There is nothing like crunching the very first footprint into a blanket of untouched snow.
However this cyclist had to make do with wobbling his way through instead.
And it was earlier than usual as the first snowfall of the season turned the Midlands winter white.
Expert Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson says, “This is a big storm by October standards.” More a foot of snow will fall in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania and the Adirondacks in upstate New York.
The heavy, wet snow is being blown by winds gusting above 50 mph, creating near-blizzard conditions in many areas. Motorists have been caught off-guard by the winter driving conditions in the Northeast. Numerous accidents have been reported on Interstates 80 and 81 as well as local highways and roads in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York state.
Jason Grumet is currently executive director of an outfit called the National Commission on Energy Policy and one of Mr. Obama’s key policy aides. In an interview last week with Bloomberg, Mr. Grumet said that come January the Environmental Protection Agency “would initiate those rulemakings” that classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws. That move would impose new regulation and taxes across the entire economy, something that is usually the purview of Congress. Mr. Grumet warned that “in the absence of Congressional action” 18 months after Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the EPA would move ahead with its own unilateral carbon crackdown anyway.
Well, well. For years, Democrats — including Senator Obama — have been howling about the “politicization” of the EPA, which has nominally been part of the Bush Administration. The complaint has been that the White House blocked EPA bureaucrats from making the so-called “endangerment finding” on carbon. Now it turns out that a President Obama would himself wield such a finding as a political bludgeon. He plans to issue an ultimatum to Congress: Either impose new taxes and limits on carbon that he finds amenable, or the EPA carbon police will be let loose to ravage the countryside.
The EPA hasn’t made a secret of how it would like to centrally plan the U.S. economy under the 1970 Clean Air Act. In a blueprint released in July, the agency didn’t exactly say it’d collectivize the farms — but pretty close, down to the “grass clippings.” The EPA would monitor and regulate the carbon emissions of “lawn and garden equipment” as well as everything with an engine, like cars, planes and boats. Eco-bureaucrats envision thousands of other emissions limits on all types of energy. Coal-fired power and other fossil fuels would be ruled out of existence, while all other prices would rise as the huge economic costs of the new regime were passed down the energy chain to consumers.
These costs would far exceed the burden of a straight carbon tax or cap-and-trade system enacted by Congress, because the Clean Air Act was never written to apply to carbon and other greenhouse gases. It’s like trying to do brain surgery with a butter knife.
A personal acquaintance of mine has a sister who is an EPA bureaucrat. Said sister has, according to my acquaintance, made it a personal mission to block any “carbon-producing” companies from getting permits to operate any new facilities. Because carbon causes global warming.
As in, “Gee, we hope nobody notices that we are changing the numbers.” But the ever-vigilant McQ at Q and O not only noticed, he has video. That “only those earning $250,000 will see a tax increase is already being lowered. By both Obama – to $200,000 – and by his gaffe-prone running mate, Joe Biden – to $150,000. As McQ points out, Biden is a walking, talking goof machine. But he also points out one other little truth:
The possibility that Biden got the numbers wrong in an interview is certainly one that can’t be dismissed. But the number Obama put out there should never have survived editing if he didn’t want that said. That is Obama’s “closing argument” ad.
So that change you were hoping for, folks? The change is in who is going to have their wealth confiscated and redistributed by an Obama administration.
A side note for folks to consider: even under Obama’s new target of those earning $200,000 getting their wealth taken away to be given away, one group of folks will all get a hefty pay raise funded by those confiscations:
John Harris and Jim Vandehei cheerfully admit that they, their site, The Politico, and the overwhelming majority of the media is cheerfully in the tank for Barack Obama. And the are completely unapologetic about it, even though their own Obama worship makes even them cringe at times.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s researchers found that John McCain, over the six weeks since the Republican convention, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. The study found six out of 10 McCain stories were negative.
What’s more, Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent).
You call that balanced?
OK, let’s just get this over with: Yes, in the closing weeks of this election, John McCain and Sarah Palin are getting hosed in the press, and at Politico.
And, yes, based on a combined 35 years in the news business we’d take an educated guess — nothing so scientific as a Pew study — that Obama will win the votes of probably 80 percent or more of journalists covering the 2008 election. Most political journalists we know are centrists — instinctually skeptical of ideological zealotry — but with at least a mild liberal tilt to their thinking, particularly on social issues.
So what?
(Do go read the whole thing, don’t let me filter the news for you.)
In other words, those of us who have been pointing out the obvious are right. The media is in the tank for Obama and quite happy to be there. So, since we no longer have to question their objectivity, perhaps it is time to begin questioning their truthfulness. In other words, how much of what they are reporting as fact is being twisted, manipulated or simply made up in their need to please their tankmates and help their chosen one across the finish line?
King: All right, Barbara, what were you getting to, since generally the redistribution of the wealth is a graduated income tax?
West: Well, Larry, no, I don’t believe that it is just a graduated income tax. I think a lot of people who are talking to me out on the street are saying they are very, very concerned that this idea of redistributing the wealth means taking it out of somebody’s pocket who is a wage earner and putting it in somebody’s pocket who refuses to work. And they’re asking about. That’s what they don’t want. That is what they want to know, what does this really mean? My job as a journalist is to ask those questions and get those answers, and I don’t believe I got answers at all.
King: Was the implication in the question that Barack Obama is a Marxist?
West: I was asking him to tell us about how Barack Obama’s redistribution of wealth was different from that quote by Karl Marx, that’s all I wanted to know.
This underscores a forgotten point here. When asked a question that required Biden to make a meaningful distinction between Obama’s policies and the theories of Karl Marx, Biden couldn’t do it.
On one level, this could be viewed simply as a “gaffe,” but the sheer amount of outrage generated by the Biden and the Obama camp doesn’t support this view. Indeed, this question is a very legitimate follow-up to the “Joe the plumber” episode, and if the Obama camp was on the ball they would have had a canned answer ready.
The meme being trotted out by the Obama camp and the media (i.e. that the “graduated income tax” equals “redistribution of wealth” so we are all little Marxists already) is so obviously inadequate they fell back on their next best solution; rely on the lap dog media to ignore the issue.
Luckily, some reporters aren’t completely in the bag.
Democrat Barack Obama has a 4-point national lead over Republican John McCain as they head into the final week of the presidential campaign, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Tuesday.
Obama leads McCain by 49 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in the three-day national tracking poll, a slight dip from his 5-point advantage on Monday. The telephone poll has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
…
McCain, a veteran Arizona senator, has sliced Obama’s 12-point advantage by more than half in the last five days but he has not been able to break through the 45 percent support mark.
Probably more significant is Obama slipping under the 50 percent mark.
The real key will be to see if this signals movement in important state battles. That probably wouldn’t be seen until later in the week.
The Obama spokesman, Bill Burton, manages to completely avoid answering the points Megyn Kelly brings up repeatedly. The full transcript of Obama’s 2001 radio appearance:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.
To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. …
I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.
So if you read this, it is obvious that Obama does not believe the courts are the way to bring about “redistributive change”. The rather obvious flip side of that is that he believes the redistributive change must be performed by the other two branches of government.
One of which he is a member of, the other of which he is running for.
Environment, Left Wing, Politics, World news | Gaius October 28, 2008 | 
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