Happy Honduras Day!!

The new President of Honduras is in office today. Porfirio Lobo.

The exPresident of Honduras is moving to the Dominican Republic today.

The military of Honduras has been exonerated in court today.

(the Washington Post continues to asininely report the events of last summer as a “coup”) (dumbasses)
Somehow in the news of record the military leaders were both a) found innocent of abuse of power and b) granted amnesty . Again – dumbasses, the only amnesty granted and received was by the weasel Zelaya.

The country’s institutions moved quickly this week to put the coup behind. On Tuesday, a Supreme Court judge found six generals innocent of abuse of power charges for ordering soldiers to escort Zelaya out of the country at gunpoint. Court President Jorge Rivera said in a statement that “prosecutors failed to prove the military chiefs acted with malice.”

Hours later, Congress voted to approve amnesty for both the military and Zelaya, who had been charged with abuse of power and treason over his defiance of a Supreme Court order to cancel a referendum on changing Honduras’ constitution.

Please read LaGringa for your accurate Honduras news.

Best of luck to Mr. Lobo!

Who to Believe…..

Der Spiegel concerning worsening storms due to global warming (the bold is mine):

At the IPCC report, the damage associated with such events “are very likely to increase due to increased frequencies and intensities of some extreme weather events” (italics in original). The report cites as evidence a study that supposedly demonstrates precisely this trend.

The only problem is that the study in question had not been subjected to outside peer review before the IPCC report went to press. This has since been done, and the conclusions are surprising: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses,” read the report published in the compendium “Climate Extremes and Society.”

Roger Pielke, a leading expert in this field, wrote in his blog: “The claims were not just wrong. The claims were based on knowledge that just doesn’t exist.”

National Geographic?

The U.S. Southeast and the Bahamas will be pounded by more very intense hurricanes in the coming decades due to global warming, a new computer model suggests.

And now we hear the besides all the glaciers melting, whoops, maybe not, we get the Amazon forest disappearing due to global warming based on data from the World Wildlife Fund!!!

he IPCC claimed that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by “tropical savannas” if temperatures continued to rise.

This claim is backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF. Indeed the two authors are not even scientists or specialists on the Amazon: one is an Australian policy analyst, the other a freelance journalist for the Guardian and a green activist.

The WWF has yet to provide any scientific evidence that 40% of the Amazon is threatened by climate change — as opposed to the relentless work of loggers and expansion of farms.

Unbelievable.

I went to a deal put on by Wild Earth Guardians last night concerning predators and their relationship with ecology. There were some dramatic looks at how the reintroduction of predators can restore ecosystems. The group is a good group. They buy up grazing permits and are looking to have public lands not be kept public for the purpose of livestock operators. I don’t disagree.

BUT – when one of the speakers mentioned that the reintroduction of wolves has not reduced the amount of elk for hunters, she could have easily lost me in an instant. We know this isn’t true. Anything said after that suddenly becomes suspect. I let her know the folly of her ways, but I sincerely doubt the whole eco movement will suddenly shift from sensationalism to science (the real stuff) because there is too much money on the line.

On the Spending Freeze

I’ll be curious what money Obama will be using for his new programs that he’ll be offering tonight. But since the freeze doesn’t start until “tomorrow”, everything is copacetic.

In the meantime Gateway Pundit has the best discussion [actually, no need to discuss, just state] statement copied here in full as a response to Nancy Pelosi being Nancy Pelosi.

For the record, during the Bush years, despite the 2000 Recession, the attacks on 9-11, the stock market scandals, Hurricane Katrina, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush Administration was able to reduce the budget deficit from 412 billion dollars in 2004 to 162 billion dollars in 2007, a sixty percent drop. In 2004 the federal budget deficit was 412 billion dollars. In 2005 it dropped to 318 billion dollars. In 2006 the deficit dipped to 248 billion dollars. And, in 2007 it fell below 200 billion to 162 billion dollars. During the Bush years the average unemployment rate was 5.2 percent, the economy saw the strongest productivity growth in four decades and there was robust GDP growth. These were amazing accomplishments considering the unexpected challenges. You certainly didn’t read much about this in the press.

But, things changed in 2007. Democrats took over Congress, gas prices started to rise, and at the end of the year and into 2008 several financial institutions started to crumble as the housing bubble began to burst. Of course, it should be noted that President Bush publicly called for the reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 17 times in 2008 alone before Congress acted. Democrats, on the other hand, blocked reform numerous times. It was later reported after the 2008 election that Bush had nothing to do with the financial crisis. Hoover Institution visiting fellow Scott S. Powell wrote in Barron’s in February of 2009 that the present crisis began in the 1970s, during the Carter administration, with passage of the Community Reinvestment Act to stem bank redlining and liberalize lending in order to extend home ownership in lower-income communities. This risk was acknowledged in the Bush administration’s first fiscal-year budget, released in April 2001. Sadly these warnings were ignored by Congress.