Harsh Winter Inspires Obama Climate Panel

By John Semmens: Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent News A decade of declining global temperatures combined with some of the worst winter weather ever seen in the nation’s capital has inspire President Obama to create a Climate Service Line Office to “combat the damage this weather has done to our campaign against global warming.” Obama Administration’s Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has been charged with responsibility for setting up the office.“It is difficult to keep people focused on the need to fight global warming when they’re digging out from three feet of snow,” Locke observed. “How can we hope to convince them they should pay higher taxes or higher energy prices to help keep the temperature down when they’re trying to stay warm?”Locke pointed out that “in this kind of environment, the need for our counterfactual message is greater than ever. That’s why we’ve got to establish this Climate Service Line. Rather than having to settle for home-made conclusions based on what’s going on around them, people can call our office and get the approved official position on what’s going on with the climate.”Dean Denounces Rise of Anti-Science AttitudesFormer Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called the mocking construction of an igloo labeled as “Al Gore’s new home” by Republicans “a demonstration of the worst form of anti-science I’ve seen in my lifetime.” The inspiration for the igloo was the worst snowstorm ever recorded in Washington DC.“Ignorant people may think that they can look out the window or read a thermometer and know what the weather is,” Dean said. “They think that because they see it getting colder that it isn’t getting warmer. They are trusting their own observations over the research of eminent climate scientologists who’ve had years of training and billions of dollars in grant money to study the phenomenon and build the case for global warming.”Dean blamed Republicans for “exploiting this ignorance for political gain. The notion that individuals can trust their own judgment over that of their scientific betters is an invitation to anarchy at a time when we all need to have faith in the scientists so we can pull together behind a common plan to save the planet.”Air American CEO Blames Freedom for Censoring Liberal Talk RadioDane Rohrvig, former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Air America, has cited “an attitude of unfettered and anarchic freedom” for causing the demise of his network of liberal talk radio programming.“Use of the radio’s educational potential is undermined when people can listen to whatever they want with no requirement that they get a ‘balanced diet’ of viewpoints,” Rohrvig complained. Drawing a parallel with our public schools, Rohrvig argued that, “our schools would be derelict in their duties if they didn’t insist that students be exposed to a broad range of viewpoints in their reading assignments. They wouldn’t allow students a ‘diet’ comprised solely of comic books. Yet, that’s what the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) has allowed to happen with talk radio.”Rohrvig suggested that the government take a stronger role in ensuring a balanced perspective. “The FCC could make an effort to see that right wing radio doesn’t monopolize the air waves by funding opposing views. That way, we wouldn’t have to be bogged down by the need to sell our product in order to stay on the air.”Obama Advisor Says Higher Taxes Needed to Fuel Economic GrowthLarry Summers, President Obama’s chief economic advisor, defended the President’s willingness to break his pledge not to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000 per year, saying that “current tax rates are too low to revive the economy.”“Nobody works harder than those on the bottom end of the income scale,” Summers asserted. “The small distance between health a starvation at those wage levels forces them to work long and hard.”“At higher income levels, people have a surplus of money they don’t really need,” Summers contended. “So their incentive to work is diluted. If government were to raise taxes on these earners they’d have less of a surplus and be forced to work longer hours in order to continue to afford their current lifestyle.”According to Summers, “compressing the income tiers downward toward the subsistence level would give the government a two-edged sword in dealing with the recession. One edge would be rescuing more resources from the sterile hands of individuals and placing them at the government’s disposal. The other would be the motivating incentive imparted to those who need to feed a family and pay a mortgage. It’s a win-win scenario.”In related news, President Obama said his campaign against the “malefactors of great wealth” doesn’t include people like Jamie Dimon (J.P. Morgan) Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), recipients, respectively, of bonuses of $17 million and $9 million last year, despite the fact that their firms had to be saved from bankruptcy by government subsidies. “I know these men,” Obama said. “They’re not just money grubbers. They’re my friends. They’ve got a social conscience.” The “social consciences” and friendship of these men may have been demonstrated by the donations each made to the Obama for President campaign in 2008.White House Says Palin Palm Writing Demonstrates Unfitness to LeadThe Obama Administration’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs pounced on former Governor Sarah Palin’s use of a few words written on the palm of her hand during her 45-minute “Tea Party” speech last week as “the clearest evidence yet that she is unfit to lead this nation.”“It’s too unstructured and off-the-cuff for the kind of complex challenges we face,” Gibbs argued. Do we really want to put this kind of person in power? The risk to the nation would, I think, be incalculable.”“A true leader is better prepared,” Gibbs continued. “He takes his time mulling things over. He hires the best experts to explain the issues and to script well-reasoned remarks that can be used to help inspire citizens’ confidence that he has matters under control.”“Sticking to a prepared script shows the kind of discipline that cannot be duplicated by the free-wheeling style exhibited by Ms. Palin,” Gibbs maintained. Gibbs dismissed contentions that the President’s mispronunciation of words in his prepared remarks was evidence of a deficiency, arguing that “it shows that the President has confidence in his staff to put together the right words, even if he can’t pronounce them.”Treasury Secretary Not Worried about Bond RatingThe prospect of trillion-dollar budget deficits as far as the eye can see and the near failure of the most recent US Treasury Bond auction have spooked securities markets. There is fear that the US Government’s heretofore AAA credit rating may fall. These fears were brushed aside by a confident Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.“No matter what happens, the people over at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s bond rating division have got to know better than to threaten a downgrade of the Government’s bonds,” Geithner said. “I mean, the IRS is under my jurisdiction. We have all of these guys’ tax records. They’re asking for a lot of grief if they cross us on this.”“All I’m proposing is a simple quid-pro-quo,” Geithner said. “They give us a good bond rating and the IRS gives each of them a a pass on an audit. That way nobody gets hurt.”Vice-Presidents Discounts Possibility of another 9/11 AttackVice-President Joe Biden says the prospects for another 9/11 style attack on the US are “slim and none.”“The credit has to go to Barack,” Biden claimed. “He’s reached out to Muslims and convinced them that he sympathizes with their cause. He’s seen as one of them, so to speak. I mean, Obama and Osama, there’s only one letter of difference between them. That’s got to establish some kind of bond. So, I don’t think bin Laden will be ordering any attacks on America for this reason.”Biden dismissed the Christmas Day bombing attempt and the Fort Hood shooting as “acts of freelancing lunatics, rather than the kind of carefully planned blows we saw on 9/11. These people may be able to kill a few people at a time, but they don’t have the strategic vision of a bin Laden.”In related news, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Nipplitaliano says she will consider a request by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to exempt Muslims from the full body scans being deployed at the nation’s busiest airports. “These types of scans are very offensive to Muslims,” Nipplitaliano conceded. “They violate sharia principles of modesty and privacy. As such, forcing Muslims to submit to them could be construed as religious persecution.”Nippitaliano’s staff is reportedly working on a process that will permit Muslims to bypass the scans if they are willing to sign a notarized affidavit in which they renounce any intent to do harm during the flight for which they are boarding. “This way, we’ll have the added deterrent of being able to append a charge of ‘filing a false affidavit’ to the list of crimes we can prosecute in the event that the signers renege,” Nippitaliano said.John Semmens’ ArchivesMore ReadingMichelle Malkin: McCain Supported Everything that theTea Party Movement Stood AgainstArizona Overcome by Green PhobiaMcCain’s ‘Seizure World’ Comment Comes Back to Haunt HimState budget cuts should include education bureaucrats