A few topics to discuss:

– ISIS beheads another American. How many more Americans need to be beheaded before Obama takes this seriously?

– After 6 years of essentially doing nothing – Obama now deems immigration to be a crisis and promises to act unilaterally before the new Congress is sworn in. Polls show that a vast majority of Americans have other top priorities, but when has that concerned the leader of the new permanent minority?

– Open enrollment for the ACA is on again, and while 56% of Americans disapprove, MSNBC was able to find that those enrollees who receive subsidies actually like the law. Imagine that? The Supreme Court could change all that soon however if they actually uphold the law as it was written – meaning that only State exchanges can hand out subsidies. Of course, Justice Roberts has once before violated that trust, so who knows.

– And Ferguson remains on edge. Apparently, being completely wrong and over reactionary about the facts of the case have not embarrassed the instigators and race baiters, nor has it given them reason to pause and reassess their juvenile actions.  Instead they move forward, sell merchandise, and request that the UN be involved in their struggle for justice. Justice of which fits with their narrow views and victim mindsets.

Mark is quite prolific at posting thought provoking articles, so much so that it is hard to keep up with. Thus, I have decided to take on the difficult task of posting a weekly open thread and considering the current state of chaos in our body politic there is much to discuss.

Take for example Jonathan Gruber’s recent admission that the ACA was intentionally opaque, disguised, and lied about in order to secure passage, and thankfully the American electorate is stupid and never figured it out. This of course excludes the many conservatives that repeatedly warned everyone about dangers of this legislation, but unfortunately too many gullible people stood with slack jaws and wonder as Nancy Pelosi proclaimed – “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it”.

Better yet, how about Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough saying that “Washington will work better if Obama has is way”.

I can predict one thing. Now that the Democrats are entrenched as the minority party of this country, from Congress on down to State Legislatures, their comments and actions will become even more brazen and even more outrageous over the next two years. This is just the start of it. I think they are genuinely upset and privately panicking about these last elections where Americans soundly rejected their policies and tactics, and now they suddenly find themselves with a very weak bench of young talent, tired old campaign cliches, and just one polarizing figure as their best hope for 2016.

It was just five years ago that the Republican party was thought to be soon relegated to a regional party comprised primarily of old white men. How those fortunes have changed thanks to the arrogance and over reach of a rabid ideologue in the White House and the justice Department, and to the Tea Party for their continued opposition in the face of strong head winds and ridicule. Now the GOP boasts majority numbers across this country comprised of a lot of diverse and young talent. The GOP’s prospects are strong provided they stick to conservative principles, Constitutional governance and common sense.

I meant to write a post about this article last week, and have since noticed that there is now a Part II version, which I have yet to read. But you see, according to the author, the reason why the racial divide still thrives is because of smug White delusion. We just don’t understand the plight of Black Americans. We’re too stupid and we need to have more conversations on this issue because we just haven’t discussed this topic enough. Like Eric Holder says, “we are a nation of cowards”. There were many statistics included in the article to support the authors contention, one of which was this:

The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.

One obvious conclusion to me for this result could be that the Democrats coveted “war on poverty” is a colossal failure. Another stat was this:

Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed

I don’t remember any “experiment in mass incarceration” – can anyone help me out here?

The way I see it, Black America has a huge cultural problem within their own community and that is a problem that only they can resolve. There have been an untold number of government programs and initiatives designed to lift them up, individually and collectively, and obviously they have all failed, and I just don’t think more “conversation” is going to help either. One idea does come to mind – improving the economy. 

Feel free to speak your mind on this issue and prove Eric Holder wrong! 

At the risk of being called a denier, and/or other names by the AGW mafia, I have to think that their fear driven, money grabbing, power based claims of the “world coming to an end”, might be just a bit premature, if not outright unfounded. As late as 2007, the chief AGW alarmist, Al Gore, predicted that the Arctic Sea would be ice free by 2014. Well considering this recent report, it seems as though he missed the mark:

……seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.

That’s the problem with settled science based on consensus – it’s fact free, and based only on opinion and data. Two measures of which are easily manipulated and influenced by long sought after goals of centralized power and wealth distribution. Take for example, these “science based” conclusions:

– Dr Hawkins added that the decline seen in recent years was not caused only by global warming. It was, he said, intensified by ‘natural variability’ – shifts in factors such as the temperature of the oceans. This, he said, has happened before, such as in the 1920s and 1930s, when ‘there was likely some sea ice retreat’.

– Dr Hawkins said: ‘There is undoubtedly some natural variability on top of the long-term downwards trend caused by the overall warming. This variability has probably contributed somewhat to the post-2000 steep declining trend, although the human-caused component still dominates.’

– Dr Hawkins said these natural processes may be cyclical. If and when they go into reverse, they will cool, not warm, the Arctic, in which case, he said, ‘a decade with no declining trend’ in ice cover would be ‘entirely plausible’.

– Peer-reviewed research suggests that at least until 2005, natural variability was responsible for half the ice decline. But exactly how big its influence is remains an open question – and as both Dr Hawkins and Prof Curry agreed, establishing this is critical to making predictions about the Arctic’s future.

– ‘Ice-free in 2050 is a possible scenario, but I don’t think it is a likely scenario,’ she concluded.

In light of these inconvenient worldly occurrences and shifting scientific opinions, which are resulting in rational people questioning the heretic and apoplectic predictions of AGW alarmists, the UN and our President are now choosing to bypass the rational based crowd and forge agreements on their own to resolve this manufactured crisis. Perhaps they see their window of opportunity to distribute and hijack huge amounts of wealth closing. And of course, championing this effort by our radical President to hurt America’s economy are the legions of leftists who believe that if America would just give up our jobs and wealth first, other nations will follow:

President Obama “is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement” but “without ratification from Congress,….the U.N. framework gives poor countries a voice, and hence a means for extracting aid in return for their consent to a climate treaty. As I’ve explained, you can have either climate justice (meaning compensation for poor countries hardest hit by climate change) or a climate treaty—not both……………By citing an international agreement, by contrast, government lawyers may be able to convince courts that our regulations will in fact accomplish something, by inspiring reciprocal action by foreign governments.

The left driven agenda of “climate change” has never been about rational, fact based concerns of staving off “the end of times”. It has always been a purely political driven agenda with goals of centralizing power and control over national economies and redistributing wealth into the hands the noble worldly elite. To date, these goals have been not as transparent, but considering that the world’s climate just isn’t cooperating with the “consensus models”, I think millions of people are starting to wake up and disagree with this agenda and see it for what it is. What millions of people will agree with I think, are sensible plans to carefully extract our vast reserves of natural gas and crude oil and lessen our dependence on unstable, violent countries, while at the same time incentivizing entrepreneurs and the private markets to find a sustainable, cleaner and viable greener energy platform, and that is a winning strategy the GOP should pounce on.