The UK is waking up when it's too late, it is not too late here

As I drove across the causeway that connects my village with the larger town I could see far across the bay to the farmlands that are becoming windfarms. It looked as if they were marching straight into our town of Rockport. We are in an essential flyway for birds, we have whooping cranes and sandhill cranes which are large vulnerable birds. Please do not let them get any closer.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought
But your 'leccy bill will keep going up to buy more of it

A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.

The report (28-page PDF/944 KB) was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir Trust and carried out by consulting engineer Stuart Young. It measured electricity actually metered as being delivered to the National Grid.

In general it tends to be assumed that a wind farm will generate an average of 30 per cent of its maximum capacity over time. However the new study shows that this is actually untrue, with the turbines measured by the Grid turning in performances which were significantly worse:

Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.

Victor Davis Hanson names it correctly again

Nobody can make a correct point quite like VDH.  Can we call him a political John Wayne?  Well, according to this he probably wouldn't want that designation because of John Wayne's personal life.

Kingdom of Lies

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.

Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies.... I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show.

I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.

But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.

As far as Hollywood, goes, as I have said, I do not go to the cinema at all. The choices are meager. We can watch a George Clooney, Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck — multimillionaires all of mediocre talent — uncover some corporate or CIA conspiracy that threatens the environment (their employers and distributors are not corporate?), the non-white male, or global peace — or sit through yuppie crises whose double entendres and cute repartees are known mostly only to metrosexuals between New York and D.C., or from Malibu to Newport Beach. .....

The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all.....

Much, so much more from VDH. Read it all here.

Left wing rhetoric (wishful thinking)

Some of the left wing persuasion just cannot admit and see the facts on the Arizona shootings.  In their minds full of wishful thinking there absolutely must be a reason they can blame conservatives and their "hateful, murderous rhetoric for this tragic happening.  No other reasons need apply. Bookworm Room has a good article on this.

Progressives live in the past when it comes to shaping the message *UPDATED*
by Bookworm

Some Democrats, either more honest or loose-lipped than others, have explicitly stated that, in making anti-Tea Party and anti-Palin statements about the Tucson shooting, they are attempting to replicate the stunning success they had with shaping the spin following the Oklahoma City bombing, back in 1995:

One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did. “They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”

Indeed, whole articles are now being written about Obama looking to the Oklahoma City bombing as an inspiration to reshape his ability to control the political agenda in this nation. It is Obama’s 9/11 (and the Dems don’t mean that in a tragic way, they mean that in a politically opportunistic way).

I have mentioned before, haven’t I, that a defining characteristics of Progressives is that they live in the past?

UPDATE (3:10 p.m. PST): Speaking of finding history on the internet, here’s a great screen shot from today’s Big Hollywood:

They had an Election in Canada and guess what happened?

Well, their liberal media couldn't believe it either.  From the Globe and Mail:

There’s good reason the masses are revolting
by Margaret Wente
My best friends are wonderful people – talented, accomplished, generous, smart and caring. So it’s hard to see them in such fear and pain. The way they see it, the Visigoths have battered down the gates of Rome, and the Vestal Virgins had better scramble for cover. In the aftermath of Toronto’s election rout, their only consolation is that Rob Ford is probably too stupid and incompetent to completely sack the place. If only they lie low for the next four years, sanity will surely return to city politics.

Like my friends, the people who work in much of the major media – the CBC, the Toronto Star, even my own beloved paper – were stunned by the Ford tsunami. After all, the polls had predicted a squeaker. But there’s another reason they didn’t see the big wave coming. Very few of these people live or work outside downtown Toronto. Very few ever hang around with someone who voted for Mr. Ford and will own up to it. They remind me of the super-smart editorial writers at The New York Times who are sincerely convinced that Tea Partiers are dangerous crackpots – even though they’ve never met any.

The media think they understand why people voted as they did. As one Toronto Star pundit helpfully explained, the voters – Ford voters, that is – “were full of largely pointless rage.” Only pointless rage could explain why voters ignored the editorial endorsements of two leading newspapers, as well as a long line of former mayors who begged them, in the name of decency, to vote for George Smitherman. Even Justin Trudeau’s twinkle dust didn’t work.

Sound familiar? Yes, why yes it does.  Same media sentiments, same insular reactions.
Go read it all here, same old story, same old media.

More Liberal Bias in the Press this time on the Republicans against the Tea Party

Of course you will probably on see this only in Big Journalism.  Sarah Palin told about it on the Fox sunday morning show with Chris Wallace.  She told him, he didn't comment.

Anchorage CBS Affiliate Caught on Voicemail Conspiring Against Alaska’s GOP Senate Candidate
posted by P.J. Salvatore
The following voice mail message was inadvertently left on the cell phone of Joe Miller campaign spokesperson Randy DeSoto.
The following is a transcript of a call recorded after CBS Alaska affiliate KTVA called Joe Miller’s Senate campaign spokesperson. The call failed to disconnect properly. It was later authenticated by McDermott, who sent a text to Randy DeSoto stating, “Damn iPhone… I left you a long message. I thought I hung up. Sorry.”

The following voice mail message was inadvertently left on the cell phone of Joe Miller campaign spokesperson Randy DeSoto.

The voices are believed to be those of the news director for CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA, along with assignment editor Nick McDermott, and other reporters, openly discussing creating, if not fabricating, two stories about Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Joe Miller.

Audio KTVA -

Clearly the reporters were conspiring to set up some type of smear of Joe Miller. With glee, they even cite a recent controversy over an incident involving the Rand Paul campaign, while discussing how they would spread the story via social media after whatever incident they had in mind came off. It also brings to mind another recent episode that ended with Jerry Brown’s California gubernatorial campaign being caught up in controversy when someone from Brown’s camp called Brown’s opponent, Republican Meg Whitman, a “whore.”

Check out Big Journalism, it always has some stories the MSM ignore.

We've rattled their cages and they ARE reacting

The Democrats are feeling the heat and reacting as Democrats do, very badly.
In Florida they have an attack ad against Allen West that includes his Social Security number, a number their Saint FDR promised would be forever secure, yeah right!

From the Palm Beach Post we see this:
Dems include West social security number in flier, call it 'oversight'

From Fox news we find this:
DNC Caught Promoting Anti-Beck Tea Party Rally

CBS as an unofficial arm of the DNC:
CBS Befuddled by How Tea Party Candidates Have Survived Despite Their ‘Unusual Assertions’

And it must have been really bad for an MSNBC co-anchor to think they had gone a tad too far:

MSNBC Anchor Admits That Christine O’Donnell Witch Graphic Is ‘A Bit Much’
Folks, you have to know, when she admits it, it is way too far.

Why Textbooks Matter

We heard a  lot of the Texas school book selections.  Much of it by the liberal press.  In my opinion  the state board is trying to pull back from the most liberal textbooks, particularly in history, and social studies.  All textbooks are, shall I use the word "tainted", with a liberal slant.  Zombie has just posted a third part of a series called, Indoctrination Nation. Here are a couple of excerpts from today's essay.

While the media generally goes into hysterics every time the Texas State Board of Education meets, with commentators hurling mockery, outrage and vitriol at the board members, there is a total lack of interest when other states’ boards of education meet for the same purpose. Yet Texas is not the only state that influences the content of American schooling: a few other states also determine textbook standards that end up being used in other parts of the country. California, in particular, is also an important textbook market for publishers. Yet mysteriously, one never hears of any controversy erupting when the California State Board of Education meets to decide the content of textbooks used throughout the state and in many other school districts around the country which shun the Texas-approved textbooks.

.......the textbooks approved by the California State Board of Education are even more politicized than Texas textbooks, and more ideologically biased. So: Why does the media ignore what happens in California textbooks? Because the state’s bias goes the other way. California-approved social studies textbooks are politically correct in the extreme, with multiculturalism and “social justice” as the defining characteristics. The pressure groups and board members setting policy for California’s (and hence a substantial portion of America’s) textbooks exceed their Texan counterparts in their extremism, but since California pushes the “correct” kind of extremism, you never hear about it.

As pointed out in this article written by a textbook editor,

To make the list in California, books must be scrupulously stereotype free: No textbook can show African Americans playing sports, Asians using computers, or women taking care of children. Anyone who stays in textbook publishing long enough develops radar for what will and won’t get past the blanding process of both the conservative and liberal watchdogs.

        More on this in a moment.

But first let’s look at another example cited in this essay by The American Textbook Council, illuminating what has happened to California’s (and the nation’s) curriculum in recent decades. If you’re young enough to have experienced this kind of schooling yourself, the example below will not be a surprise to you; but if you’re over a certain age, and haven’t been paying attention to changes in American education, you’ll scratch your head at some of the names in this textbook’s list of America’s greatest heroes:

Editors [at Houghton Mifflin] were put in the hands of revisionist historians, Islamist activists, and diversity counters. … Its eighth-grade history, Creating America, produced by Houghton Mifflin’s McDougal Littell imprint, … identifies ten representative American heroes:
Abigail Adams
Crispus Attucks
Andrew Jackson
Queen Liluokalanai
Abraham Lincoln
Juan Seguin
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
George Washington
Ida B. Wells
Zitkala-Sa

In fact this list is highly unrepresentative of American history. This “American history” cobbled together from “representative” national heroes conforms to multicultural ideology, but it fails. The continuing effort to make diversity along lines of gender and ethnicity into the essence of the national past comes up short and cheapens the narrative.

If you've read this far you know you need to read the rest, including Part I, and Part II.

Wall Street Journal asks if American are Bigots

A rhetorical question. And it speaks to the problem of reporters and opinion writers who are liberals who loathe the American people and want to focus on them as bigots rather than argue the merits of a case.  That would be the previously mentioned JournoLists.
Here's the piece, what do you think?

Are Americans Bigots?
Attacking the motives of those who disagree with elite opinion has become all too common.
by William McGurn

When in 1983 Ronald Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," the reaction from his betters was swift. Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Lewis called it "primitive"—and wondered (naturally) what the Europeans would think. A headline in Time referred derisively to "The Right Rev. Ronald Reagan." All agreed on one thing: this kind of black-and-white moralizing had no place in American politics.

Now cut to today, where moralizing about the ugly motives of the American people has become common. Whether it's a federal judge declaring there exists no rational opposition to same-sex marriage, a mayor railing against those who would like a mosque moved a few blocks from Ground Zero, a Speaker of the House effectively likening the majority of her countrymen who did not want her health-care bill to Nazis, or a State Department official who brings up the Arizona law on immigration in a human-rights discussion with a Chinese delegation, the chorus is the same: You can't trust ordinary Americans.
[...........]
When asked about the legitimacy of grass-roots opposition to the health-care bill, for example, Nancy Pelosi dismissed protestors as people "carrying swastikas." Her counterpart in the Senate called them "evil mongers." How convenient. If turning up to protest a health-care bill makes someone a Nazi or an evil monger, there's no point to having a real debate, is there?

These kinds of remarks, moreover, tend to be amplified by a press corps that seems to share many of the same prejudices. Look at Internet listserv JournoList. In this group, participants felt free to urge various outrages—notably, manufacturing a charge of racism for purely political purposes. They did so, moreover, comfortable that no one would find such suggestions beyond the pale.

Take the Washington Post. When the JournoList emails hit, we learned that the reporter assigned to cover conservatives actively loathed them. Sometimes it spilled out, as when he tweeted that opponents of same-sex marriage are bigots. (He later offered a limited apology.) Does it not say something when the hometown paper of our nation's capital cannot seem to find a reporter who can control his contempt for beliefs held by millions of ordinary Americans?
[........]
As the controversy over the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero escalates, we have had many secular sermons on the need to recognize that the vast majority of Muslims should not be confused with the terrorists. No argument there. But how much more fruitful our own debates might be if the Judge Walkers, Mayor Bloombergs and Speaker Pelosis could extend that same presumption of decency to the American people.

Read the whole article here.

Who Wrote This Headline?

I looked at this story because the headline did not reflect what I had heard on the subject earlier.  As I read the story I thought "this headline doesn't say what this story is telling."  An AP story from the Houston Chronicle.

Gates agrees to proposal to repeal gay ban

By ANNE FLAHERTY ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday gave lukewarm support to a new White House-backed plan for a vote in Congress to immediately repeal the law that bans gays from serving openly in the military.

Even though the plan would let Gates decide when to implement repeal of the “don't ask, don't tell” policy, he has said he would have preferred more time to study the issue before Congress acts.

Gates “continues to believe that ideally the DOD review should be completed before there is any legislation” changing the law, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said. Gates has previously said he didn't want to change the policy until the study is finished in December.

Read it all.

Victor Davis Hanson on the news

From Pajamas Media via Instapundit:

News beneath the news

From the embarrassing to the pathetic

I don’t want to beat the proverbial dead horse, but these media polarities are getting to the point of absurdity. Bush, the lazy golfer while we were at war; Obama the engaged commander-in-chief playing golf for needed relaxation more in one year than in Bush’s eight. Katrina, the emblem of federal inaction and culpable incompetence; the BP slick, either a result of private greed overwhelming noble federal auditors or proof of the Obamian competent response. Bush’s illegal war clearly alienating Muslims and thus creating terrorists daily; laughable excuses from a terrorist that Obama’s stepped-up targeted Predator assassinations “created” would-be killers such as himself. Right wingers in bed with Wall Street oligarchs greedily crafting federal policy for the exploiting class; Obama for some odd reason, no doubt in the end a noble reason, taking more money from the likes of Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum than any politician in history. The Bush-Cheney nexus shredding the Constitution with the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Predators, and renditions; Obama the civil libertarian reluctantly forced to maintain or expand such protocols, albeit at last under a watchful liberal eye. Bush’s “lost” war in Iraq miraculously soon to be Obama’s “greatest achievement.”

What is the theory behind all this other than partisanship or cynicism? I think it involves the power of faith and the irrational, in some cases not confined to the left. (e.g., I once got a prominent conservative angry at me when I suggested Reagan embraced large deficits, signed an amnesty bill, wanted nuclear disarmament, and raised payroll taxes). Politics is a religion, never more so than in the case of Obama. And true believers always prefer the saintly explanation rather than the most logical.

You will want to read it all, go here.

This is seriously Not Funny: Discrimination against the American Flag

Students Kicked Off Campus for Wearing American Flag Tees

Freedom of expression or cultural disrespect on Cinco de Mayo?

By GEORGE KIRIYAMA

On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.

Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal's office.

We have such an anti-American bent in so many of our schools and this is in a very strongly PC, liberal area I guess it should not be surprising. At the end of the article we do find this, it gives me a little hope.

The five boys and their families met with a Morgan Hill Unified School District official Wednesday night. The district released a statement saying it does not agree with how Live Oak High School administrators handled this incident

The boys will not be suspended and they were told they can go back to school Thursday. They may even wear their red, white, and blue colors again, but this time, the day after Cinco de Mayo, there will be no controversy.

These are only the opening and closing paragraphs, read it all here.

We Really Need a Thick Skin to take all these Insults

via Lucianne a column from Michael Graham:

Big lie from Brandeis

The folks at Brandeis assure me it’s all just a big misunderstanding. When they compare the Tea Party movement to neo-Nazis, they mean it in a nice way.

And so, if all goes as scheduled, Brandeis will host a symposium tomorrow on “The New Right-Wing Radicalism.” It starts with a discussion of rising neo-Nazism in Europe (2:30 p.m. - “Mein Kampf: A Book Of The Past In The Present”) and ends with an analysis of the Tea Parties in America (4:30 p.m. - “From Tea Parties to Armed Militia”).

To make sure everyone got the message, the promotional posters featured swastikas. And to make sure we knew who these “right-wing radicals” were, those swastikas were on the Brandeis Web page right above a link to the “Tea Party Express in Boston Commons (sic).”

That’s the Tea Party event I personally helped promote.

This is a two pager so read it all.

Goldman Sachs and Other Donors

Drudge links to an Open Secrets.org site with an article showing Goldman Sachs as one of the top volunteers to the Obama campaign.  Drudge asks the questions, "will he return the contributions?"  My first thought was NOT!
When I looked at the Open Secrets site my thoughts went from Goldman Sachs to how many of the top donors were universities. Granted many of these are bundled contnributions, it still shows what a liberal bias our universities have. And of course they get much of their funding through government grants.

Here's the list:

University of California $1,591,395      (from a state so far in debt!)


Goldman Sachs $994,795

Harvard University $854,747

Microsoft Corp $833,617

Google Inc $803,436

Citigroup Inc $701,290

JPMorgan Chase & Co $695,132

Time Warner $590,084

Sidley Austin LLP $588,598

Stanford University $586,557  (another California university and I think his brother in law is there.)

National Amusements Inc $551,683

UBS AG $543,219

Wilmerhale Llp $542,618

Skadden, Arps et al $530,839

IBM Corp $528,822

Columbia University $528,302   (another elitist university and I'm thinking Columbia School of Journalism, would it be listed separately?)

Morgan Stanley $514,881

General Electric $499,130

US Government $494,820 (looking out for the next boss?)

Latham & Watkins $493,835