…they don’t even have a plan on how to get them! Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) insisted this weekend that she “will be able to get the votes needed to pass sweeping health care legislation in the House.” What this really means is that she does not have those votes right now. And if you were watching the television yesterday it quickly became apparent that the leadership in the House has no idea how they are going to get them. First Speaker Pelosi on This Week:
VARGAS: If — but the point is when it does finally come to vote on it in the House, you’re certain that you can muster the 217 votes that you need…even with the differences over abortion language? Things…
PELOSI: Yes.
VARGAS:… that there are members of the House who voted in favor of it before, who are now saying, “We can’t vote for this bill, because of the Senate language on abortion?
PELOSI: Well let me say I have this in three — just so you know how we sequence this. First we zero in on what the policy will be. And that is what we’ll be doing — following the president’s summit yesterday.
Secondly, we’ll see what the Senate can do. What is the substance? And what is the Senate prepared to do? And then we’ll go to the third step as to what my — my members will vote for.
Meanwhile, Pelosi’s second-in-command, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) was singing a different tune on Face the Nation:
BOB SCHIEFFER: We’re back now with our panel. Steny Hoyer, there’s been a lot of back and forth. Senators say the House has to go first. Some in the House are reluctant to go before the Senate goes. Are you, number one, willing to go first and don’t you have to?
REPRESENTATIVE STENY HOYER: We– whether we’re willing or not, we have to go first if we’re going to correct some of the things that the House disagrees with, correct, change so that we can reach agreement, the House will have to move first on some sort of corrections or reconciliation bill
Tomorrow, NBC (which is owned by General Electric) will begin broadcasting the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver, Canada. Only two events are scheduled for the opening day (alpine skiing and ski jumping), but even those events will be difficult to pull off. Why? There is no snow in Vancouver. And International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge knows exactly what is to blame: global warming. Rogge tells AFP: “Global warming of course is a worry, it is a worry for the entire world.”
Considering that NBC/GE has already received billions in TARP bailout cash from the Obama administration and is actively lobbying for a global warming energy tax bill so that it can receive billions more in government green-energy subsidies on top of the millions it already receives, we are sure to hear lots from NBC announcers about how the lack of snow in Vancouver is just another reason Washington needs to act now to stop global warming.
But back in Washington, the global warming scare-monger crowd is singing a slightly different tune. Facing record snowfalls, Time is reporting: “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change.” But do not confuse this headline with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s column from two years ago claiming that global warming was causing “anemic winters” in the Washington region.
No snow, too much snow. It does not matter to the enviroleft crowd. For them, global warming always is to blame. That is the whole reason the movement made a deliberate decision earlier this decade to stop calling it “global warming” and start calling it “climate change.” That way they could expand the universe of terrible things they could plausibly blame on global warming. One British citizen even maintains a comprehensive list of everything the enviroleft has tried to blame on global warming including: Atlantic ocean less salty, Atlantic ocean more salty, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning faster, fish bigger, fish shrinking, and (most importantly) beer better, beer worse.
The media are not the only ones complicit in the climate fear industry. The 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which is the most prestigious scientific body charged with determining what is and is not settled science) has also been found to be cooking the books. In just the past year, the IPCC’s 2007 report has been exposed for overstating the science on glacier loss in the Himalayas, crop loss in Africa, Amazon rain forest depletion and damage from weather catastrophes.
Here is what we do know: the cap-and-trade system in Europe is completely failing to reduce carbon emissions; the cap-and-trade system proposed here in the United States would do nothing to affect global temperatures, but would do trillions of dollars of damage to the U.S. economy.
Something to think about while you shovel out your driveway today.
Quick Hits:
- The military will formally discipline at least six officers for failing to take action against Maj. Nidal Hasan’s increasing Islamist radicalization before his deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood.
- In the wake of contradictory public statements from President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) said he would now tape-record all future calls with Brennan so that Brennan could not misrepresent the conversations later.
- In an effort to head-off huge opposition demonstrations planned for Thursday, the Iranian authorities on Wednesday drastically slowed Internet service and shut down text messaging services.
- The Obama administration is cutting $55 million in drug trafficking prevention aid to Colombia.
- With the governments of Portugal, Spain, Italy and now Greece all spending more than they can afford, Germany is beginning to doubt its role in the European Union.