[Many more wonderful New Year graphics can be found here]

Welcome to 2011 and 1/1/11 – one of those rare dates you get to use only once a century. As the date reflects we have a rare opportunity this year to pick a new path for the country. The liberals will continue to pretend they are they saviors of humankind (it’s their greatest character flaw and why they believe so much in controlling others). One historic shellacking is not going to wake them up from their delusions.

And the DC-NY-LA political punditry class will continue to believe they are the only ones who can unravel the desires and requirements of We The People.

But the new crop of politicians heading to DC, especially in the House, have a brief opportunity to establish new libertarian priorities and chart a different course than we have seen in decades. Dramatic cuts to spending will be tolerated as long as they come with sound rationales (not lame sound bites you might hear out of elementary school or staged PR stunts). Most cuts will not pass, they will be stymied by the old guard in the Senate and the far left administration. This is to be expected and nurtured.

We want to rally the people to a new path of minimal government intervention and meddling, matched with more personal freedoms and responsibility. It is this second part that will be a tough sell, and cannot be sold by replacing left wing government diktats with right wing government diktats. Tolerance will be the underpinning of confidence, not domination.

I foresee plenty of hearings on why CO2 has never been proven to be driving the world’s climate, why all the data collected and mashed to date is incapable of measuring a global temperature, let alone sub-degree changes over a century. We have an opportunity to reacquaint America to the idea of solid math, full result reporting and the complexity of nature so vast no CRU or GISS with a handful of overblown PhDs could grasp. I foresee outsiders coming in and a debate royal on the entire theory of man-made, CO2-driven warming. It will provide time to suspend the EPAs madness and force the left to start acting like mature scientists.

I foresee similar hearings and debates on health care ramifications, spending, defense, mortgages, social security, etc. We don’t need a bunch of new legislation – we need to suspend the madness and figure out what is worth saving and what has to go. We need to provide the people ideas to implement in 2012 (much of which will be the repeal of decades of government bureaucracy, waste and greed). The resulting priorities will need to be so endearing and enticing to a broad and central core of America that the sweep that began in 2010 is continued and expanded in 2012.

We need less of the slogans and vague candidates we saw in 2010. We definitely want more outsiders runnig for office (which was the endearing quality that led many fresh faces to their primary victories). We need to recruit ordinary, simple people with families and careers to come help fix Washington once the last of the liberal dead-enders are booted. We need a tolerant and flexible position to begin the debate and build and up-swell of support. We don’t need know-it-alls.

How to fail: bash the moderates in the middle. Lose the middle and they go back to the Democrats. How to fail: demand quick action as opposed to a multi-year plan to rally broad support. How to fail: act as arrogant and ignorant as the left did the last two years.

We either are going to see simple people of good will trying to fix the mess without rigid ideology, or we will see another swing of the ideological pendulum that will leave Obama in the White House and our government slowly strangling this nation into defeat.

The best review of 2010 I have seen so far from a political standpoint comes from RCP:

“The biggest mystery of 2010 may be Democrats’ failure to explain and sell their landmark health law, and the public’s sustained resistance to it despite the popularity of many of its components.”

The mystery is why it’s still such a mystery. About 85 percent of Americans had healthcare. Polls showed Americans were largely pleased with the status of that care. The one consensus complaint was cost. But Democrats sought to address everything but cost.

Democrats’ top priority was healthcare when the nation’s top priority was the economic crisis.

There was a major but subtle political realignment in 2010. It comprised two simultaneous shifts. First was the Democrat Party’s fall off the left fringe of the political spectrum. Once Pelosi, Reid and Obama (Jarret) were in control there was no way the far left would ever allow the moderate left control of the party again. To lose control of the Democrat Party would relegate the liberal/progressive movement to long term marginal status. While they are marginal in reality, their egos cannot grasp this reality – so they will distill the Democrat Party down to nothing in a few short years.

On the GOP side the social conservatives have run out of gas and support. Attack someone for being a Christian, try and silence their right to pray in public or wear symbols of their religion and the conservative movement will still rally to protect freedom of religion. But if anyone thinks government will be used to dictate social ‘norms’ they have not learned the lesson of 2010. The era of big government is over.
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I stand with John Hinderaker at Powerline and his call to make public worker unions illegal once again – as they should be.

For the large majority of our history, public employee unions have been illegal. It is only since the 1960s and 1970s that they have been allowed. Currently, they are legal in roughly half the states. The United States has carried on a four-decade experiment in legalization, and the results are in: public employee unions are a cancer on our country.

Public employee unions flourish because government is, by its nature, a monopoly. Thus, there is no need for unionized government units to compete against non-unionized units. Moreover, public officials who negotiate with public employee unions generally lack the same incentives that private employers have to keep costs down. The result has been a fiscal disaster, with numerous states and municipalities now going over the waterfall of bankruptcy.

All these unions do is siphon our hard earned tax dollars from the salaries of civil servant to fund political propaganda machines. It is a complete scam. Civil servant compensation, work conditions, processes, etc is set by legislation. And too many times unions drift into political topics which are of no direct consequence to their charter – like whether we should be at war with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Too many times unions use our tax dollars to foil the will of the people. And as we saw in NY City this week, they risk lives with their selfish, pouting protests.

It is all a political propaganda scam:

Officials say the fast-growing union spent $85 million during the campaign season last year, and that it was well worth it: The Obama administration has appointed union officials to top posts and is backing legislation to make it easier for workers to organize.

There is no ‘organizing’ in civil servant jobs. Worse yet, civil servants have actual legal clout over private sector workers attempting to do the jobs the government needs done (few civil servants do more than monitor outside contractors or push the mountains of paperwork congress has mandated – and ignores). This means unionized and none unionized civil servants can (and do on many occasions) threaten companies with retribution if they do not do what is told – no matter the consequences financially.

This is the prime source of government waste, right up their with private company greed and incompetence (its evil cousin). I know from personal experience and easily accessed OIG reporting how civil servants can team up with unethical private companies and produce all sorts of graft and failure. I have seen disastrous projects stumble on and on for years, as millions or billions keep flowing into ‘the matrix’ of government contractors and their lobbying firms. Here is one quarter’s report from the NASA OIG to give a sample of what goes on in government contracting.

Can you envision the damage and greed that could be done if there was a union structure coordinating intimidation and kickbacks across the federal bureaucracy along with a political machine that controlled the legislature campaigns and the courts? It would be the end of America and its individual freedoms.

Someone needs to go to jail. Here are some basic dots to connect.

First, some NYC unions used the blizzard as a way to protest budget cuts:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

Which led to the death of a new born child:

A blizzard baby delivered inside the lobby of a snowbound Brooklyn building died after an emergency call of a woman in labor brought no help for nine excruciating hours.

The baby’s mother, a 22-year-old college senior, was recovering Tuesday night at Interfaith Medical Center, where her newborn was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. on Monday. That was 10 hours after the first 911 call from the bloody vestibule on Brooklyn Ave. in Crown Heights.

That is called negligent homicide or manslaughter – and every union idiot who participated in that blizzard protest should be charged and locked away for as long as possible.

Update: Hot Air has the story – but what about the death of an innocent child?

Update: A consensus is building

Mother Nature has a message for the home country of the CRU and the IPCC historical temperature data – don’t mess with Gaia:

BRITAIN’S winter is the coldest since 1683 and close to being the chilliest in nearly 1,000 years.

Latest figures reveal that the average temperature since December 1 has been a perishing -1C.

That makes it the second coldest since records began in 1659.

The chilliest on record was 1683/84, when the average was -1.17C and the River Thames froze over for two months.

Looks like a century of man-made global warming has been wiped out in 3 short years of historic global cooling. Seems ironic that the UK, home of CRU and Climategate, would get the brunt of nature’s wrath.

The worst-case accepted ‘guesstimate’ for the effect of man-made CO2 on the world’s climate is 0.74°C over the last 100 years, with statistical error bars of +/- 0.18°C. Because of this minuscule level of supposed global warming over the last century, all of humanity must be financially punished for the next century – of course paying trillions of dollars to the holier-than-thou liberals (who just coincidentally all the while become rich and powerful).

0.74°C – Oh the horror!
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It doesn’t get much worse than this:

The federal government has accumulated more new debt–$3.22 trillion ($3,220,103,625,307.29)—during the tenure of the 111th Congress than it did during the first 100 Congresses combined, according to official debt figures published by the U.S. Treasury.

Obama and the spend-mad liberals in Congress did more damage in 2 years than was done in the first 200 years of this nation. Dots connected. Lesson learned.

Follow this link for many more great pictures from ABC News of the 2010 Christmas Blizzard

The mythology of runaway global warming is being given the full Al Gore effect this Christmas – what with the historic blizzard that just walloped the center of liberal ‘thinking’ on America’s East Coast. As President Obama’s administration make one more attempt to uselessly raise the price of energy and line left-wing pockets by going after the gas we breathe by pretending it is a poison to life (as opposed to literally being ‘the oxygen’ to all plants on Earth), Mother Nature (a.k.a. Gaia) is out in force reminding puny humans to be humble in the face of forces we cannot yet grasp, let alone predict.

My friend Don Surber took a nice jab at the lame excuses coming out of the left wing regarding the last 15+ years of flat or cooling climate:

Blizzards across the northern hemisphere and a white Christmas in Australia do not disprove global warming. The lies from the researchers, as disclosed in Climategate, already did that.

Actually, the researchers themselves already did the disproving. One thing to remember is that all this science has been put to the test for the last twenty years. For two decades we have scientific predictions on what was going to happen to Earth’s climate due to CO2 levels rising slightly (from a historic perspective, Earth is at a severe low point in the all important CO2 levels). The classical scientific theory is generally made up of the following steps:
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Is the shared fear of Christmas and its Christian roots some interesting and bizarre coincidence, or a commonly shared fear of good people and historic teachings? Sadly, ’tis the season to ponder such disturbing questions.

I found these news stories before Christmas quite enlightening. First Hitler’s view:

But the Nazi Christmas was far from traditional.

Hitler believed religion had no place in his 1,000-year Reich, so he replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas with the Norse god Odin and urged Germans to celebrate the season as a holiday of the ‘winter solstice’, rather than Christmas.

Out of sight at the top of the tree behind Hitler was a swastika instead of an angel, and many of the baubles carried runic symbols and iron cross motifs. The remarkable pictures were captured by Hugo Jaeger, one of the Fuhrer’s personal photographers.

Sounds quite familiar. Seems the left can’t shake its fear of the symbols of good over evil. The modern fear of celebrating Christ’s life is just as pathetic. Check out the title to this WaPo nonsense:
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Merry Christmas to all from the Strata-Sphere!

We hope everyone has a joyous and wonderful Christmas, and we thank you for all the time you spend visiting and sharing your thoughts with us.