St.Louis Tea Party’s First Birthday

St.Louis Tea Party’s First Birthday was attended by more than 1500 American Patriots. People Gathered on the Steps of the Gateway arch to celebrate the accomplishments of the Tea Party’s First Year.

Dana Loesch.

Bill Hennessy.

James Stewart.

Jim Hoft.

Michelle Moore.

Jon Burns.

Stephanie Rubach.

Dr Gina Loudon.

The T.E.A. Party Spreads to the United Kingdom

Fed up with over taxation, political corruption, And the loss of personal freedom, the People of the U.K. Take a stand and start  a British Tea Party.

Taxed Enough Already! Join Daniel Hannan at the Brighton Tea Party.

Join DANIEL HANNAN MEP at the Brighton Tea Party at 5.30 p.m. this Saturday 27 February at the Best Western Hotel, 143-145 King’s Road, Brighton BN1 2PQ

The event will take place on the Conservative Party Spring Forum fringe, but is outside the secure zone, so all members of the public are very welcome to attend.  Admission is free.  Tea and other refreshments will be available at a small charge.  Cash bar.

Daniel, a Council Member of The Freedom Association, says, “you can’t tax your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt”.

 

The Tea Party Movement in the USA has demonstrated the huge scale of public opposition to excessive taxation.  In the UK, tax is much higher and, in addition, British membership of the democratically unaccountable EU raises the issue of “no taxation without representation”.  From the Boston Tea Party to the Brighton Tea Party, it’s time to demonstrate our opposition to excessive taxation.

See you there!

Argentina seizes pension funds to pay debts. Who’s next?

I know, It’s an old article but who knew countrys could do stuff like this and still be considered “Free”

From Telegraph.co.uk October 21st, 2008
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Here is a warning to us all. The Argentine state is taking control of the country’s privately-managed pension funds in a drastic move to raise cash.

Should we worry about our pensions?

It is a foretaste of what may happen across the world as governments discover that tax revenue, and discover that the bond markets are unwilling to plug the gap. The G7 states are already acquiring an unhealthy taste for the arbitrary seizure of private property, I notice.

So, over $29bn of Argentine civic savings are to be used as a funding kitty for the populist antics of President Cristina Kirchner. This has been dressed up as an anti-corruption and efficiency move. Aren’t they always?

Argentine sovereign debt was trading at 29 cents on the dollar today, pushing the yield to 25pc. Tempted?

Credit Default Swaps on Argentine bonds reached 2,900. Do we have a Latin Iceland on our hands, but with 100 times the population? Or several, Pakistan, Ukraine, Hungary? …… Switzerland? Australia? Britain?

The funds being targeted are known as AFJPs or retirement accounts, but how long will it now be before Mrs Kirchner cracks down on the entire $97bn pool of private pensions? There are a lot of much-needed hard currency assets in those portfolios.

“A state takeover of pensions creates all kinds of doubts and throws into relief the extreme financing needs of the government next year,” said Jorge Alberti, from ElAccionista.com

Needless to say, the Kirchner government (part II) is unable to raise any money on the global markets at a tolerable price.

Investors have already been burned by her stealth default on Argentina’s index linked bonds. This was achieved by sacking the head of the statistics office and rigging the inflation data (by 20pc annually, or so.)

Frankly, I am a little surprised that Argentina’s 2001 default – the biggest in history – was not a severe enough burning in itself for investors. But political risk seems to be a blind spot for some asset managers. And then there was the great agro-boom of 2005-2007 so all was forgiven, until commodities went into free-fall in May.

President Kirchner has been eyeing the pension pool for some time. Last year she pushed through new rules forcing them to invest more money inside the country – always a warning signal.

My fear is that governments in the US, Britain, and Europe will display similar reflexes. Indeed, they have already done so. The forced-feeding of banks with fresh capital – whether they want it or not – and the seizure of the Fannie/Freddie mortgage giants before they were in fact in trouble (in order to prevent a Chinese buying strike of US bonds and prevent a spike in US mortgage rates), shows that private property can be co-opted – or eliminated – with little due process if that is required to serve the collective welfare. This is a slippery slope. I hope Paulson, Darling, and Lagarde tread with great care. I do not expect Steinbruck to tread with any care.

World’s biggest coal company brings U.S. government to court in climate fraud

by John O’Sullivan
on February 17, 2010

The world’s largest private sector coal business, the Peabody Energy Company (PEC) has filed a mammoth 240-page “Petition for Reconsideration,” a full-blown legal challenge against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The petition must be answered and covers the entire body of leaked emails from ‘Climategate’ as well as those other ‘gate’ revelations including the frauds allegedly perpetrated under such sub-headings as ‘Himalayan Glaciers,’ ‘African Agricultural Production,’ ‘Amazon Rain Forests,’ ‘Melting Mountain Ice,’ ‘Netherlands Below Sea Level’ as well as those much-publicized abuses of the peer-review literature and so called ‘gray literature.’ These powerful litigants also draw attention to the proven criminal conduct by climate scientists in refusing to honor Freedom of Information law (FOIA) requests.

Peabody is, in effect, challenging the right of the current U.S. federal government to introduce cap and trade regulations by the ‘back door.’ In this article we summarize Peabody’s legal writ.

PEC has pulled out all the stops to overturn the EPA findings ‘Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act’ made on December 7, 2009. Those findings were in turn premised on the Supreme Court decision of April 2, 2007 of Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), where the court ruled that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act.

PEC argues inter alia that the law requires that the federal agency must articulate a “rational connection between the facts found and the choice made” as per the case of Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass’n of the United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mutual Auto Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29, 43 (1983).

The PEC arguments are based primarily on the release of email and other information from the University of East Anglia (“UEA”) Climatic Research Unit (“CRU”) in November of last year. Their civil action lists most of the principle scientists such as Professor Phil Jones, of the UK’s Climatic Research Unit, who recently admitted there has been no ‘statistically significant’ global warming for 15 years and agreed the Medieval Warm Period may have been just as warm, if not warmer than current global temperatures.

The petition argues the EPA must reconsider its Endangerment Finding based on all the new material from Climategate that was not available during the original EPA ‘comment period’ and which is central to the outcome that EPA reached in promulgating its Endangerment Finding.

The petition further states that the EPA failed to properly exercise its judgment as required by the Clean Air Act (“CAA”) and acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” fashion by relying almost exclusively on flawed reports of the IPCC in attributing climate change to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions and which were influenced by political rather than scientific concerns.

Among their submissions the PEC legal team attacks the “Nice Tidy Story of Unprecedented 20th Century Warmth” using emails written while climatologists were making preparations for the Third IPCC report. Among them Keith Briffa stated that:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.” [CRU email 938018124.txt (Sep. 22, 1999)]

Briffa went on to say that:

“I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.” [CRU email 938018124.txt (Sep. 22, 1999)]

The PEC legal eagles then cite another key researcher, Ed Cook, who in a lengthy email bristles at the effort to eliminate the MWP and wrote:

“I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong.”

[CRU email 988831541.txt (May 2, 2001)]

The PEC action criticizes the discredited IPCC reports that were not the product of a rigorous, transparent and neutral scientific process. PEC argues:

“The CRU information reveals that many of the principal scientists who authored key chapters of the IPCC scientific assessments were driven by a policy agenda that caused them to cross the line from neutral science to advocacy.”

As an example of bias, Dr. Kevin Trenberth – Senior Scientist, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is cited for his admission:

“I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same.”

Hide the Decline
The coal company’s lawyers argue that to hide the decline in the correlation between recent temperatures and what was showing in the proxy data, Professor Michael Mann and then Phil Jones unethically and fraudulently grafted on actual temperature data to the end of their proxy reconstructions rather than using the same proxy data as had been used throughout the reconstruction.

By this ‘trick’ they made the graphic presentations of the proxy reconstructions misleading, since the effect is to make it seem as if the proxy data shows rising 20th century warming when it doesn’t. But the real deception in the trick was in hiding what became known as the “divergence” problem.

The divergence problem is where the proxy data are contradicted by actual data, as they are for a significant period of the time when direct temperature measurements exist, the accuracy of the proxy data over the entire period of the proxy reconstruction is called into question so that the science cannot be determined to be “settled.”

In a robust attack lawyers for the PEC further assert:

“Moreover, the Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom (“U.K.”), the agency that oversees and enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws, after investigation, recently concluded that CRU broke those laws in refusing to respond to information requests.”

The petition concludes that:

“In sum, given the seriousness of the flaws that the CRU material and other information reveal in the development of the IPCC reports, the Agency must reexamine the Endangerment Finding. The Agency can no longer have confidence that those reports present a fair, unbiased and accurate assessment of climate science.”

Moreover, PEC is demanding that the EPA shall convene a full evidentiary hearing as a part of such reconsideration. If this element of the petition were granted it is highly probable that the weight of the new evidence now freely available since Climategate would expose the criminal and fraudulent component within the science of man-made global warming, and would likely succeed in having all the EPA’s findings on carbon dioxide invalidated.

Thereby, from accomplishing their civil task Peabody will lend further weight to the likelihood of criminal charges being brought against those individuals implicated in international fraud on the largest scale ever known.

Chris Matthews is the New Obama Girl

A young girl with incredible drawing talent.

100 US Government Communists in 67 Seconds

World may not be warming, say scientists

From The U.K. Sunday Times February 14, 2010

Jonathan Leake

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

Timeline shows Bush, McCain warning Dems of financial and housing crisis; meltdown

The Bush Admin and Senator McCain warned repeatedly about Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and what thus became the 2008 financial crisis — starting in 2002 (and actually even earlier — in the Clinton and Carter White Houses. Democrats resisted and kept to their party line, extending loans to people who couldn’t afford them — just like you would expect of socialists.

The 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/RT Sport Edition

Saudi Arabia Shifts Course on Child Marriage

Theunis Bates

(Feb. 9) – For the first time, the Saudi Arabian state has intervened in the marriage of a preteen girl to an older man, leading some campaigners to speculate that the kingdom could be about to ban the cruel and archaic practice of child marriage.

The government-run Human Rights Commission (HRC) has hired a lawyer to review the case of a 12-year-old girl who was paired off with her father’s 80-year-old cousin last year. The girl’s mother opposed the marriage and attempted to secure a divorce, but suddenly dropped the case earlier this month with no explanation.

According to the local Okaz newspaper, her daughter had told the court that she consented to the ceremony, which reportedly earned her father a $23,000 dowry. “I agree to the marriage. I have no objection,” she said. “This is in filial respect to my father and obedience to his wish.”

 

AFP / Getty Images

However, HRC lawyer Sultan bin Zahim told Reuters that even though the “mother withdrew” her protest, the marriage is still a “public rights issue that concerns the Saudi community.”

Other members of the HRC have hinted that the review will end with the case being sent back to court in the next few days and a divorce being granted. “Our main concern is to safeguard the child’s rights,” Alanoud al-Hejailan, a lawyer for the commission told the Times of London. “It is in the hands of the court but the commission is firmly on the child’s side.”

This sort of intervention is unusual in Saudi Arabia’s highly patriarchal society, where men have the power to decide who and when their children marry. The utter powerlessness of Saudi mothers was exposed last year, when a court in the city of Onaiza repeatedly dismissed a divorce petition by the mother of an 8-year-old girl whose father had sold her into marriage with a man in his 50s. The judge ruled that the woman did not have the right to file such a case on behalf of her daughter. (Another judge later granted the annulment, after the families of the bride and groom reached an out-of-court settlement.)

Many of the country’s hard-line Wahhabi imams claim child marriage is justified by the Koran, since the Prophet Muhammad wed his third wife, Aisha, when she was only 9 years old. “It is incorrect to say that it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,” Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom’s top cleric, said in January, according to the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. “A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she’s too young are wrong, and they are being unfair to her.”

However, although relatively few of these ceremonies are believed to take place each year, the international outrage they spark is embarrassing for the ruling al-Saud family. And in the past year, influential figures in the Kingdom have started to speak out against the practice.

“A child has the right to live her childhood and not be forced to get married,” Princess Adela bint Abdullah, the daughter of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, said earlier this month according to Al-Riyadh. “Even an adult would not accept that.”

And senior Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdullah al-Manie last month told Okaz that Aisha’s marriage to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century “cannot be equated with child marriages today because the conditions and circumstances are not the same.”

Human rights campaigners now hope that the international focus on this new case will force the government to speed the passage of draft legislation, currently being studied by a government committee, that would set the minimum age of marriage between 16 and 18.

“This case is an investment in order to push for a law,” Wajiha al-Huweider, a Saudi rights activist, told Reuters. “We need to affect public opinion and I believe that Saudi Arabia will issue a law preventing child marriages soon.”

Little Old Lady

Defense Attorney:
Will you please state your age?

Little Old Lady:
I am 94 years old.

Defense Attorney:
Will you tell us, in your own words, what happened the night of April 1st?

Little Old Lady:
There I was, sitting there in my swing on my front porch on a warm spring evening,   when a young man comes creeping up on the porch and sat down beside me.

Defense Attorney:
Did you know him?

Little Old Lady:
No, but he sure was friendly.

Defense Attorney:
What happened after he sat down?

Little Old Lady:
He started to rub my thigh.

Defense Attorney:
Did you stop him?

Little Old Lady:
No, I didn’t stop him.

Defense Attorney:
Why not?

Little Old Lady:
It felt good. Nobody had done that since my Albert died some 30 years ago.

Defense Attorney:
What happened next?

Little Old Lady:
He began to rub my breasts.

Defense Attorney:
Did you stop him then?

Little Old Lady:
No, I did not stop him.

Defense Attorney:
Why not?

Little Old Lady:
His rubbing made me feel all alive and excited. I haven’t felt that good in years! 

Defense Attorney:
What happened next?

Little Old Lady:
Well, by then, I was feeling so ‘spicy’ that I just laid down and told him
‘Take me, young man. Take me now!’

Defense Attorney:
Did he take you?

Little Old Lady:
Hell, no! He just yelled, ‘ April Fool!’ And that’s when I shot him, the little bastard

Rash of retirements pushes Social Security to brink

By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Social Security’s annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years as the recession led hundreds of thousands of workers to retire or claim disability.The impact of the recession is likely to hit the giant retirement system even harder this year and next. The Congressional Budget Office had projected it would operate in the red in 2010 and 2011, but a deeper economic slump could make those losses larger than anticipated.

“Things are a little bit worse than had been expected,” says Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration. “Clearly, we’re going to be negative for a year or two.”

Since 1984, Social Security has raked in more in payroll taxes than it has paid in benefits, accumulating a $2.5 trillion trust fund. But because the government uses the trust fund to pay for other programs, tax increases, spending cuts or new borrowing will be required to make up the difference between taxes collected and benefits owed.

Experts say the trend points to a more basic problem for Social Security: looming retirements by Baby Boomers will create annual losses beginning in 2016 or 2017.

“The moment of truth has arrived,” says Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., top Republican on the House Budget Committee. “This is a wake-up call.”

JOBS AND THE ECONOMY: Rebound in 2010?

Social Security took in only $3 billion more in taxes last year than it paid out in benefits — a $60 billion decline from 2008, according to federal data. The slide in revenue occurred sooner than Social Security actuaries had expected, for three reasons:

• Payroll tax revenue that was growing at a 4.5% average annual clip along with wages flattened out in 2009 because of rising unemployment and pay raises that largely disappeared.

• The number of retired workers who began taking benefits increased by 20%; those taking disability jumped by 10%.

• Monthly benefits were raised 5.8% because of a spike in energy prices the year before.

Social Security was saved from bankruptcy in 1983 by a bipartisan deal that increased payroll taxes, taxed some benefits and gradually raised the retirement age to 67. That was supposed to keep the system solvent at least until 2058, but the projection has slipped to 2037.

The impact of the recession shows that “for all these projections, unexpected things happen,” says Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.. “Money has to be found to repay those trust funds.”

President George W. Bush proposed voluntary private retirement accounts in 2005, but the effort stalled in Congress. President Obama has proposed giving Social Security and other thorny fiscal issues to a bipartisan commission.

From the Desk of Congressman Todd Akin

Dear Missouri Friend:

What is your share of the national debt? Would you believe that Congress just raised it’s own credit limit again – and your share of the bill will be $46,319 by the time they are done spending?

On Thursday, I voted against increasing Congress’s debt limit (the amount that Congress can spend our country into debt) and I introduced legislation to make it more difficult for Congress to keep raising its debt limit. I blogged about how it is necessary to force Congress to take responsibility for out-of-control spending: “Congress needs every possible incentive to get its fiscal house in order. My resolution requires that a debt limit increase be voted on separately – not hidden in another bill. And, with a super-majority requirement, raising the debt will not be quite so simple.”

On Wednesday, I went down to the House floor to discuss the President’s new budget. In case you missed it, my staff has put together parts of that discussion on YouTube for you to watch. While we are still not finished reviewing the new budget, the big picture is clear. This budget will raise the deficit to a record level: $1.6 trillion and 10.6% of our nation’s gross domestic product. It will double the national debt in five years. By 2020, the interest on our debt will reach $840 billion. In addition, this budget raises taxes by $2 trillion. Even as our current entitlement spending is ballooning out of control, the White House has added brand new entitlements to this budget, including $1 trillion for government run healthcare.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the President’s budget, the debt limit increase or any other subject.

Sincerely,

W. Todd Akin

P.S. The 2010 Congressional Art Competition for high schoolers is coming up soon. If you know a talented student who lives in the 2nd District, invite them to complete a student entry form on my website and submit their work for this exciting event.

Congressman Todd Akin
http://www.house.gov/akin
202-225-2561 – Washington
314-590-0029 – St. Louis
117 Cannon HOB
Washington, DC 20515

The crooked judges of Amsterdam

Geert Wilders, A member of Holland’s House of Parlement, gave a speech to that house. Trying to save his Country. Trying to save his Country from Islamification. Geert Wilders is now on Trial for Hate Speech. It seems Holland / the netherlands is quite abit more progressive than the u.s.a. You can read the Geert Wilders Speech Here; https://spikestl.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/geert-wilders-speech-to-hollands-parliament/
Free Speech, We take it for granted, Islam takes it from all who are not Islam.