[HT: Fox Nation]

Peter Cukor, 67, first called at about 8:45 p.m. Saturday on a non emergency line to report a suspicious person “hanging around” his property near Tilden Park…

Cukor’s wife, Andrea, phoned 911 to report the assault 13 minutes after Cukor first called, said law enforcement sources, speaking on condition of anonymity because a police investigation is continuing. Several officers then arrived within four minutes and arrested DeWitt a short distance from the home at 9:22 p.m.

Cukor, a business management consultant and father of two grown sons, died at Highland Hospital in Oakland. His family has declined to comment…

One of the officers who responded after the 911 call, Jerome Cobert, had noticed Cukor’s initial non-emergency call on his police-cruiser computer while driving on Shattuck Avenue, about two miles away, sources said. He volunteered to respond two to three minutes before the 911 call, the sources said.

However, a dispatcher reminded Cobert that police officials had decided to respond only to high-priority calls Saturday night because of an Occupy Oakland march that was headed up Telegraph Avenue toward UC Berkeley, sources said.

It’s impossible to say if the additional 2-3 minutes would have saved Peter Cukor’s life, but it’s very possible it could have. We’re talking about 13 minutes in all and the murder seems to have happened later in that time-frame.

What seems clear is that police were hampered from responding as they normally would have because a bunch of 20-something assholes looking for attention wanted to march through the streets vilifying the cops. In case you somehow missed it, here’s what this same march has looked like in previous weeks:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So who is the real villain here? The cops who would have risked their lives to save Peter Cukor or the people who tied up the city’s resources so they could have their weekly tantrum in the streets?

The last realistic opportunity to rein in federal spending on food stamps came with the Bush Administration’s 2005 budget proposal, when Republicans still held the majority in both houses of Congress . The administration proposed to close out a loophole in the criteria used for food stamp eligibility, a change which would have resulted in $574 million in program cuts over 5 years. An outcry ensued of course from all the the usual sources, accusing Republicans of attempting to “slash” food aid for the poor. In truth, this change would have resulted in a reduction in spending of only three tenths of one percent (.3%) without actually cutting the program at all.

It would, however, have set an important precedent, but the proposal never came up for a vote on the Senate floor. Proudly leading the charge to kill the measure was none other than Senator Rick Santorum, who served on the Agricultural Committee which decided it’s fate. As evidence of this, his office issued a press release touting that Santorum had played a “major role” in defeating the proposal, lauding Santorum for “shielding nutrition programs from funding cuts” for “needy Americans”.

A year later in a promotional flyer (pdf) for his re-election campaign Santorum bragged that he “led the Senate” in protecting the Food Stamp program from the cuts proposed by the White House.

So what exactly was this loophole which the Bush Administration sought to close and which Santorum was so determined to save? The Bush budget proposal from 2005 describes it pretty well (emphasis added):

Historically, households which were determined eligible for comparable means-tested benefits were deemed “categorically,” or automatically, eligible for food stamps. When the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was established, categorical food stamp eligibility was extended to households receiving TANF cash assistance as well as those only receiving TANF-funded services. However, in practice, TANF-funded services are extremely diverse, and do not necessarily have eligibility criteria that are comparable to the Food Stamp program. In some cases, States have expanded categorical eligibility for food stamps to those who have received a pamphlet published with TANF funds. As a result, in some States, households with income and resources well above the regular eligibility criteria are able to receive food stamps.

The Budget proposes to limit Food Stamp categorical eligibility to households receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash benefits. Households receiving TANF-funded services, but not cash, would no longer be automatically eligible for food stamps, but could apply under regular program rules. This proposal conforms the program’s rules to their historical intent, ensuring that Federal assistance is targeted to individuals who are most in need.

In short, the loophole allowed states to confer automatic eligibility for food stamps by simply handing out an informational pamphlet to potential beneficiaries, and in the process bypassing the means testing required under normal program rules. Rules which were intended to limit the granting of food stamps only to individuals and families with income at or below the poverty level, and with very little in the way of other financial assets. Using this loophole, state-level administrators of the food stamps program could legally grant eligibility to individuals with tens of thousands of dollars in assets or more, lottery winners even.

Notably, the Bush administration was not attempting to eliminate the granting of automatic eligibility in its entirety, but rather only to restrict this status to beneficiaries who were already receiving some other form of cash welfare benefit, where some minimum level of means testing had already been performed. The effort by some state administrators to bypass statutory means testing by simply handing out a piece of paper seems like just the type of regulatory loophole that Congress would have an interest in closing. In the name of fairness, if not fiscal restraint.

But not Rick Santorum, apparently.

In the year following Santorum’s effort to lead the defeat of this proposal in the Senate, 18.7 percent of the households receiving food stamps were deemed automatically eligible under this loophole, which equated to about 2.1 million households (source). By 2010 this figure had grown to a whopping 51.3 percent of all households receiving food stamp benefits, or just over 9.4 million households (source). That’s nearly a 350% increase in only 5 years, and probably accounts for most of the increase in the total number of people receiving food stamp benefits outside of the effects of the economic downturn.

Thanks to Rick Santorum’s “leadership”.

Now that’s not to say that many of these individuals and families would not otherwise be eligible for food stamps. I’m sure many of them would, perhaps even a majority. But with over 50 percent of food stamp recipients now exempt from basic means testing, it’s a safe bet that there is a significant amount of over-spending taking place. Consider that if the 5-year savings number was $574 million in 2006, then 350% of this total (reflecting the increase in the number of recipients deemed automatically eligible since then) would be just over $2 billion. The actual number is probably much higher given that spending per recipient has also increased significantly in recent years.

Rick Santorum promises to cut food stamps spending if he is elected, but he had a prime opportunity to rein in the program when he was in the Senate. Not only did he vote the wrong way, but by his own admission he played a central role in blocking what would have been a very reasonable change in the way the program is administered. If the accusation of being insensitive to the plight of the poor was enough to convince Santorum to oppose such a reasonable, and ultimately nominal reduction in food stamp spending in 2005 – when the unemployment rate was less than 5% – I’m not sure why we should believe that he would resist this same type of pressure in making the more significant cuts he has promised.

It’s a longish piece with a number of fairly significant problems. For instance, in her litany of example of police violence she writes:

The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.

First of all, maximum sub-lethal force is pepper spray? That’s what many of these links involve. I would think a baton strike or a tasering would be closer to maximum sub-lethal force but I guess that’s at least somewhat arguable. But is Rebecca aware that there is serious doubt about whether the pregnant woman she references was ever pregnant? If so, she doesn’t mention it. There are lots of other omissions from this piece. Here’s her summary of violence at Occupy camps:

On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.

The rapes and sexual assaults at Occupy camps have certainly been front and center in recent weeks, but that shouldn’t be an excuse to overlook all the other ongoing crimes related to the camps, which included arson, assault, theft, vandalism and even murder. Murder is an especially notable omission since the last straw for Occupy Oakland was the murder of one of it’s members across the street from the camp November 10th. Occupy Oakland organizers initially claimed he wasn’t connected to the camp, but the man’s parents told a different story.

And all of that’s just the tip of the iceberg really. There was far more criminal behavior happening within these camps than the general public knows because people inside kept it quiet. We know this was the case with sexual assaults at Occupy Baltimore and it was also the case at Occupy Oakland. For instance, the multiple death threats inside the camp which never made the national news. Or how about the fights and threats with a knife that led one beat cop to compare the Occupy Oakland camp to “Lord of the Flies.” None of that registers at all in Solnit’s telling (or re-imagining) of peaceful Occupy Oakland.

So putting all of that aside, let’s just focus on the splashy claim in her headline, i.e. that violence in Oakland actually went down during the Occupation. This is based on one report of an email which she characterizes as follows:

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19 percent in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

So I did a little digging. Turns out Oakland does keep a weekly record of crimes reported. The archive of those reports is available on their website here. But notice that the email was specific about the drop. It was a 19% drop for the last week in October. And sure enough if you compare the total number of “Type 1″ crimes from 10/24-10/30 to the same number from the week before, you see a 19% drop. Had she known, Rebecca might have noted that the next week the drop was even sharper showing almost a 25% drop in crime that week alone. Occupy saves the city!

Here’s the problem with her crime stats. The Occupy Oakland camp started on 10/10. It was rousted on 10/25, but protesters retook it almost immediately. It wasn’t finally cleared until 11/21. Have a look at the weekly crime stats look like for that period:

The week Rebecca identifies as a miracle drop in crime is 10/24-10/30, but notice crime was just as low six weeks earlier (9/12-9/18), which was a full month before the occupation began.

Also, while it’s true crime went down sharply two weeks during the occupation, the very next week (11/7-11/13) crime shoots up by 57%! And the next week it’s up again to the highest level during this nearly three month period of time. And that all happened while the occupation was still going on.

Then, as if by magic, crime drops 24% the last week of my chart, which also happens to correspond with the end of the occupation (on 11/21). Did clearing the park stop crime?

My point is, you can take these numbers and, by isolating any given two week period, make any kind of argument you want. You can say Occupy Oakland was “already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems“ by looking at two weeks when crime dropped and ignoring the following two when it shot right back up (all during the occupation), but it’s not a very fair use of the facts.

What I think this chart shows is that weekly crime stats vary quite a bit week to week. What we do know from the annual statistics is that crime was flat (i.e. didn’t go up or down) in Oakland in 2011 compared to 2010. This follows a trend of dropping crime in the city since 2007. If there is an Occupy crime miracle in there it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Did you notice how little Moore actually says. He plays the race card in the first 12 seconds, then he stumbles for 18 seconds saying literally nothing. Then he rambles for 30 seconds saying that Santorum is using dog whistles. Finally he ends with a bad joke. That’s it.

• Race card.
• Mumbles.
• Dog whistles.
• Bad joke.

This is the progressive left in summary. This is MSNBC.

For my first variable, I took the percentage increase in real consumer spending in the last six months of the year in which the election was held, compared with the previous year’s last six months. That’s a more tangible sign of confidence, in my view, than surveys of confidence.

For my second variable, I examined the rate of unemployment for married males over the last six months of each election year. This provides a more continuous measure of labor’s pain over the past half-century than the overall rate of unemployment, whose demographic mix has changed over time.

To compute my measure of voters’ economic well-being, or VEWB, I subtracted that bad thing, the married-male unemployment rate, from the good thing, the rate of increase in real consumer spending, and got a single number.

The result is that having a negative integer for a VEWB seems to correlate pretty well with a loss in the presidential elections since 1956 (the exception being Eisenhower who was only slightly negative at -0.6). As for Obama, he currently comes in just behind Jimmy Carter with a -3.9 (Carter is -4). The bottom line is that Obama should lose unless things improve dramatically.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In an attempt to convince people the vote is being handled properly, the government has installed 54,000 cameras to watch the ballot gathering. The plan is for that number to triple over time.

An additional document Gleick represented as coming from The Heartland Institute, a forged memo purporting to set out our strategies on global warming, has been extensively cited by newspapers and in news releases and articles posted on Web sites and blogs around the world. It has caused major and permanent damage to the reputations of The Heartland Institute and many of the scientists,  policy experts, and organizations we work with.

A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.

In his statement, Gleick claims he committed this crime because he believed The Heartland Institute was preventing a “rational debate” from taking place over global warming. This is unbelievable. Heartland has repeatedly asked for real debate on this important topic. Gleick himself was specifically invited to attend a Heartland event to debate global warming just days before he stole the documents. He turned down the invitation.

Gleick also claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source. This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.

We hope Gleick will make a more complete confession in the next few days.

I’m just speculating, but I suspect Gleick may be aware that copping to the fake document could put him in some serious legal and financial jeopardy. He’s holding back out of sheer self-preservation.

Tonight, someone named Peter Gleick (h/t PJ Tatler) admitted to being the leaker:

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

Okay, so the documents he got under false pretenses are real. We assumed that already. But the key document, the one that has all the left wing blogs talking, that came from an unnamed person. In other words, Gleick can’t vouch for that document and apparently doesn’t know who it came from. This is significant because, going back to McArdle, it was this document that got most of the press:

There’s a reason that the majority of the quotes in the early blogging and reporting on this story seem to have been taken from the memo, including the initial post on DeSmogBlog.  For example, someone named Richard Littlemore wrote “It is clear from the documents that Heartland advocates against responsible climate mitigation and then uses that advocacy to raise money from oil companies and ‘other corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies.’ Heartland particularly celebrates the funding that it receives from the fossil fuel fortune being the Charles G. Koch Foundation.”  That is all taken from the memo, not the supporting documents.  The fundraising document actually contains no record that I can see of contributions from oil companies.

The climate blogs presumably relied so heavily on the memo because the quotes were punchier, and suggested far darker motivations than the blandly professional language of the authenticated documents–and because it edited the facts into a neat, almost narrative story.

At this point it seems fair to ask why Gleick is suddenly coming forward. Perhaps because he didn’t want to be tarred with what is pretty clearly a bogus document. My opinion: Too late. You put it out there without knowing where it came from, you’re responsible (see Rathergate). At some point you get the impression the alarmists aren’t that trustworthy a bunch.

Update: The Heartland Institute issues a response fingering Gleick as the author of the bogus memo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve contributed $20 to help them finish the film. If you’re interested, you can do likewise by going to this site. Checkout is via Amazon so it’s easy to do. They are already more than halfway to their goal with 45 days to go. BTW, you can give as little as $1 (but with $20 you can get a copy of the DVD).

In the five-day polling period ending on Sunday, Feb. 19, Santorum was first with 36 percent, Romney was second with 26 percent, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was third with 13 percent, and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas was fourth with 11 percent…

Santorum has gained 20 points in Gallup’s tracking poll in the last two weeks, while Romney has dropped 11 points.

This is surprising given the heat Santorum is taking in the media. I wouldn’t be surprised if the progressive effort to slam him on contraceptives began to show some results in the next week.

According to Der Spiegel, even members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s staff are now describing the policy as a massive money pit. Philipp Rösler, Germany’s minister of economics and technology, has called the spiraling solar subsidies a “threat to the economy.”…

despite the massive investment, solar power accounts for only about 0.3 percent of Germany’s total energy. This is one of the key reasons why Germans now pay the second-highest price for electricity in the developed world (exceeded only by Denmark, which aims to be the “world wind-energy champion”). Germans pay three times more than their American counterparts.

Solar is not in a position to replace fossil fuels any time soon. God willing it will one day but now it’s just a money pit. Is Obama listening? We had Solyndra fail last year at a loss to taxpayers of several hundred million dollars. Meanwhile, Obama is holding up the Keystone pipeline and progressives are waging war on hydro-fracking which could develops massive amounts of natural gas (and jobs) right here in the US.

On a personal note, just the other day I learned my daughter’s girl scout troop would be doing a unit on renewable energy. She and another girl will be doing some sort of project related to solar power. Now, I’m fine with learning about renewable power and being optimistic about the potential it holds for her lifetime. That said, I have a feeling that her troop, and indeed kids across America, are not learning that solar (and wind) are no match for fossil fuels in a number of ways (cost to produce, energy density). This bothers me enough that I think we’ll be doing a little extra lesson on the realities of solar power at home.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There she goes, there she goes again
She calls my name, pulls my train
No-one else could heal my pain

And I just can’t contain
This feelin’ that remains

There she goes
There she goes again
Chasing down my lane

And I just can’t contain
This feelin’ that remains