Those watching Bernanke's testimony before Congress were just treated to a socialist diatribe by a congresswoman prepped to embarrass Bernanke as the "former CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS)." Of course the former CEO of GS she was referring to is Treasury Secretary Paulson, resulting in her utter embarrassment rather than Bernanke's. Not to be outdone, a Republican colleague just had to be educated on national television about the basic functioning of the Fed's Term Auction Facility (TAF).
I agree that knowing Bernanke and Paulson's resumes should not be expected of your average person. Nor is the TAF a household concept. But these lawmakers are on the House Budget Panel.
This is not some libertarian tantrum, Minyans. Congress is trying to figure out how to spend a few more hundreds of billions of your dollars "to help the economy", and they don't seem to have a clue of what planet they are on.

A Story That Michael Moore Will Never Tell You.....

Dentists Flee U.K. Health System, Patients Pay More
A rebellion by U.K. dentists against the latest government contract has led more than 7 million Britons to avoid state-subsidized dental care in the past two years. A Citizens Advice Bureau survey released today reports that 4.7 million people were forced to use private care since April 2006 at twice the cost of a state-funded dentist because so many practitioners refused to see National Health Service patients.
Another 36 percent of people, or 2.7 million, who responded to the poll by London-based Citizens Advice have gone without any treatment for almost two years. Under the NHS, every resident is eligible for care by a local dental practice. Since the government changed its contract with 21,000 NHS dentists in April 2006, one in 10 dentists stopped offering state-funded services, saying the contract required them to increase their workloads while limiting their earnings. The U.K.'s private dental market grew 63 percent to 3 billion pounds ($5.9 billion) from 2002 to 2006, overtaking the 2.4 billion pounds budgeted by the government. ``Dentists are exiting the NHS either completely or they're spending a much smaller proportion of their time doing NHS work,'' said Sharon Grant, chairman of the public advocacy Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Healthcare. The Birmingham, England-based group published a survey in October with similar findings. The shortage of dentists willing to take NHS payments has resulted in an increase in the use of private dental insurance. The number of subscribers to dental plans, which cost 15 to 20 pounds a month for basic care, rose 31 percent to 2.9 million in 2006, according to London-based market research firm Laing & Buisson.
Skipping Care
Two in three Britons see NHS dentists, 25 percent use private ones and the rest, about 10 percent, skip dental care, according to an October survey of more than 5,000 patients and 750 dentists published by the commission.``Improving access to NHS dentistry is now a national priority for the health service,'' Health Minister Ann Keen said. The 2006 contract groups charges for 400 dental procedures into three bands and requires practitioners to meet quotas to maintain their earnings. Patients have paid for a portion of
their dental care since 1951, three years after the NHS was founded. Four years ago, NHS patients paid dentist Ian Gordon about
37 pounds per filling. Now, he's required to fill as many teeth as needed at one time for 44 pounds.
Hitting the Target
``In the past, you looked at patients, at what they needed,'' said Gordon, who just sold his NHS practices in and around Middlesbrough, England to a large chain and plans to open one that will only accept private patients. ``Now you have to look at hitting the target. Working to a target culture isn't the best thing for patient care.''
The country has about 42 dentists for every 100,000 residents, according to the Department of Health. Germany has 78 per 100,000, while the U.S. has 59, according to the World Health Organization.

Ballooning Budgets
The U.K. government, like counterparts in the U.S. and Europe, faces pressure to slow the growth of health-care spending as the cost of treatment rises and people live longer. While the NHS' total budget grew 41 percent to 78.4 billion pounds from 2002 to 2006 in England, government spending on dentistry increased 38 percent.
The squeeze prompted private-equity firms such as Duke Street Capital Ltd. and Hutton Collins & Co. and corporate dentistry chains to buy up practices and has fueled a boom in dental plans and insurance. The 2006 NHS contract was aimed at encouraging preventive measures and reducing dentists' incentives for so-called drill and fill care in an assembly-line fashion to boost earnings. A parliamentary committee plans to probe the contract's impact in an inquiry next month. About 58 percent of dentists who responded to the October survey said the quality of care has declined. ``If a patient comes in and needs a lot of work, there's no additional reward for that,'' Gordon said. ``You get no gain for prevention. Who in their right mind is going to treat six crowns for the price of one?''
Leaving the Country
Patients' frustration has reached the point where thousands seek dental care outside the U.K. Dublin-based Reva Health Network, a Web-based referral service, estimates 35,000 Britons a year travel to countries including Poland, Hungary, Thailand and Turkey for dental treatment that would cost more or require too long a wait at home. The government plans to increase the dentistry budget by 11 percent in the 12 months starting in April. Some practices stopped seeing NHS patients and sent their workers on forced vacations toward the end of the last fiscal year as government money ran low.
Last March, retirees Joan and Les Smith received a telephone call from their dentist in Rickmansworth. ``They phoned up and said they couldn't do us on the National Health because they'd run out of funds,'' Joan Smith, 73, said. ``We had to wait.''

While Obama talk in generic terms like “hope” and “change” in an eloquent manner which the media loves, at some point he’ll have to describe what his actual plan is for America if he becomes president. We have read both of his books (they lack substance) and they also lack specificity about his ideas. Obama got himself some criticism last year when he said 3rd grade sex-education was a good thing and said he as President would meet with dictators. His specific opinions on matters at the end of the day will have to be detailed. What exactly is his plan for Social Security, Healthcare, War on Terror, etc.?….
He will also have to discuss –as candidate George Bush had to in regards to his DWI and drinking, his admitted illicit drug use, with questions like when he stopped taking illicit drugs, where did he buy/get cocaine from, did he ever sell illegal drugs, etc..

Pattern of Politics
Before everyone writes the ticket for Obama to be the next president. Consider the history of the Democratic primary campaign. The early voting showing is based on emotional idealism and then the business of politics take hold…
History is full of idealists doing well early in the campaign and then eventually losing as the “establishment” candidate starts to call in all chips from the special interests groups that will benefit from his/her winning. Mayors start bussing in voters, teacher unions rally, etc. Recall that the Democratic party wanted John Kerry to be the 2004 candidate-and he just fired his campaign manger in Dec 2003 and his campaign was considered “all but dead”… then Howard Dean yelled and his campaign was run over….
Eugene McCarthy, Paul Tsongas, Howard Dean, etc. all had early wins and strong support only to lose eventually to the Democratic Party establishment candidate.
----------------This is evidenced by the single big fact that elections are won 99% of the time by the current office holder

A cold spell soon to replace global warming
Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.
Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.
The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.
Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.
This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.
It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations—in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill?
Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.
The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.
Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean’s surface warms up, it produces the “champagne effect.” Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.
Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution—a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.
Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.
Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.
Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.
Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.
The principal among those diverse links is Earth’s reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.
What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.
Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.
-------Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute