NobleKnight

"If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation...to a continuance in union... I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.' "

-- Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826)

From the page:

"Obama calls tea partiers "extremists" as they rally in Iowa, plus GOP fundraiser highlights"

"As freedom loving Americans from around Iowa headed to Des Moines this weekend, President Barack Obama was calling these same U.S. taxpayers "extremists", during an effort to rally the Democrats to pass PelosiCare. Iowa Congressmen Steve King and Tom Latham were on the front line on Capitol Hill, trying to thwart the attempted takeover of our healthcare industry.

Meanwhile, Saturday was a big day for conservatives and Republicans in the nation's most important state for Presidential elections. The Iowa Tea Party held its statewide convention, former 4-term Governor Terry Branstad held an open house in his new campaign headquarters, and 2012 Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty headlined an Iowa GOP fundraiser.

Here are my thoughts, observations, notable quotes and other interesting tidbits from the day's events:

Money for nothing: One group at the Iowa Tea Party Convention was charging $5 just to get on their mailing list. Dumb move. I declined, as did most people. Get people to join your cause, then ask for money. Not the other way around.

Smart politics: Most of the Republican gubernatorial candidates showed up at the Tea Party Convention and mingled with the crowd.

Notable observation: During his speech at the GOP fundraiser, House member and gubernatorial candidate Chris Rants made an interesting point. "The problem is there were more people (at the Tea Party Convention) than are here tonight. These are people we've lost," Rants said.

It should be noted that the Tea Party Convention was free. Tickets to the GOP fundraiser were $25. However, attendance at the fundraiser was lower than expected. Tea partiers are unhappy with almost all of their elected officials. Not just the Democrats. It is time the Republican Party paid attention.

Biggest snob: This did not happen in Iowa, but it's relevant. President Obama called the tea partiers "extremists" in front of Democrat House members. Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon said the President asked them, "Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit Democratic voters â€oeand it will encourage the extremists."

Our President believes middle-aged, middle-class, Americans who exercise their First Amendment rights are "extremists", but warns against "jumping to conclusions" when an Islamic radical commits mass murder on a U.S. base. Harvey Dent has nothing on this two-faced hypocrite."

From the page:

"How They Are Turning Off the Lights in America"

"On October 31, 2009, the once largest aluminum plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another American industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company in Montana will shut down its aluminum production because it cannot purchase the necessary electrical power to continue its operations.

How did this happen in America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability. America's industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.

America grew because of innovation and hard work by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been extinguished. Why?

Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls Aluminum.

But the real reasons are much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources of electricity other than Bonneville?

We need to look no further than the many environmental groups like the Sierra Club and to America's elected officials who turned their backs on American citizens and in essence themselves, for they too are citizens of this country. These officials bought into the green agenda promoted by the heavily funded environmental groups. Caving to pressure, they passed laws and the environmental groups filed lawsuits that began turning off the lights in America. The dominos stated to fall.

They began stopping nuclear power plants in the 1970's. They locked up much of our coal and oil resources with land laws. They passed tax credits, which forces taxpayers foot the bill for billionaire investors to save taxes by investing in less productive wind and solar energy projects.

In 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency called a meeting of atmospheric scientists and others with environmental interests. I remember well the meeting I attended in the San Francisco Bay Area. The meeting was in a theater-like lecture room with the seating curved to face the center stage and rising rapidly toward the back of the room. Attending were many atmospheric scientists whom I knew from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute and some local colleges.

The room became silent when a man walked up to the lectern. He told us that the next big national problem was global warming. He explained how human carbon dioxide emissions were trapping the earthâ€s radiation like a greenhouse and causing the atmosphere to heat beyond its normal temperature. He said this will lead to environmental disasters. He finished by saying the EPA will now concentrate its research funding toward quantifying the disasters that would be caused by our carbon dioxide.

The room was silent. I was the first to raise my hand to ask a question, "How can you defend your global warming hypothesis when you have omitted the effects of clouds which affect heat balance far more than carbon dioxide, and when your hypothesis contradicts the paper by Lee in the Journal of Applied Meteorology in 1972 that shows the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse"

He answered me by saying, "You do not know what you are talking about. I know more about how the atmosphere works than you do."

Not being one to drop out of a fight, I responded, "I know many of the atmospheric scientists in this room, and many others who are not present but I do not know you. What is your background and what makes you know so much more than me?"

He answered, "I know more than you because I am a lawyer and I work for the EPA."

After the meeting, many of my atmospheric science friends who worked for public agencies thanked me for what I said, saying they would have liked to say the same thing but they feared for their jobs."

From the page:

"Gamma-ray sources guide astronomers to pulsars
Fermi Telescope observations provide candidates to check for radio emissions"

"WASHINGTON Energetic gamma rays are providing astronomers with a new way to hunt those hard-to-find whirling dervishes known as pulsars.

"We usually have to look over the whole sky" to find pulsars, said Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. "Now we can use the gamma-ray point sources as guides, telling us exactly where to look."

Ultradense, collapsed remnants of massive stars, pulsars rotate up to hundreds of times a second and emit beacons of light that sweep across the sky like lighthouse beams. Pulsars are not only predicted to be key sources of gravitational waves the subtle ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity but their clockwork pulses can be used to detect those waves in surrounding space.

Although researchers have calculated that the Milky Way galaxy contains tens of thousands of the fastest spinning pulsars, known as millisecond pulsars, radio telescopes have found only about 100. Because these celestial bodies can reside anywhere in the galaxy, searching for millisecond pulsars was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, requiring radio surveys of the entire sky, noted Ransom, who presented his new work November 2 during the 2009 Fermi Symposium.

Last year, pulsar hunters got some encouraging news. Researchers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope demonstrated that many millisecond pulsars emit gamma rays. However, many pulsars emit so few high-energy gamma rays only 300 to 1,000 over an entire year that it has been difficult to use the gamma rays to identify the period of many of these pulsars (or even to clearly identify if any of these rapid rotators are the source of the gamma rays).

But Ransom and colleagues calculated that a significant number of the unidentified gamma-ray sources found by Fermi might turn out to be pulsars. So the researchers recently aimed a giant radio dish, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, at four of these sources and found that three were indeed radio-emitting millisecond pulsars, Ransom reported."

When will Chrissy Matthews get his sex change operation? It's clear that his personality and thought processes match those of a woman. I think he'd be much less bitter and be able to handle someone disagreeing with him. Of course he's the mirror image of all leftists. Nothing but girly men in the party, kicking people out for disagreeing. Enjoy your upcoming thrashing in 2010, all you democrat girls. Do you have any men left in your party? Stupid question, of course you don't.

From the page:

"MSNBC's Chris Matthews Visibly Frustrated After Being Taunted for Leg Tingle"

"MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Tuesday night got visibly annoyed with radio host Mark Williams for daring to bring up the Hardball host's famous assertion that Barack Obama gave him a "thrill" up his leg. After Matthews goaded Williams and suggested he didn't know the name of the Republican leadership in Congress, Williams paraphrased, "Chris, you're making my legs tingle!"

Matthews, who only seconds before had been smiling as he mocked the host, became flustered: "See, this is- this is. I'm going to- What do you mean? How is your leg? What do you mean? Your leg's tingling? I don't get what you mean- what you mean." After Williams repeated himself, Matthews shot back: "What do you mean?" [Audio available here.]
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Earlier in the segment, the radio personality cited the Republican gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia as a revolt from big government. Matthews derided that as the "wing nut line" and barked, "There are some people that believe that all their lives. They've always believed the black helicopters are coming. They've always believed somebody's coming to get their guns. They've always hated government."

Clearly, Matthews can dish out the insults, but can't take any jibes of his own.

A transcript of the November 4 segment, which aired at 12:02am EDT, follows:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let's begin with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and radio talk show host Mark Williams. Both of you, first of all, let's go through the headline of the evening, everybody's going to see it, the double header, Virginia and New Jersey, the governorships, especially that nitecap in Jersey where the Democrat, Corzine, spent so much of his own money, his own wealth, both for the Senate race and later as governor and still got yanked out of there. I'll give you the first joy of the night, Mark Williams, I know you are going to love to bite into this baby. So, go for it.

MARK WILLIAMS: Well, I think what you're seeing is the first two and a half victories of what's going to be serious change in this country's direction in 2010.

MATTHEWS: What's the two and a half? What's the half?

WILLIAMS: The half is we managed to blow out that fake Republican in upstate New York.

MATTHEWS: But, that race looks like, Mark, as we're speaking, it looks like the Democrat is ahead there

WILLIAMS: You know, I'll be happy if we walk away from that race with having slapped the Republican leadership that sat behind closed doors and selected a Working Family Party, ACORN party candidate and ran them as a token Republican. The number one problem we have in this country right now is we no longer have two parties representing two ideologies. And New York is a machine party state. You're seeing with neck and neck in New York City, too, I think you're seeing what happens when the citizenry becomes engaged and actually pays attention and goes out and votes their conscience. I don't think this is a Republican or Democrat thing, I think this is an ideological thing. People feel that their country and rights are threatened by oppressive atmosphere that they're rejecting."

From the page:

"The Democrats get lashed"

The most pathetic moment of Creigh Deeds sad campaign came toward the end, with a gauzy commercial invoking last year's Obama campaign, featuring the tag line, "We can do it again." Jon Corzine ran similar ads in the Obama idiom. But the mystical incantations of Barack Obama's name did not perform miracles. It was like watching Democrats try to kindle a campfire in the pouring rain. In the end, they were reduced to mere nostalgia. It was not much of an electoral appeal: "We'll always have Paris."

Today, national Democrats are trying their best to dismiss missing limbs as flesh wounds. It is their job. But they are in deep trouble if they believe their own spin. Compared to 12 months ago, 24 percent more Virginians voted Republican at the top of the ticket. Independents broke decisively against Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey. If this is not a backlash against Democrats, then who, exactly, was being lashed?

These losses, for the most part, donâ€t seem to be a personal repudiation of the president. But they highlight a political fact -- the political fact of the last year. In 2008, Obama won a broad, but not ideological, victory. Voters endorsed his reasoned, moderate tone in a moment of economic crisis, not the sustained, ambitious leftism of his current legislative agenda. Obama has massively overreached. During a summer of town hall discontent, and now in Virginia and New Jersey, citizens have begun to render their verdict.

A few other lessons:

* Both successful Republican candidates were conservative, but not strident or angry. They benefited from an ideological backlash against liberalism precisely because they did not adopt a scary, pitchfork populism. McDonnell, whom I saw on the campaign trail, was uniformly respectful of Obama -- even while reflecting public concerns about deficits, debt and intrusive government. He also offered a positive legislative agenda on transportation and economic growth. The Republican Party clearly needs more genial, upbeat, wonkish conservatives.

* Democrats, once again, discovered the dangers of being the first to escalate the culture war. Deeds went after McDonnell on abortion, women's rights and his ties to the religious right with persistent viciousness. But voters tend to punish candidates, from either party, who raise divisive cultural issues as the centerpieces of their campaigns. It was Deeds, not McDonnell, who ended up looking obsessed by abortion.

* Voters showed admirable maturity -- a refusal to be manipulated -- on a variety of issues beyond the culture war. Corzine's attempt to tie his opponent, Governor-elect Chris Christie, to George W. Bush fell flat. Corzine's classless attempts to call attention to Christie's girth also failed -- not least because Christie is such a good sport. (Christie observed during the campaign: "We got to spur our economy". Dunkin Donuts, International House of Pancakes, those people need to work too." Voters seemed to punish over-the-top negativity."