Archive for February 13th, 2010

Climate Change This Week: Blizzard Disrupts Bureaucracy

February 13, 2010

Granted, in Wyoming, we call it winter…

The Obama administration announced this week that it will unveil yet another bureaucratic brainchild: another new agency to study and disperse information about climate change to both the public and policy makers. Interestingly enough, the press conference announcing the agency was disrupted by the blizzard in Washington, DC, and had to be conducted via telephone.

The agency, which will be headquartered in DC, will have six directors throughout the country and will work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA head Jane Lubchenco claims that its creation is crucial to making informed decisions regarding wind power, fishing industries and coastal community planning. But NOAA is known to be in the tank for envirofascists, and there is little reason to believe that this information will be accurate.

There is humor to be found in almost any situation, however, and Republican Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) certainly found it in the snow-covered streets of Washington. He and his family used some of the 32 inches of snow that fell on the city to make an igloo. The structure, placed strategically near the Capitol, was then fitted with a sign reading “Al Gore’s New Home.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Public Works is running out of places to put the snow, settling on an empty parking lot at the edge of town where they’re building a “snow mountain.” How appropriate — things have been piling higher and deeper in the Swamp for some time now.

Naturally, warmists such as those at Time magazine are blaming global warming for the snow, though they correctly point out that “Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries.” But then, curiously, the mag admits that “while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate.” And here we thought it was settled science.

Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto concludes, “It’s true that cold weather, while providing an occasion to mock global warming, does not disprove it. But the mocking would be far less effective had global warmists not spent the past quarter-century making a mockery of the scientific method.”

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Missionaries Charged With ‘Kidnapping’

February 13, 2010

It seems that the “Puma” candidate is a toothless pussy cat that can spout off quite well, if not colorfully as we noted HERE some time back. When it comes to doing her job though? It would appear that she is just to damned busy to give a growl about American citizens that need their government…

It’s always nice when governments have their priorities in order, especially in the wake of a devastating tragedy. The Haitian government has made theirs perfectly clear — it is more important to prosecute those participating in the relief effort than to save their own citizens.

After the Jan. 12 earthquake, people around the world stepped in to help. The United States (as usual) led the charge, both through government aid and contributions of time and money by private citizens. Ten Baptist missionaries were among them, risking their own lives to travel to Haiti and pitch in. On Jan. 29, these same missionaries were arrested and charged with kidnapping — despite their claim to have had the necessary papers in order — after they tried to bring 33 Haitian orphans across the border into the Dominican Republic. There, the missionaries told authorities, the children would have been placed in another orphanage better equipped to deal with their needs.

When the attorneys for the “Baptist 10” wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, asking for her intervention on their behalf, Clinton’s icy response demonstrated precisely where her priorities are — or more accurately, are not. “Obviously,” Clinton remarked, “this is a matter for the Haitian judicial system.”

The State Department has turned a blind eye to the missionaries’ fate (if convicted, they could spend the rest of their lives in a Haitian jail), stating that it would be “highly unusual” for the secretary of state to become involved. Americans traveling to other countries to serve the cause of humanity are now aware that their efforts may be met with similar mindless cruelty, their plight with a similar cold shoulder.

At the end of the day, the injustice being committed by the Haitian government, coupled with the lack of interest and incompetence of our own, is only going to hurt the Haitians and others suffering hardships around the world.

SOURCE

Profiles of Valor: WWII Vet Louis Stamatakos

February 13, 2010

On Feb. 28, 1945, Louis Stamatakos saved a B17 Flying Fortress crew from sure disaster in the skies over Germany. The 19-year-old from Dayton, Ohio, was trained as a tail gunner and survived 31 missions over Europe with the 8th Air Force, which flew out of England. While bombing railroad yards in Kassel, Germany, on his 23rd mission, two 250-pound bombs failed to drop. One was stuck by a single shackle and the other by both shackles. “Everyone went crazy when they heard that,” Stamatakos said, “and then somebody said, ‘Hey, get the Greek, he’s been going to armament school.’ I took a look and said, ‘Well, maybe I can break them loose.'”

Break them loose he did — with a short-handled fire ax. The wind had spun a small propeller on the nose of one bomb, which armed it and meant one false move would detonate it. At 20,000 feet and 20 below zero, Stamatakos kept swinging until the shackles released both bombs. “That’s back when I was young and dumb,” said Stamatakos. Crewmate Richard Rainoldi, a retired Air Force colonel, said, “If he hadn’t done it, it was either bailing out or blowing up.”

Stamatakos’s three sons were so impressed with their dad’s story that they tracked down Rainoldi, who had been the plane’s navigator, and he gave a sworn statement that was delivered to the Army. On Christmas Eve, 2009, Stamatakos, now a retired Michigan State University professor, received a letter from the Department of the Army saying he would be awarded the Silver Star in a ceremony on Feb. 17 at Michigan’s state capitol in Lansing.

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