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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: joseffy who wrote (117452)	11/11/2011 2:00:46 AM
From: MJ	2 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 224755

Congratulations to Governor McDonnell on leading the Republicans to victory in Virginia in 2011. There is more to this story------the victory did not stop at the State level------it was seen at the local level also. In Northern Virginia, we have what are called Magisterial Districts governed by a Board of Supervisors with each Supervisor representing 1 Magisterial District. Each district is the size of a small city or very large town. The two counties across the river from Washington D.C. are Fairfax County and Loudoun County. In this election, the Republican Party was successful in taking all of the nine Magisterial District seats in Loudoun County. They will serve for 4 more years. I am still looking in to the statistics on these wins and Fairfax County. Thank you for posting this. mj

To: joseffy who wrote (117452)	11/11/2011 11:37:16 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 224755

By Ryan Tracy Here’s a prediction that was made February of this year: An underperforming loan to Solyndra LLC will lead to a “storm” of criticism from Republicans. It came from Dan Carol, an energy policy adviser to President Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign, according to emails released by a government official Friday. Sure enough, the solar-panel maker declared bankruptcy in September, and Republicans have been on the Obama administration’s case about it ever since. Playing prophet wasn’t Mr. Carol’s goal at the time. He wanted to shake up the Energy Department and cited Solyndra in the context of describing how he believed the department was going astray. In his February email, Mr. Carol, who is a fellow at a Washington think tank, suggested ousting Energy Secretary Steven Chu. He said the Nobel laureate was a “brilliant man” but better-suited in the role of “chief scientist” at the department. For a replacement, Mr. Carol suggested avoiding Silicon Valley executives. Someone with that background, he wrote, would “get caught up in the wave of GOP attacks that are surely coming over Solyndra and other inside DOE deals that have gone to Obama donors and have underperformed. No reason to fuel that coming storm, and believe me it will come.” It did. Solyndra’s top investor was a family foundation backed by George Kaiser, a major Obama fund-raiser, and Republicans say political considerations might have helped Solyndra get its $535 million Department of Energy loan guarantee. The Obama administration denies that. An administration official said Friday that Mr. Carol “turned out to be right” in predicting the storm over Solyndra, but that the emails did not show evidence of political influence in making the Solyndra loan. Mr. Chu remains on the job and is set to testify Nov. 17 before a House committee investigating the Solyndra deal. The Energy Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Reached Friday, Mr. Carol disclaimed ownership of a crystal ball. “At the time I wrote the email, Solyndra was already a well-documented deployment problem,” he said. “And that was the context in which I was making a broader argument about possible changes that could be made.” The documents show top White House aide Pete Rouse circulated Mr. Carol’s email, saying he wasn’t interested in the criticism of Mr. Chu but wanted to know what colleagues thought of the broader proposals for energy policy. It isn’t clear if anything came of that discussion.

To: joseffy who wrote (117452)	11/12/2011 3:13:26 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	2 Recommendations Respond to of 224755

Don't Stop Doubting Posted 11/11/2011 06:28 PM ET Climate: Just a few weeks ago, a formerly skeptical scientist made news when he changed his mind about global warming. If he looked at the new data a meteorologist has pulled up, he'd change it back again. Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, said that data from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project convinced him that "global warming is real." "We see no evidence," he said Oct. 21, that global warming has "slowed down." The alarmists, of course, leveraged Muller's statements to suit their agenda. But Muller's is not the "consensus" position of the team. Judith Curry, a Georgia Tech climate researcher with more than 30 years experience who was also part of the BEST project, has said "there is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn't stopped." She looked at the same data Muller did and noted it shows global temperatures haven't increased since the late 1990s. Now comes meteorologist Anthony Watts armed with data showing the continental U.S. has not warmed in the last 10 years, and in fact has grown cooler in the summer and colder in the winter. The numbers aren't a collection of weather forecasts from Watts, who runs the website "Watts Up With That," but data from the National Climatic Data Center. Granted, the Lower 48 aren't the entire world, only a small slice of it. But it is a large portion of the developed world, a significant contributor of man-made carbon dioxide emissions and full of "heat islands" — big cities — that should be skewing temperature data upward. Yet, that's not what's happening. The 2001-to-2011 trend shows a cooling of 0.87 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the 1911-2010 average. Backing up the starting date to 1996 doesn't help the alarmists' case, either. Temperatures are flat over that period. Both the falling and flat temperature trends are coming at a time when man is putting out more emissions of carbon monoxide than ever. Given that, it seems to us that the U.S. should be warming. Unlike Muller, we remain skeptics and would be even if he were right. Because rising temperatures are indicative of only one thing — rising temperatures — it'll take more than an upward trend line to change our minds.