Only two months ago it was communist China that saved us from Commuhagen global wealth redistribution. Presented under the ruse of saving the world from a small amount of warming the policies were extremist, dangerous and very anti-business. China publicly said they wanted no limits on their economic growth and would sign nothing that required verification that they were doing as they promised. Today Massachusetts, an 80% democrat state made the same call, too much government is not good for peoples health (Some pun intended).
The peoples money
The peoples property
The peoples freedom
The peoples choice
The Peoples Seat!
Lest we forget from whence we came, how we arrived, and what was sacrificed.
—————–
In Boston on March 5, 1770, what began as a rock-throwing incident against a few British soldiers ended in the shooting of five men by British soldiers in what became known as the Boston Massacre. The incident caused further anger against British authority in the commonwealth over taxes and the presence of the British soldiers.
One of the many taxes protested by the colonists was a tax on tea, imposed when Parliament passed the Tea Act, and laws that forbade the sale of non-East India Company tea. On December 16, 1773, when a tea ship of the East India Company was planning to land taxed tea in Boston, a group of local men known as the Sons of Liberty sneaked onto the boat the night before it was to be unloaded and dumped all the tea into the harbor, an act known as the Boston Tea Party.
The Boston Tea Party caused the British government to pass the Intolerable Acts in 1774 that brought stiff punishment on Massachusetts. They closed the port of Boston, the economic lifeblood of the Commonwealth, and reduced self-government. The Patriots formed the Massachusetts Provincial Congress after the provincial legislature was disbanded by British military governor Thomas Gage. The suffering of Boston and the tyranny of its rule caused great sympathy and stirred resentment throughout the colonies. On February 9, 1775, the British Parliament declared Massachusetts to be in rebellion, and sent additional troops to restore order to the colony. With the local population largely opposing British authority, troops moved from Boston on April 18, 1775, to destroy the military supplies of local resisters in Concord. Paul Revere made his famous ride to warn the locals in response to this march. On the 19th, in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the famous “shot heard ’round the world” was fired, British troops, after running over the Lexington militia, were forced back into the city by local resistors. The city was quickly brought under siege. Fighting broke out again in June when the British took the Charlestown Peninsula in the Battle of Bunker Hill after the colonial militia fortified Breed’s Hill. The British won the battle, but at a very large cost, and were unable to break the siege. Soon afterwards General George Washington took charge, and when he acquired heavy cannon in March 1776, the British were forced to leave, marking the first great American victory of the war. This was the last fighting in the Commonwealth.
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Massachusetts
the Air Vent 
I thought things would have to get a lot worse before people started standing up for themselves.
Thank God I’m wrong!!
THANK YOU MASSACHUSETTS!!!!
Actually, one drawback is that it will be that much harder for the rest of the Dums in the Senate to implement the ritual suicide they were planning (known as Universal Health Care). This may, in the long run, help their chances in November.
Mark
He has the right position on the most important issue. Browns positions Hopefully ACES will be finally put to rest and common sense legislation can be put in place.
Of course, I say that and the Dums are already talking two even more lethal means of ending their reign: “nuclear option” in the Senate, which gives them an end run around procedural rules bypassing a filibuster, and House approval of the existing Senate bill as is. The former will result in a backfire that will haunt the Dums for a loooong time, and the second may result in public lynchings. The people overwhelmingly do not want was is already on the table.
Mark
‘Tis a good night.
Mark, I think that the Dums have already committed political suicide. I believe that includes almost every member of Congress and every Senator. They may not be aware of it yet, but their votes and actions so far have already sealed their fates.
I want to remember today as the day the tide stopped flowing out, and began coming back in. I believe that by November that tide will be a deafening tsunami that will sweep through the Capitol building and flush out almost everyone in its path.
Thank you, Massachusetts! There’s hope yet we may return to a small, limited government that is not hell-bent on committing financial suicide.
“British authority”
That’s what it all boils down to. Rebellion against an out-of-control Authority.
Seems the folks in Washington thought they could rule through brute Authority.
That’s what the zealots at the IPCC, GISS and MetOffice thought too.
“How dare you question us! Don’t you konw who we are?”
Well, we got news for them, don’t we? Take your self-ordained authority and ram it where the sun don’t shine. Sorry but there’s this thing in the USA called Democracy.
Governing without it and making climate policy would be so much easier without it, wouldn’t it?
Too bad.
To put it simply, they got too arrogant.
Last comment:
This will give even the dumbest of Senators pause with respect to the Climate Bill, which by now has to be as dead as anything could ever be. You’d have to be a moron among embiciles to want to vote for it.
Is this result mainly because of healthcare, or do some people think there is a bit of anti cap-and-trade in it as well? Anyone from Massachusetts care to comment?
A very good night to all
One comment in Senator Elect Brown’s acceptance speech had to do with “bringing common sense” into the health care debate. The next step will be to bring common sense into the AGW debate. If anyone looks the supposed science behind AGW, one would have to be brain dead not to be a skeptic. Jeff, you have done a great job looking at the temperature records, and there have been many other postings across the net of graphs and animated before/after adjustment station charts. It is not apparrent that there is any organization that is pulling this all together. I would like to contribute, am retired & have the time, but need direction. I am sure that there are many others like myself-Anthony Watts found a lot of volunteers to support his surface stations effort. What is needed is someone to pull it all together.
For us non US types what happened?
#14. In a special election the underdog from the minority party overcame a 30 point deficit to win by 5 points. He opposes the plans of the president and the legislature that he will be joining to ram through unpopular health care, deficit spending, and climate change legislation. It’s a bellweather of the massive but so far under-reported dissatisfaction with the current regime at the federal level. Only one year ago the party in control thought it had won a mandate to socialize the whole US economy. The people in several states are saying no to this by electing opposition candidates.
@ #15
isn’t socialism, it is fascism
under socialism profits are shared, under fascism only losses are shared while the profits are pocketed by business that is using the govt
I purposely watched the meltdown on MSNBC last evening. I already knew they were bad losers, but they took it to a new level last night. Obermann is in a “class” by himself, and Maddow isn’t far behind.
The most amazing conclusion from these people seems to be that the problem was that Democrats didn’t move fast enough to implement Health Care. Their view on it is that if the Demcorats don’t pass Health Care, it will be political suicide in the fall, whereas if the pass health Care they can point to this great accomplishment come November and ride the wave to victory.
They couldn’t be more detached from reality. It’s amazing to watch, really.
#17, Mark in #2 had it right. The health care issue would have been suicide for the whole party. They would have hidden costs for a few years though so the ignorant public wouldn’t attach the cost with the benefit. It would have been incredibly hard to undo the mess though so it’s better this way.
I think Obama is such a narcissist, he won’t ever change one tiny bit. He will keep on going as though nothing happened and Pelosi, Reed will follow right along trying to bash and buy their way into the same policy as before. Really it could just mean buying one more, somewhat more expensive, senator. But the Dem’s own the money printers, so no problem.
#19 –
Godwin’s Law count = #17.
Apparently, the Dems’ mistake was in not embracing Nixon’s plan which was stronger .
While Mass. is widely viewed as a blue state, Independents are the majority, but Democrats do outnumber Republicans by 3:1.
That is important, because in recent national polls regarding global warming, it was the Independent classification which moved most strongly away from alarmism compared to past years.
If the Republicans use climate as an issue this fall, the Independents will help them win.
Before last year’s presidential election I was thinking that it would be a bad thing for McCain to be elected. My reasoning was that he would be the face of conservatism, but he would govern like a liberal. As a result, his failures would be blamed on conservatives and it would hurt the election chances for any conservative running for Congress. I felt like the only way that conservatives were going to regain Congress was by Obama being elected. Looks like that is turning out to be true in an even more profound way than I expected. I didn’t think that the swing would be so hard and so fast that we could take a Kennedy seat in Massachusettes after only a year.
#23 Vsaluki
Exactly my thoughts as well.
#24, 23, The talking heads never figured out why McCain wasn’t popular. I sure wasn’t excited about him, just afraid of the other guy.
I like to go and spar with the folks over at Real Climate on occasion. James Hansen has recently put up a post where he describes the difference between the GISS surface temperature record and the HadCRUT surface temperature record. There has been a significant divergence between GISS on the one hand and HadCrut, UAH, and RSS on the other as is shown here:
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/10/updated-11-year-global-temp-anomoly.html
The argument by the warmers has always been that GISS is better because it includes the poles. I always found it hard to believe that all of the divergence resulted from only the poles, because it would take a huge amount of warming at the poles to cause such a large divergence for the entire planet.
What Hansen did in the article was to take the GISS data and to mask off all of the gridcells that were not represented by HadCrut3. Most of these were at the poles of course. The result was that the masked GISS aligned fairly well with HadCRUT. So the answer was that the divergence was indeed a result of the poles. But what was also true was that it required a huge amount of heating at the poles to produce the effect.
Hansen gives two sets of charts in his figure 3 at RC. One for 1998 and another for 2005. Remember that most temperature records have 98 as the hottest year, while GISS has 2005 as the hottest year. One look at how the poles have been interpolated and extrapolated makes it immediately apparent why GISS differs with the other records.
But here is the problem. When I look at the interpolations and extrapolations that GISS has done, and when I compare them to the HadCRUT unextrapolated data, it looks like Hansen’s algorithm produces hugely unrepresentative results. For example, Hansen’s algorithm takes a row of cells near the Arctic that HadCRUT shows as having a cool anomaly and turns that row into cells having a maximum hot value. In other words, the extrapolation causes a value change for the cells of more than 6.7C.
The bottom line is that the divergence between GISS and the other sources is due to the poles, however, and more specifically, it is due to Hansen’s extrapolation and interpolation algorithms producing highly unrepresentative results at the poles.
For anyone who has ever wondered why Hansen’s record continues to show warming while the other records show that temperatures have remained flat since 1998, that post is enlightening, and people should look at it. I’m posting as Tilo Reber at RC.
#11 “You’d have to be a moron” Isn’t that the definition of a Congresscritter?
(re: Mark Twain)
I wouldn’t pop any corks just yet. The Dems ran a weak candidate with a lot of baggage. Brown wasn’t well known, but had a good record and addressed the right issues.
The battle isn’t over by a long shot. Waxman-Malarky may be dead, but the EPA could enforce it anyway. Health care “reform” may sneak in the back door. Eternal vigilance. And the truth. Sites like tAV and WUWT are a small, but necessary part.
A small step of a long journey.
#14: To add to what Gary said,
“#14. In a special election the underdog from the minority party overcame a 30 point deficit to win by 5 points. He opposes the plans of the president and the legislature that he will be joining to ram through unpopular health care, deficit spending, and climate change legislation. It’s a bellweather of the massive but so far under-reported dissatisfaction with the current regime at the federal level. Only one year ago the party in control thought it had won a mandate to socialize the whole US economy. The people in several states are saying no to this by electing opposition candidates.”
More background: In the U.S., states elect a total of 435 representative to one legislative group (The House) and 100 to another group (The Senate). The health care bill was passed by the house by a narrow 2-vote margin. Senate rules complicate things… senators are supposed to be wise statesmen who take the time to thoroughly debate and understand things sent to them from the house before passing them. A rule developed around 150-200 years ago that said that debate cannot end on a topic in the senate until 60 members vote to end debate… therefore, if you have at least 41 senators, you can endlessly debate an issue and prevent it from ever being voted on (this is called a Filibuster).
So, the house passed their version of the healthcare bill narrowly, the senate passed their version and had exactly 60 votes to do it. Since the bills were different (substantially different) the next step is for house and senate leaders to create one bill that is again voted on by the House and Senate; this is the reconciliation process. This was problematic enough, as the bills were different and passed with such narrow support in both legislatures. It became a catastrophic problem yesterday when one of the democratic senators, appointed in the wake of democrat Ted Kennedy’s death, will be replaced by republican senator Scott Brown via special election. Now, republicans can filibuster anything that comes through the senate.
Democrat options are:
1) Get the house to vote on the senate bill, exactly as passed, so that reconciliation is not necessary (and so the senate doesn’t have to vote on the bill again). This is unlikely due to House complaints about the bill, and because it is even more unpopular with the public than it was when they last narrowly passed it.
2) The “nuclear option”: theoretical way to avoid filibusters in the senate, never used before. When senate rules were written to allow unlimited debate, they put an exception in for Budget bills, as failure to pass a budget would shut down the government. If enough provisions are taken out of the healthcare bill, senate leaders hope, they could construe the bill as a “budget bill” and pass it with a simple 51-vote majority without opportunity to filibuster. I can personally say that the democrats have no chance of reducing this to a budget bill, because something that induces a $1T cost and which is not comprehensive could hardly be called a budget.
3) Start all over, get a new bill that republicans can vote for.
No idea what they might try to do here… all options are bad for dems, option #3 is their best chance of not getting destroyed in the 2010 congressional elections in november. But it’s bad no matter what for them. Thank god for scott brown.
#26
Funny you should mention that thing about how the “warming” at the poles is done by GISS. A copule of days ago I sent a PDF to Jeff that is based on what the Anomaly maps really look like with out all the infill. NOAA has a 2008 non infill map for GHCN that has basically nothing in Canada and this got me thinking because of something Phil Jones said in an Email that GISS got 2005 so “warm” due to infilling the poles. So I went to the GISS map anomaly map maker and looked at first the 1200km radius infill then switched to a 250km radius infill. What you find on the polar map is that with the 1200km infill (which is the GISS “official” product) you get a nice big red spot. On the 250km scale you get no data. The entire arctic ocean anomaly is nothing but an extrapolated mathematical construct.
Brown for me was the tipping point.
Boballab”
“The entire arctic ocean anomaly is nothing but an extrapolated mathematical construct.”
This is absolutely true. But it goes further than that. If you look at the HadCRUT gridcells that do exist in that area, it also looks like the infill is a horrible extrapolation/interpolation of the data that is actually available. And in some cases, the process changes cells that are available in HadCRUT by 6.7C or more.
Then, when you go to the Antarctic, the amount of infill is even bigger. And it seems to be dependent on so few actual sites that it ends up weighing the contribution of those sites beyond anything that is reasonable.
I think Hansen’s intention with his post at RC was to show that GISS was better than HadCrut and the satellites. But if you look very closely at what he did, it shows that his extrapolation/interpolation algorithm is garbage. And that it probably does a lot more to decrease the accuracy of the global temperature estimate than it does to increase it.
I especially like this tie in since my Father-in-Law often refers to Mass as the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. Not so much since John Kerry went back to his day job in late 2004.
19:
“I think Obama is such a narcissist, he won’t ever change one tiny bit. He will keep on going as though nothing happened and Pelosi, Reed will follow right along trying to bash and buy their way into the same policy as before. Really it could just mean buying one more, somewhat more expensive, senator. But the Dem’s own the money printers, so no problem.”
I think you are exactly right about BHO, except I’m not sure it is just narcissism. He will keep charging against the majority’s wishes, trying to bankrupt the country and making himself more and more unpopular. But I don’t think he will get any further on his agenda. And I’ll bet he corrupt vote-buying is over.
I do not want to rain on your celebration guys, but I think the people of MA voted against the current Democrat agenda and not necessarily for the Republican. The Democrats won big in 2008 not because they deserved to win but that people thought the Republicans deserved more to lose.
I have little confidence in people’s movements permanently changing things. I think it has to come from an intellectual movement and the majority of that movement at the moment is looking for excuses to support those politicians in favor of bigger government. Ideally it would be fun to see the people rebelling against all politicians in a non partisan way and watch how the prevailing intellectuals would respond to that.
I currently am in a non voting mode because of my bipartisan detestation of all politicians and my wife claims that that disgusts her. I tell her I will look at the politicians, assuming that they are all unprincipled and irresponsible actors, and when I find an exception I might vote for that person. I told I’d look yesterday. No not yet.
Hey Bo
That is absolutely awesome;
Just use their tool to show the wild extrapolations!!!
I think that would be the kind of thing that Anthony Wattsupwiththat.com would jump all over.
I saw the prior PDF, and wondered, but I needed for you to make it explicit.
I’ve been searching for some way to highlight the way that certain Influential stations get expanded far beyond their credible reach.
You’ve got it man!
RR
#34: Ken, I think that the voters see a train wreck in the current democratic congress and presidency in terms of spending and a path towards socialism that few wanted. So many are definetely voting against that rather than “for” something, i.e. republicans. On the other hand, I do believe that a reagan-conversative resurrection is in the making, and that many voters are indeed as much “for” that as “against” pelosi/obama/reid. I am not denying that many are also voting against democrats, full well knowing that they might not get anything good from republicans, but only stating that I believe people will have something to vote for by november if the conservative movement continues to expand.
Re:#34 I agree that it was mostly ‘against the dem agenda’. They have mandatory health care in Mass. (under Romney) and it is already 2B in the red. More expensive and less care- and that was with a republican governor. Imagine what will happen with the dems in charge. My friends up there are not happy.
Kenneth Fritsch #34:
I dont necessarily like either party either, but I still vote. I just vote 3rd party.
Nice post and thanks for the history.
It was such a pleasant shock to see Brown pull it out. Even better that he won by a big enough margin to squash any complaints of vote fraud. There won’t be any recounts here. As for who people were voting for, I think the comments above were right, people were voting against the Dems more than for the republican. Apparently the “get out the Democrat vote” crowd ran into a lot of “Dems” who made it very clear why they would not vote for the Dem candidate.
Let’s hope that Brown can get seated before the vote on that health care monstrosity.
Seems to me that with the current Congress it’s the Republican’s game to lose. Don’t underestimate their ability to fumble the ball and throw plenty of interceptions. Especially regarding warming. There are a lot of people in the Rep. party who are solid believers in AGW. While I think the Rs will take plenty of seats in November, they could take more if they seriously pushed Reagan type policies.
The Tea Party people are more popular than the Republicans right now due to the inability of the R’s to separate themselves from the Democrats. An awful lot of voters don’t see any significant difference between the two parties. This seems to hold regardless of which system is calculating the voter temperature anamolies.
As far as voting FOR something goes, I think that if a Reagan type candidate ran for President on 2012 that he’d win by a very comfortable margin. He’d win by an even larger margin if we had a decent news media in this country.
Also, since the President gets the credit, and the blame, for policies consider the possibility that a breaking of the Dem stranglehold on our Gov may save Obama’s presidency. He’ll be able to take credit for the saner policies the R’s will force him to take. Much like Clinton and the R’s in the 90s.
It would be rather nice to see Senator Inhofe back in a position of importance.
Not trying to spam, honest. But those GISS emails Judicial Watch received under FOIA has some amazing stuff. Would you believe GISS admits they have NO evidence of AGW in the US data (even though it is the best on the planet) and don’t expect to detect any evidence for 2-4 decades!
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/12532
Almost as good as the win was watching MSNBC try to spin the thing…
Near as I can figure, Rachel Maddow claims that the good liberals of Massachusetts were so impatient for Obama-care that they voted republican out of frustration. The lesson for democrats, she claims, was that they absolutely positively must pass health-care right away before voters become more frustrated and elect more republicans.
Maybe the notion is that once it passes people will realize what a good thing it is – or something. Rachel and Keith were positively apoplectic.
Not as exciting as AGW, though.
Not voting or voting 3rd party is essentially a Democrat vote where the US Congress is concerned. In some states, voting 3rd party is LITERALLY voting Democrat because they’ve instituted “vote sharing” and the process only seems to benefit Democrats.
The other problem where Congress is concerned is that unless the 3rd party candidate caucuses with one of the two major parties, he’s essentially frozen out of the committees where the real work is done. The independent/3rd party Congress critter is only relevant in a close vote.
The only real cure for all this is for Americans to wake up to their responsibility to understand the issues and hold their representatives accountable. Too often I hear the comment, “I don’t follow politics.” It usually comes from the mouth of someone who goes on to complain about how rotten things are.
If Americans want to know who is responsible for the woeful state of affairs in our country, we need look no further than the image in the mirror.
As a Bay Stater who cast his ballot absentee whilst in China, you are welcome. By the way, I can access the mobile version of the site via wireless internet through my BlackBerry. Three days of inversion followed by rain. The smog days gave some idea of what the London killer fogs must have been like. The problem here is particulate, any co2 issue is trivial by comparison