NC Media Watch

Ackerman on a roll this morning

Russ Steele

I do not always agree with the Editor/Publisher of the Union,  but this morning you should take a peek at his weekly colum : We brought this economic mess upon ourselves

How did it all come down to … this? How did our credit rating drop too low to qualify for a used car loan?

Let's start with the rules and regulations. Federal, state and local governments have regulated most U.S. companies to death, driving up the cost of production to the point where it is far cheaper to make things in China, where companies are not bound by the same environmental and labor laws.

We don't seem to have a problem with the pollution, or slave labor, so long as it happens outside our borders.

And unions haven't helped themselves much, often bleeding the companies to the point where they can't compete in a global marketplace. We need look no further than the U.S. auto industry to see evidence of that.

We also love our gold, silver and oil, so long as it comes from mines and rigs sitting outside our borders. We're sitting on maybe 2 million ounces of gold right here in the Gold Country — at $1,600 per ounce — but can't get it. Never mind that this community was built on the backs of miners.

America could drill, mine and grow out way out of this economic mess, but we refused to help ourselves.

Local left blaming the Dow plunge on Tea Party (Updated)

Russ Steele

When ever I get a little depressed, I check out the local lefty blogs, and they never fail to provide me a few chuckles. I always feel better after reading some of their political and scientific fantasies, here is one of the latest examples

How the tea party “win” on debt deal helped restore confidence on Wall Street



Really?  It was only 512 poins today and 1,300 over the past two weeks.  According to the discussion on Tom Sullivan on KFBK today,  the real issues is what is happening in Europe. The debt deal prevented default, but it did not lower the debt. According to Stuart Varney on Fox News, it just made us look more like Europe. 

Europe is in the tank, and US investors are looking at what is happening in the European Union and realize that we are next. They are escaping to liquidity and gold. The Tea Party did not do that, individual investors did it.  Most of these investors are much smarter than our intellectually challenged local left.  We are Americans. we are not European socialist. We are not going where Obama is taking us and the market is sending him a message.

Update ( 08-06-11, 10:10) This cartoon is from the folks at Powerline, which came from the Investors Daily. 

I wonder if our local left will also blame the Tea Party for this as well.

Over the e-mail transom: The Door Bell

Russ Steele

The Powerline Door Bell Video has gone viral.

Doorbell started to take off on a trajectory that roughly doubled the number of views each day.
Over the last 24 hours on Power Line, Doorbell has been viewed 38,235 times, or, on the average,
once every 2 and 1/4 seconds. Traffic on YouTube has been similar.

Check out the Door Bell for yourself HERE. It only takes 59 seconds of you time, but the message
will stay with you until the problem is fixed, 2012 cannot come soon enough. 

The Union wins 10 awards in best newspaper contest

Russ Steele

All the local bloggers complain about The Union, especially our local lefty blogger who is a former editor of the paper.  However, The Union is more revered by their peers, winning ten awards from the National News Paper Association.  Details at The Union.

Lets hope that they excel at investigative reporting in the coming year. Our local government needs some detailed examination.

Over the e-mail transom: Grinding Down America

Russ Steele

A regular reader sent me this video.  As a cold war vet, I am have a hard time refuting the facts presented in the video, perhaps some of NCMW's readers have read the documents referenced in the video and can provide more insight.

 

Local left growing concerned about Territorial Dispatch reach

Russ Steele

The Territorial Dispatch is a free weekly newspaper serving Yuba County, Sutter County, and Nevada County.  I have been seeing more and more of this newspapers in key locations around the community, as have the left and they are concerned.  Read some of their concerns in the comments here.

The Territorial Dispatch is owned operated by John and his wife Kitty O’Neal. They have published the Territorial Dispatch from Marysville for over nine years. Since taking over nine years ago they have grown  the Territorial Dispatch from a once a month paper to a weekly publication.

Dan Logue recently recognized the paper as the Small Business of the Year in his District.  Logue said. “With one of the largest distributions of any North State publication, the Territorial Dispatch is a very important part of our rural news community, providing news and information services to many remote cities and towns.”

I recently received a request to re-publish one of my CABPRO Off the Top of My Head articles on the Forest Service Planning Document in the paper.  That would be my second article to be published the Territorial Dispatch, with more in the future.  I have given the Editor permission to use any material his staff finds useful on this blog as long as I get some attribution and a URL link. 

You can download the current online edition here.

Nevada County Corruption in Sac Bee - Again

Russ Steele

The Sac Bee has the this story:  Nevada County DA took special 'hard money' loan favors

NEVADA CITY – His personal finances in disarray and his ability to do his job compromised, Nevada County District Attorney Clifford Newell sat in a local cafe, eyes welling, as he described how he became beholden to a loan broker who is under investigation for bilking investors.

A few years ago, Newell and his wife assumed crushing debts to keep their summer camp business solvent. Unable to get a conventional loan – "Neither of us were qualified," Newell said – they borrowed from what is called a "hard money" broker, the equivalent, some say, of a legal loan shark who uses others' money to make high-priced loans.

That decision inextricably linked Newell, the county's top law enforcement officer, to Philip Lester. That hard money broker has since been accused by investors of cheating them, leading to investigations by police, and now the state attorney general's office, for securities fraud.

A yearlong Bee investigation found that Newell, 54, received favorable treatment on his own loans from two hard money brokers. Documents show that one of them, Lester, tried to help the Newells avoid foreclosure and possible bankruptcy by raising money for a loan and misleading investors who contributed.

Lester has since forfeited his lending license, ceased doing business, and admitted to numerous violations of laws designed to protect investors, involving other loans. Newell said he did not know about the false statements to investors and could recall little about his own transactions with Lester.

Newell said he and his wife "were moving property and loans, trying to keep all the balls in the air. Some of it was smoke and mirrors."

Newell's ties to the broker offer a window into a culture of fraud in the hard money community in Nevada County. A Bee review of thousands of pages of court and regulatory filings shows that for more than 20 years, a number of hard money brokers have misused or stolen their investors' money. Some brokers landed in prison; many investors lost their life savings.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Exit Question: Will this corruption eclipse the ongoing Diaz/County/Aptitude Solutions law suit for violating copyright laws?

OTOMH: Where will those damn dams be when the drought comes?

Russ Steele

My monthly OTOMH column has been published in the CABPRO News, and it is now posted on the CABPRO Report webs site.

It was a drought that is responsible for my interest in long term climate trends. In the 1970s my oldest daughter took an interest in the Anasazi cliff dwellings when we lived in Holbrook, Arizona for a year. The Strategic Air Command Radar Bomb Scoring Unit in Holbrook was my assignment upon my graduation from Air Command and Staff College in 1973. Not an auspicious assignment out of Command and Staff College, but I digress. Our year in Holbrook allowed us to take many family trips to the cliff dwellings scattered throughout Arizona and New Mexico, and eventually Colorado. But, Colorado is another story.

As we visited the cliff dwellings, one of the questions that kept coming up in our discussion was, why did this sophisticated community abandon their fields and dwellings and then vanish? The Internet was not yet a universal research tool, so we visited the local library and started researching possible causes: warfare, weather, famine, etc. We discovered there had been a long period of drought in the mid-11th and 12th centuries which may have contributed to the Anasazi cultural collapse.

Research by paleoclimatologists has confirmed that temperatures rose in the western U.S. from about A.D. 800-1300, known as the Medieval Warm Period, which translated into a series of droughts. The most devastating of these occurred in the mid-11th and 12th centuries, when dry conditions persisted for several decades. As I recall from our research, the longest we found was 27 years.

Paleoclimate data from tree rings and other sources also suggest that the mechanism driving drought during this Medieval Warm Period was eastern Pacific Ocean cooling. Much like a widespread extended La Ni√±a event with cool sea surface temperatures strengthening a persistent moisture-blocking system of high-pressure off the West coast, nudging storm tracks north. This year the blocking is lower down the coast, creating droughts in New Mexico and Texas. We are fortunate that the La Niña this year resulted in a record-breaking snowfall. However, this has not always been the case.

During the Dalton Minimum there was a 13-year drought in coastal California according to Church Mission records. This was also a period when a deep La Niña weather pattern dominated the Pacific. The La Niña weather patterns have been associated with drought throughout climate history We are entering a period of low sun spot activity similar to the Dalton Minimum. The Pacific has entered a cool phase, which promotes more La Niña weather patterns. We could be on the cusp of some long-term periods of drought if history is an indicator.

You can read the rest of my column here, which column concludes:
It is time to start building more of those damn dams. The cold Pacific droughts are just around the corner, and it takes ten years to build a dam as large as the Auburn Dam. Waiting for the droughts to happen before taking action is not an option!

Over the email transom: Vote Notes from Tom McClintock's Office.

 Russ Steele

HR 1540 - National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012: NO.

I have one over-riding objection to this measure, which authorizes the Defense budget for the coming year: Section 1034 of the bill provides an unconstitutional and open-ended delegation of authority to the President to initiate hostilities with any country he alone determines is “associated” with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The Constitution is explicit that only Congress has the authority to declare war, and the American Founders were quite clear that so monumental a decision should be reserved to the representatives of all the people and never left to a single individual.

A men!

No know water risk from fracking - EPA's Lisa Jackson

Russ Steele

We have been having an on going discussion here on the threat of fracking to surface water after the movie Gasland tried to convince the public that fracking was responsible for threatening farmers and ranchers water supplies.  At the U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, President Barack Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, admitted the environmental risk of hydraulic fracturing is practically nonexistent.

“I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water, although there are investigations ongoing,” she said.



Sen. James Inhofe, ranking member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, commended Jackson’s honesty and pointed out that ". . . States are regulating hydraulic fracturing effectively and efficiently, and there is no need for the federal government to step in"