It’s Tuesday, November 29th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens offers yet another reason Newt will never get our vote:

The Great Global Warming Fizzle

The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.

How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.

Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it’s worth asking what.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

This week, the conclave of global warming’s cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes “catastrophic and irreversible,” according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent’s heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. “Green” technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don’t die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.

That’s where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the “hide the decline” emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.

But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren’t going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn’t turning green. Florida isn’t going anywhere.

The reply global warming alarmists have made to these disclosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its “watered down” predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn’t end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that’s another way religions die.

Only false religions, Bret….only the false ones!  As for Newt, he’s an amateur paleontologist; thus, HE….

….know better!  Just ask him.

Next up, courtesy of Speed Mach, George Will’s tongue-in-cheek list of things for which we should be thankful:

No time like our own

Reasons aplenty to be amused, bemused

 “People who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”

Doris Day, 87, released an album of new songs. Que sera, sera.

We can only assume Will’s gratitude is based on The Obamaos’ imminent relocation to Chicago….hence the impossibility things can get any worse.

And since we’re on the subject of things which….hopefully….can’t get much worse, here’s a forward from Carl Polizzi:

‘Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone’

Neither is the country!

For more on why the American economy is doomed to, at best, the doldrums, we go North to Alaska, where, at least as long as Team Tick-Tock’s anti-energy policies hold sway, there’s

No Bridge to Oil

North of the Arctic Circle, the tiny village of Nuiqsut, Alaska, has become the latest flash point in the struggle between oil drilling and environmentalism. The town, with a population of 400, nearly all Eskimos, sits on the edge of the Colville River and the National Petroleum Reserve, or NPR. How isolated is it? It takes four flights and eight hours to get there from Seattle.

Conoco Phillips wants to build a road bridge and pipeline over the river to connect to the nearby Alpine development, which sits just outside the NPR. But the Army Corps of Engineers rejected the plan telling, the oil company it had to go under the river.

Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar supports the Corps’ decision. “It has to be done the right way in the right place in making sure we’re taking into account environmental protections,” Salazar said.

Conoco Phillips said piping below the river is too expensive and risky. In its application, the company argued the oil coming out of the NPR would be a mix of oil, gas and water which poses a greater threat of corrosion. If pipes are underground, they’re harder to monitor if a problem arises.

The NPR, 23 million acres of North Slope wilderness, was established by President Warren Harding in 1923 for oil to fuel the U.S. Navy. While reserve estimates have been downgraded in recent years, it’s still believed to contain 900 million barrels of oil.

Conoco Phillips expects to produce up to 18,000 barrels of oil per day if it can get there. Access is poor. There are no roads, so equipment would have to be flown in, which is why there’s not a single production well in America’s National Petroleum Reserve. The bridge, which is supported by the people of Nuiqsut, was supposed to change that and the village’s 38 percent unemployment.

“This community would become a hub for the oil industry,” said Nuiqsut mayor Thomas Napageak. “I believe that would create a lot of jobs.” Napageak, 28, does not blindly support the oil interests. As a whaling captain, he opposes offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, which is a battle being fought between Shell Oil Company and environmental groups. He also sits on a committee charged with monitoring Conoco Phillips’ Alpine operation to make sure it does not harm the environment. Napageak said the company has been a responsible neighbor and has had minimal impact on Nuiqsut’s subsistence hunting and fishing.

The native Eskimos live mostly on whale, seals, caribou and fish. Napageak says a bridge across the Nigiliq channel of the Colville River would actually make it easier for natives to access their hunting grounds. But federal law doesn’t see it that way.

The EPA designated the Colville River as an aquatic resource of national importance. The Army Corps of Engineers had to take that into consideration when deciding on the bridge proposal. “We should minimize the harm to the environment,” says Col. Reinhard Koenig of the Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska. (One unaccountable bureaucrat covering for another.)

Environmentalists agree. Eric Myers of the Alaska Audubon Society has never been to Nuiqsut, but he says the Colville Delta is vital. “It’s a very important area for shorebirds. It has a large variety of habitat for fish species,” Myers said. (And a bridge would adversely impact this habitat….how?!?)

Alaska’s lone congressman, Don Young, said building a bridge into the NPR should be a no-brainer. “We have to start listening to logic,” Young said. “There’s not much logic when those interest groups don’t want this country to progress and go forward.”

For now, the issue is stalled. The Army Corps of Engineers has been asked to reconsider its opposition to the bridge. So like the Colville, which is frozen for over half the year, the bridge fight is stuck in a bureaucratic ice jam. Green groups fear a road would pave the way for massive oil development while supporters ask the question, if not in a place named the National Petroleum Reserve, then where can you drill for oil?

That would be….nowhere!  Have you ever noticed green groups always “fear”, “feel” or worry about “what if”?!?  Such substitution of baseless emotion for fact-based reality requires not a shred of proof; only the remotest potential bordering on….impossibility.

Meanwhile, having greatly over-promised and grossly underperformed, it’s time for The Dear Leader to abandon the Heartland, as the WSJ‘s William McGurn details:

Obama Abandons the Working Class

An opening for Romney, if he’s smart enough.

When President Obama visits Scranton Wednesday, he will speak at the same high school gym where Hillary Clinton kicked off her Pennsylvania campaign in March 2008. We forget it now, but even then Scranton folks were skeptical about the guy promising hope and change.

In that primary, Mr. Obama never did connect. On St. Patrick’s Day, he showed up in Scranton wearing no green until someone asked him why and he borrowed a green tie from a staffer. It didn’t help that a few weeks earlier, he had explained his inability to gain traction in Pennsylvania by accusing its small-town citizens of being “bitter” and clinging “to guns or religion.”

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, played the homecoming queen. In a speech to an overflow crowd, she spoke about the Scranton Lace Company where her grandfather worked; about the Court Street Methodist Church where she had been baptized; about the slice she’d enjoyed that afternoon at Revello’s Pizza-Café.

Mrs. Clinton’s message resonated: She won the Pennsylvania primary handily. Most telling was her strength among the non-college-educated white working class, which went for her by as much as three to one. Indeed, though Mr. Obama would go on to win Pennsylvania that November, he would still lose its white working class to Republican John McCain.

There’s a message here for Republicans for 2012. Ironically, it may have been outlined best by two Democratic strategists in a publication for the left-leaning Center for American Progress. In “The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election,” Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin made headlines for making official what everyone has known unofficially for some time: The Democratic Party is abandoning the white working class.

The timing may be a little embarrassing, appearing as it does on the eve of Mr. Obama’s visit to Scranton. Still, the authors are probably correct. For all of Joe Biden’s nostalgia about the blue-collar virtues of his home town (where he hasn’t lived since the early days of the Eisenhower administration), the coal mines shut down years ago and many in the white working class have been drifting to the Republican Party.

The authors therefore suggest that Mr. Obama’s best demographic bet for 2012 lies in holding white college graduates. They are also up front about the vulnerability. Mostly they phrase it politely—”the perceived inability of the Obama administration’s policies to spark real recovery”; “serious doubts about Democratic stewardship of the economy”; or “disenchantment on the economy.”

That shouldn’t be a hard sell in places like Scranton, where the 9.7% unemployment rate is the worst in the state. When the Obama stimulus came, Lackawanna County spent nearly half of the $39 million it received on education, which means teachers. The city has been deemed “finally distressed” for two decades, and just this month the mayor released a new budget that includes a 29% hike in property taxes.

If these citizens weren’t bitter before, they sure have reason to be now. For the white working class, the private sector was what gave them jobs and propelled them into the middle class. Yet whether it’s drilling for oil or putting up a shopping mall, today’s Democratic Party seems opposed to most of the private-sector jobs that deliver opportunity to those without a college degree. (And damn few to those with one!)

That’s an opportunity for Mitt Romney. In these hard economic times, the former Massachusetts governor could be the first Republican in history to benefit from the prejudice that Republicans are the party of business.

Put it this way. If you are a Democrat or independent who has lost confidence in Mr. Obama, what might you like about Mr. Romney? You might like that he’s proved himself successful in business. You might find that especially attractive if you are someone who has lost your job or worry that you might lose your job.

Alas for Mr. Romney, the winning message here will not come by accepting Mr. Obama’s class approach to tax relief. The way to win is by drawing distinctions—between states that welcome investment and states that drive it away; between states burdened by a politicized and overcompensated public sector and states that are not; between an approach that divides people by race and class and one that emphasizes upward mobility for all.

Above all, the way to win is by asking Americans whether they want a future for their children that looks like Texas and Indiana—or like Michigan and Illinois?

People in places like Scranton are hungry for more than a 59-point business plan. They need an economic vision rooted in an expanding private sector. Mr. Romney appreciates that his success next November would depend in good part on his ability to attract disaffected Democrats and independents. What he may not know is that this will in turn depend on whether he comes across as a successful businessman, or merely a rich one.

Mitt may make the case; the question is, can he….

….stick with it long enough for it to take effect?!?

Moving on, in this next forward from Tom Neale, The American Spectator‘s Christopher Orlet describes….

The New Welfare Swindle

Ever since I moved to the inner city one thing has puzzled me more than any other, and that is how my low-income neighbors get by. Assuming they aren’t doing anything illegal, how do they afford their homes, their meals, their gadgets, their cars?

Few seem to work, even part time, for they are home in the morning when I leave for work, home if I stop by for lunch, and home when I return in the evening. They can’t work the graveyard shift, for they keep me up half the night with their raucous music. I am left to conclude that they seldom, if ever work. Therefore, their funds must come from elsewhere. And none of them strike me as a trust fund baby.

The best I can figure is they make do with a patchwork of welfare programs. Besides, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which expires after five years, there is housing assistance, WIC (Women, Infants and Children) and Medicaid. There are food stamps, which also can be sold in parking lots for cash, and various lesser programs, such as heating assistance.

Beyond government subsidies, there is no shortage of help available from church and nonprofit groups. My mother volunteers at a pregnancy crisis center where the poor are given free diapers, clothing, and baby formula. Every day she has to turn away scammers who try to exceed their monthly allotment. Our parish sponsors a food pantry and local religious organizations provide free furniture. Meantime, nearly all of my neighbors have cable, big screen plasma TVs, and cell phones (I have none of these). From the smells that waft over our fence, many somehow afford illegal drugs.

But even with government subsidies, housing isn’t completely covered. By my reckoning my neighbors must still come up with a few hundred dollars a month for rent and miscellaneous expenses.

THEN A SOCIAL WORKER friend clued me in. Many of the poor also collect federal disability benefits in the form of Supplemental Security Insurance, or “crazy money” as it is known on the streets, since one must “act crazy” to receive it. (Not to mention anyone must be crazy to provide it!!!) Oftentimes several people in the same household — adults and children — collect checks. This surprised me, since I had never for a moment guessed that my neighbors were disabled.

SSI was enacted in 1974 to supplement the Social Security benefits of disabled low-income seniors, and, as an afterthought, to help pay for the care of severely disabled children from poor families. As with any federal program, SSI has ballooned to Hindenbergian proportions, and now covers virtually any low-income person with any long-term ailment. Not surprisingly, easy-to-fake learning, behavioral, and mental disorders are the most common complaints, especially among children, making up 55 percent of all cases.

Poor adults, who in pre-welfare reform days were offered incentives to be idle and proliferant, are again incentivized to be idle and proliferant. And what an incentive it’s been. Last year the Social Security Administration paid almost $50 billion in SSI benefits. More than $9 billion was paid to 1.2 million disabled children.

What’s more, recipients are not required to get treatment for their or their children’s maladies — although this may be a good thing, since it is doubtless harmful for kids to take powerful psychotropic drugs for counterfeit or exaggerated symptoms.

My friend visits one such family in which four members collect SSI checks, one adult and three children. One child suffers from asthma, which would probably clear up if the mother — who is unemployed — bothered to clean her house. However, she has a monetary incentive not to clean or to seek treatment for her child, for if the asthma cleared up, and this was found out (an unlikely event since SSA workers routinely fail to conduct follow up visits), that could mean one less check. Also, like the now defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children, SSI encourages dependency and is cyclical in nature. More than half who go on SSI as a child, requalify as adults. And the cycle continues.

Economically speaking, it makes perfect sense for the poor to rely on SSI. Compared to the old welfare, SSI is a plump cash cow. Here in Missouri, one of the least generous states, TANF recipients receive a measly $136 per person per month, while each SSI recipient takes home about $674. A family of four could amass $32,352 annually, not counting other benefits. Besides, since most of my neighbors dropped out of high school, there is not much they could do to earn a living other than work in fast food for minimum wage. And why put yourself through that when you can watch television all day and collect more in aid? Why bother trying to raise yourself up?

In 1988, there were 4.46 million SSI recipients. Today, there are 8 million. It is impossible to know how many of these are fakers gaming the system, but SSI recipients know no color or geographic boundary. Federal data shows that roughly half are white, half black. Nor does the phenomenon apply to all of the poor. My social worker friend visits several severely mentally handicapped persons who work menial jobs rather than accept government largess. They take pride in going to work every day and in setting a good example for their children. My neighbors would think them crazy.

Here’s the juice: after paying taxes, a hard-working, honest American citizen making $60,000/year takes home less than a irresponsible, indolent parasite can suck out of the system annually courtesy of you, the American taxpayer.  What’s wrong with this picture?!?

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll wrap things up with what’s undoubtedly the least-read book in Ireland….

Magoo