January 26, 2012


IS USDA’S NEW PLANTING MAP FORCING A GLOBAL WARMING AGENDA?

USDA Releases New Plant Hardiness Map
USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (Image: USDA)
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released an updated guide for the color-coded map of planting zones often seen on the back of seed packets. Half of the cities included on the guide are now in warmer zones, which many are saying reflects global warming.
The headline used by the Associated Press was “New map for what to plant reflects global warming”.
But AP reports later in the article that USDA spokeswoman Kim Kaplan, who was on the team that created the map, didn’t want the new zones on the to be associated with global warming. AP reports Kaplan as saying even though some areas of the country are now in warmer zones, the map “is simply not a good instrument” to be used to support global climate change. Kaplan says this is because the map is based on the coldest days of the year, not average temperatures.
On the flip side, AP goes on to report David Wolfe, a professor of plant and soil ecology at Cornell University, as saying that the map clearly reflects global warming:
The revised map “gives us a clear picture of the ‘new normal’ and will be an essential tool for gardeners, farmers and natural resource managers as they begin to cope with rapid climate change,” Wolfe said in an email.
According to USDA’s press release, which does not mention the words “global warming” or “climate change,” this update to the plant hardiness zone map comes two decades after the last update in 1990. The new version of the map includes 13 zones, with the addition for the first time of zones 12 (50-60 degrees F) and 13 (60-70 degrees F). Each zone is a 10-degree Fahrenheit band, further divided into A and B 5-degree Fahrenheit zones.
AP points out that entire states, such as Ohio, Nebraska and Texas, are now in warmer zones. Here are some examples AP uses to show the changes in zones:
For example, Des Moines used to be in zone 5a, meaning the lowest temperature on average was between minus 15 and minus 20 degrees. Now it’s 5b, which has a lowest temperature of 10 to 15 degrees below zero. Jerry Holub, manager of a Des Monies plant nursery, said folks there might now be able to safely grow passion flowers.
Griffin, Ga., used to be in zone 7b, where the coldest day would average between 5 and 10 degrees. But the city is now in zone 8a, averaging a coldest day of 10 to 15 degrees. So growing bay laurel becomes possible. It wasn’t recommended on the old map.
The new guide also uses better weather data and offers more interactive technology. For example, gardeners using the online version can enter their ZIP code and get the exact average coldest temperature.
Also, for the first time, calculations include more detailed factors such as prevailing winds, the presence of nearby bodies of water, the slope of the land, and the way cities are hotter than suburbs and rural areas.
The press release states that the new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. This is mostly a result of using temperature data from a longer and more recent time period; the new map uses data measured at weather stations during the 30-year period 1976-2005. In contrast, the 1990 map was based on temperature data from only a 13-year period of 1974-1986.
The Associated Press contributed to this report

36 Obama aides owe $833,000 in back taxes

Posted 08:18 AM ET
Pete Souza / White House (Obama addresses his White House staff, file)
Pete Souza / White House (Obama addresses his White House staff, file)
How embarrassing this must be for President Obama, whose major speech theme so far this campaign season has been that every single American, no matter how rich, should pay their "fair share" of taxes.
Because how unfair -- indeed, un-American -- it is for an office worker like, say, Warren Buffet's secretary to dutifully pay her taxes, while some well-to-do people with better educations and higher incomes end up paying a much smaller tax rate.
Or, worse, skipping their taxes altogether.
A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven't paid any share, let alone their fair share.
Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama's White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That's up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration's last year.
Nearly one-third of Obama's aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each. 
The IRS' 2010 delinquent tax revelations come as part of a required annual agency report on federal employees' tax compliance. Turns out, an awful lot of folks being paid by taxpayers are not paying their own income taxes.
The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That's up 3% in the past year.
That scale of delinquency could annoy voters, hard-pressed by their own costs, fears and stubbornly high unemployment despite Joe Biden's many promises.
The tax offenders include employees of the U.S. Senate who help write the laws imposed on everyone else. They owe $2.1 million. Workers in the House of Representatives owe $8.5 million, Department of Education employees owe $4.3 million and over at Homeland Security, 4,697 workers owe about $37 million. Active duty military members owe more than $100 million.
The Treasury Department, where Obama nominee Tim Geithner had to pay up $42,000 in his own back taxes before being confirmed as secretary, has 1,181 other employees with delinquent taxes totaling $9.3 million.
As usual, the Postal Service, with more than 600,000 workers, has the most offenders (25,640), who also owe the most -- almost $270 million. Veterans Affairs has 11,659 workers owing the IRS $151 million while the Energy Department that was so quick to dish out more than $500 million to the Solyndra folks has 322 employees owing $5 million.
The country's chief law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, has 2,069 employees who are nearly $17 million behind in taxes. Like Operation Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder has apparently missed them too.
As with ordinary people, the IRS attempts to negotiate back-tax payment plans with all delinquents, whose names cannot be released. But according to current federal law, the only federal employees who can be fired for not paying taxes are IRS workers.

SOROS ‘SUPPOSES’ HE‘S ONE OF LENIN’S ‘USEFUL IDIOTS’

While in Davos for the World Economic Forum, billionaire currency speculator and philanthropist George Soros took the time to sit down for a Reuters’ interview with Chrystia Freeland.
During the interview, Soros explains why there wouldn’t be much difference for Wall Street between President Obama and Mitt Romney. He also tells Chrystia Freeland why his billionaire counterparts see him as a “traitor to his class.”
“You were a very early supporter of President Barack Obama. What report card do you give him now?” Freeland asks.
“I think I’m not the only one who’s been slightly disappointed and I continue to support him, actually, in view of the alternative,” Soros replies.
“The Republicans or any particular Republican?”
“Well, look, either you’ll have an extremist conservative — be it Gingrich or Santorum — in which case I think it would make a big difference which of the two comes in,” Soros said.
“If it’s between Obama and Romney, there is all that much difference – except for the crowd that they bring with them. Romney would have to take Gingrich or Santorum as a Vice President and you’ll probably have some pretty extreme candidates for the Supreme Court. So that’s the downside.”
“And the other side, the Obama administration, is a bit exhausted, so it’s not all that strong. So it won’t be that great a difference and I think there won’t be a great deal of enthusiasm on either side of the battleground. It’ll be more civilized than the previous elections have been.”
“Or,” Soros adds, “you’ll have an extremist candidate then I think there’ll be a lot of emotion on both sides.”
The conversation then turns from discussing the possible Republican presidential nominee, to what Freeland believes is the major difference between former governor Romney and President Obama: the taxation of the “one percent.”
“That is the big difference,” Soros says, “And that has led my hedge fund community to abandon Obama in favor of any Republican because they don’t like to be taxed. I personally believe that when it comes to policy, you shouldn’t be pursuing self-interest, but the public interest. And I think that the income differentials are too wide and ought to be narrowed.”
“Are you one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ in the view of your fellow hedge fund billionaires to be making this sort of argument?” Freeland asked.
“Well, I suppose so,” Soros says with a smile. “I’m a traitor to my class”
See the ReutersTV interview:
Two points should be made:
First, the term “useful idiot,” as Freeland notes, is commonly attributed to the Communist dictator Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It’s normally used to describe Communist sympathizers in the West: “useful” because they advance Communist ideology, “idiots” because they contribute to their own downfall.
Did Freeland just accuse George Soros of sympathizing with Communist ideology — and he agreed?
Secondly, many critics doubt the sincerity of Soros’ “concern” with “income inequality.” In fact, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh claims that it’s all part of a self-preserving façade:
“Why? Why are all these rich guys all of a sudden so liberal? Buffett, Gates.” Folks, there’s a simple answer: The filthy rich will SAY they are liberal — they will do things in public that reflect that they might be liberal — to keep the peasants with the pitchforks away from ‘em.
It’s all a game! Have you ever heard of a family called the Kennedys? Have you ever heard of a family called the Rockefellers? Every filthy rich individual or family must spout, support, do (in public) liberal stuff. It is how they convince people that their wealth is justified and is untouchable. It is a protection mechanism. It is to keep the Occupy Wall Street crowd off of their front yards and instead on the front yards of people that work at AIG. That’s all it is. And these filthy rich people who claim publicly and do in public liberal things are simply engaged in 100% acts of public relations. It accomplishes two things. It keeps the hordes away from you.
When the president comes up and suggests that the rich aren’t paying their fair share, they never say it about Buffett. Why? ‘Cause he says it about himself. “Yeah, Warren Buffett, he gets it! That’s absolutely right. Bill Gates, he gets it.” So, they’re left alone. The hordes, the peasants with the pitchforks never seek them out. The second thing that happens is that in many cases they end up being loved for it. The Kennedys were loved because it was thought that all they cared about was the poor, and the Kennedys never used their own money to fix any of this stuff. No liberal ever does. They always use everybody else’s. But that’s why they do this stuff. It’s pure public relations. It also justifies earning more. All you have to do is say, “I’m not paying enough!”


Bill Clinton's drive to increase homeownership went way too far

Posted by: Peter Coy on February 27, 2008
bill clinton.jpgAdd President Clinton to the long list of people who deserve a share of the blame for the housing bubble and bust. A recently re-exposed document shows that his administration went to ridiculous lengths to increase the national homeownership rate. It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. It’s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place.
President Bush continued the practices because they dovetailed with his Ownership Society goals, and of course Congress was strongly behind the push. But Clinton and his administration must shoulder some of the blame.
In writing this blog entry, I’m following the lead of Joseph R. Mason, who is a finance professor at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and a consultant at Criterion Economics. Here is a link to a piece that he wrote on Feb. 26.
The Clinton-era document that Mason cites—“The National Homeownership Strategy: Partners in the American Dream”—was hiding in plain sight
on the website of the Department of Housing & Urban Development until last year, when according to Mason it was removed (probably because the housing bust made it seem embarrassing to the department). Mason credits Joshua Rosner of Graham Fisher & Co. with saving a copy of it before it was expunged.
The National Homeownership Strategy began in 1994 when Clinton directed HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to come up with a plan, and Cisneros convened what HUD called a "historic meeting" of private and public housing-industry organizations in August 1994. The group eventually produced a plan, of which Mason sent me a PDF of Chapter 4, the one that argues for creative measures to promote homeownership.
The very worst idea in the plan, which fortunately never gained approval, was to let first-time homebuyers freely tap their IRA and 401(k) retirement-savings plans with no penalty to scrounge up a downpayment. That, HUD estimated, would have "benefited" 600,000 families in the first five years.
Plenty of other ideas in the plan did become reality, though. Knowing what we know now about the housing bust, the earnest language in the document seems faintly ridiculous. Here's an excerpt. Read it closely and you can see the seeds of disaster being planted:
For many potential homebuyers, the lack of cash available to accumulate the required downpayment and closing costs is the major impediment to purchasing a home. Other households do not have sufficient available income to to make the monthly payments on mortgages financed at market interest rates for standard loan terms. Financing strategies, fueled by the creativity and resources of the private and public sectors, should address both of these financial barriers to homeownership.
Note the praise for "creativity." That kind of creativity in stretching boundaries we could use less of. Mason puts it well: "It strikes me as reckless to promote home sales to individuals in such constrained financial predicaments."

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IS SOROS CONNECTED TO NEW GLOBAL WARMING WEBSITE TARGETING METEOROLOGISTS?

Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical Meteorologists
(Image: Forecast the Facts)
A website — Forecast the Facts – devoted to calling out weather forecasters who aren’t convinced of man-made global warming and informing them about “the most important weather story of our lifetime” launched Sunday.
In addition to drawing criticism from some meteorologists, the site also seems to have a curious connection with billionaire George Soros.
Michael Lewis and Anthony Watts write on the Watt’s Up With That? (WUWT) blog that Forecast the Facts partner, Citizen’s Engagement Laboratory — a “non-profit, non-partisan organization that uses digital media and technology to amplify the voices of underrepresented constituencies” — has received funding from George Soros in the past.
Receiving a tip from a reader identified as Jan, Watts — a former meteorologist with 25 years of on air experience who runs the blog as commentary on the “puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news” — along with Lewis, his co-author for this post who holds a Ph.D., show that Soros donated money to CEL and “its projects, Color of Change (CoC) and Presenté.”
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical Meteorologists
Screenshot of a grant found under one of Soros' initiatives on his Open Society Foundations website.
CEL is co-directed by  James Rucker, who co-founded Color of Change with Van Jones in 2005 to help “strengthen Black America’s political voice”.
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical MeteorologistsAccording to the press release, Forecast the Facts was established to “pressure TV meteorologists to inform their viewers about climate change”
Forecast the Facts went live on Sunday to coordinate with the timing of the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in the hopes of gaining signatures from the association to “pass a strong statement on climate change” — its current statement is set to expire Feb. 1.
“This is an important moment in the history of the AMS,” Daniel Souweine, the campaign’s director, said in the release. “It’s well known that large numbers of meteorologists are climate change deniers. It’s essential that the AMS Council resist pressure from these deniers and pass the strong statement currently under consideration.”
According to the Forecast the Facts website, a little more than 50 percent of meteorologists “deny human-induced climate change.”
Among other things, what Watts and Lewis take issue with the fact that CEL, a Forecast the Facts partner along with 350.org and League of Conservation Voters, in that it states it is a “non-partisan organization”, when they find it clearly has some partisan undertones. The WUWT post notes that CEL is located in a building in Berkeley, Calif., that describes the organization as with “key progressive messages”.
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical Meteorologists
Screenshot of CEL's description on the website of the building within which it is located.
Looking at web servers with the same domain IP address as Forecast the Facts, the authors state, “you discover a whole flock of political activist websites” (see their screenshot below).
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical Meteorologists
WUWT screenshot of the reverse IP domain check for Forecast the Facts.
WUWT notes the following about some of the organizations in the list above:
Turn Off Fox, “bastadobbs” (to get Lou Dobbs fired from CNN), occupyhomes ( an occupywallstreet spinoff), and trail2010 (a website pushing a vote for the Dream Act) are just a few of the “non-partisan” websites run by the same outfit on the same server.
Watts and Lewis believe that the campaign to educate meteorologists on man-made climate change “is Big Money come to the service of shadowy figures in the background of international politics and economics.”
In a response to criticism about the campaign, Forecast the Facts has written that “when the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Military, and the insurance industry all agree that humans are a leading cause of climate change, when prediction after prediction of climate models is borne out, when highly trained and incredibly learned professionals tell us that the window for action is closing, and when the effects of inaction are going to negatively impact millions if not billions of lives, it is simply not acceptable for professional journalists (that is, after all, what broadcast meteorologists are) to refuse to inform their viewers of this information, or worse to say that these things that directly contradict these facts. ”
Forecast the Facts compares meteorologists avoiding what it considers widely held climate science to doctors refusing to tell patients that smoking does not cause lung cancer. Forecast the Facts states that it sees the American Meteorological Association as having a responsibility to address the issue of climate change strongly in its new statement as many broadcast meteorologists are its members:
[....] in our eyes, there is only one way for them to appropriately comport themselves — quickly pass a statement that is consistent with the current scientific consensus, and then vigorously promote that statement to their members. Anything short of this would be a derilection of their duty as a scientific association.
Forecast the Fact is identifying meteorologists‘ position on climate change and is encouraging citizens to email them tips as to their meteorologists’ stance. So far, 52 meteorologists have been identified. Forecast the Facts is calling out meteorologists on their website who don’t believe in man-made global warming, including what it believes are incriminating quotes on this stance. Here are a few examples:
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical Meteorologists
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical Meteorologists
Forecast the Facts Pushes Man Made Climate Change on Skeptical Meteorologists
Watch Forecast the Fact’s animation, which is being used to promote the campaign:
Confused at all? Here’s the recap: Forecast the Facts is pressuring meteorologists to accept man-made climate change; one of its partners is the Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL); CEL, which claims to be non-partisan, received funding from George Soros.
Curious?

  • Billionaire Warren Buffett sings "I've Been Working on the Railroad" for China's CCTV for Lunar New Year
Billionaire Warren Buffett sings "I've Been Working on the… (YouTube / Russia Today)
January 23, 2012|By Tiffany Hsu
Warren Buffett, ukulele-strumming folk singer? The billionaire investor debuted his musical chops just in time for the Year of the Dragon, performing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” for a Chinese television station on the first day of the Lunar New Year.
In the clip, the Oracle of Omaha is clad in a simple sweater and backed by a large model railroad set as he croons in a slighty gruff voice. At the end of his set, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman waves and says “xie xie,” or “thank you” in Mandarin.
Buffett’s segment was perhaps the most minimalist of the many extravagant featurettes broadcast on China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala program.  The CCTV program attracts a massive viewership each lunar new year, a holiday usually considered the most important in Chinese culture.
Perhaps Buffett is gearing up for a back-up career in music. Last week, he hung out with rap mogul Jay-Z at a New York City club, even flashing Hova’s usual diamond symbol, according to the Huffington Post. Buffett has also paired up with Beyonce’s husband to make an animated video about financial literacy for young students. 
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