The contents are based on Fact and Truth. Challenges are invited.
The day’s top political news:
Illinois Democrats: Keeping Obama Senate seat not easy
The White House and Illinois Democrats admit their bid to hold on to Obama's old Senate seat won't be easy and their difficulties aren't just because of the scandal that engulfed ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Next year is the first major election for Democrats since Blagojevich was arrested last year on federal corruption charges and removed from office. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to sell or trade Obama's Senate seat.
Republicans are pushing hard to claim Obama's old Senate seat. The seat is currently held by Sen. Roland Burris, who was appointed to the post by Blagojevich after the then-governor was arrested last year. A crowded GOP primary includes U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk of Chicago's northern suburbs, the best-known of the candidates in the field.
Obama to attend beginning of U.N. climate meeting
Obama will go to Copenhagen for a U.N. climate change meeting on December 9, hoping to add momentum to an international process despite slow progress on a domestic bill to cut carbon emissions.
Most nations have given up hopes of agreeing to a binding legal treaty text in Copenhagen, partly because of uncertainty about what the United States will be able to offer.
The meeting comes in the immediate wake of discovery of fraud by scientists supporting the Global Warming theories.
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5AO2F120091125
Economy's rebound not as strong as first thought
The economy grew at a 2.8 percent pace last quarter, as the recovery got off to a slower start than first thought.
The Commerce Department's new reading on gross domestic product wasn't as energetic as the 3.5 percent growth rate for the July-September period estimated just a month ago.
The main factors behind the downgrade: consumers didn't spend as much, commercial construction was weaker and the nation's trade deficit was more of a drag on growth. Businesses also trimmed more of their stockpiles, another restraining factor.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091124/D9C5UBSO2.html
Opinion:
Liberals in the media try to ignore Al Gore’s Global Warming being proven a phony scam
I’ve long realized liberal Democrats have neither pride nor shame.
We saw that demonstrated last week end when Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu openly sold her vote on Reid’s health care scheme for $300 million and bragged about it.
But that was Louisiana, and Democrat politicians there have done such things openly for generations. Edwin Edwards, as governor, was openly crooked, yet he got re-elected again and again.
But liberal efforts to effect a denial of recent proof of scientific dishonesty about the myths of Global Warming, may reach new limits. Giving the devil his due, the NY Times has run an article – while more responsible media such as the Washington Times has actually editorialized on it.
The importance of driving a final stake through the heart of this Gore-created monster, is the pending legislation in the Senate, involving Cap and Trade. It was a bill liberals claimed answered Gore’s global warming threat, but is actually a thinly disguised Democrat scheme to create a new and extremely high tax.
The revealed truth regarding this issue, should end the Cap and Trade threatm and with it the collateral damage. (Under Cap and Trade grocery prices and gasoline prices at the pump would also rise)
Here is a quick take on the story:
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?
James Delingpole Politics
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters.
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.”
What else is new?
Liberals have long toiled mightily to keep dissenters to their schemes and scams on the outside of things. We see the same approach on Capitol Hill these days – Liberal Democrats conspire in private, behind closed doors, and keep rational suggestions from Republicans off the table.
No wonder we see such outrageous scandals as the Global Warming myth being a basis for terrible legislation, but we also are witnessing the bare knuckled efforts by liberals to take over our health care system, raise our taxes, and destroy access and quality.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125908904046562751.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Bachus Seeks Data on Bank Loans to AIG, Subsidiaries
MEENA THIRUVENGADAM
WASHINGTON -- The top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee is demanding data on banks he suspects are being asked to take significant haircuts on loans they extended to subsidiaries of American International Group, now effectively a ward of the state.
"While foreign and domestic counterparties were made whole, AIG has been attempting to force many of its creditors that are U.S. banks to accept severe reductions in the debt owed to them," Rep. Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.) wrote in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner this week.
At least 17 banks are being asked to accept less than what is owed to them, Mr. Bachus said in an interview, citing information he has received.
"It's tremendously unfair. What is it about a [credit default swap] that makes it any more sacred?" Mr. Bachus asked. "The credit default swaps were a bet ... gamble ... a risk."
In an earlier letter to Mr. Geithner, Mr. Bachus said one AIG subsidiary, AIG Baker, was demanding a 72% reduction in principal on a $45 million syndicated loan made by a trio of unnamed U.S. banks. AIG Baker is an Alabama-based developer of shopping centers with a presence in about 20 states.
Mr. Bachus now is requesting details on banks providing credit to AIG and any of its real estate subsidiaries that have received federal assistance. Further, he wants to know the amount of the banks' exposure to AIG, the names of all AIG subsidiaries that had relationships with small regional banks and the extent to which AIG has met its obligations to U.S. bank creditors.
The Treasury on Tuesday declined to comment on Mr. Bachus's request.
The Treasury has been facing growing anger on Capitol Hill in recent weeks after the emergence of an oversight report that confirms the government failed to negotiate the best possible deal for taxpayers in connection with its $180 billion bailout package for AIG.
The report, from a special inspector general overseeing the rescue of AIG and other firms, suggests the Treasury and the New York Fed -- headed by Mr. Geithner at the time -- could have pressed AIG counterparties harder to accept less than the full amount they were owed in connection with credit default swaps written by the firm.
The report showed the government negotiated with AIG counterparties for only two days, stressing that taking haircuts on their positions was voluntary.
AIG counterparties paid in full include Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank.
"They could have paid the regional and community banks for the amount of money they gave to any one of those institutions," Mr. Bachus said.
Write to Meena Thiruvengadam at meena.thiruvengadam@dowjones.com
2.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17183
Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren involved in unwinding “Climategate” scandal
“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball. “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature. It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised.
“The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge. Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied.”
While the mainstream media is bending into pretzels to keep the scandal under the rug, Climategate is already the biggest scientific scandal in history because of the global policy implications.
A throwback to the intro of the television series Dragnet, “Ladies and Gentlemen: “The story you are about to hear is true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent”, the innocent in Climategate have already been thrown to the ravening wolves.
“There is a multitude of small but frightening stories in the massive files,” Ball writes. “For example I’ve known solar physicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon for a long time. I’ve published articles with Willie and enjoyed extensive communication. I was on advisory committees with them when Sallie suddenly and politely withdrew from the fray. I don’t know if the following events were contributing factors but it is likely.
“Baliunas and Soon were authors of excellent work confirming the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from a multitude of sources. Their work challenged attempts to get rid of the MWP because it contradicted the claim by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Several scientists challenged the claim that the latter part of the 20th century was the warmest ever. They knew the claim was false, many warmer periods occurred in the past. Michael Mann ‘got rid’ of the MWP with his production of the hockey stick, but Soon and Baliunas were problematic. What better than have a powerful academic destroy their credibility for you? Sadly, there are always people who will do the dirty work.”
Indeed, Holdren’s emails show how sincere scientists would be made into raw “entertainment”.
How the deed was done
“A perfect person and opportunity appeared. On 16th October 2003 Michael Mann, infamous for his lead in the ‘hockey stick’ that dominated the 2001 IPCC Report, sent an email to people involved in the CRU scandal; “
Dear All,
Thought you would be interested in this exchange, which John Holdren of Harvard has been kind enough to pass along…” At the time Holdren was Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy & Director, Program in Science, Technology, & Public Policy, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is now Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—informally known as the United States Science Czar.
““In an email on October16, 2003 from John Holdren to Michael Mann and Tom Wigley we are told:
”“I’m forwarding for your entertainment an exchange that followed from my being quoted in the Harvard Crimson to the effect that you and your colleagues are right and my “Harvard” colleagues Soon and Baliunas are wrong about what the evidence shows concerning surface temperatures over the past millennium. The cover note to faculty and postdocs in a regular Wednesday breakfast discussion group on environmental science and public policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences is more or less self-explanatory.”
The Wednesday Breakfast Group
“This is what Holdren sent to the Wednesday Breakfast group.
“I append here an e-mail correspondence I have engaged in over the past few days trying to educate a Soon/Baliunas supporter who originally wrote to me asking how I could think that Soon and Baliunas are wrong and Mann et al. are right (a view attributed to me, correctly, in the Harvard Crimson). This individual apparently runs a web site on which he had been touting the Soon/Baliunas position.”
“The exchange Holdren refers to is a challenge by Nick Schulz editor of Tech Central Station (TCS). On August 9, 2003 Schulz wrote;
“In a recent Crimson story on the work of Soon and Baliunas, who have written for my website [1 techcentralstation.com, you are quoted as saying: My impression is that the critics are right. It s unfortunate that so much attention is paid to a flawed analysis, but that’s what happens when something happens to support the political climate in Washington. Do you feel the same way about the work of Mann et. al.? If not why not?”
“Holdren provides lengthy responses on October 13, 14, and 16 but comments fail to answer Schulz’s questions. After the first response Schulz replies, “I guess my problem concerns what lawyers call the burden of proof. The burden weighs heavily, much more heavily, given the claims on Mann et.al. than it does on Soon/Baliunas. Would you agree?” Of course, Holdren doesn’t agree. He replies, “But, in practice, burden of proof is an evolving thing-it evolves as the amount of evidence relevant to a particular proposition grows.” No it doesn’t evolve; it is either on one side or the other. This argument is in line with what has happened with AGW. He then demonstrates his lack of understanding of science and climate science by opting for Mann and his hockey stick over Soon and Baliunas. His entire defense and position devolves to a political position. His attempt to belittle Soon and Baliunas in front of colleagues is a measure of the man’s blindness and political opportunism that pervades everything he says or does.
“Schulz provides a solid summary when he writes, “I’ll close by saying I’m willing to admit that, as someone lacking a PhD, I could be punching above my weight. But I will ask you a different but related question. How much hope is there for reaching reasonable public policy decisions that affect the lives of millions if the science upon which those decisions must be made is said to be by definition beyond the reach of those people?”
“We now know it was deliberately placed beyond the reach of the people by the group that he used to ridicule Soon and Baliunas. Holdren was blinded by his political views, which as his record shows are frightening. One web site synthesizes his position on over-population as follows, “Forced abortions.
Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.”
“Holdren has a long history of seeking total government control. He was involved in the Club of Rome providing Paul Ehrlich with the scientific data in his bet with Julian Simon. Ehrlich lost the bet.
Holdren’s behavior in this sorry episode with Soon and Baliunas is too true to form and shows the leopard never changes his spots,” Ball concludes.
Meanwhile, even with an AWOL mainstream media, the Climategate snakes continue to slither out from under the rocks.
3.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/56879
Intel Committee Republican Says Administration is Withholding Information on Fort Hood Attack
CNSNews.com ^
Christopher Neefus
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Monday that the Obama administration has been withholding “critical information” on the Fort Hood murders allegedly committed by Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan.
Hoekstra is demanding that the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Director of National Intelligence preserve documents relating to the incident for use in possible future congressional investigation.
"President Obama said people should not jump to conclusions about what happened at Fort Hood, but the administration is in possession of critical information related to the attack that they are refusing to release to Congress or the American people," Hoekstra said in a statement. "I intend to push for intense review of this and other issues related to the performance of the intelligence community and whether or not information necessary for military, state and local officials to provide for the security of the post was provided to them."
The Michigan lawmaker sent a letter Saturday to the top administration intelligence officials, saying he saw “serious issues” with their performance related to the Fort Hood murders, and indicating that the intelligence community had refused to comply with his request to review certain information related to the case.
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