Politics and other stuff. There may not be much Bakken stuff below this line.
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Hilarious
We've been reporting this for almost two years now.
Yahoo!News/Live Science is now reporting:
Antarctica's ice paradox has yet
another puzzling layer. Not only is the amount of sea ice increasing
each year, but an underwater robot now shows the ice is also much
thicker than was previously thought, a new study reports.
The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica's expanding sea ice.
According to climate models, the region's sea ice should be shrinking
each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations
show the ice is expanding, and the continent's sea ice has set new
records for the past three winters. At the same time, Antarctica's ice
sheet (the glacial ice on land) is melting and retreating.
Measuring sea ice thickness
is a crucial step in understanding what's driving the growth of sea
ice, said study co-author Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Climate scientists need to
know if the sea ice expansion also includes underwater thickening.
Warmists predicted this also. It was a footnote in one of Algore's PowerPoint slides.
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Pentagon Politics
Chuck Hagel Out
Well, that didn't last long. I saw this coming about the time SecDef Hagel testified during his confirmation hearings. He was in way over his head. I wonder if he didn't show signs of some early memory problems. Headlines:
- Chuck was the sole Republican on the President's national security team
- first cabinet-level casualty of mid-term elections
- wasn't up to the job
- blamed for slow response to ISIS, Ebola
- how do you spell "scapegoat"? -- Kristol
I assume that's why the market is down a bit today. LOL.
From
The Los Angeles Times:
Obama is expected to officially announce Hagel's resignation today but doesn't plan to name a successor right away.
Remember when LBJ took on as his personal responsibility the targeting of North Vietnam? And history repeats itself. And Einstein's definition of "insanity" holds.
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What?
From
The Los Angeles Times, "
the White House threatens to put brakes on alternative fuels."
As biotech masterminds and venture capitalists scramble to hatch a new
generation of environmentally friendly fuels that can help power the
average gasoline-burning car, they are confronting an unexpected
obstacle: the White House.
Yielding to pressure from oil
companies, car manufacturers and even driving enthusiasts, the Obama
administration is threatening to put the brakes on one of the federal
government's most ambitious efforts to ease the nation's addiction to
fossil fuels.
The proposed rollback of the 7-year-old green energy
mandate known as the renewable fuel standard is alarming investors in
the innovation economy and putting the administration at odds with
longtime allies on the left.
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Administration Imploding?
Hagel abruptly resigns; White House considering a rollback of the 7-year-old green energy mandate; and now this -- a previously OMB budget analyst double-counts enrollees to pad ObamaCare numbers. And is caught. And is appalled. Certainly seems like the administration has its hands full -- and most of it seems self-inflected.
Bloomberg is reporting:
The mistake was “unacceptable,” Burwell said in a memo sent to her senior managers yesterday evening, obtained by Bloomberg News.
As an first step, she told them to convene meetings with staff to
solicit suggestions to increase “transparency, ownership and
accountability” at the 77,000-employee agency she runs.
The
number of people signed up for health insurance is a key measure of
success for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The health
department acknowledged
November 20, 2014, that it had double-counted about 393,000 people in dental plans
when it announced that 7.3 million Americans were enrolled in August.
Enrollment was revised downward as a result, to 6.9 million in August
and 6.7 million in October.
Wow, the number keeps dropping. Edging ever closer to my number (4 million).
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Global Warming
Buffalo preparing for flooding.
