usage of more than 8,200 American households, according to the international body’s own figures.

The U.N. estimates the summit, called COP24, will emit 55,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide—the very greenhouse gas U.N. officials are trying to keep from accumulating in the atmosphere…”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/12/03/un-climate-summit-to-emit-more-co2-than-8200-american-homes-do-in-a-year/

All the best people in media and government told us this wasn’t true. Weird how all the best are uniformly wrong so often.

“…A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.

In a new analysis of the latest numbers, from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/census-confirms-63-percent-of-non-citizens-on-welfare-4-6-million-households

Kurt Schlichter:

“…They hated Bush 41 with a cold fury. Now, most of the juice box nimrods on social media or piping up on MSNBC were maybe three years old when he was the prezzy, so maybe they don’t remember that the liberals slimed him mercilessly. From the grocery scanner lie to the Willie Horton racism lie, to the wimp lie, it was all lies, all the time. In fact, even today, some libs are off-message and celebrating on Twitter.

Shhhh. You’re supposed to be pretending to revere him!

They did it with John McCain too, through his funeral and its endless sequels…”

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/12/03/the-only-good-republican-is-a-dead-republican-n2536850

This was a politically motivated hit job orchestrated by the Clinton Campaign and democratic operatives in government masquerading as public servants (Brennan, Comey, etc), The idea was to destroy the newly elected president and cover for democrat malfeasance prior to the election.

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY:

“…No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, “Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.”?

For a prosecutor, like any trial lawyer, what the jury thinks is at least as important as what the law says. If the most memorable thing the jury takes into the deliberation room is that no one should believe a word your witnesses say, you are not going to convict the lowliest grifter, much less the president of the United States of America.

As a prosecutor, you build a case by having your cooperating accomplice witnesses plead guilty to the big scheme you are trying to pin on the main culprit. After all, what makes these witnesses accomplices, literally, is that they were participants in the main culprit’s crime. That’s the scheme you’re trying to prove. So, on guilty-plea day, the cooperator comes into court and admits guilt to the same conspiracy on which you are trying to nail the lead defendant.

That gets you 90 percent of the way home…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/robert-mueller-plan-trump-russia-investigation-report-not-case/

Tyler O’Neil:

“…The small island nation of Qatar is pulling out of the international oil cartel OPEC. Qatar is the 11th largest oil producing country in OPEC, but this is still huge news. Bloomberg’s team (Walid Ahmed, Dan Murtaugh, and Javier Blas) break the news:

Qatar said it will leave OPEC next month, a rare example of the toxic politics of the Middle East rupturing a group that had held together for decades through war and sanctions.

Qatar, a member since 1961, is leaving to focus on its liquefied natural gas production, Energy Minister Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi told a news conference in Doha on Monday. He didn’t mention the political backdrop to the decision: dire relations with Saudi Arabia, which has led a blockade against his country since 2017; and a rhetorical onslaught from U.S. President Donald Trump against the cartel.

The Middle East has been plagued with serious problems in previous decades, and Qatar stuck with OPEC.

Even through extreme events like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s or Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait, producers still saw the benefits of retaining their membership and cooperating on oil policy.

Qatar’s departure in far less severe circumstances is testament to the declining influence of OPEC in its historical form. Since non-members started cooperating with the group in 2016, direct talks between Russia and Saudi Arabia often bypass the cartel’s traditional decision-making process. The surge in North American oil production has also shifted the balance of power away from the Middle East.

Why is OPEC less powerful? Perhaps it has something to do with the United States’ booming oil production…”

https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/live-blog-135/entry-247162/

Institutionalized voter fraud. That is what ballot harvesting is.

“…As the polls closed on election day last month, six California Republican House candidates, including Representatives Dana Rohrabacher, Steve Knight, and Mimi Walters, were ahead in their respective races. However, as the absentee and provisional ballots rolled in over the intervening weeks, all six lost to their Democratic opponents.

The case of Korean-American GOP candidate Young Kim was one of the most prominent examples. On election night, Kim held an 8,000 vote lead over her Democratic opponent Gil Cisneros, and even attended freshman orientation in Washington, D.C. before watching her lead, and her victory, slowly evaporate over the subsequent weeks.

The results drew the attention of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

“California just defies logic to me,” said Ryan at a Washington Post live event. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election, and three weeks later, we lost basically every California contested race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”

The stunning turnaround in California, of all states, can be attributed to several factors, as conservative critics like The Federalist’s Bre Payton wrote, but the most significant of those seemed to be the practice of “ballot harvesting.”

Passed as a barely noticed change in the state’s vote by mail procedures in 2016 and signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown, California’s AB 1921 allows voters to give any third party — not just a relative or someone living in the same household, as was previously the law — to collect and turn in anyone else’s completed ballot.

Called “ballot harvesting,” critics say the practice is ripe for fraud. Consider “Lulu,” who was recorded trying to “harvest” what she thought was a Democratic voter’s ballot in Rep. Knight’s district…”

https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/01/ballot-harvesting-california-dems-gop

A well-earned show of respect and a nice gesture.

“…The remains of former President George Herbert Walker Bush will return to Washington in the most dramatic and distinguished fashion possible, occupying the plane that normally serves as Air Force One.

President Donald Trump told reporters of the plan aboard the aircraft as they returned from the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

‘So what we’re doing with the plane – we land, and then they come in, and these are great people that run these aircraft. They are unbelievable,’ he said.

‘And they’re taking apart – I don’t think this section. The section up front, They’re taking all of the seats out. … We’re sending the plane, this plane, to Houston. And it picks up the casket.’

Earlier on Saturday, Trump said during a photo-op with Chinese President Xi Jinping that the final flight to Washington ‘is a special tribute that he deserves very much. And it’s my honor. And again, he’ll be missed. He’ll be greatly missed. He was a terrific person and terrific man.’…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6451957/Trump-send-Air-Force-One-plane-bring-former-George-H-W-Bushs-remains-Washington.html

“…Thirty-five years ago Tracy Kidder electrified readers with his “Soul of a New Machine,” which detailed the development of a minicomputer. Today we may be seeing the emergence of another machine, a political variety that could turn the country toward a permanent one-party state.

This evolution has its roots in California, where a combination of Silicon Valley technology, changing demographics, control of media, culture and academia have worked to all but eliminate the once-fearsome state GOP. For all intents and purposes, the California Republican Party has ceased to exist.

But this is not, as some conservatives contend, a case simply of California lunacy. Several once historically conservative states — Colorado, Arizona, Nevada — have been turning ever-bluer in recent elections. The party now barely is able to hold onto seats in places such as Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida, while the Midwest, the region that elected Donald Trump, seems to be shifting back to its bluer past…”

https://www.ocregister.com/2018/12/01/the-soul-of-the-new-machine/

 TOM HARRIS AND DR. MADHAV KHANDEKAR:

“…The U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA), released last Friday, provides a superb illustration of journalist H. L. Mencken’s (1880-1950) claim:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The 1,656-page NCA report, produced by a team from thirteen federal agencies, is riddled with imaginary hobgoblins. Especially mistaken is the NCA’s repeated reference to increased warming and extreme weather events, both in the recent past and in the future. The NCA asserts:

Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced …

While NASA’s claim that there has been slightly more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 deg Fahrenheit) of warming since 1880 is likely correct, there has been no additional warming since the new millennium. This is referred to as the “Global Warming Hiatus” by the climate modeling community. Contrary to the outputs of climate models that project continued warming, the Earth’s climate appears to be cooling down, with increasing cold weather extremes worldwide in the last six years.

The past two winters have been especially cold over North America. November 2018 set low temperature records across the contiguous U.S., with three winter storms as of November 28 and the coldest Thanksgiving Week in one hundred years. Among some of the cold records: 19 F (degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at New York City’s Central Park on November 22, which was the park’s coldest Thanksgiving since 1871; on the same day, the temperature at the top of Mount Washington in northern New Hampshire fell to -26 F, the coldest ever recorded for November. This beat the previous record of -20 F on Nov. 30, 1958.

Extreme cold was also witnessed in many locales in central and eastern Canada on November 22. For example, Toronto’s Pearson Airport recorded -13.3 degrees Celsius (8 F), 0.9 Celsius (C) colder that the previous record set in 1989. Kingston saw -16.7 C (2 F), breaking the record set in 1880 by 2.7 C. Ottawa recorded -17.2 C (1 F), 1.6 C colder than the record (1895). And Algonquin Park experienced -22 C (-7.6 F), 1.4 C colder than the previous record set in 1929.

The NCA’s projections of catastrophic warming of 5 C over next 80 years is clearly at odds with the current cooling trend that appears to be the reality of climate change.

Even if warming resumes in the near future, a number of peer-reviewed papers now suggest that future warming would be about 0.5 C (0.9 F) to, at most, 1 C (1.8 F) by 2100. This is not dangerous in the least, and certainly not worth dedicating trillions of dollars to try to prevent it by attempting to reduce worldwide human-CO2 emissions…”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-u-s-climate-report-a-scientific-embarrassment/

Is Google Already Censoring Search Results?

“…Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.

The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal.

Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.

Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.

Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results…”

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/29/google-censorship-conservative-media/

Or worst political and media class of all time?

Michael Barone:

“…In the wake of the midterm elections, conservative analyst Yuval Levin saw no winners. “It is the weakness of all sides, and the strength of none, that shapes this moment.”

You can see what he means. President Trump hasn’t gotten everything he wanted — no Obamacare repeal, not even the wall — from the Republican House of Representatives. And on one issue or another he’ll probably get something from Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats he couldn’t get from Paul Ryan’s Republicans.

Now, maybe House Democrats will overplay their hand and help Trump win re-election in 2020. And maybe Democrats, faced with a crowded field of presidential candidates, will choose an unelectable nominee.

But even though Republicans gained Senate seats and are in good shape to confirm conservative judges, Trump is weakened by the results. Republicans lost just about every House seat he carried in 2016 by 5 percent or less. And he got only 46 percent of the popular vote.

Do the math. Forty-six minus five is 41. No way a 41-percent candidate gets 270 electoral votes in a two-way race.

It doesn’t have to be this way. CNN analyst Harry Enten points out that Trump’s job approval on the economy at this point is the second highest of recent presidents. But his overall approval is the second lowest. The obvious advice: Behave in a more dignified manner.

But Trump is not alone among national leaders in behaving in a way that makes him weaker than he might be. It seems to be a common, though not quite universal, ailment…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/whos-to-blame-weak-leaders-weak-institutions-weak-voters

Late stage socialism. Note also Reuters calls Venezuela’s situation a recession. It is closer to total collapse of society.

“…After a woman died while connected to a respirator at a hospital in central Venezuela last month, one of her relatives punched the attending doctor in the chest, blaming her for the woman’s death.

“They think when there’s no equipment or antibiotics that it’s the doctor’s fault,” said the doctor at the Hospital Central in Maracay, 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of the capital Caracas. She requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Hospital Central was one of 62 percent of hospitals across the country where doctors say they have suffered attacks by frustrated patients’ relatives, as violent acts in Venezuela’s decaying medical system have become increasingly common, according to a study published on Thursday by a doctors advocacy group.

In addition, 45 percent of hospitals reported robberies and shootings, the report showed, in the latest sign of how Venezuela’s five years of recession have left the country’s hospitals, once among the best in Latin America, in dire straits…”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-health-idUSKCN1NY2P5

Yesterday: Venezuela Economy Contracted 29.8 Percent in Third Quarter.

Comments on the latest government produced global warming report.

“If these claims [Summary Findings, Chapter 1] were true then how is it that the US has grown so prosperous since the 1900s? You have just finished stating that massive, historically unprecedented climate changes occurred in the past century, especially in the past few decades. It is a matter of historical record that throughout this period the quality of life in the US just kept going up and up. Now you say that the next increment of warming will be completely different and will lead to ruin across the land. No exceptions, no caveats, no qualifications: you are asking the reader to forget the pattern that held up to now and take your word for it that disaster is coming. If you really believe that, then you owe it to the readers to be convincing, not cartoonish and apocalyptic. As one example, the opening phrase “cascading disruptions and damages in interdependent networks of infrastructure, ecosystems and social systems” reads like a Hollywood disaster flick – i.e. fiction. You have a very evocative style, but it sets a tone at odds with the expectation that this is a serious scientific document.”