From time to time over the past nine years, I have written about “globaloney,” a shorthand term for the pseudo-science behind “climate change,” and “globalarmism” to describe the enviro-hysteria over “global warming” and the misguided public-policy prescriptions arising from that hysteria. Since the Paris climate talks have just begun, the press hysteria has reached a fever pitch.

At the Associated Press on Sunday, Seth Borenstein, swept up in that hysteria, wrote up a perfect example of “news” coverage embodying the essence of each term. We should be foreven grateful that longtime skeptic Christopher Monckton, at the Watts Up With That blog, picked Borenstein apart, utterly destroying the AP reporter’s work, piece by piece.

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A story by Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press (“AP ANALYSIS: VW EVASION LIKELY LED TO DOZENS OF DEATHS”), originally published on Saturday but currently carrying a Monday morning time stamp, claims that “Volkswagen’s pollution-control chicanery” has been responsible for “killing between five and 20 people in the United States annually in recent years.” Those results, based on an AP “statistical and computer analysis,” “cleverly” recast the effort’s raw results of “somewhere between 16 and 94 deaths over seven years.”

Given how poorly supposedly sacrosanct computer models have done in predicting “global warming” trends, and how gullible journalists, especially Borenstein, have been all these years about them, it seemed quite wise to treat his VW “analysis” with caution. In an op-ed at Investor’s Business Daily yesterday, Michael Fumento has demonstrated that such skepticism was warranted, and that the outrage over VW’s ruse, though wholly justified, is wildly out of proportion to the damage it has done.

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It would appear that Hillary Clinton’s act is wearing thin even among the people at that liberal bastion known as NPR.

Tuesday afternoon, the headline at an NPR story about Mrs. Clinton’s sudden decision to publicly announce her opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline project indicated that her announcement was deliberately timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s visit to the United States (HT Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media):

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In what appears to be a mixed result in the quest for clarity, the Associated Press has announced that its reporters and those who wish to adhere to its Stylebook guidelines will henceforth refer to those who don’t worship at the altar of the global warming/climate change absolutists “doubters” instead of “deniers” and “skeptics.”

The specific change reads as follows: “To describe those who don’t accept climate science or dispute the world is warming from man-made forces, use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science. Avoid use of skeptics or deniers.”

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For six decades, dietiticians and doctors have insisted cholesterol is bad for you.

It’s not, and there have been consequences:

… why did carbohydrate consumption start to increase so rapidly in the 1960s? At least partly because of the advice to avoid meat and cheese. Obesity and diabetes are the price we have paid for getting fat and cholesterol so wrong.

How about a full, drains-up inquiry into how the medical and scientific profession made such an epic blunder and caused so much misery to people? Consider not just the damage that was done to people’s lives by faulty advice, but to the livelihoods of dairy and beef farmers and egg producers.

Over at Barrel Strength (HT American Digest via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit), there is an excellent comparison to “globaloney,” the ridiculous proposition that humans are primarily responsible for warming the planet (which hasn’t been warming for 18 years) and that only radical changes in how everyone lives directed and controlled by a centralized worldwide entity can save us:

RIP: The great cholesterol scam (1955 – 2015)

… The cholesterol scam bears a strong relationship to the anthropogenic global warming scam.

1) it is propagated by scientists on a non-scientific mission.

2) it is believed because it plausibly explains an observation (increasing global temperature [for a time], increasing heart attacks from smoking in the 1950s and 60s). It taps into large anxieties about too much wealth, too much happiness, in western societies. There must be sin somewhere, and the public is ready to flog itself in the cause of a secularized idea of God, uh, I mean Good.

3) the causal relationship is weaker than first supposed; the research is found to be sloppy, the facts have been fudged, subsequent studies do not fully support the original claims, nevertheless the orthodoxy is promulgated all the more harshly for being doubted.

4) by now, powerful economic and ideological interests have taken hold. They supply an ongoing source of funds and opinion to ensure the perpetuation of the alarm: in the case of cholesterol, the margarine industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment, and in the case of AGW, the tribe of bureaucrats and leftists who seek to control markets, whose god of Marxism had failed, and who needed a new god (Gaia) to justify their rule.

5) The skeptics who have patiently argued on the basis of facts that the science of each phenomenon was weak, are ostracized by the opinion establishments of medicine and global warming. Cranks, but the cranks are right and the orthodox priests and Levites are wrong.

6) Eventually, after fifty or sixty years, the subject of discussion just changes. In the case of cholesterol, the evidence gets weaker and weaker, and the problems caused by too much sugar consumption (obesity, diabetes), caused in part by people not eating enough fats and meats, reaches a stage where it can no longer be ignored.

7) the retreat of the orthodoxy is covered by a smokescreen of fresh concerns for some other catastrophe. No admissions of error or apologies for wrecked careers and following bad science are ever issued. Time flows on, bringing neither knowledge nor greater understanding of the role of folly in human affairs.

8) stages 6 and 7 have been reached in the cholesterol cycle; they are beginning in the anthropogenic global warming scam. Fifty years from now, there will still be clanking windmills in the North Sea, but whether they will be still linked to a power grid is less likely, and whether anyone will pay attention is doubtful. The lobbies that keep them there, however, will still exist.

The unfortunate difference is that “globaloney” has a vast array of statists and complicit media apparatchiks behind it, meaning that their chances of prevailing in their draconian policy prescriptions are much higher. It will be tougher to discredit, and even tougher to get an admission of error from anyone who has been in on the scam.

As of 5:30 p.m. ET today, a search on “Koningstein” at the Associated Press’s national web site returned no results.

That’s an indication that the wire service’s globaloney-believing pseudo-science reporters are still trying to figure out how to respond to a November 18 article in the IEEE Spectrum by Ross Koningstein & David Fork, a pair of Google engineers tasked by the company in 2007 to “tackle the world’s climate and energy problems.” The pair, whose active work on the project at Google ended in 2011, have concluded, as succinctly stated in the UK Register (HT Instapundit), that renewable energy sources “will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists.”

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Chief spokespersons for unrestricted immigration.

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This column went up at PJ Media on Monday evening and was teased here at BizzyBlog Wednesday morning.

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Immigration is the “climate change” of non-scientific political issues.

Proponents consider climate disruption — which I have for years preferred to call ”globaloney“ — to be “settled science.” No contrary evidence, such as the inconvenient fact that the planet hasn’t warmed and has perhaps even cooled for 19 years, can intrude on their computer model-driven fantasies. Some proponents, if they were to achieve the positions of power they covet, would jail so-called climate deniers faster than you can say “Climategate.”

The press shields ordinary people who have been slowly brainwashed into becoming globaloney sympathizers by decades of journalistic malfeasance from the movement’s virtual dominance by socialists and de facto Communists. Most of those in the polling pluralities who believe globaloney’s garbage are among those who would suffer the most economically if these wannabe tyrants ever get what they want.

Similarly, immigration advocates are utterly convinced that the overall benefit of granting amnesty to all who have come to this country illegally — committing what is still quaintly known as a crime the minute they cross the border — is a matter of settled political science. Mountains of evidence of the irrevocable harm such a move would cause fail to dent their illogic.

Most of those advocating amnesty also believe that whoever wants to come here for jobs related to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) should be allowed to do so. That many STEM trainees going through federal jobs programs are hitting brick walls when trying to find employment, and that some currently employed Americans about to be laid off have been forced to train their shadily placed outsourced H-1B visa-holding replacements, is irrelevant.

No institution has been more persistently stubborn and utterly impervious to reality in its unfettered immigration advocacy, accurately characterized as immigration uber alles, than the Wall Street Journal.

In July 1984, the Journal advocated a new Constitutional amendment. It would simply read: “There shall be open borders.” It repeated its plea for such an amendment four additional times during the rest of the decade. Even though events during the 30 years since the first such editorial appeared have moved the Journal’s position from barely defensible to astonishingly stupid, the paper has never officially backed away from it.

As an illegal-immigrant amnesty effort orchestrated by President George W. Bush and a Democrat-dominated Congress was underway in the summer of 2007, the Journal voluntarily published a video showing its white-dominated editorial board bashing anyone who opposed the effort as presumptively nativist and racist. These people genuinely thought this incredibly counterproductive video would help their cause, which fortunately went down in flames after the American people vocally, intensely and overwhelmingly objected.

In response to the wave of unaccompanied illegal-immigrant children pouring over our southern border during the past year — a flow which, oddly enough, has subsided temporarily in time for this year’s midterm elections — a July Journal editorial’s final paragraph was more worried about harm to their cause than anything else:

The larger tragedy of this episode is that it has done enormous and needless damage to the cause of immigration reform. The Obama Administration’s incompetence has again undermined its own agenda. But once the misery of the children is past, no one should think that illegal immigration can be stopped by more enforcement alone, by more Border Patrol agents or more harassment of American business. The way to reduce illegal immigration is by providing more work visas to enter—and leave—the U.S. legally.

The H-1B argument is an insult to every laid-off STEM worker in the country. As Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, said in a must-read floor speech on September 10:

… elected officials, activist groups, the ACLU, and global CEOs are openly working to deny American workers the immigration protections to which they are legally entitled.

… there is actually not a shortage but a surplus of Americans who have been trained in the STEM and IT fields and that this is why wages for these fields have not increased since 1999.

Well, there’s that, and the fact that dozens of tech companies secretly and illegally conspired to suppress their employees’ wages for five years.

The Journal has been beating the “we’ve tried enforcement, but it doesn’t work” drum for decades.  The editorial cited earlier claimed in an earlier paragraph that “America’s southern border is already far more under control than it was for most of the last 20 years.”

This is perhaps the most dangerous falsehood this usually sane bunch has pushed over the years. James O’Keefe proved in a recent video that he could cross the border wearing an Osama bin Laden mask and walk several miles to Interstate 10 without even a hint of Border Patrol scrutiny. Mexican drug cartels have had functional control of areas on our side of the border — for at least four years. Earlier this month, according to several ranchers in Texas, effectively confirmed by Congressman Jason Chaffetz, “four people known with terror ties to the Middle East, were allegedly caught sneaking over our southern border into the United States.”

Megyn Kelly at Fox News, who interviewed Chaffetz on September 17, noted that “the GAO (Government Accountability Office) has estimated there’s only a six percent operational control of this border.” What would the Journal would say about a company which only achieved 6 percent of its revenue target during its most recent financial quarter? How would a member of its editorial Board react if their home security provider said that the perimeter around their house was six percent secure?

The economic arguments supposedly favoring amnesty are completely fictions. A nation already on the path to financial ruin cannot afford the raids on Social Security and other entitlement programs which would ensue. Low-wage American worker can’t afford the sudden influx of millions of amnestied competitors. The huge minimum-wage increase the Obama administration seeks wouldn’t solve that problem, but would instead create a permanently unemployed and under-employed underclass.

The Wall Street Journal’s unrelenting, decades-long advocacy is having its desired effect. Republicans in Washington, egged on by the misguided “reform” fanatics at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are showing serious signs of caving. Nothing short of national ruin looms.

From the New York Post:

Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

… Al Gore was right in one respect: Climate change is a moral issue — but that’s because there is nothing quite so immoral as well-fed, well-housed Westerners assuaging their consciences by wasting huge amounts of money on futile anti-global-warming policies, using money that could instead go to improve living standards in developing countries.

It’s all a bunch of globaloney.

Tuesday’s primaries unmasked intense opposition.

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This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Tuesday.

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Establishment Republicans and their pals in the press – at least until the general election campaigns begin (RINOs never learn) — are celebrating their defeats of tea party-sympathetic challengers in last Tuesday’s Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio primaries.

They would be well advised to hold the champagne. At least a half-dozen victorious candidates in GOP state legislative contests in those three states, including several who defeated party-supported incumbents, discovered that the key to motivating voters on their behalf was expressing genuine and vocal opposition to the federal government’s stealth imposition of the Common Core standards and testing regime in their schools.

Their success has national implications. You can rest assured that party leaders who have been doing all they can to hide from the issue, as well as all-in “Fed ed” proponent and current Republican establishment fave Jeb Bush, have noticed.

Nowhere was the anti-Common Core momentum more clear than in the Buckeye State. The entity I have dubbed ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) and its legislative leaders are visibly shaken.

Although the state’s press will only acknowledge Common Core’s relevance in one of Tuesday’s state rep race results, a reliable longtime activist told me on Thursday that candidates’ opposition to Common Core tipped the balance in their favor in four instances. My review of Stop Common Core Ohio’s endorsements against actual election results confirms that contention.

The result that’s impossible to ignore is Tom Brinkman’s triumph over incumbent Peter Stautberg in Southwestern Ohio.

ORPINO thought they had ended “Tax Killer Tom’s” political career two years ago when he lost in a comeback attempt after being term-limited from the legislature four years earlier. Heavily aided by ORPINO, two-term incumbent Stautberg dished out a 22-point drubbing.

This time around, it was different, principally because Brinkman sincerely and strongly aligned himself with anti-Common Core activists. ORPINO doubled down on its smear campaign, spending huge sums on a radio blitz and baldly false campaign literature which, among other things, hysterically implied that the supposedly “radical” Brinkman sided with Democrats on critical matters. ORPINO also claimed that he opposed a 2005 “tax cut” that was really an initially revenue-neutral restructuring which gave birth to an ugly new gross receipts tax.

Brinkman’s trump card over the wishy-washy incumbent was his vocal opposition to Common Core. Stautberg claims to have not taken a position. My source calls BS on that; but in any event, convenient neutrality doesn’t cut it. It instead allows force-fed “Fed ed” to become a permanent fixture of the educational landscape.

In winning by seven points on Tuesday, Brinkman engineered a 29-point turnaround from 2012, inducing palpable fear and loathing at ORPINO and among GOP legislative leaders.

Suddenly, the same people who have spent well over a year blowing off, marginalizing, and in some cases insulting concerned parents and teachers feel that they must commission a poll to see if the rest of the state is as opposed to Common Core as voters in Southwestern Ohio.

I can save them the trouble. A late-April University of Connecticut poll showed that thanks to its undemocratic imposition, only 39 percent of Americans have heard of Common Core. But of those who have, only 38 percent across all ideologies support it, while 44 percent oppose. A scant 24 percent of conservatives favor it. In the Buckeye State, Common Core polled as the number one issue of concern in the GOP primaries, even ahead of Governor John Kasich’s authoritarian expansion of Medicaid.

Why oppose Common Core? Five videos posted at my home blog in March of 2013 take only 33 minutes to fully explain why. Here’s a quick boil-down:

• These are standards which have been furtively pushed onto the states — i.e., not developed by the states, as proponents claim — through de facto federal government bribes contained in the 2009 stimulus bill and through the conditional granting of No Child Left Behind waivers. State legislatures had virtually no input into Common Core’s initial adoption.
• Costly and rigid standardized national tests will force reluctant private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling parents to conform their curricula to Common Core to ensure that their students perform well on them.
• One “feature” of Common Core is a national student data tracking system involving a reported 400-plus “data points” from pre-school through the workforce which will strip away students’ and families’ personal privacy. Personally identifiable and sensitive student and family data can and will be shared among government and private entities.
• The bottom line is that Common Core strips the states of their constitutional authority over education, will end parents’ ability to influence what their children are taught, and will ultimately and illegally accomplish the far left’s long-time dream of giving the federal government full control over the nation’s school curricula.

In the intervening year, it has become dreadfully obvious that Common Core’s “standards” are a watered-down muddle of incoherence backing a curriculum which is frustrating the nation’s children, infuriating their parents, and driving down test scores.

As would be expected of a “progressive” contraption conceived in back rooms, it virtually “eliminate(s) American children’s core knowledge base in English, language arts and history.”

No radical-driven “reform” would be complete without heavy doses of deconstructive indoctrination. Examples of horrid items which have surfaced include Holocaust denial, portrayals of Barack Obama’s opponents as racists, presumptive submission to the state, and the “clear” human-caused “impacts” of “climate change,” now known as “climate disruption,” which yours truly prefers to call “globaloney.”

Several Common Core-approved texts subject high school students to pornographic passages which are so graphic and offensive that government officials have prevented outraged parents from reciting them aloud at public meetings, and newspapers have refused to publish them. But they’re okay for 14 and 15 year olds to read and discuss?

Common Core supporters who thought they had their fixed game in the bag but now find themselves losing are responding as arrogant people who have run out of arguments invariably do — with demonization and brute force.

Those like Education Secretary Arne Duncan who believe that the opposition is just a bunch of “white suburban moms” who are upset that “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were” can’t explain why Huntsville, Alabama, which has the highest concentration of degreed engineers in the country, is a hotbed of anti-Common Core activism.

Fever-swamp leftists who characterize Common Core’s center-right opposition as a “wingnut … plot to destroy public schools” have failed to reconcile that assertion with the fact that “wingnuts” like the Chicago Teachers Union and two-thirds of Parent Teacher Association survey respondents in New York oppose it, largely because of the same federal intrusions to which the liberty movement objects.

Over their parent’s objections, school officials are routinely forcing kids to take standardized tests which are supposed to be optional. Teachers who refuse to sign agreements not to share test contents with parents, i.e., their customers, are being suspended or fired. Officials are treating parents who dare to speak out at public meetings like common criminals.

This garbage has got to go. The default assumption has to be that anyone who still supports Common Core is uninformed, bought and sold, or an unapologetic statist. The road to improved school standards is through decentralizing education so that parents and localities once again have control over what and how their children are taught. That worked quite well 50 years ago, when the average high school graduate was measurably more knowledgeable than today’s grads, three-quarters of whom are not ready for college.

In Ohio, that will mean a sea change in the go-along, Kasich-subservient legislature, which appears at long last to be heading in that direction. Kasich is a friend of Jeb Bush who nominally supports Common Core, but he also has 2016 presidential aspirations. Lawmakers need to pass repeal and force Kasich to unequivocally commit.

Mr. “Stand for Something,” who has surely noted that Common Core has become 2014′s bipartisan wedge issue, just might be cynical enough to do a 180. If so, we’ll take it.

This open thread will stay at or near the top today. Rules are here.

This continues a two-week catch-up effort, where I am mostly getting to items which may be a bit dated but which many readers might have missed. Other topics are also fair game.

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Feb. 25 — Bethany Mandel at PJ Media: “7 Famous Supporters of the Chavez Regime”

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Feb. 25 — The near silence from the left on this is deafening: “Supreme Court Strikes Blow To 4th Amendment With Homeowner Consent Ruling”

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Feb. 24 — The rule of law has officially ended: “‘Truly disturbing’: Eric Holder says state AGs not obligated to defend laws they disagree with”

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Feb. 24 — I think it’s an open question as to whether the Comcast’s attempt to buy Time Warner Cable is neutral or good for the economy and Internet users. Paul Venezia’s opinion at Infoworld mostly deserves consideration:

The broadband barbarians will soon control the gates

The massive advancement we saw in the first 10 years of our Internet consciousness is being destroyed by the deregulation and lobbying of the past nine.

We only have to look at the reaction of the big ISPs to Google Fiber to see a crystal-clear example of this in action. Where Google has shown up and delivered extremely high-speed, high-quality data and television service for extremely reasonable rates, the incumbent carriers have been forced to step up their game to where it should have been years ago. For example, Time Warner is now offering speeds up to 300Mbps/20Mbps in Austin, Texas — not coincidentally, where Google Fiber has set up shop.

The only disagrement I have is with Venezia’s characterization of the problem.

It isn’t “deregulation.” It’s “rent-seeking behavior by those who are regulated.” In other words, if the cable companies didn’t have regulatory friends, or if we were in a truly deregulated situation, new carriers and concepts could enter the market without existing providers having any recourse but to get better themselves.

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Feb. 24 — “Soon, the Supreme Court will rule on “if and/or how far the EPA has the Constitutional prerogative to use the Clean Air Act of 1960 — which does not include carbon as a pollutant under the regulatory jurisdiction of the EPA — as legal authority to regulate so-called greenhouse gasses.”

The EPA clearly has no legal authority, and the Court would have to invent it out of thin air for the EPA to prevail.

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Feb. 23 – While the left distracts attention by flogging the relatively insignificant Koch Brothers, “Unions Are Using $300 Million to Eliminate Five GOP Governors”

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March 4 – Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology:

For the past 15+ years, there has been no increase in global average surface temperature, which has been referred to as a ‘hiatus’ in global warming. By contrast, estimates of expected warming in the first several decades of 21st century made by the IPCC AR4 were 0.2C/decade. This talk summarizes the recent CMIP5 climate model simulation results and comparisons with observational data. The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.

In other words, Curry says there’s an over 98% chance that the global warming models are full of globaloney.

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March 6 — Debo Adegbile’s nomination to be the next head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division failed because seven Democrats voted against it. Obama and Harry Reid apparently thought they had it in the bag, and went into intimidation mode:

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid warned Republicans just before the vote that if Adegbile lost there would have to be a “broad discussion” of civil rights in America.

Pat Toomey and Seth Williams made the compelling argument several days before the vote:

… it is one thing to provide legal representation and quite another to seize on a case and turn it into a political platform from which to launch an extreme attack on the justice system. When a lawyer chooses that course, it is appropriate to ask whether he should be singled out for a high-level national position in, of all things, law enforcement.

Even seven Dems wouldn’t go there. Even the lack of a filibuster couldn’t save Adegbile.

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March 6 — At the Fiscal Times — “Military Gateway to the Middle Class Is Vanishing”

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Feb. 24 — “Paul Krugman doesn’t think there are any Obamacare horror stories.”

Krugman and Harry Reid want us to believe that all of these people liars. Nope. They’re obviously the liars.

This open thread will stay at or near the top today. Rules are here.

This continues a two-week catch-up effort, where I am getting to items which may be a bit dated but which many readers might have missed. Other topics are also fair game.

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Feb. 27 — “The political arm of Planned Parenthood is preparing to launch its largest campaign offensive ever, targeting more than a dozen states and some of the cycle’s top Senate and gubernatorial races,” with their spending “expected to cross the $18 million mark.”

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Opportunism exposed:

Attorney General Eric Holder’s call to restore voting rights to felons after they’ve served their time in prison has split Senate Democrats.

Liberal Democrats who are not facing tough re-elections this year say it’s the right thing to do, but vulnerable incumbents are steering clear of the proposal.

In other words, their degree of stated support depends on whether they’re up for election or reelection.

Safe assumption: They all favor allowing convicted felons to vote.

In my view, that’s the case even if a Dem up for election says that he or she opposes it.

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Feb. 27 — “… the Obama administration wants to institutionalize the targeting in the form of the new IRS regulations that will leave unions, trade groups, and big media unscathed.” I suspect that in this lawless administration, the targeting will continue whether or not the regulations are approved.

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Feb. 28 — “Vice President Joe Biden’s role in the administration was virtually frozen after he angered President Barack Obama in 2012 by announcing his support of gay marriage while the president was still on record opposing it.”

If so, he deserves it.

Related: Many African-American pastors want to impeach Eric Holder.

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Feb. 28 — “Texas Lt. Governor: We Did the Job the Feds Won’t Do – We Shut Down the Border.” I’d like to see some stats on this.

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March 4 — Grandstanding: Ahead of President Obama’s visit to Connecticut last week, New London passed an ordinance raising its minimum wage to Obama’s favored $10.10 per hour.

New London is the city which “won” the infamous Kelo v. New London property rights case at the Supreme Court in 2005, but which hasn’t been able to develop anything on the site where 78 perfectly useful homes were destroyed in the ensuing nine years. The city’s finances are in grave peril. But the Mayor and City Council agreed to spend $13,000 (some commenters believe it will cost more than that — and they didn’t even pick up on the costs associated with payroll taxes) to pay summer employees in their recreation department $10.10 instead of $8.70.

Go to the link, and you’ll see that commenters are not amused at this stunt, and with good reason. Here’s one of them: “The mayor just announced that he cannot afford trash and snow removal for downtown businesses yet they can afford to raise minimum wage.”

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March 3 — “London Mayor Calls For State to Take Children Based on Parents’ Political Beliefs.” I don’t need to tell you which political beliefs held by parents might make them vulnerable to having their kids seized, do I?

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The federal government’s reported January deficit was $10.4 billion, about $13 billion worse than the $2.9 billion surplus seen in January 2013.

Previous months in the current fiscal year all showed somewhat sizable improvement over the previous year. February’s result, which should come out on Wednesday, will bear watching. If it’s a comparative repeat of January, it may be evidence that the economy really has weakened.

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Two rich guys on globaloney:

• Warren Buffet, Democratic Party darling, “told CNBC (on) March 3, that extreme weather events haven’t increased due to climate change, saying that weather events are consistent with how they were 30-50 years ago.”
• Apple CEO Tim Cook says, in Breitbart.com’s words, that “Global Warming Skeptics Should Dump Company’s Stock.” I presume that means we should also stop buying Apple’s products. That’s a deal, Tim. You won’t see me with buying an iPhone or an iPad. Whether I replace my current Mac with another one in 2016 has become an open question.

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Feb. 21 — “The Washington state Health Benefit Exchange has spent $2.6 million on an advertising campaign in order to convince young people to sign up for Obamacare. Its latest advertising push features a rap duo who interviews people who have signed up coverage.”

They’re awful. The videos’ creators are laughing all the way to the bank at the waste.

Closed minds:

CNN — “And there are some stories which do not have two sides. The climate change debate is one of them.”

A sharp mind:

Charles Krauthammer (HT Heritage) —

Money quote: “So the arrogance of this is rather appalling. But worse is the application of it to our economy, shutting the coal industry, hurling us into mass transit, getting us out of our larger cars, all of this is driven by this ideology, which in and of itself is a matter almost of theology.”

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Past related BizzyBlog posts:

• March 26, 2007 — Settled, Schmettled
• March 4, 2007 — Consensus, Conschmensus

This open thread will stay at or near the top today. Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow. Other topics are also fair game.

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Laughing uproariously for several minutes in an open hearing would be the best response to claims like this: “Sebelius Denies Well-Documented ObamaCare Joblessness.”

Investor’s Business Daily’s wrap: “… denial of obvious realities goes beyond honesty and borders on delusional.” I would disagree in Sebelius’s case. She knows she’s lying, and doesn’t care.

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At Heritage — “Why It’s the Government’s Fault There Isn’t Enough Salt to Make Roads Safe in New Jersey”

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“(Ohio Governor John) Kasich wants younger vocational students; Wants 7th-graders to get vocational training and 1st-graders to start planning careers.” So vocational training takes six years now? I shouldn’t even have to explain why the “1st-graders” idea is stupid. But, amazingly, it does correlate with cradle-to-grave mindset of Common Core.

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A non-surprise — “Union Intimidation Continues at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Plant”

Related: “German Union Boss Threatens American Workers’ Jobs After They Reject UAW”

Also: The UAW appears to have spent an estimated $5 million in its unsuccessful VW-Chattanooga effort. That’s about $8,000 per vote, and about $3,500 per plant employee.

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Congressman Dan Maffei of New York is the latest participant in the fraudulent Food Stamp Challenge.

He says that “I will be eating on a budget of $4.50 per day, which is the average grocery budget that SNAP recipients live on daily.”

The current Maximum Monthly Allotment for a single person is $189 per month. That’s about $6.25 a day. The averages for rising family sizes work out to between $5.28 and $6.11 (they drop with larger household sizes.). If you can’t eat on those amounts per day, you’re not trying hard enough.

Maffei, like all of the other participants in this bogus “challenge,” refuses to recognize that not everyone gets the Maximum Monthly Allotment because there are offsets for income and sometimes for assets.

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Steve Deace observes: “It has now been 6 days since 1.22 million of Rand Paul’s constituents who voted to defend marriage in their state constitution were disenfranchised by a federal judge. Rand has said nothing.”

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From mid-November, desitined for the “You Can’t Catch Everything Right Away” file (HT Political Outcast): “WebMD pockets millions from feds to promote Obamacare”

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As anyone could have predicted, they won’t let a little thing like a court ruling stand in their way: “FCC: We’re Not Done With Net Neutrality; Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler challenges last month’s court ruling, moves forward with plans to create a new version of rules promoting an open Internet.”

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At Hot Air — “Are California Democrats abandoning Gov. Brown’s beloved high-speed rail boondoggle?” We should be so lucky.

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“Time to push back against the global warming Nazis” — Actually, it’s long past time. It would easy and oh so politically correct to say that Dr. Roy Spencer is overreacting and going where one shouldn’t go. Sadly, he’s not incorrect.

If the true believers in the environmentalist movement, whose pet cause is maximizing statism through promotion of globaloney, were to have their way, they would take the earth’s population down to under 1 billion, turning the number murdered in the Holocaust into a rounding error.

This open thread will stay at or near the top today. Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow. Other topics are also fair game.

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Mixed-race household facts for the bigots at MSNBC — “… among families with step-children or adopted children, 11 percent of conservatives were living in mixed race households compared to 10 percent of liberals living in mixed-race households.”

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While Obama is focusing everyone on what he might unconstitutionally do with his executive authority, his regulators are doing the real dirty work.

One example:

President Barack Obama’s environmental regulators will spend the rest of this year writing climate rules that would reshape the nation’s electricity supply, throw a cloud over the future of coal power and take the biggest stride ever in throttling the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution.

And that’s just the beginning.

All based on the hoax known around here as globaloney.

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Retiring California Congressman Henry Waxman’s legacy is not “rich.” It’s repressive.

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At CNS News — “Solar Provides 0.2% of Electric Supply–Up From 0.02% Before Obama.” At that rate of incremental increase (0.18% every five years), it will provide 1% of the nation’s electric supply in 2037.

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At the Jerusalem Post — “Kerry pressure on Israel has anti-Semitic undertones.”

Specifically, “First-term MK Motti Yogev claims the secretary of state ‘wants to decrease the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.’” That’s pretty much a given, seeing how the Obama administration insists that Israel retreat to it pre-1967 borders.

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A MassResistance email informs me: “This week … Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination (MCAD) against a Catholic girls prep school because the school declined to hire a man because he is ‘married’ to another man.”

Chances are you’ll never see this covered in the press unless the litigant wins.

Of all the lies of the past 40 years, the following from the “LGBT community” is among the worst: “Just give us our rights, and we’ll leave you alone.”

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At the Hollywood Reporter — “Oscar Winner Pens Letter Accusing Academy of Christian ‘Bigotry’ in Song Flap.” It appears that the Motion Picture Association searched desperately for a reason to disqualify the already nominated “Alone Yet Not Alone” — and came up with one that doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Gerald Molen, an Oscar-winning producer of “Schindler’s List,” is calling BS: “Critics will pounce and accuse us of being out of touch and needlessly offending middle America by stripping this song — a song sung by a quadriplegic hero to evangelical Christians who has captured the imagination of the American people — of its nomination …” From all appearances, the “critics” are correct.

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Via Sean Davis at TheFederalist.com — “11 Facts About The Minimum Wage That President Obama Forgot To Mention.”

Here’s one which goes directly against an Obama SOTU claim: “A Full-Time Minimum Wage Worker In 2014 Will Make 24 Percent More Than The Federal Poverty Limit. … And that’s before federal benefits like Medicaid and food stamps are included.”

Related, at Heritage: “How Obamanomics Promotes Inequality”:

his poll-tested focus on inequality and a struggling middle class is an indictment of his own policies. Debt, stimulus, Obamacare, welfare expansions, green energy, and higher tax rates were all supposed to lift the middle class and poor from this funk. This was supposed to be a shared prosperity and we have gotten just the opposite.

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At Breitbart — “CA OBAMACARE SPENT $1.37 MILLION ON RICHARD SIMMONS LIVE STREAM.” And that’s with Simmons supposedly getting no compensation.

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At Twitchy — “‘I will not comply’: Doctor slams Obamacare, sends must-read breakup letter to Aetna”

This open thread will stay at or near the top today. Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow. Other topics are also fair game.

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At FT.com: “US banks warn Fed interest cut could force them to charge depositors.”

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At the Daily Caller: “Former Secret Service agent Bongino: Holder’s Justice Dept. is a ‘travesty’”

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Globaloney Update:

NOAA: Slow Atlantic hurricane season coming to a close
No major hurricanes formed in the Atlantic basin – first time since 1994

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Cultural decay indicator of the day ABC Begins the Effort to Mainstream Polyamory (“Open Marriages: When Husband and Wife Have Lovers and Date Other People”). Note the “It takes a village to raise a child” quote at the link.

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At Newsmax: “Wife of American Jailed in Iran ‘Devastated’ US Didn’t Demand Release” (related links here and here). Getting a crappy, dangerous, Neville Chamberlain-like deal with Iran out of sheer domestic desperation was obviously so important that the plight of Christian pastor Saeed Abedini wasn’t allowed to get in the way.

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Another reason why Obama’s “you can keep your plan” lie is a lie:

Large employers cite Obamacare ‘Cadillac’ tax in reducing benefits

Aaron Baker, 36, his wife Billie and their two young children are covered under a generous health insurance plan offered by the private Midwestern university where he’s worked for 10 years. When they opened their benefits notice this year, they were pleased to see their $385 premium is only up by four dollars next year. However, they were shocked to discover that instead of covering the first dollar they spend with no deductible, the Baker’s plan now includes a $1,000 deductible and a $2,500 out of pocket maximum. They also will still have small co-pays for services.

According to the enrollment notice, the changes are “to relieve future health plan trend pressure and to put the university in a position to avoid the excise tax that becomes effective in 2018.” The 40 percent excise tax—often called the “Cadillac tax”— is part of Obamacare and is levied on the most generous health plans. It’s designed to bring down overall health costs by making companies and workers more cost-conscious.

Logic dictates that the university’s move will lead to cost consciousness. But trying to claim that going from a first-dollar plan to a high-deductible one means that you still “kept your plan” is hogwash.

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At the Daily Beast (of all places):

Amtrak Is a Tax-Sucking Behemoth That Deserves to Die
The passenger-rail behemoth sucks up more taxpayer dollars than ever, and its ridership gains are merely a blip. Kill it once and for all.

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At the New York Times: “Don’t Dare Call the Health Law ‘Redistribution.’” Even though it is.

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at the Politico Magazine: “The Obamacare ‘Fix’ Is Illegal.” And that matters exactly why? (/sarc)