Quote:
Actually no she did not. She is not a candidate for office she is just an average citizen with a voice. That is often heard too, thanks to the MSM and Social Media she has a powerful one it seems to ruffle feathers when this citizen speaks out. Who or whom does she threaten on both sides of the aisle?

Did Sarah Palin Go Too Far in Wanting to Hang Jerry Sandusky?

By Mark Whittington | Yahoo! Contributor Network – Wed, Nov

COMMENTARY | Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has likely made another controversy when she suggested that if Jerry Sandusky were to be found guilty of the child molestation charges that he should be hung from a tree and that she would bring the rope.

One can almost write the narrative for the mainstream media. There goes Sarah Palin again, advocating violence. Indeed even Greta Van Sustren, a former defense attorney, seemed to be a little shocked. With the whole cross hairs map story in relation to Gabrielle Giffords being revived, the media cannot quite wean itself of the desire to flog Palin one more time. Even Giffords' husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, claims the congresswoman was "troubled" by Palin's "violent rhetoric."

There will be a couple of problems with any attempt to go after Palin for wanting to hang Sandusky.

First, she can hardly be accused of being a purveyor of "violent rhetoric" when Vice President Joe Biden recently congratulated a union crowd for "firing the first shot." There is little difference between that and Palin's often said admonition to "don't retreat, reload."

Second, nobody likes child molesters. If one were to take a poll, the overwhelming result would be that hanging would be too good for them. The often expressed cliche about child molesters being despised in prison happens to be a true one. If Sandusky does go to jail for his alleged crimes, his future is pretty bleak.

Palin's desire to string Sandusky up "if he is guilty of what is being alleged" comes, as many of her public statements do, from her being a mom. Most parents are protective of their children, Palin most of all. Her term for herself as "Mama Grizzly" is very apt indeed. One sure fire way to get Palin to react in anger is to go after one of her kids.

A clear example occurred when David Letterman suggested Palin's then-14-year-old daughter Willow might get "knocked up" by baseball player Alex Rodriguez. Palin was, understandably, not amused. One of the likely reasons Palin declined to run for the presidency this cycle was to spare her children that kind of abuse.

So, the media better be careful. If the choice is between Palin and a man who has been accused of attacking little boys in the shower, one suspects the Mamma Grizzly will come out on top.

@yahoonews on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook

Television Review http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/arts/television/too-big-to-fail-on-hbo-review.html?pagewanted=all

Economic Crisis Unfurls in Hushed Suspense

By MICHAEL KINSLEY

Published: May 22, 2011

It can’t be easy to create a financial thriller. There’s no blood, there are (usually) no bodies. How do you create excitement when most of the action consists of middle-aged white men in conservative suits talking on the phone, and the closest thing to a car chase is a stately procession of big black Town Cars? How often can you show people peering at spreadsheets and recoiling in alarm? What do you do when the scandal itself might as well be labeled “Too Complicated to Understand”? The HBO film “Too Big to Fail,” based on the book of the same name by the reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, about the financial crisis of 2008, uses every cinematic trick in the book, but ultimately succeeds because we know that the danger was real.

Macall B. Polay /HBO

Too Big to Fail, a film on HBO based on a book by Andrew Ross Sorkin, features Topher Grace, left, and William Hurt.

Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.

Macall B. Polay/HBO

Billy Crudup in the movie, directed by Curtis Hanson.

One way to create an atmosphere of crisis is simply to have your characters assert that it’s a crisis. In “Too Big to Fail,” directed by Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential”), people are always saying things like, “If we don’t do this now, we won’t have an economy on Monday.” There’s also a lot of staring soulfully through windows or into mirrors. The hero of Mr. Sorkin’s version of events, Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., played by William Hurt, indicates the terrible stress he’s under by talking ever-more softly. The Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke, played by Paul Giamatti, does the same. As things get worse, the conversation at their weekly breakfast meetings degenerates into a low rumble.

This being HBO, there is a lot of potty mouth, which is another easy adrenaline inducer. It’s hardly surprising to hear James Woods screaming obscenities in a movie, but a bit more surprising to hear them pouring from the mouth of the character he plays, Richard S. Fuld Jr., the chief executive of Lehman Brothers. Even Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, looking even more angelic as played by Billy Crudup than he looks in real life, flings around the vulgarities with abandon. That is how big a crisis it was.

Mr. Sorkin’s take on the story is the conventional one. That doesn’t make it wrong. Presidents back to Reagan overderegulated the financial industry. Borrowing became too easy, especially for houses. People got in over their heads. When they couldn’t pay back their debts, they dragged the banks (and one insurance company, A.I.G.) down with them. Finally, too late for Lehman Brothers, the government stepped in to save the banks, and the economy, from collapsing. The movie reminds us that President George W. Bush needed Democratic votes to get the necessary legislation passed, because Republicans were already demagoguing it. And “Too Big to Fail” makes clear that, in Mr. Sorkin’s view, doing nothing would have been catastrophic. The movie is heavy on the idea that saving the troubled banks required merging them with healthy banks, thus creating new institutions that are even bigger than the ones that the government rescued because they were too big (to be allowed) to fail.

This version of events is largely correct, I think, and the movie tells it with exemplary clarity. I’ve never come closer than the two minutes after watching “Too Big to Fail” to understanding what a “credit default swap” is (except possibly for an hour or so after reading Michael Lewis’s “Big Short”). The exposition can be heavy-handed. When Cynthia Nixon of “Sex and the City,” here playing the Treasury Department’s head of public affairs, asks, “What should I tell the press?,” the movie stops for several minutes so that all the men in the room can explain things to the only woman (and to us).

“Too Big to Fail” uses all the familiar “Law & Order” techniques for creating a sense of urgency on the cheap. People never seem to just sit at their desks while talking on the phone. Instead, they stride purposefully down long corridors, surrounded by a cloud of aides, barking into their BlackBerrys. And as soon as the current plot development has been taken care of, they just snap the phone shut without saying goodbye. Rude! But message conveyed: This is a crisis. There is no time for niceties.

Obnoxious, thumping music in the background can create tension and suspense, no matter how banal what’s going on in the foreground may be. The “Airplane” movies mocked this convention hilariously. In “Too Big to Fail” the hilarity is unintended, but genuine. The music behind a standard helicopter shot of Lower Manhattan leads you to expect another Sept. 11, but all you get is more men in suits, more meetings, more black Town Cars.

Part of the fun of “Too Big to Fail” is trying to recognize the famous people from Hollywood who are impersonating somewhat less famous people from Washington and Wall Street. Besides those already mentioned, there is Ed Asner as Warren E. Buffett; Tony Shalhoub as John J. Mack, chief executive of Morgan Stanley; and Evan Handler (also of “Sex and the City”) as Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein.

Bill Pullman is in a lot of movies and rarely seems to get the girl. Here, though, playing the suave Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, he is the closest thing to a romantic lead in a story with virtually no women. He doesn’t get the girl, because there is no girl to get. But even before the movie starts, he gets the securities firm Bear Stearns, with a big government subsidy, and by movie’s end he is being begged to accept more taxpayer money to take over a bank or two.

Speaking, I think, for the HBO-watching public, I would have liked to see a torrid affair between Mr. Dimon and the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde. Played by Laila Robins, she has only a brief cameo, berating Hank Paulson for allowing Lehman to go under. But it’s one of the highlights of the film when she calls him Honk. I suppose that an affair in the movie was out of the question because (as far as we know) it never happened in real life. It will be a happy moment when petty distinctions like this, between fantasies and real life, disappear for good. We’ve pretty much done it in Washington. Why is Hollywood so far behind?

TOO BIG TO FAIL

HBO, Monday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific time; 8, Central time.

Presented by HBO Films. Produced by Spring Creek Productions and Deuce Three Productions. Directed by Curtis Hanson ; written by Peter Gould, based on the book “Too Big to Fail” by Andrew Ross Sorkin; Mr. Hanson, Paula Weinstein and Jeffrey Levine, executive producers; Carol Fenelon, co-executive producer; Ezra Swerdlow, producer; Mr. Gould and Mr. Sorkin, co-producers; Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, consultants.

WITH: William Hurt (Henry M. Paulson Jr.), Ed Asner (Warren E. Buffett), Billy Crudup (Timothy F. Geithner), Paul Giamatti (Ben S. Bernanke), Topher Grace (Jim Wilkinson), Matthew Modine (John Thain), Cynthia Nixon (Michele Davis), Michael O’Keefe (Chris Flowers), Bill Pullman (Jamie Dimon), Tony Shalhoub (John J. Mack), Evan Handler (Lloyd C. Blankfein), Laila Robins (Christine Lagarde) and James Woods (Richard S. Fuld Jr.).

Michael Kinsley is a senior editorial adviser for Bloomberg View, a new opinion section of Bloomberg News.

Well now wasn't that interesting? Now it is hard to understand when you are not really sure what the crisis is they are trying to work through. I think this video may help you.

Understanding The Financial Crisis--For Kids and Grownups

Quote:
Hello Jim,

It is a shame that Sarah decided not to stand for President but thought I would still share this video from Ray Stevens for your enjoyment anyway. LOL

Quote:
Actually no she did not. She is not a candidate for office she is just an average citizen with a voice. That is often heard too, thanks to the MSM and Social Media she has a powerful one it seems to ruffle feathers when this citizen speaks out. Who or whom does she threaten on both sides of the aisle?

Did Sarah Palin Go Too Far in Wanting to Hang Jerry Sandusky?

By Mark Whittington | Yahoo! Contributor Network – Wed, Nov

COMMENTARY | Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has likely made another controversy when she suggested that if Jerry Sandusky were to be found guilty of the child molestation charges that he should be hung from a tree and that she would bring the rope.

One can almost write the narrative for the mainstream media. There goes Sarah Palin again, advocating violence. Indeed even Greta Van Sustren, a former defense attorney, seemed to be a little shocked. With the whole cross hairs map story in relation to Gabrielle Giffords being revived, the media cannot quite wean itself of the desire to flog Palin one more time. Even Giffords' husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, claims the congresswoman was "troubled" by Palin's "violent rhetoric."

There will be a couple of problems with any attempt to go after Palin for wanting to hang Sandusky.

First, she can hardly be accused of being a purveyor of "violent rhetoric" when Vice President Joe Biden recently congratulated a union crowd for "firing the first shot." There is little difference between that and Palin's often said admonition to "don't retreat, reload."

Second, nobody likes child molesters. If one were to take a poll, the overwhelming result would be that hanging would be too good for them. The often expressed cliche about child molesters being despised in prison happens to be a true one. If Sandusky does go to jail for his alleged crimes, his future is pretty bleak.

Palin's desire to string Sandusky up "if he is guilty of what is being alleged" comes, as many of her public statements do, from her being a mom. Most parents are protective of their children, Palin most of all. Her term for herself as "Mama Grizzly" is very apt indeed. One sure fire way to get Palin to react in anger is to go after one of her kids.

A clear example occurred when David Letterman suggested Palin's then-14-year-old daughter Willow might get "knocked up" by baseball player Alex Rodriguez. Palin was, understandably, not amused. One of the likely reasons Palin declined to run for the presidency this cycle was to spare her children that kind of abuse.

So, the media better be careful. If the choice is between Palin and a man who has been accused of attacking little boys in the shower, one suspects the Mamma Grizzly will come out on top.

@yahoonews on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook

Climategate II: Emails Provide Early Christmas for Manmade Global Warming Deniers

Sometimes the holiday season does come early. For the Green Grinches intent on stealing our freedom, along with a whole lot of our dough, a bevy of swiped email gifts being dubbed Climategate II released near midnight the 21st promise a different kind of Cyber Monday for the multi-billion dollar climate fraud industry.

Among the Who-pudding and roast beast is a feast of political-scientific incest exposing the lucrative business of warm-mongering. The examples are many, but a sit down with a cup of coffee and an eye to examining the political assumptions behind the climate “science” can be revelatory for even the non-specialist (like all of those lawyers and rights activists who participated in the first IPCC).

This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, considering that even an esteemed organization like the Union of Concerned Scientists (remember “nuclear winter,” anyone?), while commenting on the significance of the IPCC, blatantly confesses that politics is involved in much of the climate “science” being produced:

Therefore, governments—as the key stakeholders in these negotiations—play an essential role in the [AR4] report’s production. Government representatives propose authors and contributors, participate in the review process, and help reach a consensus on the report’s major findings. This can result (especially in the SPMs) in language that is sometimes weaker than it otherwise might be.

But it also means that governments cannot easily criticize or dismiss a report that they themselves have helped shape and approved during political negotiations. As Sir John Houghton, co-chair of TAR Working Group I, once put it: “Any move to reduce political involvement in the IPCC would weaken the panel and deprive it of its political clout [emphases mine]. . . . If governments were not involved, then the documents would be treated like any old scientific report. They would end up on the shelf or in the waste bin.

With that in mind, here are some of the faux-diamonds in an email treasure trove littered with glass:

<1583> Wilson:

any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These many [sic - probably "may"] be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.

Striking here is the use of the word “honest.” It’s not easy to dismiss the argument that the scientist knows he is being dishonest by excluding data that introduce more error, and thus more uncertainty, into the models. It is important to remember that he is communicating to colleagues in a presumed peer review process that is founded on honesty and transparency. Instead what we see is a tacit political motivation to make the model reconstructions appear more certain than he knows them to be.

A more explicitly political email:

<2495> Humphrey/DEFRA:

I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.

So the government is interested in the “scientific” project because it is a “message that the Government [love the G capitalization - as in G-d] can give on climate change to help them tell their story”? Then the scientists are sensitive to how the government wants the story to be told? This is science? Whatever happened to using rigorous scientific methods to try to come to the truth about what is going on, to the extent that it is possible to be objective, as can be assessed through replication with the aim of falsification, and then letting politicians explain why the findings are significant? That would be too much like democratic deliberation though, I suppose, and we wouldn’t want any of that messy democracy to get in the way of the politicians’ and technocrats’ scheming to micro-manage every aspect of human life, would we?

And still more isolated emails:

<3066> Thorne: I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

A bit of honesty for a change. That’s refreshing.

<2884> Wigley: Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

Trouble in consensus paradise?

<4755> Overpeck: The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.

Now that is some rotten cherry-picking. And you would think the memo would have gotten around about using the word “trick.”

<3456> Overpeck:

I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about “Subsequent evidence” [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?

Lots of green bucks and no bang.

<2009> Briffa:

I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!

It’s hard to toe the grant party line sometimes.

<2775> Jones: I too don’t see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones certainly will not as we’re choosing the periods to show warming.

That’s hot.

<0813> Fox/Environment Agency: if we loose the chance to make climate change a reality to people in the regions we will have missed a major trick in REGIS.

Make it a reality? Climate changes on its own, and doesn’t need a PR firm to announce it. And there’s that’s “trick” word again.

<1485> Mann: the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.

Maybe we should have a Climate Science/Public Relations Double PhD. program set up so warmists can wear two hats at the same time?

Kjellen:

I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming

Nothing says crisis like an amalgamous statement that “climate changes.” Just drop the “change” for the sake of eliminating redundancy, and let’s just say “climate.”

The truth is that man contributes a minuscule amount to the greenhouse effect, taking DOE figures and extrapolating out the basic math, we are talking about a .30% contribution. If you want to throw hundreds of billions of dollars, if not several trillions in the future, away on that feel free to contribute to that yourself. But if we are asking government to enforce policies based on this scam, then we are also trading away our economic liberty, and indeed, the management of our own lives away, just so that climate fraudsters can get rich and politicians can assume even more control over us.

To quote Carl Sagan:

“Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not as great.”

It is high time for the manmade climate change “consensus” to start backing up its claims by providing more substantiated evidence to the public, which will be cross-examined by other scientists with a mind to getting to the truth of the matter, rather than simply ratifying the preferences of their political backers. Such would spell the end of the manmade climate change “crisis,” which in any event has been dragging on for decades now, with no discernible apocalypse in sight.