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“Klimaschutz hat mit Umweltschutz kaum mehr etwas zu tun“
I have from day one written many, many posts in this blog about the intimidation of people and blatant censoring of facts done in the name of ”science” and Global Warming Hysteria. And that the Global Warming Hysteria has nothing to do with saving the Earth or the environment. It has always been a political agenda.
I have written extensible (over 120 of posts) about the scam called Cap and Trade, – the Biggest Heist in History- where BOTH BUYER AND SELLER BENEFITS FROM CHEATING. And we, as taxpayers and consumers pay the prize. It’s an open invitation to fraud and manipulation.
And recognize it for what it is – A GIANT FINANCIAL SCAMthat puts all the burden on the common people and does nothing whatsoever for the environment.
Therefore it is refreshing to se that more and more of the Global warming Hysterics are coming out from behind their masks and are openly admitting their political agenda.
The latest one is Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III. He is also the deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology. He will be co-chairing the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change”.
Here are some direct quotes from an article in Neue Zürcher Zeitung November 14:
“Grundsätzlich ist es ein grosser Fehler, Klimapolitik abgetrennt von den grossen Themen der Globalisierung zu diskutieren. Der Klimagipfel in Cancún Ende des Monats ist keine Klimakonferenz, sondern eine der grössten Wirtschaftskonferenzen seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg….. da führt kein Weg daran vorbei, dass ein Grossteil der fossilen Reserven im Boden bleiben muss.“
“Aber man muss klar sagen: Wir verteilen durch die Klimapolitik de facto das Weltvermögen um. Dass die Besitzer von Kohle und Öl davon nicht begeistert sind, liegt auf der Hand. Man muss sich von der Illusion freimachen, dass internationale Klimapolitik Umweltpolitik ist. Das hat mit Umweltpolitik, mit Problemen wie Waldsterben oder Ozonloch, fast nichts mehr zu tun.“
“Aber dann müssen wir sehen, dass erfolgreiche Klimapolitik eben eine andere globale Handels- und Finanzpolitik braucht.“
“Und in den Industrieländern wird uns klar, dass für ein Klimaschutzziel von zwei Grad weder rein technische Lösungen noch Lebensstilwandel ausreichen. Die Leute hier in Europa haben die groteske Vorstellung, Einkaufen im Bioladen oder Elektroautos lösten das Problem. Das ist arrogant,denn der ökologische Fussabdruck unseres Lebensstils hat sich in den letzten 30 Jahren vergrössert, trotz Öko-Bewegung.“
“Es muss Strafen und Anreize geben: weltweite CO 2 -Zölle und Technologie-Transfer.“
“Was wir suchen müssen, ist eine Oase, das ist die kohlenstofffreie Weltwirtschaft. Es geht um den gemeinsamen Aufbruch zu dieser Oase.“
My english translation:
“Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War….there is no getting around the fact that a large part of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.”
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. That the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this, is obvious.
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”
“But then we need to see that a successful climate policy must specify a different global trade and financial policy.”
“And in developed countries, we have realized that for a climate protection target of two degrees neither purely technical solutions nor life style change will be sufficient. The people here in Europe, have the grotesque idea that shopping in the health food stores or in electric cars solved the problem. This is arrogant, because the ecological footprint of our lifestyle has increased in the last 30 years, despite the eco-movement.”
“There must be penalties and incentives: global CO 2-tariffs and technology transfer.”
“What we need to look for is an oasis that is the non-carbon global economy. It’s about the common departure for this oasis.”
Klimaschutz hat mit Umweltschutz kaum mehr etwas zu tun, sagt der Ökonom Ottmar Edenhofer. Der nächste Weltklimagipfel in Cancún sei eigentlich ein Wirtschaftsgipfel, bei dem es um die Verteilung der Ressourcen gehe. Interview: Bernhard Pötter
NZZ am Sonntag: Herr Edenhofer, beim Klimaschutz fordern alle eine Reduzierung von Emissionen. Sie sprechen jetzt von «gefährlicher Emissionsreduzierung». Was ist das?
Ottmar Edenhofer: Bisher ging Wirtschaftswachstum immer Hand in Hand mit dem Wachstum der Treibhausgasemissionen. Ein Prozent Wachstum heisst ein Prozent mehr Emissionen. Ins historische Gedächtnis der Menschheit hat sich eingebrannt: Wer reich ist, verfeuert dafür Kohle, Öl oder Gas. Und deshalb haben die Schwellenländer Angst vor Emissionsgrenzen.
Beim Klimaschutz sollten aber alle mitmachen, sonst funktioniert er nicht.
Das sagt sich so leicht. Aber vor allem die Industriestaaten haben ein System, das fast ausschliesslich auf fossilen Energien beruht. Es gibt kein historisches Vorbild und keine Weltregion, die ihr Wirtschaftswachstum von den Emissionen abgekoppelt hat. Da können Sie nicht von Indien oder China erwarten, dass die finden, dass das eine tolle Idee ist. Und es kommt noch schlimmer: Wir sind mitten in einer Renaissance der Kohle, weil Öl und Gas teurer geworden sind, Kohle aber nicht. Die Schwellenländer bauen gerade für die nächsten 70 Jahre ihre Städte und Kraftwerke, als ob es dauerhaft keinen hohen CO 2 -Preis gäbe.
Das Neue an Ihrem Vorschlag zu einem Global Deal ist die Betonung, wie wichtig Entwicklungspolitik für die Klimapolitik ist. Bis jetzt denken viele bei Entwicklungshilfe an Almosen.
Das wird sich sofort ändern, wenn global Emissionsrechte verteilt werden. Wenn das pro Kopf der Bevölkerung geschieht, dann ist Afrika der grosse Gewinner, und es fliesst viel Geld dorthin. Das hat für die Entwicklungspolitik enorme Konsequenzen. Und es wird sich auch die Frage stellen, wie diese Länder mit so viel Geld überhaupt sinnvoll umgehen können.
Das klingt alles nicht mehr nach der Klimapolitik, die wir kennen.
Grundsätzlich ist es ein grosser Fehler, Klimapolitik abgetrennt von den grossen Themen der Globalisierung zu diskutieren. Der Klimagipfel in Cancún Ende des Monats ist keine Klimakonferenz, sondern eine der grössten Wirtschaftskonferenzen seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Warum? Weil wir noch 11 000 Gigatonnen Kohlenstoff in den Kohlereserven unter unseren Füssen haben – und wir dürfen nur noch 400 Gigatonnen in der Atmosphäre ablagern, wenn wir das 2-Grad-Ziel halten wollen. 11 000 zu 400 – da führt kein Weg daran vorbei, dass ein Grossteil der fossilen Reserven im Boden bleiben muss.
De facto ist das eine Enteignung der Länder mit den Bodenschätzen. Das führt zu einer ganz anderen Entwicklung als der, die bisher mit Entwicklungspolitik angestossen wurde.
Zunächst mal haben wir Industrieländer die Atmosphäre der Weltgemeinschaft quasi enteignet. Aber man muss klar sagen: Wir verteilen durch die Klimapolitik de facto das Weltvermögen um. Dass die Besitzer von Kohle und Öl davon nicht begeistert sind, liegt auf der Hand. Man muss sich von der Illusion freimachen, dass internationale Klimapolitik Umweltpolitik ist. Das hat mit Umweltpolitik, mit Problemen wie Waldsterben oder Ozonloch, fast nichts mehr zu tun.
Trotzdem leidet die Umwelt unter dem Klimawandel – vor allem im Süden.
Es wird auch viel bei der Anpassung zu tun sein. Aber das geht eben weit über klassische Entwicklungspolitik hinaus: Wir werden in Afrika mit dem Klimawandel einen Rückgang der landwirtschaftlichen Erträge sehen. Aber damit kann man umgehen, wenn die Effizienz der Produktion gesteigert wird – und vor allem, wenn der afrikanische Agrarhandel in die Weltwirtschaft eingebettet wird. Aber dann müssen wir sehen, dass erfolgreiche Klimapolitik eben eine andere globale Handels- und Finanzpolitik braucht.
Das grosse Missverständnis vom Uno-Gipfel in Rio 1992 wiederholt sich in der Klimapolitik: Die Industriestaaten reden von Umwelt, die Entwicklungsländer von Entwicklung.
Es ist noch komplizierter. In den achtziger Jahren waren unsere lokalen Umweltprobleme für die Entwicklungsländer ein Luxusproblem. Wer schon satt ist und Auto fährt, der kann sich über sauren Regen aufregen. Für China ging es hingegen darum, wie man 600 Millionen Chinesinnen und Chinesen in die Mittelschicht bekommt. Ob da ein Kohlekraftwerk steht oder in den Kohleminen die Sozialstandards niedrig sind, das war erst einmal nachrangig – wie bei uns im 19. Jahrhundert.
Aber die Welt ist kleiner geworden.
Jetzt kommt etwas Neues: Es geht nicht mehr nur um unseren Luxus, unsere Umwelt. Den Entwicklungsländern wird klar, dass die Ursachen im Norden liegen und die Folgen im Süden. Und in den Industrieländern wird uns klar, dass für ein Klimaschutzziel von zwei Grad weder rein technische Lösungen noch Lebensstilwandel ausreichen. Die Leute hier in Europa haben die groteske Vorstellung, Einkaufen im Bioladen oder Elektroautos lösten das Problem. Das ist arrogant, denn der ökologische Fussabdruck unseres Lebensstils hat sich in den letzten 30 Jahren vergrössert, trotz Öko-Bewegung.
Sie sagen, für die erfolgreiche Klimapolitik sei ein hohes Mass an internationaler Kooperation nötig. Gerade die sieht man aber nicht.
Ich teile die Skepsis. Aber haben wir eine Alternative? Derzeit gibt es drei Ideen, wie man die schwierige Kooperation umgehen kann: Man verlegt sich auf unsichere Experimente wie das Geo-Engineering, man konzentriert sich auf den Ausbau von sauberer und sicherer Energie, oder man vertraut auf regionale und lokale Lösungen. Es gibt allerdings keinen Hinweis darauf, dass eine dieser Ideen das Problem löst. Wir müssen die Kooperation also wollen, so wie man auch für die Regelung der Finanzmärkte zusammenarbeiten muss.
Aber anders als bei der Finanzkrise hat in der Klimapolitik ein Land Vorteile, wenn es nicht mitmacht.
Die Finanzkrise war eine Notoperation – angesichts von Gefahr verhalten wir uns kooperativer. So etwas wird es beim Klima nicht geben, denn es bleibt immer fraglich, ob ein konkretes Ereignis wie eine Überschwemmung ein Klima-Phänomen ist. Aber es gibt immer die Gefahr, dass individuelle Rationalität zur kollektiven Dummheit führt. Deshalb kann man das Klimaproblem nicht allein lösen, sondern muss es vernetzen mit anderen Problemen. Es muss Strafen und Anreize geben: weltweite CO 2 -Zölle und Technologie-Transfer.
In Ihrem neuen Buch ist viel von Ethik die Rede. Spielt sie bei den Klimaverhandlungen eine Rolle?
Ethik spielt immer eine Rolle, wenn es um Macht geht. China und Lateinamerika betonen zum Beispiel immer die historische Verantwortung der Industriestaaten für den Klimawandel. Diese Verantwortung ist nicht zu leugnen, aber es ist auch ein strategisches Argument der Länder. Ich würde eine Verantwortung für die Zeit seit 1995 akzeptieren, weil wir seither wissen, was den Treibhauseffekt verursacht. Die Verantwortung bis zur industriellen Revolution auszudehnen, ist ethisch nicht gerechtfertigt.
Kann man die Ethik nutzen, um den Stillstand zu beenden?
Das Buch enthält eine Parabel: Eine Gruppe Wanderer, die Weltgemeinschaft, ist in der Wüste unterwegs. Die Industriestaaten trinken das Wasser zur Hälfte aus und sagen dann grosszügig: «Jetzt teilen wir den Rest!» Da sagen die anderen: «So geht es nicht, ihr habt das Wasser ja schon zur Hälfte geleert. Wir reden jetzt mal über eure historische Verantwortung.» Wir meinen: Wenn wir nur um den Wasservorrat streiten, weil wir uns auf die ethischen Prinzipien nicht einigen können, werden wir verdursten. Was wir suchen müssen, ist eine Oase, das ist die kohlenstofffreie Weltwirtschaft. Es geht um den gemeinsamen Aufbruch zu dieser Oase.
The first Tsunami wave is just rolling in over the Washington establishment.
Sitting here late at night (02:35 am) and watching the American election drama unfold minute by minute via a lot of different channels; I just want to say one thing – it is an honour to see a democracy in action where the common people are sending a very strong and clear message to the political elite. And are actually throwing them out.
And folks, this could NOT happen in Europe. So you should be really proud of yourself.
And remember, this is just the first wave!
This is a picture of the first early results in the house in the states where the polling stations have closed:
And this is a picture of the first early results in the senate in the states where the polling stations have closed:
I am going to finish this 10 part series in the same way as I started it: YOU MUST VOTE!
So go and vote for some you can trust (yeah I know it’s hard), some one that upholds the constitution and knows what it actually means (yeah, there are not many left), some one that want to rein in the Big Government Agenda and REALLY means it (yeah I know, there are many turncoats), and some one that want to protect YOUR liberty, freedom and the American way of life (yeah, that’s another hard one).
There is in the end only one way you can judge them – By their actions.
Your vote REALLY MATTERS! This time more than ever!
Sooo much is at stake this time – The constitution, the American way of life with freedom and free markets. America is at a crucial crossroads.
Do you want a government for the elites, of the elites and by the elites?
Or a government for the people, of the people and by the people?
It is YOUR CHOICE! A very clear choice! You have to get out and flood the voting booths November 2.
And if you don’t choose, it’s going to be the former.
The turnout of voting-age population in the mid term elections 2006 – 37,1%, and 2002 – 37.0% was pathetic and a joke. 63 % of the voting age population apparently doesn’t care what is happening to their country.
If you don’t wake up now when will you ever do? You have to stand up for freedom and liberty. Or sit back and let the American dream become a nightmare.
”All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826.
America, your whole system has been hijacked, and you have done nothing, so far, to stop it. What the Obama administration has done during the last one and half year makes a mockery of your constitution and the principle of separation of power.”
These are the “representatives” that rammed through the Obama Care, the financial bill, etc., against the will of the people. They don’t care about the constitution, and they don’t know the difference between the declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and they don’t care that they don’t know.
The people in congress who voted for these bills, this is EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED AND INTENDED with these bills. But to get it through Congress they gladly and willfully lied through their teeth and ears, they even gladly put their lies in writing.
Why? Because they are ramming through their political agenda which they have been waiting and planning so long for to be able do.
In short, it is very troubling to see a country on a path of economic and political self destruction. But if the present trend continues you are, to put it simple: toast.
It’s time for the people of America to take their country back. Otherwise the consequences for you as a country are going to be devastating. Especially for the common people.
Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.
I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron.They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.
They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.
Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.
Whence all this hate? Is it the usual story of love gone wrong? Do Democrats have a mad infatuation with the political system, an unhealthy obsession with an idealized body politic? Do they dream of capturing and ravishing representational democracy? Are they crazed stalkers of our constitutional republic?
No. It’s worse than that. Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability.Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.
Armed with the panoply of lawmaking, these moonstruck fools for power go about in a jealous rage. They fear power’s charms may be lavished elsewhere, even for a moment.
Democrats hate success. Success could supply the funds for a power elopement. Fire up the Learjet. Flight plan: Grand Cayman. Democrats hate failure too. The true American loser laughs at legal monopoly on force. He’s got his own gun.
Democrats hate productivity, lest production be outsourced to someplace their beloved power can’t go. And Democrats also hate us none-too-productive drones in our cubicles or behind the counters of our service economy jobs. Tax us as hard as they will, we modest earners don’t generate enough government revenue to dress and adorn the power that Democrats worship.
Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference. Democratic advocacy for feminism, gay marriage, children’s rights, and “reproductive choice” is simply a way to invade -power’s little realm of domestic private life and bring it under the domination of Democrats.
Democrats hate immigrants. Immigrants can’t stay illegal because illegality puts immigrants outside the legal monopoly on force. But immigrants can’t become legal either. They’d prosper and vote Republican.
Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.
And Democrats hate the military, of course. Soldiers set a bad example. Here are men and women who possess what, if they chose, could be complete control over power. Yet they treat power with honor and respect. Members of the armed forces fight not to seize power for themselves but to ensure that power can bestow its favors upon all Americans.
This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling.
P. J. O’Rourke, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author of a new book, Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards (Atlantic Monthly Press).
Twenty months ago, on February 19, 2009, business reporter Rick Santelli of CNBC took to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to deliver his famous rant against government bail-outs, and call for “a Chicago tea party.”
Santelli may have sparked the Tea Party movement. But he only tapped into outrage that had been growing in many of us for decades.
For too long, you and I have watched helplessly as a clique of politicians, intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats from both parties have tried to obliterate our Constitution, our capitalist system, and our personal liberty. This “bipartisan Ruling Class”—as scholar Angelo Codevilla describes it—sees itself as a moral, cultural, and intellectual elite. Codevilla says that “Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.”
Oozing sanctimonious arrogance, viewing the rest of us as coarse, unsophisticated rubes who cling bitterly to guns and bibles, this class seeks to impose its own supposedly superior values and visions upon the rest of us, by force of law.
As we know too well, the ultimate goal of our Ruling Class is power. They exist—not to produce, not to invent, not to create—but to manipulate and master others.Ronald Reagan memorably summed up the Ruling Class’s governing outlook this way: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
By contrast, the rest of us Americans seek power over circumstances, but not over each other. We acquire our personal sense of identity and self-esteem through productive work—not through imposing our will, values, and visions on our neighbors. We accept a “live and let live” philosophy.
This is the spirit embodied in our “Declaration of Independence.” That document was more than a declaration of political independence from our European rulers; it was a declaration of the moral independence of every human being. It was a declaration of each individual’s moral right to his own life, his own liberty, his own pursuit of happiness.
This is the vision enshrined in our Constitution. That governing framework grants to public officials only specific, enumerated, and narrowly limited powers. As James Madison and the other Framers made explicitly clear, the Constitution was intended—for the first time in human history—to bridle the authority of politicians and bureaucrats, and thus to protect the moral right of Americans to go about our lives without interference.
So, the Constitution imposes upon government officials a host of constraints: separations of powers, checks and balances, the Bill of Rights. By constraining government, citizens enjoy the fruits of freedom.
Which explains why, since the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, Ruling Class power-seekers have targeted the Constitution for annihilation. The regimes of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt subjected constitutional limitations on power to systematic, bipartisan attack. So did the “New Deal” of Franklin Roosevelt and the “Great Society” of Lyndon Johnson.
In our time, the clamor against individual rights and constitutional constraints on power has risen to a crescendo. And that is why we’re here. Today’s Ruling Class consists of the intellectual heirs of the earlier progressives. From Obama to McCain, from Arianna Huffington to David Gergen, from George Soros to Michael Bloomberg, our Beltway grandees continue to impart their wisdom and good taste upon us by law—telling us what to eat, what our children should learn and in what kind of schools, what vehicles we should travel in, what fuels should power them, where we should live, where our thermostats should be set, what we should grow, how we should use our land, with whom we should engage in business, what we should sell and at what prices, what portion of our earnings we may be allowed to keep, what “good causes” we must support, what language we must use in conversations about “sensitive” topics ranging from race to romance to religion, what medical coverage we must have, who must provide it, and at what price, and on, and on, and on.
It goes on without limit, because our Ruling Class accepts no limits, legal or moral, on its power to “do good” to us. We are mere mortar and bricks for their social engineering.Like missionaries visiting primitive tribes, they view us as savages, whom they must cage and civilize.
We see their boundless arrogance in Barack Obama, who tells his fellow Ruling Class members that “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” with his nose held so high in the air that any passing rainstorm would waterboard him. We see it in Senator John Kerry when, like some monarch, he refers to himself in the third person. We see it in Barney Frank, the only human on the planet who is able to strut even while sitting. We see it in Harry Reid, who told us the other day that, “But for me, we’d be in a world-wide depression.” We see it in Nancy Pelosi, who—when asked where in the Constitution was Congress granted the power to order us to buy health insurance—replied: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
Never mind that the Ruling Class and its progressive policies have failed miserably to achieve their announced objectives. For more than a century, countless government programs have plundered untold trillions of dollars from taxpayers, then redirected them, supposedly to eradicate poverty, to end unemployment, to prevent disastrous business cycles, to put everyone in his own home.
But what do we see? Record levels of people on food stamps; soaring unemployment rates; a recession longer and deeper than any since the 1930s; a debacle in the housing market. Yet, what does the Ruling Class do in response? It demands more power to enact more of the same.
They say that a sure sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different outcome. By that criterion, progressives are bat-crap crazy.
But then, what are we, if we re-elect them?
Bad as this is, it is even more sickening to watch ambitious young men and women trying desperately to enter the Ruling Class, then rise through its corrupt ranks, in their lust for power and position. For an example, look no farther than our freshman congressman in Maryland’s First District. In his disgustingly dishonest campaign ads, as well as his voting record, Frank Kratovil has demonstrated that he’ll eagerly sell his soul for a seat at a Ruling Class table.
Mr. Kratovil has spent most of his campaign running away from his voting record—even from his party affiliation. From his ads, you would think he’s running as an “Independent,” not a Democrat. He demonstrates this independence by voting with his party 84.6 percent of the time—then accepting well over a million dollars in campaign contributions from party coffers.
Consider his votes on ObamaCare. Like Hamlet, Mr. Kratovil spent a year in anguished public indecision. This waffling persisted all the way to the last week before the final vote, while Nancy Pelosi collected the backing she needed to pass the bill. Then, after Pelosi had lined up enough support to let him off the hook, Kratovil first voted for ObamaCare to proceed to a final vote, then announced he would vote against the final bill on the floor. But since then, he has refused to back a bill to repeal ObamaCare.
Doing John Kerry one better, Kratovil was for ObamaCare before he was against it, before he was for it once again. This, he says, demonstrates his independence from the Democratic party line.
On the other big bills of the past two years—namely, the “stimulus” and “cap and tax” bills—this self-described “fiscal conservative” voted to add more than one-and-a-half trillion dollars to the government credit card. The stimulus boondoggle poured billions of tax dollars into pork projects for public-employee unions. Meanwhile, cap-and-tax was designed to clobber the oil, coal, and natural-gas industries, and to raise your energy costs $1600 per household. Kratovil voted for other earmarks and pork projects, too.
Two years ago, Frank Kratovil boarded a flight headed into Ruling Class territory. He’s well on his way—unless you cancel his flight on November 2nd.
Happily, I think that will happen. And it will happen to many other members of the self-appointed elite. Signs are everywhere that people are, at last, wising up and fighting back. Your presence here today is one of those signs.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been paying close attention to politics since I was a teenager in the 1960s. I’ve never been so optimistic about America’s future—and you are a major reason for that. For nearly half a century, I wrote and preached about our lost liberties and endangered rights, feeling like a lonely voice in the wilderness. But now, millions of voices are carrying that message.
However, we can’t stop on November 2nd. Our next task must be to transform the Republican Party into something more than an auxiliary chapter of the Ruling Class clique. The GOP has pretended for decades to be the party of freedom, capitalism, and limited government. And it has betrayed those principles repeatedly.
But we have not just a political party, but a cultural legacy, to reclaim—a legacy often described as American individualism. From our nation’s earliest days, when our pioneer ancestors blazed trails through forbidding frontiers, we Americans havenever viewed ourselves as victims of circumstances. Fiercely self-assertive, proudly independent, we, more than any other people on earth, view ourselves as masters of our fates, as captains of our souls.
The spirit of American individualism, and the moral quest for personal liberty, motivated the Foundersto pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause. It is a cause for which many have fought and died, so that we don’t have to.
So, let us win a peaceful victory for that cause on November 2nd—and then, in the words of Washington, let us continue in the months and years ahead to raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.
These are the “representatives” that rammed through the Obama Care, the financial bill, etc., against the will of the people. They don’t care about the constitution, and they don’t know the difference between the declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and they don’t care that they don’t know.
Together with all the people in congress who voted for this bill. This is EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED AND INTENDED with this bill. But to get it through Congress they gladly and willfully lied through their teeth and ears, they even gladly put their lies in writing.
Why? Because they are ramming through their political agenda which they have been waiting and planning so long for to be able do.
I, and many, many others told you so before the Obama Care “reform” was rammed through at all costs against the will of the American people.
We where told by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it”
Well, we REALLY did find out a lot of things, and remember it’s just the beginning:
It’s going to ruin states, it’s going to be ENFORCED by IRS, close hospitals, fewer doctors, rationing (the new government agency, the Medicare Advisory Board, Section 3403 of the senate bill, that is going to decide (ration) what kind of Medicare you are going to receive), cuts in Medicare, increase the health care costs for companies by billions (and who do you think is going to pay for that?), etc. etc.
And then there were ALL these kickbacks, bribes and pork barrel spending in there to get the bill through at ALL COST.
And worst of all, the blatant hypocrisy from this new nomenklatura:
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well.
Meanwhile, we STILL await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
And remember – They DELIBERATELY PULLED THE TRIGGER ON THIS LOADED GUN knowing fully well “most” of the consequences.
Here are just a few articles:
Lost in Taxation – The IRS’s vast new ObamaCare powers..
“The reality is that voters who oppose ObamaCare are far more knowledgeable about the law and its consequences than most Congressmen who voted for it.”
“..the top actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid revealed that millions of American seniors will have to pay increased out-of-pocket health care costs next year for “less generous benefit packages” as a direct result of Obamacare.”
“Last month, a Kaiser Family Foundation report showed that family health care costs are up by 14 percent in 2010 – with even larger increases forecast for future years, again as a result of Obamacare.
“Health reform mandates new levels of coverage that will increase employers’ costs at least until 2014,” a Kaiser analyst noted.
Beyond higher costs, “Obamacare” is already reneging on government promises regarding prescription drug plans – another benefit that never should have been subsidized by taxpayers. According to a study released earlier this year by Avalare Heath, as many as 3.7 million seniors could be forced out of their prescription drug coverage under the new law next year – ostensibly so the government can provide them with “more meaningful choices.”
All across the country, Obamacare’s costly new mandates are driving Americans out of their existing coverage and forcing them to pay increased out-of-pocket expenses – perpetuating the worst inefficiencies of government-run health care.
“This much is clear: If the law with its expensive mandates remains on the books, millions of Americans are going to lose the health care plans they have now — plans the president repeatedly promised they could keep,” Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe wrote recently.”
Rasmussen’s final pre-election poll on the repeal of Obamacare shows that independents favor repeal by the colossal margin of 45 points (70 to 25 percent).
“Eighty-four percent (84%) of voters who have health insurance rate their coverage as good or excellent. Only two percent (2%) describe it as poor. Among voters with health insurance, 60% favor repeal of the health care law.”
“As has been the case since the health care debate first began to heat up in September 2009, there is a large divide between the Political Class and Mainstream voters.Seventy-six percent (76%) of Mainstream voters favor repeal of the health care law, while 76% of the Political Class are opposed.
Seventy-nine percent (79%) of voters in the Political Class say the law will be good for the country. Seventy-four percent (74%) of Mainstream voters disagree.“
“Voters now rank health care secondon a list of 10 important issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports. The economy continues to be the most important issue on voters’ minds. “
Health Care: The more we know about ObamaCare, the more we find out it wasn’t designed to cut costs but to eventually eliminate private insurance coverage and create a government-run system.
Provisions of the Democrats’ health care overhaul started to become law only a month ago, yet the list of companies dropping medical benefits for their employers is piling up.
Mega-firms such as AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere and Verizon are among those that are either considering ending coverage for their employees or have already chosen to do so.
It’s not just the big companies eliminating benefits, either. Smaller employers are doing the same. Larry M. Elkin, president of Palisades Hudson Financial Group, wrote Thursday in the Business Insider: ”For 15 years, I have taken pride in paying the full cost of health insurance for every full-time PalisadesHudson employee who wanted it. This month marks the last time I will do that.”
Elkin said that every one of his employees has the option of staying on the company plan. But those who choose that route ”will have to pay the entire cost — ranging from $574 to $683 per month — themselves, through payroll deductions.”
And where will those who don’t opt for staying on the company plan go? Maybe they end up leaning on the government along with the 46 million or so other uninsured Americans the Democrats are trying to cover.”
“As the debate over ObamaCare raged, Americans were assured by the president himself that those of us who like our insurance plans would be able to keep them. But workers will not only lose their employers’ plans due to their employers’ increasing costs under the law, they will also be losing coverage because carriers are dropping some of the policy options they offer.
WellPoint, Cigna, CoventryOne, Humana, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna and Golden Rule have, for instance, announced that they will no longer sell child-only policies under the Democrats’ health care regime.”
In some cases — the Principal Group and its 840,000 customers is one example — carriers are dropping out of the health insurance market entirely.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s and 29 other companies told Washington that ObamaCare was going to force them to drop insurance coverage for some workers. Had those companies not been granted federal waivers from the requirement that they raise the minimum annual benefits of their low-cost health plans, roughly 1 million Americans would have been added to the rolls of the uninsured.
Don’t think it can’t get worse, because under the Democrats’ ill-thought-out plan, it will. Large pieces of ObamaCare that will make the system painfully expensive and increase federal intrusion still haven’t become law. The next Congress needs to get focused fast on stopping the march toward costly, substandard care.”
Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf on Obama Care: ObamaCare includes work disincentives likely to shrink the amount of labor used in the economy.
Factoring in additional demand for workers in health care and insurance, CBO estimates that “the legislation, on net, will reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by roughly half a percent,” he said. (For perspective, half a percent of current payrolls is 651,000 jobs, though the impact would show up in both fewer jobs and fewer hours worked.)
“Perhaps the most comprehensive critique can be found in ”Fresh Medicine,” a new book by Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat. In a year in which he isn’t even running for re-election, Mr. Bredesen pulls few punches. ”Congress and the Obama administration have just added over 30 million people into an obsolete and broken system and done little to address the underlying problems; in multiple ways, they’ve made them worse,” he wrote. ”Worse” is an understatement. Lower quality health care, higher costs, more complexity and more regulations would be Obamacare’s legacy.
The American people have a chance to stop it from happening. Just as the drubbing of congressional Democrats in 1994 in the wake of the Clinton gun ban has kept overt gun-control measures out of the national spotlight, the 2010 drubbing could kill the desire for health care nationalization once and for all. Already, 71 percent of voters in Missouri have approved a ballot measure that will block implementation of Obamacare at the state level. Big votes tomorrow on similar constitutional amendments in Arizona, Colorado and Oklahoma will make it clear once and for all that Obamacare is not long for this world.”
“We now know that federal employees across the nation owefully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.
As in, 1,000 times one million dollars.”
“Now, back taxes have been a problem for the Obama-Biden administration. You may recall early on that Tom Daschle was the president’s top pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. But it turned out the former Democratic senator, who was un-elected from South Dakota in 2004, owed something like $120,000 to the IRS for things from his subsequent benefactor that he just forgot to pay taxes on. You know how that is. $120G’s here or there. So he dropped out.
And then we learned this guy Timothy Geithner owed something like $42,000 in back taxes and penalties to the IRS, which is one of the agencies that he’d be in charge of as secretary of the Treasury.The fine fellow who’s supposed to know about handling everyone else’s money. In the end this was excused by Washington‘s bipartisan CYA culture as one of those inadvertent accidental oversights that somehow never seem to happen on the side of paying too much taxes.”
“But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama’s very own White House owe the government they’re allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.
In the House of Representatives, 421 people owe a total $6,524,892. In the Senate, 217 owe $2,774,836. In the IRS’ parent department, Treasury, 1,204 owe $7,670,814. At the Labor Department, where Secretary Hilda Solis’ husband had some back-tax problems before her confirmation, 463 owe $7,481,463. Eighty-one workers for the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors owe $1,076,733.
Over at the Justice Department, which is so busy enforcing other laws and suing Arizona, 1,971 employees still owe $14,350,152 in overdue taxes.
Then, we come to the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who preferred to call terrorist acts ”man-caused disasters.” Homeland Security is keeping all of us safe by ensuring that a Dutch tourist is aboard every inbound international flight to thwart any would-be bomber with explosives in his underpants.
Within that department, there reside 4,856 people who owe the tax agency a whopping total of $37,012,174.”
2010 Congressional Pig Book Summary. An exposé of pork-barrel spending. The Pig Book revealed 9,129 earmarks worth $16.5 billion.
Sixty percent (60%) of U.S. voters say most members of Congress don’t care what their constituents think, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Our latest interview with the White House Insider reveals a Democratic Party civil war, with growing opposition to the Obama White House.
“So who do you place the most blame for the Democratic Party’s troubles today? President Obama and his administration -without a doubt. The Obama White House has been a political train wreck from day one, and it isn’t getting any better at the moment. You already know my feelings on that.
Previously you stated that Obama could be re-elected in 2012, and that if he improved himself on the job – that if he took a more active and responsible role as President, that you would support him. Do you still feel that way? Is that what I said? (shakes head) Well…(pauses) Ok, I’ll just come out and say what is already underway, and to hell with the possible consequences to me. I will not support Barack Obama in 2012. That possibility has left the table for me. Based on what I know, what I have been told, what I have seen in recent weeks…no, I cannot support the President for a second term. My concern for the party , for the country…my conscience does not allow me that option any longer. Obama is not fit to be president. He simply does not possess the inclinations necessary to lead the country. And I don’t like saying that. I helped the man get elected. I was in the trenches day after day from city to city helping things get done in 2008…I take no pleasure in saying I was a part of that. And I take no pleasure in saying Obama should not be re-elected in 2012.
That is a very strong statement – anything recent that causes you to now say you will not support Obama in 2012? (Long pause – question is repeated) There is much I have been told, some I know, some more that will probably develop in the coming weeks and months. But you want specifics, right? I understand that…I’ll give you an example of why President Obama is not right for America. He sure as hell has not been right for the party. Not long ago, the president took a meeting. He’s late, which apparently is becoming more and more common with him. The meeting was almost cancelled. In strolls the president, joking with an aide. He plops down on a sofa, leans over and claps another guy on the back asking how he’s been. Apologizes for being late, says he was “held up”. He laughs some more. The meeting begins. After just ten minutes, during which time the president appears to almost totally withdraw into himself, an aide walks in and whispers something to the president, who then nods and quickly stands up, shakes a few hands and tells another aide to update him later on the rest of the meeting. As the president is walking out he is laughing at something yet again. He asked no questions of those at the meeting – not one. He left after just ten minutes, coming in laughing and leaving laughing. His behavior during that brief time he was there was described as “borderline manic”.
Ok, you have already stated previously that the president doesn’t show much interest in the day to day business of being president – why is this example so bad, or different? Care to know what that particular meeting was about on that day?
Certainly. Afghanistan. That meeting was an update on Afghanistan, and the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, could give a -expletive-.
Were you actually there to witness this? No, I was long gone from the White House by then. It was told to me though by someone who was. They were there. First hand. They were also left to apologize to the ones left in the room after the president left. Some of these were military. They were not happy. No…that is not accurate. They were pissed. They didn’t say much at the time, but word got back. They were in shock at the president’s behavior. The country had just lost a number of soldiers the week prior, the public opinion on the war was falling…and the president didn’t seem to care. He arrives late, leaves early, appears to emotionally shut down during the actual discussion, and to then start laughing once again as he is leaving…how does someone reconcile with that kind of behavior? I can’t. It turns my stomach. I didn’t want to believe what I was being told, but I had seen similar kinds of behavior from the president myself, and I can’t dispute the credibility of the source. They have no reason to lie.
So is that one example the real tipping point for you in no longer being willing to support Obama in 2012? Or do you have any others you wish to share? Oh, I have others, though I cannot share all of them at this point because they involve some still in range of potential White House retribution. Then again, I suppose I am still in range of such retribution myself.
What do you mean by retribution? Punishment. Political punishment, and even personal punishment. The powers of a president extend far beyond the Oval Office – you know that. I make my living, and it has been a very good living, working within the system of politics. A president can create considerable…pressure if you will, to limit or even destroy my place in that system. Working with a president is an extraordinary and terrifying thing. In regards to my experience with Obama, it became far less extraordinary and far more terrifying. And it’s getting worse.
Terrifying? Yes, terrifying. To see one’s expectations so disappointed. To see a figure who wields such great power and influence fall so short of the responsibilities of that power and influence…that is terrifying to witness. Initially I developed great fear for my party – for the Democrats whose political careers were being destroyed by this administration and party leader ship. Now I sincerely fear for my country.
- The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001
- The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.
- The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
- As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
- Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
- In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
- Dell Inc. has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.
- Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.
- If our trade deficit with China increases at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.
- As of the end of July, the trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.
- The Census Bureau says 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty, which is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.
“So how many tens of thousands more factories do we need to lose before we do something about it?
How many millions more Americans are going to become unemployed before we all admit that we have a very, very serious problem on our hands?
How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave the country before we realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that is killing our economy?
How many once great manufacturing cities are going to become rotting war zones like Detroit before we understand that we are committing national economic suicide?
The deindustrialization of America is a national crisis. It needs to be treated like one.
If you disagree with this article, I have a direct challenge for you. If anyone can explain how a deindustrialized America has any kind of viable economic future, please do so below in the comments section.
America is in deep, deep trouble folks. It is time to It is time to wake up.”
18 Iconic Products That America Doesn’t Make Anymore
Rawlings baseballs, Etch-a-sketch, Chuck Taylors shoes, Stainless steel rebar, Mattel toys, Minivans, Vending machines, Levi jeans, Radio Flyer’s Red Wagon, Televisions, Cell phones, Railroad parts, Dell computers, Canned sardines, Incandescent light bulb, Forks, spoons, and knives.
”Buying American” used to be a popular political gesture. But these days it’s becoming impossible. “
Is this the end result if present political and economic trend continues? “Why do great nations fail?…. They all make the same mistakes. .. He He Now they work for us.”
Chinese Professor
79% of Private Sector Job Growth Over Last 5 Years Has Been in Texas
“In total, over 2 million jobs have been eliminated, in contrast to the over 3 million more jobs Americans were promised if Democrats’ 2009 stimulus plan passed. The only place in America that has exceeded its projected job growth following Democrats’ stimulus is Washington, D.C.”
“The study, ”The Adult Recession: Age-Adjusted Unemployment at Post-War Highs,” adjusts the current unemployment rate to account for demographic differences and finds that the unemployment rate has not fallen below 10.8 percent in the last 12 months. During the worst episode of the recession of the 1980s — the second half of 1982 and the first half of 1983 — unemployment passed 10 percent for 7 months.
The analysis notes that the population is older today than it was in the 1980s, which has the effect of lowering today’s unemployment rate relative to the past. Since they change jobs more frequently and are more likely to move in and out of the labor market, Young people have a higher unemployment rate than older workers. Adjusting for this older workforce shows that the United States is experiencing the weakest labor market since the Great Depression.”
60 Minutes Shock Report: National Unemployed and Underemployed 17.5%; California 22%
”When you take into account the underemployed as well as the unemployed, the national rate hits 17% and California a staggering 22%.
To put a face on the realities of the underemployed in America under Obamanomincs, reporter Scott Pelley spoke with a fiber-optics engineering manager who has been looking for work for over a year. He just took a job working at a Target. 20% of the unemployed in America have college degrees.
According to the report, 1/3 of the unemployed have been out of work for over a year. This hasn’t happened since the Great Depression.”
Licensing to Kill
A new study showshow city regulations harm small business.
“When most people think of occupations requiring fingerprints and police reports, corner bookshop owners don’t spring to mind. Try telling that to Los Angeles,where many used booksellers are required by law to get a police permit and take a thumbprint from every 40-something trying to offload his collection of French poetry.
That’s one scene from a study to be released this week by the Institute for Justice, which has collected dozens of examples of regulations choking economic growth by taxing and over-licensing small businesses. In a survey of eight major cities, the study found that entrepreneurs routinely face obstacles …”
“While Republicans have been taking aim at Democrats voting record, including their backing a $787 billion stimulus that failed to produce the promised jobs and a $500 billion cut to Medicare for Seniors, Democrats have gotten mean with ad hominen attacks.”
”It’s a political game played by both sides of the aisle in every election, of course. But there are indications the midterm election of 2010 is emerging as one of the dirtiest races ever with most of the mud flying from Democratic ramparts.”
“The Democrats are wary of trying to brag about anything, given the bad mood and the recession,” said Eugene Kiely, an official with the FactCheck.org watchdog. ”So they have done relatively few positive ads.
”It’s been attack from the beginning,” he told The Huffington Post.”
New York Times: Democrats Backing Fake Tea Party Candidates
“Increasingly desperate and fearful of a GOP takeover of Congress, the Democratic Party is secretly supporting fake tea party and other third-party candidates in the hopes of diverting votes from Republican contenders.”
“Seeking any advantage in their effort to retain control of Congress, Democrats are working behind the scenes in a number of tight races to bolster long-shot third-party candidates who have platforms at odds with the Democratic agenda but hold the promise of siphoning Republican votes.
The efforts are taking place across the country with varying degrees of stealth. And in many cases, they seem to hold as much risk as potential reward for Democrats, prompting accusations of hypocrisy and dirty tricks from Republicans and the third-party movements that are on the receiving end of the unlikely, and sometimes unwelcome, support.“
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate for a suburban Philadelphia House seat, Bryan Lentz, admitted this week that his volunteers helped Jim Schneller — a prominent skeptic of President Obama’s citizenship — collect petitions to run against Mr. Lentz and his Republican opponent, Pat Meehan.
“It is one of the dirtiest moves,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, a vice chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It’s not as though the Democrats are playing to compete against the third party — they’re helping to build the third party up to make those votes not count.” Calling it “a concerted effort,” Mr. McCarthy added, “In Congressional races, it could steer the tide for the majority.”
“In other efforts, Democrats have tried to keep a lower profile, though they have not always succeeded.
Democrat Dirty Tricks: A Primer on Stealing Elections
“Democrats are desperate to stop the red tide spreading from the heart of the nation and heading toward the coasts. They are eager to preserve and protect their liberal agenda and extend it in the years to come. They fear that Republican ascendancy in the House might lead to the defunding of several elements of ObamaCare and thus put it on life support until they can deliver the coup de grace in 2012 under a veto-proof majority or a new president.
Democrats are reaching into their bag of tricks. They are going beyond garden-variety tactics such as push polls and misrepresenting their own records, positions, and even identities (including stripping their party designation, the Scarlet D, from ads; hiding the fact that they are incumbents; denying one’s paternity, as in the case of Harry Reid’s son, who went the way of Cher during his campaign and used just his first name, Rory; running away from Barack Obama and their own votes on ObamaCare and the stimulus; pledging to vote to repeal ObamaCare and extend tax cuts for one and all; misrepresenting the views of their opponents; and portraying themselves as Blue Dogs despite being Pelosi Lapdogs). And, of course, they are postponing ethics trials of prominent Democrats until after November 2. “
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, and we are beginning to see the Democrats start to rely on ”dirty tricks” to spoil the fun (because if you have to run from the policies that are destroying your party’s popularity, you have to resort to all means, fair and foul — and mostly foul — to win). Politics is war by another means, and when the Democrats are led by the CookCounty Gang that could not play straight, all sorts of tactics will emerge.
Let’s take a tour across the political landscape and catch some highlights:
The Department of Justice, The Secretary of State Project, Smear Campaigns, Death to the Tea Party, False Flags”
“False, misleading or fraudulent claims have long brought the wrath of juries, judges and government agencies down on perpetrators. So have substandard manufacturing practices.
Who could oppose following the rules, making quality products and being honest? But shouldn’t these values apply where far more is at stake than a few companies, pills, baseball records or bad role models? Shouldn’t we demand that these rules apply to people and actions that have unprecedented impact on lives, livelihoods, liberties and communities throughout the country?
Can we afford to continue having double standards that let government officials violate basic standards of honesty and accountability that they apply “vigorously” to citizens and companies?Why should legislators, regulators and investigators be exempt from rules they devise and impose on everyone else? Shouldn’t we teach our kids that government officials mustn’t lie to us, either?
“Military voters from the land of Lincoln could be shut out of the midterm election after the Justice Department reached an agreement with Illinois that gave the state ”a pass” for violating federal election law, an advocacy group warned Monday. “
“Eric Eversole, a former Justice voting section attorney who runs the nonprofit Military Voter Protection Project, told FoxNews.com the deal effectively lets wayward Illinois election officials off the hook and does little to ensure the state’s military voters get their ballots in time.
”For at least 29 counties, there were absolutely no consequences,” he said. ”Illinois is precisely the reason why you can’t wait until a week before the election to try and resolve a clear violation of military voting rights.”
“Washington, D.C. – Nearly six weeks after receiving a waiver of the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which allowed New York to mail absentee ballots to our troops no later than October 1, 2010, the New York State Board of Elections admitted on Tuesday that New York City and several counties failed to meet the deadline and still have not mailed their absentee ballots. [Read more: http://www.fvap.gov/resources/media/ny_delivery_cert.pdf] With only 25 days before the election, thousands of New York military voters now stand on the brink of having their voices silenced in the upcoming elections.”
The right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights of American democracy. It has been defended for well over 200 years by the sacrifices our men and women in uniform. Yet, when it comes to their right to vote—our military members’ right to choose the next Commander in Chief or their elected representatives—their voices have long been silenced by an electoral process that has failed them. That silence was most evident in the 2008 when thousands of absentee military ballots never received by the military voter or received after the election. The MVP Project is here to defend our military members’ right to vote and to provide them with the very right that they defend
Mayor Bloomberg Slams Board of Elections for Failure to Mail Military Ballots
“Bloomberg told Fox News. ”We send our young men and women overseas to fight and to die for us and we don’t care enough to make sure they get the right to exercise their franchise ? That’s what they’re over there fighting for as much as anything else.”
“Not only did Maryland fight like crazy to deprive soldiers of their constitutional right to vote for state candidates, they might appeal today’s victory for military voters against Maryland. I wonder if the Baltimore Sun will FOIA how much it is costing the taxpayers to litigate so as to avoid mailing ballots to military voters. But Maryland doesn’t seem to be a state that places high priority on military voters. They are more interested in registering 16 year olds to vote and where you can hunt ducks.More on Maryland’s unfortunate position. “
At DOJ, Military Voting Rights Hang in the Balance
“Eric Holder’s DOJ isn’t interested in making sure our military members’ votes are protected and counted, so PJM is gathering evidence to ensure that problems are reported properly and will be fixed.
Pajamas Media is asking military voters who had problems getting their ballots to send their stories to story@pajamasmedia.com. Why? Because the MOVE Act may likely be rewritten next year, and information about problems you experienced will be essential to get it right in 2012.”
”Sixteen states and territories, at least, blew it and didn’t mail ballots on time. The Maine secretary of state, amazingly, told Fox News last week that compliance has been “pretty impressive.” I’d hate to see what he thinks is pretty “awful.”
”But the Eric Holder Justice Department deserves enormous blame. As far back as February, a manager at the Voting Section told state election officials that the new law was vague and the DOJ didn’t really want to sue anyone. State election officials were flabbergasted and acted accordingly. They assumed compliance with the new law wasn’t a big deal to the DOJ, the agency charged with enforcement.
Then things really got bad. In the spring, the DOJ never provided the Pentagon waiver guidance despite the Pentagon’s repeated requests. And how many lawsuits did the DOJ file despite the multiple states that were facially out of compliance with too-late primary elections? Zero. The summer dribbled away with analysis, talk, and chatter instead of action.”
Disgrace: DOJ Fails to Protect Military Voting Rights
“In 2008, some 17,000 servicemen and servicewomen mailed home completed ballots that were never counted. The DOJ barely lifted a finger to prevent or prosecute this travesty. What will happen in 2010?”
”Election ’10: The president’s home state gets a pass from the Justice Department on ensuring its soldiers overseas can vote. An administration obsessed with gays in the military doesn’t care about voting rights for GIs.
You can call it a tragedy of errors, a perfect storm of incompetent and uncaring bureaucrats, or you can call it a deliberate attempt to steal what looks to be a close race for both governor and U.S. senator in President Obama’s home state by disenfranchising its servicemen overseas, votes likely to tilt Republican.”
“Meanwhile, the Chicago Board of Elections hand-delivers ballots to inmates in CookCounty Jail. The board doesn’t even wait for the inmates to apply — it brings the applications with the ballots! More than 2,600 inmates have cast ballots — strikingly similar to the 2,600 soldiers who will likely not receive a ballot for Tuesday’s election.”
Holder puts felons over soldiers. The Justice Department obstructs military voting rights
“Obama Justice Department outrages never cease. The politically charged gang led by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is more interested in helping felons vote than in helping the military to vote. Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, has put a legislative hold on the already troubled nomination of James M. Cole to be deputy attorney general until the attorney general ensures full protection for voting rights of our military (and associated civilian personnel) stationed abroad. The senator is right to raise a ruckus.
Mr. Cornyn co-authored a 2009 law mandating that states mail absentee ballots to military voters at least 45 days before the election. Yet, as former Justice Department lawyer Eric Eversole first reported in The Washington Times last week, the department seems to be encouraging states to apply for waivers so they won’t have to follow that law. More than 17,000 Americans serving overseas were denied the vote in 2008 – but, presumably because military personnel are thought to lean conservative, the liberal Obama administration is in no hurry to correct the situation.
The Justice Department is so unenthusiastic about military voting that its website still lists the old requirement for a shorter 30-day military voting window, rather than the current law mandating 45 days. On the other hand, the Justice Department has no legislative mandate whatsoever to involve itself with helping felons to vote, but its website devotes a large section – 2,314 words – to advising felons how to regain voting privileges.”
You can help fight the vote fraud and rigging of the election: There’s an app where you can report about voter fraud, intimidation, or other irregular election activity. Download it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ireport2010/id398437175?mt=8
“We’re looking for citizen journalists/poll watchers from across the country to help us report on cases of voter fraud, intimidation or other voting misconduct. Sign up using the form below to get involved.” Sign up here: http://pajamasmedia.com/voter-fraud-watch-2/
“Election watchers True the Vote have found disturbing amounts of fraud in Harris County, Texas. Rather than support their important work, the Texas Democratic Party (among others) is suing them. “
“Talk about denial! A group of liberal activists is making the media rounds, assuring reporters and editors that election fraud is a fairy tale. Nothing serious, they assert, nothing to see here. Too bad for them that citizens in Houston, energized by the Tea Party movement, have formed a group called True the Vote. Their hard work has demonstrated that, in some parts of the country at least, our election system is still infested with problems.”
“True the Vote reports that at least four noncitizens have been registered to vote in Harris County. The group provided Justice with the actual voter registration forms where applicants marked “NO” to the question: “Are you a U.S. Citizen?” The group also provided the voter registration numbers of these confessed noncitizens. Yes, astonishingly, HarrisCounty registered them to vote anyway. They are now on the rolls and able to participate in the upcoming midterm elections.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 was supposed to stop this from happening. But this federal legislation is only as good as the Justice Department’s willingness to enforce it. If Harris County is registering noncitizens, then it is violating numerous provisions of federal law, including those that prohibit the registration of foreigners to vote in federal elections.
True the Vote uncovered other types of fraud as well. The group forwarded to DOJ seven voter registration forms with applicant names different from the signature name. For example: Ta’mackayn Harrison’s application was signed by “Bra Kelly.” Jason King’s was signed by “Jemma Noel.” Yet HarrisCounty inexplicably approved all of these applications. Jason King, aka Jemma Noel, is now on the voter rolls in Houston.
The citizens group also found multiple registrations for individual voters. For example, True the Vote provided the Justice Department government documents showing that at least four persons, including Jose Gomez and Victor Nickerson, had registered to vote multiple times successfully.
These problems were found by True the Vote in just a small sampling of the county’s voter registration list. How many other, similar problems would turn up in a comprehensive review? Don’t forget: every vote counts. Which also means that every legitimate vote cancelled out by a fraudulent vote should be a concern to anyone interested in fair elections and protecting the right to vote.”
Stunner. AZ Group Accused of Massive Voter Fraud Is Offshoot of SEIU
“What the Yuma Sun did not tell you is that over 65% of these last minute registrations were invalid due to the registrant not being a citizen, a wrong/invalid address, or a false signature.”
Raul Grijalva fakes “terrorist attack” to cover up Yuma voter fraud story
“Here is a perfect example of political cynicism from the gangster Congressman in Arizona’s 7th District.
Just hours after the Yuma Sun reports that 3000 voter registrations had been dumped at the Yuma County Recorder’s Office by a group affiliated with the SEIU (with most of them subsequently found to be fraudulent), Raul Grijalva’s office received a suspicious package covered in swastikas with a white powder inside.
Now the story about the suspicious package — the “terrorist attack” as Grijalva puts it — has gone national, and the voter fraud story has gone unnoticed by the mainstream media. How convenient, right?
Raul Grijalva part-time staffer Emily Romero has repeatedly bragged to Democratic insiders that the campaign concocts these threats to take attention away from bad publicity. In this case, the campaign decided to fake a “terrorist attack” on themselves to cover up the story of voter fraud that had just broken. “
Watch this video of a poll watcher’s story about what she has seen during early voting in Houston, Texas. This is eyewitness testimony to voter fraud in the form of poll worker casting votes on behalf of voters,
Tea Partiers Outraged Over Democratic Tea Party Plant’s Fraudulent Google Ads
“Tea Party groups in New Jersey are outraged over ads that have mysteriously surfaced in support of a supposed Tea Party candidate. The sponsored ads on Google are being served up all over the web, in places like BlogTalkRadio, in support of one Peter DeStefano, and direct viewers to the website of njteapartycoalition.org.
The problem is, the NJ Tea Party Coalition, the owners of that website, did not purchase any such ads.
It’s one thing to use dirty Democratic tricks to get on the ballot in an effort to siphon votes away from the Republican candidate, former NFL football player Jon Runyan. But it’s another to fraudulently represent yourself as another existing Tea Party organization in online advertising campaigns, even using that group’s URL to make it seem as though that group has endorsed your fake candidate.
So, the latest question still remains. Who is fraudulently using the NJ Tea Party Coalition’s website address in Google advertisements?”
See also
Tea Party candidate Peter DeStefano was backed by John Adler campaign
“Do you remember when Barack Obama said: “The SEIU Agenda Is My Agenda”?
The same SEIU offshoot group that is accused of turning in thousands of bogus voter registrations in Arizona has come under fire in Colorado.Mi Familia Vota is accused of turning in 6,000 bogus voter registrations in Colorado.”
Rule Of Law: Suspicious voting-machine malfunctions and cheating candidates are the stuff of banana republics, not America. With Democrats about to suffer historic losses, is our election’s integrity in question?
‘It can’t happen here,” most Americans would say about the chances of voting one way and seeing your votes recorded the opposite. But that’s what happened in early voting in North Carolina’s unfortunately named Craven County last week.
Voter Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern found that ”an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended,” the New Bern Sun Journal reported.
Laughinghouse ”pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked,” the local paper reported. ”He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result.”
Election personnel eventually straightened it out, but clearly a less observant Republican voter would have inadvertently voted for every Democrat on his ballot. Chuck Tyson, chairman of the Craven County Republican Party, told the Sun Journal he ”got two or three calls” from voters experiencing the same problem and is not satisfied with state election officials’ efforts to fix it.
In Boulder City, Nev., meanwhile, where voters use computer screens, another disturbing episode was reported by Fox News. When voter Joyce Ferrara and her husband went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, they — and several others, according to Ferrara — found that Democratic incumbent Harry Reid’s name was already checked. The county registrar’s explanation: The high-tech voting screens are sensitive.
The Nevada case is especially disturbing because the seat of the most powerful Democrat in the Senate is at stake.”
“Power is hard to give up, but when those in power compromise campaign and election rules, we cross a sacrosanct threshold.”
The union SEIU controls voting machines in Clark County, NV and the ballots are pre-marked for Harry Reid. What a coincidence wouldn’t you say? Especially since SEIU are spending $44 million of their member’s fees (and the members have no say in this) on helping democrats. How reassuring that the same people are in charge of the voting machines.
They have also spent $225,000.00 of their member’s fees to fight Sharron Angle (R).
“According to Joyce Ferrara who was an eyewitness to this strange ballot ordeal, the problem was widespread, “One person that’s a fluke. Two, that’s strange. But several within a five minute period of time — that’s wrong.”
It is particularly troubling that Clark County has put the uber left-wing SEIU Local 1107 in charge of their voting machines.”
Ballots In Nevada Are Cast For Reid Before Voters Vote
Notice, this video was first published on January 3 2010 long before the Obama Care bill was passed
America Rising: An Open Letter to Democrat Politicians
”America elected you on a promise of hope and change. We trusted you. So we elected you. We regret it. So in 2010…. You Will Lose Big. No more taxes. No more spending. No more socialism. We tried to warn you. But you wouldn’t listen. So now you will pay.We’re taking our country back. From radical leftists and liberals. We’re coming after you.
Blue collar democrats, libertarians, independents, and conservatives. We love our country. We are proud of our founders. And we will fight for our traditions. We don’t want your revolution! “
America Rising Part 2- A Call for the Republican Party to Join!
This is your last chance, Republican Party, to prove to the American voter that you are serious and mean what you say. No more co-opting freshmen to model them to stooges. (read John Trent (R) in WP July 18: “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them”)
Frank Caprio (D) Gubernatorial candidate for Rhode Island:
“I never asked for President Obama’s endorsement. You know, he can take his endorsement and shove it as far as I’m concerned. The reality here is that Rhode Islanders are hurting. We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. We had one of the worst floods in the history of the United States a few months back. And President Obama didn’t even do a flyover of Rhode Island like President Bush did when New Orleans had their problems. He ignored us, and now he is coming into Rhode Island and treating us like an ATM machine.”
“Another laugh at Mr. Obama’s expense came when he was responding to a line of questioning from Mr. Stewart that encapsulated the liberal critique of his presidency; namely, that he hasn’t done enough to bring about the promised ”fundamental transformation” of America. For the left, there is a widening audacity gap. Would Mr. Obama have to change his slogan, ”Yes, we can?”the president began. ”I think what I would say is ‘yes, we can, but … .’ ” At that point, Mr. Stewart and the crowd began laughing. The president dude looked a little foolish. Hope and change died with that ”but.”
Is America Really A 50-50 Nation? Not Even Close, New Polling Finds
“Here’s a well-kept secret: Americans are in overwhelming agreement on social issues. Here’s a not-so-well-kept secret. Many in the media and politics have absolutely no idea.”
Campaign’s Big Spender
Public-Employees Union Now Leads All Groups in Independent Election Outlays
“The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is now the biggest outside spender of the 2010 elections, thanks to an 11th-hour effort to boost Democrats that has vaulted the public-sector union ahead of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and a flock of new Republican groups in campaign spending.
The 1.6 million-member AFSCMEis spending a total of $87.5 million on the elections after tapping into a $16 million emergency account to help fortify the Democrats’ hold on Congress. Last week, AFSCME dug deeper, taking out a $2 million loan to fund its push. The group is spending money on television advertisements, phone calls, campaign mailings and other political efforts, helped by a Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions on campaign spending.
”We’re the big dog,” said Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME’s political operations. ”But we don’t like to brag.”
A recent Gallup poll piled on bad news for President Obama. At the beginning of 2010 the president enjoyed support from 69% of Hispanics. By May that number was down to 57%. Now just 55% of Hispanics support the president and his liberal agenda.
But what’s going on behind the numbers could possibly be a harbinger of doom for Obama’s re-election in 2012. Across the country conservative Latino organizations are springing up as fast as illegal immigrants are streaming across the border. And these organizations are not content to just conduct meetings and complain about the liberal takeover in Washington. Some are taking action. In Dallas, Amigos de Patriots is launching an online and TV ad campaign called “Vote your Values, Vote Conservative.” The idea is to remind Hispanics that their ancestors fled countries where prosperity was killed by left-wing regimes. The 30-second spots also take on social issues like abortion, a practice that is dear to liberals and Democrats but that the Latino community at large finds offensive.
“In 2006, 17 categories favored Democrats, which helped them take control of the House and Senate from Republicans. Democrats picked up six Senate seats and 30 House seats.
In the Pew Poll, 23 of the 28 categories of voters now favor Republicans. What’s more, 22 of the 28 categories support the GOP by 49 percent or more. There are only four categories of voters that are under 40 percent: those making less than $30,000 a year, at 39 percent; voters who are unaffiliated with a religion, at 37 percent; black voters, at 10 percent; and Democrats, at 8 percent.
What is most remarkable is how far some categories have swung away from Democrats and toward the GOP.
Democrats have lost a significant advantage with women voters, who supported Democrats by a 48 to 41 percent margin in 2006, but who have now flipped to supporting the GOP by 49 to 43 percent.
Voters over 65 years old were for Democrats by a 48 to 42 percent margin four years ago. They now favor Republicans by 52 to 38 percent. That’s a 20 point swing.
Perhaps most damaging for Democrats, they have suffered huge losses among Independents. Democrats were up 7 points in 2006, by 42 to 35 percent. They now are down 19 points, 49 to 30 percent. That’s a 26-point swing.
”The first: the tea party is not a ”threat” to the Republican Party, the tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn’t remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.
In a practical sense, the tea party saved the Republican Party in this cycle by not going third-party. It could have. The broadly based, locally autonomous movement seems to have made a rolling decision, group by group, to take part in Republican primaries and back Republican hopefuls. (According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, four million more Republicans voted in primaries this year than Democrats, the GOP’s highest such turnout since 1970. I wonder who those people were?)
Because of this, because they did not go third-party, Nov. 2 is not going to be a disaster for the Republicans, but a triumph.
The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration’s spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: ”We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!” They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.
And they not only freed the Washington establishment, they woke it up. That establishment, composed largely of 50- to 75-year-olds who came to Washington during the Reagan era in a great rush of idealism, in many cases stayed on, as they say, not to do good but to do well. They populated a conservative infrastructure that barely existed when Reagan was coming up: the think tanks and PR groups, the media outlets and governmental organizations. They did not do what conservatives are supposed to do, which is finish their patriotic work and go home, taking the knowledge and sophistication derived from Washington and applying it to local problems. (This accounts in part for the esteem in which former Bush budget chief and current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is held. He went home.) “
On a personal note: The material for this post ended up being nearly 60 pages full of quotes, facts, figures, links, videos, reference material etc. Why? Because this is an important subject – directly for the future of the American people and your way of life, indirectly for the rest of the world. But this is way too much to make a meaningful and readable blog post. So I had to drastically cut it down and split it up. My only hope is that I got it reasonable right, you are the judge of that.
So I split this post into different parts: You must vote, The campaign, The voter fraud, Dirtiest election ever, Some points on the economic situation, The Government, All these lies about Obama Care, The speech by Robert Bidinotto and the article by P. J. O’Rourke
You must vote
So go and vote for some you can trust (yeah I know it’s hard), some one that upholds the constitution and knows what it actually means (yeah, there are not many left), some one that want to rein in the Big Government Agenda and REALLY means it (yeah I know, there are many turncoats), and some one that want to protect YOUR liberty, freedom and the American way of life (yeah, that’s another hard one).
There is in the end only one way you can judge them – By their actions.
Your vote REALLY MATTERS! This time more than ever!
Sooo much is at stake this time – The constitution, the American way of life with freedom and free markets. America is at a crucial crossroads.
Do you want a government for the elites, of the elites and by the elites?
Or a government for the people, of the people and by the people?
It is YOUR CHOICE! A very clear choice! You have to get out and flood the voting booths November 2.
And if you don’t choose, it’s going to be the former.
The turnout of voting-age population in the mid term elections 2006 – 37,1%, and 2002 – 37.0% was pathetic and a joke. 63 % of the voting age population apparently doesn’t care what is happening to their country.
If you don’t wake up now when will you ever do? You have to stand up for freedom and liberty. Or sit back and let the American dream become a nightmare.
Five quotations come to mind. All apply describing the present situation:
”All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826.
”No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) from her book ”This Is My Story”, 1937.
”It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedomthat it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say … that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.” Etienne de la Boetie’s (French judge, writher, philosopher and “politician” during the16 century), The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790, was written sometime shortly before February 17,1775 as part of his notes for a proposition at the Pennsylvania Assembly.
”Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom”. – Albert Einstein
“President Obama, one of the men behind the Biggest Heist in American History – Cap and Trade, and who at ALL COSTS want to ram through the cap and trade bill, has now put in place an administrative system that allows him, at will, to totally bypass Congress.
After the EPA, Health care bill and now the financial bill, they can sneak it trough in big chunks through administrative orders. Not the whole cap and trade bill at once, but in two, tree maybe four steps.
America, your whole system has been hijacked, and you have done nothing, so far, to stop it. What the Obama administration has done during the last one and half year makes a mockery of your constitution and the principle of separation of power.”
These are the “representatives” that rammed through the Obama Care, the financial bill, etc., against the will of the people. They don’t care about the constitution, and they don’t know the difference between the declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and they don’t care that they don’t know. (see for example my post Obama Care 30)
The people in congress who voted for these bills, this is EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED AND INTENDED with these bills. But to get it through Congress they gladly and willfully lied through their teeth and ears, they even gladly put their lies in writing.
Why? Because they are ramming through their political agenda which they have been waiting and planning so long for to be able do.
As I have been saying all along, it has always been a political agenda – anti human, anti freedom, anti development and anti capitalism.And this Global Warming Hysteria is part of that agenda.It has nothing to do with science, facts or saving the environment or the Earth.
All of this, as always, paid by us, the common people, in the form of taxes, high energy costs and reducing our living standard back to the Stone Age.
And these guys spends billions and TRILLIONS of $ of our tax money.
While they at the same time preach austerity, frugality and sacrifice from us, the taxpayers.
This blatant hypocrisy is so mind numbing that it would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these people have the power to force us to obey them.
They are a truly parasitic class in the sense that Karl Marx wrote about it.
How ironic that today most of this parasitic class is leftists and so called “liberals”.
In fact, it is the PERFECT scam and heist – the more they can get you to feel guilty, the more money they earn. And the more control they get over society.
In short, it is very troubling to see a country on a path of economic and political self destruction. But if the present trend continues you are, to put it simple: toast.
It’s time for the people of America to take their country back. Otherwise the consequences for you as a country are going to be devastating. Especially for the common people.
Meanwhile, we STILL await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
“Italy is a member of the EU. It is charged with running the government of Europe, through the European Council and other institutions, alongside our own government. Yet you have a government which can’t even sort out its own rubbish problems, and it is telling us, the British people, how to run our affairs.
In a way though,the experience is a more than adequate symbol of Europe – an expensive pile of festering rubbish, mired in corruption, surrounded by inept and impotent politicians, which is managing to piss of the local population so much that they are driven to rioting. We should be so proud to belong to such an exclusive club – and hope to share in the end game some time soon.!
As a complement to my previous posts on EU and the Lisbon Treaty, (see my posts:
If anything can be taken to define the ”European” experience, it is this amazing confrontation over the rubbish of Naples. Over this one issue, we have Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi vowing to put a stop to an ongoing dispute over whether to build another dump in a national park near Naples, after violent clashes between police and protesters.
As the rubbish piles up in Italy’s third-largest city, Naples, and at least 20 police offers were injured in violent clashes with protestors. Thus is Berlusconi forced to say: ”We expect that within 10 days, the situation in Terzigno can return to normal.” And this at a news conference in Rome after an emergency meeting – about rubbish? He needs an emergency meeting about rubbish?
What has triggered this is the government’s plans to build a new dump in Terzigno, which is located 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of Naples in Vesuvius National Park. This has for years met with fierce opposition by locals, who have repeatedly blocked access to the existing waste disposal site there. Then, on Thursday, police confronted around 2,000 demonstrators, who threw stones, marbles and firecrackers and used tree trunks to block access to the dump.
Berlusconi also announced he would release €14 million ($20 million) to modernize the existing facility, which the protesters say is overflowing and causing health problems.
The bigger problem, however, is that the site is overflowing with Camorra, the Naples version of the Mafia, who have taken control of waste management in the region. And while the current report refers to the crisis being a major issue for the Italian government for several years, with Berlusconi declaring a national disaster in 2008 – which is when we picked it up, also charting EU involvement - the problem goes back over 14 years. And still the Italians can’t sort it out.
Despite this, as we noted in 2008, Italy is a member of the EU. It is charged with running the government of Europe, through the European Council and other institutions, alongside our own government. Yet you have a government which can’t even sort out its own rubbish problems, and it is telling us, the British people, how to run our affairs.
In a way though,the experience is a more than adequate symbol of Europe – an expensive pile of festering rubbish, mired in corruption, surrounded by inept and impotent politicians, which is managing to piss of the local population so much that they are driven to rioting. We should be so proud to belong to such an exclusive club – and hope to share in the end game some time soon.
I have written many, many posts in this blog about the intimidation of people and blatant censoring of facts done in the name of ”science” and Global Warming Hysteria. And that the Global Waming Hysteria has nothing to do with saving the Earth or the environment. It has always been a political agenda.
I have written extensible (over 120 of posts) about the scam called Cap and Trade, – the Biggest Heist in History- where BOTH BUYER AND SELLER BENEFITS FROM CHEATING. And we, as taxpayers and consumers pay the prize. It’s an open invitation to fraud and manipulation.
And recognize it for what it is – A GIANT FINANCIAL SCAMthat puts all the burden on the common people and does nothing whatsoever for the environment.
The European model is a carnival of corruption, profiteering, speculation and multi-billion-dollar fraud. It’s done nothing to improve the environment while handing undeserved profits to big business and driving up the cost of energy to consumers.
What they are really advocating is huge price increases in the cost of energy, meaning the cost of everything.
That’s it. That’s their plan.
Anything else they say is a lie.
This is a scam to enrich the corrupt.
As always – Follow the money.
Here are some good videos on the big company, organisations and political money behind the Global Warming Hysteria.
Part 1-The Big Money & The Global Governance Agenda That Fuels Environmentalism
Part 2- The Big Business of Scaring America to Death
Part 3-Green Gold: BP, GE & the World’s First Carbon Billionaires
I have written many, many posts in this blog about the intimidation of people and blatant censoring of facts done in the name of ”science” and Global Warming Hysteria. And that the Global Waming Hysteria has nothing to do with saving the Earth or the environment. It has always been a political agenda.
I have written extensible (over 120 of posts) about the scam called Cap and Trade, – the Biggest Heist in History- where BOTH BUYER AND SELLER BENEFITS FROM CHEATING. And we, as taxpayers and consumers pay the prize. It’s an open invitation to fraud and manipulation.
And recognize it for what it is – A GIANT FINANCIAL SCAMthat puts all the burden on the common people and does nothing whatsoever for the environment.
The European model is a carnival of corruption, profiteering, speculation and multi-billion-dollar fraud. It’s done nothing to improve the environment while handing undeserved profits to big business and driving up the cost of energy to consumers.
What they are really advocating is huge price increases in the cost of energy, meaning the cost of everything.
“Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way,hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible.
The new global ”carbon trading” market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions.Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd ”carbon-saving” energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.
With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager ”renewables” developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.)
Let all that fluffy white ”global warming” continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein’s monster.It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.”
“It has always baffled me that all the good scientists out there mostly in silence allow the shenanigans and charlatans of there craft to destroy the creditability of science as a whole.
A very good description in today’s The Australian of the sad state of the so called “science” behind the Global Warming Hysteria. And the medias and politicians roll in spreading this gospel.
And the censorship and intimidation from the press, media, politicians and fellow “scientists” of everyone who has opposed this hysteria.
I all along have said that this Global Warming Hysteria has nothing to do with science, facts, or saving the environment. It’s all a political agenda. An anti human, anti development and anti freedom agenda. They also hate the capitalistic system for obvious reasons.”
”Of course, the root of this whole thing is money,” Spann said. ”And, there is a vast amount of wealth being generated by this whole issue. And I always recommend to folks – if anyone speaks on the subject, get a disclosure and find out their financial interests in it.”
He pointed to former Vice President Al Gore as an example of how money behind climate change and global warming alarmism can perpetuate a theory that shouldn’t warrant as much merit otherwise.
”I’m not a politician, don’t understand it – I honestly don’t know,” Spann said. ”But, I will tell you that there’s a lot of people who have gotten very, very wealthy – filthy rich off this subject. I think former Vice President [Al Gore] collects a minimum of $200,000 per speech on this and all of this money – it can corrupt anybody, and I just think it’s all about money.”
Well, finally, more and more real scientists are revolting against the corruption and politicization of science. The latest example is Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics.
Se also:
Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society
“What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)”
“None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake.”
Dissenting members ask APS to put their policy statement on ice due to Climategate
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave.It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion.I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge?It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer ”explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)
Above a short but very succinct description of the Lisbon Treaty and what it really means for the common people.
The EU’s president Herman Van Rompuy:
”Today, people are discovering what a ‘common destiny’ in monetary matters means. They are discovering that the euro affects their pensions, savings, and jobs, their very daily life. It hurts,” he said.”
The political elite in Europe DELIBERATELY constructed the Lisbon Treaty so that the common people COULD NOT UNDERSTAND IT and comprehend what was going on.
I.E. THE LARGEST TRANSFER OF SOVEREIGNTY AND POWER FROM the people and local governments to the EU central level.
And the people were NOT allowed to have their say and to vote on it. With one exception, Ireland. Its constitution made it impossible for the politicians not to have a referendum.
The result – the people of Ireland voted NO 54 to 46 %.
But of course – The political elite in Europe doesn’t accept a NO from the people.
As already have happened before in France (2005 – 55% NO) Netherland (2005- 62% NO), Ireland (2001- 54% NO) and Denmark (1992 – 51% NO)
They started their manoeuvring, twisting, some minor concessions here some more money and transfers there etc.
At ALL COST they had to have a Yes on this one. And they got one a year later.
How many times does the voters have to vote NO before NO is really a NO? Or what part of NO! don’t you understand?
And a very INTERESTING Account of how former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in a meeting with Gorbachev in January 1989, told Gorbachev that Europe in 15 years time is going to be a FEDERALSTATE.
How in the HELL DID HE KNOW THAT??????
Well the answer is very simple – because that’s been the plan all along from the political elite in Europe.
And surprise, surprise, he become the author of the European constitution (2002-03).
Wouldn’t you say that that was another “lucky” coincidence?
Below are just a small number of articles describing the EU mess and the consequences for the common people who have to pay the price for this elitist political project.
“UKIP health spokesman David Campbell Bannerman said: “People’s health and in some cases their very lives will be put at risk at the altar of being good Europeans.” Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said: “It beggars belief that patients are to be put at such obvious risk from EU legislation.”
Safety tests on EU nurses working in Britain scrapped for being ‘discriminatory’
“Ministers are ready to hand sweeping Big Brother powers to EU states so they can spy on British citizens.
Foreign police will be able to travel to the UK and take part in the arrest of Britons. They will be able to place them under surveillance, bug telephone conversations, monitor bank accounts and demand fingerprints, DNA or blood samples.
Anyone who refuses to comply with a formal request for co-operation by a foreign-based force is likely to be arrested by UK officers. “
“Belgium has acknowledged that there will be a major battle over proposals to give the EU powers to vet budgets before they are presented to national parliaments.
Formal legislative proposals on ”budget peer review” and increased ”budgetary surveillance” to prevent another euro zone debt crisis will be tabled by the Commission Wednesday.
”There is a question of sovereignty if the role of the European Commission in economic government is reinforced,” admitted the Belgian source.
Belgian officials, with strong French and German support, are pushing hard to set up new EU supervisors to police financial markets, giving European authorities the power to dictate to regulators in the City of London. ”It is necessary to transfer some decisions away from national to European authorities,” said the source.
EU officials have warned British diplomats that the Lisbon Treaty means it will have to compromise on sovereignty because Britain does not have veto for either the budget scrutiny or financial market supervision measures.
Belgium is also ready to pick a fight with Britain over plans for new European-wide taxes to directly fund the EU independently of contributions from national treasuries.
”We can also explore, for example, the financing of European projects via new sources of revenue,” said the government source.”
“explained why the euro has always been a monstrosity, and why it will and must fail. Although the current plans to ”get a living corpse to walk” are touching, he scoffed, one thing is already clear: The euro bailout package will only save the banks.”
Wilhelm Hankel, professor for currency and development policy, Ministry for Economic Cooperation, the Foreign Office, chief economist of Bank for Reconstruction, the head of the department of money and credit in the Ministry for Economic Affairs and one of the closest staff members to the German economy minister Karl Schiller. etc.
”As was once the case before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Europe‘s politicians have now lost any sense for the rights, concerns and expectations of their citizens.”
Dieter Spethmann, the former CEO of the giant German industrial conglomerate Thyssen.
“He criticizes Berlin for demanding solidarity with Europe while demonstrating no solidarity whatsoever with its people. Hundreds of billions of euros are being destroyed in Germany ”because the country has taken on the role of the monetary union’s paymaster,” Nölling says. ”In violation of all laws, we are being forced to rescue a currency that cannot be saved.”
Wilhelm Nölling, former member of the Bundestag for the SPD, finance minister for the city-state of Hamburg and president of Hamburg’s state central bank.
“But he finds it undemocratic that citizens are simply being forced to be part of a community in which one country is required to bail out another. ”What is happening here is almost dictatorial,”
Karl Schachtschneider, constitutional law expert, lawyer and professor.
Galileo Satellite Needs Extra Financing of $1.85 Billion, Le Monde Reports
“This was done by permanent representatives, known as ”EU ambassadors” who met behind closed doors yesterday to sign off the amendment. The amendment must now be ratified in all the Union’s 27 countries and will require primary legislation in the UK – ”potentially opening up dissent among Conservative MPs who campaigned for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.”
Actually, though, it isn’t an amendment to the Lisbon Treaty. According to the EU Council, it is a ”protocol amending the protocol on transitional provisions annexed to the treaty on European Union, to the treaty on the functioning of the European Union and to the treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community.”
Now, if you can actually work out what that is saying, we are talking about an addendum amending an addendum which sets out changes to transitional provisions. It doesn’t even change a treaty. It simply changes the speed at which a previously agreed change to the treaty comes into force.”
Ordinary people were misled over impact of the euro, says Herman Van Rompuy
In the first public admission of the scale of the popular backlash, Mr Van Rompuy acknowledged that ”growing public awareness” of the euro zone’s problems was ”a major political development.”
”Today, people are discovering what a ‘common destiny’ in monetary matters means. They are discovering that the euro affects their pensions, savings, and jobs, their very daily life. It hurts,” he said.”
“The President of the European Council, the body that brings together EU leaders in summits, also confessed that the euro had been flawed from the moment of its creation in 1992, a situation that had not been made clear to voters.
”We are clearly confronted with a tension within the system, the ill-famous dilemma of being a monetary union and not a full-fledged economic and political union,” he said. ”This tension has been there since the single currency was created. However, the general public was not really made aware of it.”
“Vincenzo Scarpetta, an analyst for the pressure group, said: ”The euro zone crisis is not simply about economic failure but also a breakdown in trust between the political class and European citizens. The EU elite simply got it wrong on the euro.”
The euro crisis is a judgment on the great lie of ‘Europe‘
“What we are witnessing here is a judgment on the entire deceitful and self-deceiving way in which the ”European project” has been assembled over the past 53 years. One of the most important things to understand about that project is that it has only ever had one real agenda. Everything it has done has been directed to one ultimate goal, full political and economic integration. The headline labels put on the various stages of that process may have changed over the years, such as building first a ”common market”, then a ”single market”, finally a ”constitution”. But by far the most important project of all was locking the member states into a single currency.
This was always above all a political not an economic project, to be driven through at any cost, which was why all those ”Maastricht criteria” laid down to bring it about were repeatedly breached. But as expert voices were warning as long ago as the 1970s, when it was first put on the agenda, there was no way economic and monetary union could work unless it was run by a single all-powerful economic government, with the power to raise taxes.
As was advised by Sir Donald MacDougall’s report to Brussels in 1978, it could only work if, following the US model, between 20 and 25 per cent of Europe’s GDP was available to such a government, to enable a huge transfer of wealth from richer countries such as Germany to the poorer, more backward countries of southern Europe – and how ironically has that come about!
When the 10-year-long construction of the euro began in the 1990s, all these warnings were ignored. The cart was put before the horse. So fixated were the Eurocrats on the need to get their grand project in place that the ”rules” were treated as mere window dressing. The member states were locked together willy-nilly in a one-size-fits-all system, with a single low interest rate, enabling countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece to live on a seemingly limitless sea of borrowed money. And now, entirely predictably, judgment day has come.”
As alarming as anything, with this tsunami roaring down on us, has been the sight of our new leaders preening themselves with their list of irrelevant little ”coalition policies” and babyish boasts about the ”greatest democratic shake-up since the 1832 Reform Act”, as if none of this was happening. As one analyst put it: ”They are like children let loose in the sweet shop, seemingly oblivious to the horrendous reality unfolding before us.”
Europe’s deflation torture is a gift to the Far Left
“Communist leader Jerónimo de Sousa said last week that the country was being reduced to a ”protectorate of Brussels”, cowed into submission by financial blackmail. He invoked the civil war in 1383 when the country rallied heroically to expel the foreign opressor – with English help, the ”ultimato inglês” as he calls it – from Portuguese soil.
”It is not just the Communists who are worrying about this. There are a great numbers of Portuguese who are concerned that this country built over the centuries, for better or worse, on a foundation of sovereignty and independence is endangered by accepting everything that comes from Brussels without a trace of patriotism. The EU’s claim of economic and social cohesion is just propaganda,” he told Publico. “
“It was refreshing to read ”The Euro Burns” by Michael Schlecht, Die Linke’s economic guru, arguing that the primary cause of Euroland’s crisis is ”German wage-dumping”. He shows from Eurostat data that German labour costs rose 7pc between 2000 and 2008, compared to 34pc in Ireland, 30pc in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, 28pc in Greece and Holland, and 20pc in France. Again, my loose translation.
Germany ran an accumulated trade surplus of €1,261bn over the period, while Spain ran a deficit of €598bn, and Portugal €273bn. This shell game was kept afloat by recycling German capital to Club Med debt markets beyond sustainable levels until it all blew up over Greece. The Club Med victims are now trapped. “
“The North-South divide within EMU has been allowed to go so far that any solution must now be offensive to either side, and therefore will be resisted. The euro is becoming an engine of intra-European tribal hatred. Brilliant work, Monsieur Delors.”
Less influence and a slower recovery: the dangers for Britain of crisis at heart of eurozone
“While every one of the 27 EU member states is looking to cutting public expenditure – some more than others – the EU is demanding a £6.3 billion increase in its budget to bring its spending ”into line with its new powers under the Lisbon Treaty.”
So much for the claim that Lisbon was a mere amending treaty, but then the ”colleagues” always have lived on a diet of lies, confident that when the chips are down, they can still hold out their hands and the member state governments will come rushing to throw money at them.
In the 2010/11 financial period, British taxpayers will have to hand over £7.9 billion – that is £7,900,000,000, or more than £400 for every household – to keep the ”colleagues” in the luxury they most certainly do not deserve, while the EU enjoys a budget of£113 billion for its 2011 financial year (which coincides with the calendar year).
This situation is beyond irony as the commission has been urging on member state governments cutbacks in their own finances, and – according to Bruno Waterfield – is calling for a six percent cut in British public spending by 2013.
At the same time, we are continually assailed by EU laws and requirements which further add to the cost of governance and daily life, all promulgated by institutions where profligacy is their middle name. And to this, we append our now ritual question – and the reason we do not rise up and slaughter them all is?
The question becomes less rhetorical with each passing day – the pics are of the Résidence Palace in Brussels, that £280 million monstrosity to house the European Council, symbol of being ”in Europe but not ruled by Europe,” as that idiot Cameron would have us believe.”
“It is easy to overcook the idea of the European Union being in crisis. It is always said—by its supporters and its critics alike—to be approaching one sort of exciting denouement or another. But then it passes, the caravan moves on and in time another potential disaster that can be negotiated around swings into view.”
“Even the death of the EU constitution, which seemed like a serious impediment to the progress of the project, wasn’t much of a setback in the end. It was simply reborn as the Lisbon Treaty.
The motive force behind the EU is integration and the creation of a continent-wide power block. National governments and the Brussels-based bureaucracyhave so much invested in advancing that cause that any obstacles will not be allowed to cause more than temporary interruptions. They have become expert at improvising ways to press on regardless.”
“Yes, after much wrangling a deal to support stricken Greece is in place, but only with the Germans enforcing strict conditions. This is a sticking plaster solution. What must come, logically, is something close to a form of economic government by those states that want to stay as the inner core of the euro. It might be called by another name, but that is what it will be.
And that leads to a full-blown political crisis for the EU itself. The choice for various countries then is between trying to be part of an inner core organized around the euro with coordinated fiscal policy, or standing outside it in a trading zone built on cooperation rather than coercion.
The Eurosceptics, in countries such as Britain, are just starting to realize this. The euro’s problems will force its strongest members into much closer integration than even they currently envisage. Other than breaking up the euro they can do nothing else—standing still isn’t an option. In this way that old discussion about there being two distinct Europe’s inside the EU is coming back rapidly into fashion. Sounds like it has the makings of a proper crisis.”
EUROBAROMETER 73 – PUBLIC OPINION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
The EU has become a lumbering, unaccountable mess, says Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker, Published: 7:00PM BST 11 Sep 2010
The latest findings of Eurobarometer, the EU’s own polling organisation, show that less than half its citizens now believe it is a “good thing”. In many countries, its popularity is at record lows, and only 19 per cent see the EU as “democratic” (in Britain, Finland and Latvia this is as low as 10 per cent).
What makes this particularly ironic is that in 2001 the EU’s leaders issued their Laeken Declaration, admitting that the EU faced a crisis through its “democratic deficit”. Their remedy was the process designed to give Europe a “constitution”. After eight years of negotiation, obfuscation, lies and referendum-reverses, they got the constitution they wanted (although they had to disguise it as the Lisbon Treaty).The upshot of this tortuous attempt to “bring Europe closer to its peoples” is that those peoples see the EU as less democratic than ever.
Meanwhile, armed with its new powers, the inflated engine of our EU government rolls on, more power-crazed than ever. It is spending £800 million on setting up its new worldwide diplomatic service, with 100 of its officials earning more than our own shrunken and virtually irrelevant Foreign Secretary William Hague.
Also now on the table are the EU’s options for imposing its own taxes, the front-runner being a tax on financial transactions to which Britain, as a world financial centre, would contribute 70 per cent, more than 300 billion euros a year. Britain and the City will also be hit hardest by the EU’s seizure of control over the regulation of financial services.
Our Chancellor, George Osborne, has just conceded the EU’s right to “supervise” the contents of national budgets, taking away much of a power Parliament has exercised for centuries. Britain also seems likely to lose what remains of the EU budget rebate won by Mrs Thatcher, putting up our yearly contributions to the EU by another £3 billion – even though, for every £1 we get back from Brussels for our farmers, we already hand over £2 to farmers in other countries.
Theresa May, our Home Secretary, weakly claims that she wants reform of the European Arrest Warrant, when half of all those affected by it are being extradited from Britain. The EU’s response, in effect, is that we agreed to this travesty of justice and we must learn to live with it.
But no current issue better illustrates the bizarre nature of the system to which we have surrendered the power to run our country than the chaos inflicted on our hospitals by the enforced application of the EU’s working time directive. Led by John Black, head of the Royal College of Surgeons, medical professionals protest that this is threatening many patients’ lives.
Even the European Commission freely admits, in a recent “communication” to the European Parliament and sundry others, that its rules are, in practice, highly “unsatisfactory” and in need of urgent reform. But it adds that attempts to amend the directives have been going on since 2004 and that any chance of getting the reforms needed will involve so many consultations and negotiations that little is likely to happen for years.
Of course, if we still had the power to run our own country, this crisis in the NHS and much else besides could be sorted out within months, But since our Government seems quite happy to continue handing over even more powers to this crazy system, there is nothing we can do about it – until eventually the whole lumbering, labyrinthine, unaccountable, undemocratic mess implodes under the weight of its own contradictions.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary was interviewed today by the Independent on “Global warming”:
”The scientific community has nearly always been wrong in history anyway. In the Middle Ages, they were going to excommunicate Galileo because the entire scientific community said the Earth was flat… I mean, it is absolutely bizarre that the people who can’t tell us what the fucking weather is next Tuesday can predict with absolute precision what the fucking global temperatures will be in 100 years’ time. It’s horseshit.”
Global warming? It doesn’t exist, says Ryanair boss O’Leary
”Nobody can argue that there isn’t climate change. The climate’s been changing since time immemorial,” he said.
”Do I believe there is global warming? No, I believe it’s all a load of bullshit. But it’s amazing the way the whole fucking eco-warriors and the media have changed. It used to be global warming, but now, when global temperatures haven’t risen in the past 12 years, they say ‘climate change’.”
”Well, hang on, we’ve had an ice age. We’ve also had a couple of very hot spells during the Middle Ages, so nobody can deny climate change. But there’s absolutely no link between man-made carbon, which contributes less than 2 per cent of total carbon emissions [and climate change].”
He suggested scientists had invented and perpetuated the theory in order to gain research grants. ”Scientists argue there is global warming because they wouldn’t get half of the funding they get now if it turns out to be completely bogus,” he said.
”The scientific community has nearly always been wrong in history anyway. In the Middle Ages, they were going to excommunicate Galileo because the entire scientific community said the Earth was flat… I mean, it is absolutely bizarre that the people who can’t tell us what the fucking weather is next Tuesday can predict with absolute precision what the fucking global temperatures will be in 100 years’ time. It’s horseshit.”
He mocked global warming campaigners, describing the United Nations as ”one of the world’s most useless organisations”, its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as ”utter tosh”, and US politician Al Gore as someone who ”couldn’t even get fucking re-elected” after a boom.
“President Obama, one of the men behind the Biggest Heist in American History – Cap and Trade, and who at ALL COSTS want to ram through the cap and trade bill, has now put in place an administrative system that allows him, at will, to totally bypass Congress
After the EPA, Health care bill and now the financial bill, they can sneak it trough in big chunks through administrative orders. Not the whole cap and trade bill at once, but in two, tree maybe four steps.
America, your whole system has been hijacked, and you have done nothing, so far, to stop it. What the Obama administration has done during the last one and half year makes a mockery of your constitution and the principle of separation of power.”
These are the “representatives” that rammed through the Obama Care, the financial bill, etc., against the will of the people. They don’t care about the constitution, and they don’t know the difference between the declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and they don’t care that they don’t know.
The people in congress who voted for these bills, this is EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED AND INTENDED with these bills. But to get it through Congress they gladly and wilfully lied through their teeth and ears, they even gladly put their lies in writing.
Why? Because they are ramming through their political agenda which they have been waiting and planning so long for to be able do.
As I have been saying all along, it has always been a political agenda – anti human, anti freedom, anti development and anti capitalism. And this Global Warming Hysteria is part of that agenda. It has nothing to do with science, facts or saving the environment or the Earth.
All of this, as always, paid by us, the common people, in the form of taxes, high energy costs and reducing our living standard back to the Stone Age.
And these guys spends billions and TRILLIONS of $ of our tax money.
While they at the same time preach austerity, frugality and sacrifice from us, the taxpayers.
This blatant hypocrisy is so mind numbing that it would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these people have the power to force us to obey them.
They are a truly parasitic class in the sense that Karl Marx wrote about it.
How ironic that today most of this parasitic class is leftists and so called “liberals”.
In fact, it is the PERFECT scam and heist – the more they can get you to feel guilty, the more money they earn. And the more control they get over society.
In short, it is very troubling to see a country on a path of economic and political self destruction. But if the present trend continues you are, to put it simple: toast.
Just one small example – the increase in federal taxes and regulations (EPA, Healthcare etc.), the cost of running a business has increased so much during the last year that it has become in many ways uninteresting. On top of that, the huge tax increases that is coming January first next year.
Not to speak about all the uncertainties what is going to happen in the near future.
As more and more people are discovering this and becoming aware of this the biggest heist in American history (see the letter below), President Obama, and his administration, is not doing so well. His approval index is at bottom. As is all the other indicators (see below).
It’s time for the people of America to take their country back. Otherwise the consequences for you as a country are going to be devastating. Especially for the common people. .
Meanwhile, we STILL await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
In today’s dangerous world, we need a president with experience, leadership and courage. Unfortunately, you have shown us little of those traits.
Your childhood and younger years denied you the opportunity to grow up as an American man, and that is no fault of your own. Unfortunately, your lack of empathy for and experience of a traditional American upbringing has left you out of touch with those of us who grew up learning the traditions and work ethic of our predecessors.
You have never accepted the honor of military service, or held and survived in any sort of entry-level working position. You are bereft of many of the basic building blocks of a true American personality and worldview.
You have never experienced the icy hand of fear caressing your gut during a firefight when your very survival from second to second depends on your luck, wits, fellow troopers and the grace of God. You have never sweated out a payroll when your receivables are late.
You’ve missed the rewarding feeling of flogging a loaded truck all night to deliver a load 500 miles away at 7 a.m. You never shoveled cow manure for less than minimum wage to earn enough for a rattletrap car. You missed out on greasing dump trucks on the night shift, and never had the opportunity to start out cleaning restrooms and sweeping floors in a factory.
Your education was in the law, and you ignored any opportunity to absorb the lessons of history or the theories of economics. You have never experienced the law of the jungle in the private sector.
While you play golf and basketball and surround yourself with ”the swells” enjoying concerts in the People’s House, those of us in the general public dine on Spam and Costco burgers. I can’t put my wife on a 747 and send her to Spain so she can be ready to spend 10 days on Martha’s Vineyard when she gets back. She works seven days a week and so do I — spreading four full- and part-time jobs between us to make ends meet.
(My explanation: ”Let them eat cake” is the traditional translation of the French phrase ”Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, supposedly said by a French princess upon learning that the peasants had no bread. As brioche is a luxury bread enriched with eggs and butter, it would reflect the princess’s obliviousness to the nature of a famine.)
I watch in pain while my business venture slides into oblivion and my small IRA erodes as your economic policies push the nation into a double-dip recession. This economy is locking up again, and you cannot blame former President Bush. The great construction jobs I created are ending while you pour trillions in borrowed money into the public sector to buy votes. I blame you personally for appointing the ship of fools you have as Cabinet officials and advisers.
You are repeating the gross mistakes of Japan in the ’90s and the Roosevelt administration in the ’30s — both of which failed and lengthened severe economic problems for a decade or more. You are intentionally smothering our private sector with regulations, taxes and mandates at the same time you squander the wages and futures of our children and grandkids.
I deplore your continued efforts to divide the greatest nation of immigrants in the world along race and class lines. Pandering to various groups and attempting to set them against other Americans is demagoguery at its worst. I sincerely hope such actions end up damaging you in the end and not our country.
You will leave office with a big pension, Secret Service protection and gold-plated health care for life. I may well end up with 40 years of hard work down the drain, living in a mobile home in the backwoods.
I do not resent you for your good fortune — you worked hard to become president and won the election fair and square. I do, however, despise your policies and the damage they are visiting on our nation, its economy and our future. I have dedicated my remaining years to fighting you and your policies and protecting our children’s futures.
I may well end up destroyed financially from the results of your misguided and dangerous actions — but you will never break me psychologically or crush my spirit. I am a Marine, I have a wonderful wife and family, and last but not least, I live in the greatest nation in the world. I shall work to my last breath to keep it that way, and you, sir, shall fail to destroy that dream.
• Howard, a Marine Corps veteran, University of Washington graduate and heavy-equipment supervisor for two decades, is now a developer with projects in Washington and Oregon.
President Obama, one of the men behind the Biggest Heist in American History – Cap and Trade, and who at ALL COSTS want to ram through the cap and trade bill, has now put in place an administrative system that allows him, at will, to totally bypass Congress
After the EPA, Health care bill and now the financial bill, they can sneak it trough in big chunks through administrative orders. Not the whole cap and trade bill at once, but in two, tree maybe four steps.
America, your whole system has been hijacked, and you have done nothing, so far, to stop it. What the Obama administration has done during the last one and half year makes a mockery of your constitution and the principle of separation of power.
What they are really advocating are huge price increases in the cost of energy, meaning the cost of everything.
That’s it. That’s their plan.
Anything else they say is a lie.
This is a scam to enrich the corrupt.
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA:
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
All of this, as always, paid by us, the common people, in the form of taxes, high energy costs and reducing our living standard back to the Stone Age.
And these guys spends billions and TRILLIONS of $ of our tax money.
While they at the same time preach austerity, frugality and sacrifice from us, the taxpayers.
This blatant hypocrisy is so mind numbing that it would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these people have the power to force us to obey them.
They are a truly parasitic class in the sense that Karl Marx wrote about it.
How ironic that today most of this class is leftists and so called “liberals”.
As I have been saying all along, this has nothing to do with science, facts or saving the environment or the Earth. It has always been a political agenda – anti human, anti freedom, anti development and anti capitalism.
And they now have a name: Crime Inc.
And more and more people are discovering this and becoming aware of this the biggest heist in American history.
Taxes: While the oil and gas companies are bearing the brunt of taxation, regulation and environmental angst, others are doing just fine, thank you. If you think cap-and-trade is dead, just follow the money.
According to a recently released Center for Responsive Politics review of reports filed with the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, General Electric and its subsidiaries spent more than $9.5 million on federal lobbying from April to June — the most it’s spent on lobbying since President Obama has been in office.
Why? As the fight over cap-and-trade grows, so does lobbying. Since January, GE and its units have spent more than $17.6 million on lobbying — a jump of 50% over the first six months of 2009.
GE is just one of many organizations and individuals that stand to make money if cap-and-trade makes it through Congress. GE makes wind turbines, not oil rigs, and has a vested interest in shutting down its fossil fuel competitors.
In an Aug. 19, 2009 e-mail obtained by Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, General Electric Vice Chairman John Rice called on his GE co-workers to join the General Electric Political Action Committee ”to collectively help support candidates who share the values and goals of GE.”
And what are those goals, and just what has GEPAC accomplished thus far? ”On climate change,” Rice wrote, ”we were able to work closely with key authors of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, recently passed by the House of Representatives. If this bill is enacted into law, it will benefit many GE businesses.”
GE is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which advocates cap-and-trade legislation and leads the drive for reductions of so-called greenhouse gases. One of its subsidiaries was involved in Hopenhagen, a campaign by a group of businesses to build support for the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference, which was supposed to come up with a successor to the failed Kyoto Accords.
To be fair, coal and gas companies lobby too, both out of self-preservation and self-interest.
But they produce a useful product that creates jobs and boosts GDP. Alternative energy, even after huge subsidies, adds little to our energy mix. Evidence suggests alternative energy is a net job loser, siphoning resources from productive areas of the economy.
Renewable energy sources like wind, solar energy and biomass total only 3% of our energy mix. Spain’s experience is that for each ”green” job created, 2.2 jobs are lost due to the siphoning off of resources that private industry needed to grow.
There’s money to be made in climate change even if the climate doesn’t change, and the profit motive may now be the main driver of cap-and-trade.
The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) was formed to buy and sell carbon credits, the currency of cap-and-trade. Founder Richard Sandor estimates the climate trading market could be ”a $10 trillion dollar market.”
It could very well be if cap-and-trade legislation like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices necessarily skyrocket, and as companies buy and trade permits to emit those six ”greenhouse” gases.
As we have written, profiteering off climate change hysteria is a growth industry as well as a means to the end goal of fundamentally transforming America, as the President has said was his goal.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called climate change a religion whose zealots seek the establishment of government control over the means of production. It reminds him, he said, of the totalitarianism he once endured.
After the Climate-gate scandal broke, Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said of the scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and those they worked with: ”They’re criminals.” He also called them ”huckstering snake-oil salesmen and ‘global warming’ profiteers.”
Like the scientists who lived off the grant money they received from scaring us to death with manipulated data, others hope to profit off perhaps the greatest scam of all time.
Together with all the people in congress who voted for this bill. This is EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED AND INTENDED with this bill. But to get it through Congress they gladly and willfully lied through their teeth and ears, they even gladly put their lies in writing.
I, and many, many others told you so before the Obama Care “reform” was rammed through at all costs against the will of the American people.
We where told by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it”
Well, we REALLY did find out a lot of things, and remember it’s just the beginning:
It’s going to ruin states, it’s going to be ENFORCED by IRS, close hospitals, fewer doctors, rationing (the new government agency, the Medicare Advisory Board, Section 3403 of the senate bill, that is going to decide (ration) what kind of Medicare you are going to receive), cuts in Medicare, increase the health care costs for companies by billions (and who do you think is going to pay for that?), etc. etc.
And then there were ALL these kickbacks, bribes and pork barrel spending in there to get the bill through at ALL COST.
And worst of all, the blatant hypocrisy from this new nomenklatura:
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well.
And as I have said before:
Meanwhile,we await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
And remember – They DELIBERATELY PULLED THE TRIGGER ON THIS LOADED GUN knowing fully well “most” of the consequences.
Here are just two examples– abortion and IRS :
This is what president Obama said on radio August 19, 2009 about abortion funding. And remember, he was talking to religious leaders. That’s why he use such “biblical language” as “bearing false witness”:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: “There are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness. But I want everyone to know what health insurance reform is all about. You’ve heard that this is all going to mean government-funding of abortion. Not true. This is all — these are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation.”
President Obama deliberately lied strait in to the faces of these religious leaders. Nice man wouldn’t you say?
“Is the ink Mr President even dry on your executive order? What is your word worth Sir?”
Remember, President Obama issued an executive order to reassure, and promise democrat Stupack and other democrat protesters so that they would vote for the bill,that the health care bill WOULD NEVER FEDERAL FUND ANY ABORTION.
The Executive order Mach 24:
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s Consistency with Longstanding Restrictions on the Use of Federal Funds for Abortion
These Democrats – from Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively – were two of the final six supposedly pro-life House members who voted to pass Obamacare. They sold their anti-abortion principles for the fool’s goldof an executive order purportedly banning the use of federal funds for destroying unborn children. Now comes the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), in a finding released yesterday, to show proof positive just how tarnished that fool’s gold actually is.
In Rep. Dahlkemper‘s own Keystone State, the federal government on June 28 approved rules governing $160 million in federal taxpayer money for a ”high risk” insurance program that will – repeat: absolutely, positively will – cover just about any abortion before the 24th week of pregnancy. The Pennsylvania plan submitted to the feds provides coverage for ”only” those abortions that satisfy certain state laws. But the key, applicable state law allows abortion if a single doctor decides it is necessary for reasons that include psychology, emotions or the woman’s age.
This isn’t merely a loophole you can drive a truck through; it’s a canyon you can fly through in O Force One. It’s as open an invitation to taxpayer-funded abortion as can be imagined.
What’s worse is that this high-risk insurance program evades laws that ordinarily would govern the use of both federal and Pennsylvania tax money. It skirts the executive order because the order applies only to new insurance ”exchanges” and ”community health programs,” not these purportedly high risk insurance programs. It also avoids state law 3215(c), which forbids state government funds from being used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or threats to the mother’s life. Because this state program is to be run entirely with federal funds, not state funds, 3215(c) doesn’t apply. How clever.
When the Stupak-Dahlkemper gang sold their souls to support passage of Obamacare, both the NRLC and the pro-abortion Planned Parenthood organization dismissed the executive order.The presidential concession is so loophole-ridden and so legally unenforceable to make it only ”a symbolic gesture,” in the words of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.
”The Obamacare law is full of faucets that can be opened to provide abortion subsidies,” NRLC legislative director Douglas Johnson told The Washington Times yesterday. ”Regrettably, this is just the first.” It also is the one that will most directly affect Mrs. Dahlkemper‘s constituents – most notably her future constituents who won’t even be born because of this program, created directly as a result of her unconscionable vote. That’s a pretty dark legacy for a congressional freshman who campaigned as a pro-lifer.
If it seems as if the tax code was conceived by graphic artist M.C. Escher, wait until you meet the new and not improved Internal Revenue Service created by ObamaCare.What, you’re not already on a first-name basis with your local IRS agent?
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates inside the IRS, highlighted the agency’s new mission in her annual report to Congress last week. Look out below. She notes that the IRS is already ”greatly taxed”—pun intended?—”by the additional role it is playing in delivering social benefits and programs to the American public,” like tax credits for first-time homebuyers or purchasing electric cars. Yet with ObamaCare, the agency is now responsible for ”the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history.” And without ”sufficient funding” it won’t be able to discharge these new duties.
That wouldn’t be tragic, given that those new duties include audits to determine who has the insurance ”as required by law” and collecting penalties from Americans who don’t. Companies that don’t sponsor health plans will also be punished. This crackdown will ”involve nearly every division and function of the IRS,” Ms. Olson reports.
Well, well. Republicans argued during the health debate that the IRS would have to hire hundreds of new agents and staff to enforce ObamaCare. They were brushed off by Democrats and the press corps as if they believed the President was born on the moon. The IRS says it hasn’t figured out how much extra money and manpower it will need but admits that both numbers are greater than zero.
Ms. Olson also exposed a damaging provision that she estimates will hit some 30 million sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations, two million farmsand one million charities and other tax-exempt organizations. Prior to ObamaCare, businesses only had to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase. But starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value of goods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.
Democrats snuck in this obligation to narrow the mythical ”tax gap” of unreported business income, but Ms. Olson says that the tracking costs for small businesses will be ”disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance.” Job creation, here we come . . . at least for the accountants who will attempt to comply with a vast new 1099 reporting burden.
Meanwhile, the IRS will be inundated with useless information, because without a huge upgrade its information systems won’t be able to manage and track the nanodetails.
In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana)denounce this new ”burden” on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find ”better ways to structure this reporting requirement.” In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.
We never thought anyone would be nostalgic for the tax system of a few months ago, but post-ObamaCare, here we are.
The summer is finally here after being a cold winter and “spring”. And I want to wish every one a warm (in the name of Global Warming Hysteria) and nice summer. It will also mean that I will write less and more sporadic posts.
But you have 1062 posts and 2042 comments to go through at your leisure.
Sommaren är äntligen här efter att ha varit en kall vinter och ”vår”. Och jag vill tillönska alla en riktigt varm (i Global Warming Hysterins anda) och skön sommar. Det innebär också att jag kommer att skriva mycket mer sporadiskt under denna period.
Men ni har ju drygt 1062 inlägg och 2042 kommentarer att botanisera bland. Om ni använder kategorier och taggar plus sökfunktionen så kommer ni att hitta många intressanta saker.
Så här skrev jag för två år sedan:
”Jag är hoppfull, vinden har vänt och Global Warming Hysterikerna är på defensiven. Det märks inte minst ute i Europa där man äntligen har insett vansinnet med dessa gigantiska summor som kommer att förslösas på nonsensåtgärder. Och som kommer att ruinera vanligt folk och de nationella ekonomierna.
Märk väl att man fortfarande pratar som om inget har hänt men bakom kulisserna så sker just nu en 180 gradig kursomläggning i många länder. För INGEN kommer på officiellt håll att erkänna denna totala omläggning utan man kommer att säga att man har “anpassat” kursen efter rådande omständigheter etc. Eller andra förskönande omskrivningar.
Det är bara våra intälägänta svenska politiker plus massmedia som inte har förstått det ännu. Och som oförtrutet kör på i denna återvändsgränd och tjatar om att vi skall gå i täten och vara världsledande vad det gäller begränsningar av CO2.
Det är bara det att skall man gå i täten så måste man ha några som följer efter också. Och de senaste 2 månaderna så har skaran bakom glesnat betydligt. Och blir glesare för varje dag.
Den största vetenskapliga och politiska skandalen i modern tid är på god väg att avslöjas. Och jag vill passa på att tacka er andra bloggare som oförtrutet har deltagit i denna kamp för vetenskap och sanning. Vi gör faktiskt en skillnad även om det inte verkar gå så fort ibland.”
Och det är bara att konstatera att denna utveckling har fortsatt och att det har blivit uppenbart för gemene man hur lite med sanningen och vetenskap hela Global Warming Hysterin har.
Det är numera bara våra intälägänta politiker som låtsas som om inget har hänt, (på samma sätt som med FRA lagen, IPRED, datalagringsdirektivet etc.), och upprepar sina inlärda mantran som en drucken papegoja. Ni vet den där Montephyton sketchen.
US Temperature during the recent 12 Month period – the same as in 1908
And the cooling continues. Sorry – I mean that Global Warming is an imminent treat to humankind.
And remember, these are the official figures. With the poor placement of stations (91 % of the stations are CRN3 to 5 =bad to very poor); where they have purposely taken away the urban heat island effect;, tweak, processes and “adjusted the data; GISS for example uses 1200 km smoothing (which assumes that the weather in London somehow directly affects the weather in Monaco) etc.
“The average temperature in May 2010 was 60.8 F. This was -0.2 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 50th coolest May in 116 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.”
This year, the May temperature is-4.6 F coolerthan 1934, the warmest May. And if we compare this year’s May with 1936, the second warmest May, it is -3.38 F cooler.
If we compare with 1896 this year’s May is -2.39 F cooler.
This year, the May temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1895! AND 1904. In fact it is 0.19 F COOLER. One fifth of a degree cooler in 115 years.
And the recent 3 Month period (Mar-May) 1895-2010.
This year, the Mar-May temperature is -1.9 F cooler than for example 1910. And if we compare this years Mar-May temperature with 2004 it is -1.78 F cooler.
This year, 2010 (Mar-May), the temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1936! In fact it is 0.08 F COOLER. One tenth of a degree cooler in 74 years.
Another glorious example of the catastrophic warming in the last 116 years!
And the recent 12 Month period (Jun-May) 1895-2010
This year, 2009/2010 (Jun-May), was the 53th coolest in 116 years
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -2.49 F cooler than for example 2000. And if we compare with 1934 it is -2.2 F cooler.
This year, 2009 /2010 (Jun-May), the temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1908! AND 1910.AND 1963. In fact it is 0.02 F Warmer. One fiftieth of a degree warmer in 102 years.
Puh, that what I call an imminent treat to humankind!
1/50 of a degree WARMER in 102 years
And the recent 12 Month period (May-Apr) 1895-2010 for states.
I thought it would be interesting to compare states with the national figures for the recent 12 months.
Arkansas
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -4.3 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1955 it is -3.7 F cooler.
California
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -2.4 F cooler than for example 1997. And if we compare with 1934 it is -1.9 F cooler.
Georgia
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -4.5 F cooler than for example 1934. And if we compare with 1922 it is -3.6 F cooler.
Indiana
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -3.7 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1922 it is -2.5 F cooler.
Kentucky
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -4.2 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1935 it is -3.6 F cooler.
Massachusetts
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -1.7 F cooler than for example 2002. And if we compare with 1898 it is -2.2 F cooler.
New Mexico
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -2.8 F cooler than for example 1934. And if we compare with 1902 it is -2.3 F cooler.
Washington
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -1,4 F cooler than for example 1934. And if we compare with 1992 it is -1,3 F cooler.
West Virginia
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -3.5 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1974 it is -2.5 F cooler.
Wyoming
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is-5.5 F coolerthan for example 1934. And if we compare with 1981 it is -3.8 F cooler.
And the cooling continues. Sorry – I mean that Global Warming is an imminent treat to humankind.
And remember, these are the official figures. With the poor placement of stations (91 % of the stations are CRN3 to 5 = bad to very poor); where they have purposely taken away the urban heat island effect;, tweak, processes and “adjusted the data; GISS for example uses 1200 km smoothing (which assumes that the weather in Paris somehow directly affects the weather in Budapest) etc.
“The average temperature in April 2010 was 54.3 F. This was 2.3 F warmer than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 14th warmest April in 116 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
This year, the April temperature is-1.99 F cooler than 2006, the warmest April. And if we compare this year’s April with 1981, the second warmest April, it is -1.88 F cooler.
If we compare with 1924 this year’s April is -1.29 F cooler.
This year, the April temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1895! AND 1910. In fact it is 0.25 F COOLER. One fifth of a degree cooler in 100 years.
And the recent 3 Month period (Feb-Apr) 1895-2010.
This year, the Feb-Apr temperature is -2.93 F cooler than for example 1925. And if we compare this years Feb-Apr temperature with 1946 it is -2.66 F cooler.
This year, 2010 (Feb-Apr), the temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1907! In fact it is 0.05 F COOLER. One twentieth of a degree cooler in 103 years.
Another glorious example of the catastrophic warming in the last 116 years!
And the recent 12 Month period (May-Apr) 1895-2010
This year, 2009/2010 (May-Apr), was the 62th coolest in 116 years
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -1.66 F cooler than for example 1934. And if we compare with 1954 it is -1.31 F cooler.
This year, 2009 /2010 (May-Apr), the temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1898! AND 1900.AND 1902. In fact it is 0.01 F COOLER. One hundreth of a degree cooler in 110 years.
Puh, that what I call an imminent treat to humankind!
1/100 of a degree COOLER in 110 years
I thought it would be interesting to compare states with the national figures for the recent 12 months.
California
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -1.2 F cooler than for example 1905. And if we compare with 1959 it is -1 F cooler.
Colorado
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -2.6 F cooler than for example 1902. And if we compare with 1934 it is -4.3 F cooler.
Florida
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -2.1 F cooler than for example 1913. And if we compare with 1949 it is -3 F cooler.
Illinois
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -4 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1954 it is -3.4 F cooler.
Pennsylvania
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -3.2 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1921 it is -1.8 F cooler.
South Dakota
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is-12,6 F coolerthan for example 1931. And if we compare with 1990 it is -13,8 F cooler.
Tennessee
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -4.6 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1922 it is -3.6 F cooler.
Texas
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -3.3 F cooler than for example 1911. And if we compare with 1935 it is -3.6 F cooler.
Virginia
This year, the recent 12 Month period temperature is -3.2 F cooler than for example 1932. And if we compare with 1954 it is -2.4 F cooler.
President Obama, one of the men behind Crime inc, and who at ALL COSTS want to ram through the cap and trade bill, is not doing so well. His approval index is near bottom.
What they are really advocating is huge price increases in the cost of energy, meaning the cost of everything.
That’s it. That’s their plan.
Anything else they say is a lie.
This is a scam to enrich the corrupt.
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANIDATE BARACK OBAMA:
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
All of this, as always, paid by us, the common people, in the form of taxes, high energy costs and reducing our living standard back to the Stone Age.
And these guys spends billions and TRILLIONS of $ of our tax money.
While they at the same time preach austerity, frugality and sacrifice from us, the taxpayers.
This blatant hypocrisy is so mind numbing that it would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these people have the power to force us to obey them.
They are a truly parasitic class in the sense that Karl Marx wrote about it.
How ironic that today most of this class is leftists and so called “liberals”.
As I have been saying all along, this has nothing to do with science, facts or saving the environment or the Earth. It has always been a political agenda – anti human, anti freedom, anti development and anti capitalism.
“21 of 44 chapters in the United Nations’ Nobel-winning climate bible earned an F on a report card we are releasing today. Forty citizen auditors from 12 countries examined 18,531 sources cited in the report – finding 5,587 to be not peer-reviewed.”
“We’ve been told this report is the gold standard. We’ve been told it’s 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have not come within a mile of a scientific journal.”
90% of the European cap and trade is a fraud according to Europol.
Europol, the European criminal intelligence agency, announced that Emissions Trading System fraud had resulted in about 5 billion euros in lost revenues.
Europol said:
“In announcing the raids, the agency said that as much as 90% of Europe‘s carbon trades were the result of fraudulent activity.
”Carbon markets are highly susceptible to fraud, given their complexity and the fact that it’s not always clear what is being traded,” says Oscar Reyes of Carbon Trade Watch.”
This is the he system that Crime Ink wants to force on us, that puts all the burden on the common people and does nothing whatsoever for the environment.
This is a scam to enrich the corrupt.
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANIDATE BARACK OBAMA:
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
Corruption: The carbon trading system being pushed here has spawned crime and fraud across the pond. Cap-and-trade is not about saving the planet. It’s about money and power, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.
All across Europe authorities have been conducting raids, rounding up individuals involved in a new version of Climate-gate. This time the data aren’t corrupted. Europe‘s Emissions Trading System is. The system is so sick, it’s turned out to be a scam built upon a scam.
Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids by British and German authorities as part of a pan-European crackdown on carbon credit VAT tax fraud.
U.K. officials announced raids on 81 offices and homes, nabbing 13 people in England and eight in Scotland. The operation involved 450 investigators from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office.
German authorities raided 230 locations, including the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the offices of RWE, one of the largest energy firms in Europe. The German operation involved 1,000 investigators targeting 50 companies and 150 suspects.
The amount of money involved in carbon trading is huge and the temptations vast. While our Congress demagogues about banks and their ”complex financial instruments,” they are simple compared to cap-and-trade, which as we have noted involves essentially the buying and selling of air. Throw in an oppressive value-added tax and you have a recipe for corruption and fraud.
Last December, Europol, the European criminal intelligence agency, announced that Emissions Trading System fraud had resulted in about 5 billion euros in lost revenues as Europe’s carbon traders schemed to avoid paying Europe’s VAT and pocket the difference. In announcing the raids, the agency said that as much as 90% of Europe‘s carbon trades were the result of fraudulent activity.
”Carbon markets are highly susceptible to fraud, given their complexity and the fact that it’s not always clear what is being traded,” says Oscar Reyes of Carbon Trade Watch.
Climate change has been found to be a fraud. Now the system to fight it has been. Yet it’s that system the administration and others want to establish here through cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer.
As we also have noted, the mechanism for such phantom carbon trading here has already been established in the form of the Chicago Climate Exchange. The Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start CCX when Barack Obama sat on its board.
CCX founder Richard Sandor estimates the climate trading market could be ”a $10 trillion dollar market.” It is an invitation to fraud that would make Europe‘s ETS scandal seem like petty theft.
In 2000, according to Joyce Foundation records, $347,600 was allocated to NorthwesternUniversity‘s KelloggGraduateSchool of Management, where Sandor was a research professor, ”to design a Midwestern pilot program for the voluntary trading of carbon dioxide and other emissions that cause climate change.”
Now President Obama would make such carbon trading mandatory, limit total emissions and make carbon as valuable a commodity as booze during Prohibition.
The Joyce Foundation’s two grants totaled just over $1 million.CCX has proved very lucrative for Sandor, whose 8 million shares in the exchange has grown to more than $260 million even before a national cap-and-trade system like Europe‘s is established.
Al Gore, who recently increased his carbon footprint by spending $8.9 million on an oceanview villa near Santa Barbara, Calif., sitting on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa, fountains, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms and no fewer than six fireplaces, is co-founder of Generation Investment Management LLP, the fifth largest shareholder in CCX.
The largest shareholder is, uh, Goldman Sachs. Other CCX founders include former Goldman Sachs partner David Blood, as well as Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris, also of Goldman Sachs. Presumably they know a lot about playing shell games with other people’s money.
What has happened in Europe is going to happen here and may already have begun. We, too, can save the earth for fun and profit.
I have written extensible (over 100 of posts) about the scam called cap and trade, where BOTH BUYER AND SELLER BENEFITS FROM CHEATING. And we, as taxpayers and consumers pay the prise. It’s an open invitation to fraud and manipulation.
And recognize it for what it is – A GIANT FINANCIAL SCAMthat puts all the burden on the common people and does nothing whatsoever for the environment.
The European model is a carnival of corruption, profiteering, speculation and multi-billion-dollar fraud. It’s done nothing to improve the environment while handing undeserved profits to big business and driving up the cost of energy to consumers.
Well here is the latest episode of “The Sopranos”, where Glenn Beck gives a very good overview of the people and politicians pushing the Cap and trade and the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), and their HUGE financial gains from this.
And these guys spends billions of $ of our tax money.
What they are really advocating is huge price increases in the cost of energy, meaning the cost of everything.
That’s it. That’s their plan.
Anything else they say is a lie.
This is a scam to enrich the corrupt.
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANIDATE BARACK OBAMA:
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
And the never ending story of exposing IPCC:s lies continues. This one from Bangladesh and Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS).
Yet AGAIN IPCC and their “scientists” “forgot” a very crucial fact.
Global Warming: Another shoe has dropped from the IPCC centipede as scientists in Bangladesh say their country will not disappear below the waves. As usual, the U.N.’s climate charlatans forgot one tiny detail.
It keeps getting worse for the much-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seems to have built its collapsing house of climate cards on sand or, more specifically, river sediment.
After fraudulent claims about Himalayan glaciers, African crop harvests and Amazon rain forests, plus a 2007 assessment report based on anecdotal evidence, student term papers and nonpeer-reviewed magazine articles, the panel’s doomsday forecast for Bangladesh has been exposed as its latest hoax.
According to the 2007 report, melting glaciers and polar ice would lead to rising sea levels and just a three-foot rise would flood 17% of the low-lying country of Bangladesh by 2050 and create 20 million refugees.
Now comes a study from the that says the IPCC forgot to factor in the 1 billion tons of sediment carried by Himalayan rivers such as the Ganges and the Brahmaputra into Bangladesh every year.
CEGIS director Maminul Haque Sarker told AFP that ”studies on the effects of climate change in Bangladesh, including those quoted by the IPCC, did not consider the role of sediment in the growth and adjustment process of the country’s coast and rivers to the sea level rise.” Even if sea levels rose according to IPCC predictions, Sarker says, natural sediment deposits would cancel the effect of any rise.
Apocalyptic changes forecast by climate change alarmists, according to Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the International Commission on Sea Level Change, are not in the cards. Despite fluctuations down as well as up, ”the sea is not rising,” he says. ”It hasn’t risen in 50 years.”
If there is any rise this century it will ”not be more than 10 cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10 cm.”
Six times he and his expert team visited the Maldive Islands to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has, if anything, dropped in recent decades. Venice, Italy, has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr. Morner.
IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri defended his organization’s predictions by warning that ”on the basis of one study one cannot jump to conclusions.” Yet he and the IPCC jumped to the conclusion that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 based on unsubstantiated student theses and anecdotes from a magazine for mountain climbers. These claims have been withdrawn amid much laughter.
Still, Pachauri persists in his fables. ”One single error doesn’t take anything away from the major findings of the report,” he said. ”The fact is that the glaciers are melting.” At least the glaciers in Iceland are, due to natural forces, namely volcanic activity. Even if real, not everything can be blamed on man.
In February, it was reported that India was pulling out of the IPCC because it could no longer trust the U.N. body’s data or conclusions. The day after India’s announcement, the Netherlands asked the U.N. to explain why the IPCC had said in its 2007 report, which helped it win its share of a Nobel Prize shared with Al Gore, that 55% of the country was below sea level, a figure the Dutch say is closer to 26%.
There’s been a sea change in the consideration of the bogus claims of the IPCC, Gore, Britain’s CRU and other climate charlatans. No longer accepted on faith, they are being challenged and disproven by scientific fact.
These are the “representatives” that rammed through the Obama Care against the will of the people. They don’t care about the constitution; and they don’t know the difference between the declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and they don’t care that they don’t know.
We where told by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it”
Well, we did find out a lot of things, and remember it’s just the beginning:
It’s going to ruin states, it’s going to be ENFORCED by IRS, close hospitals, fewer doctors, rationing (the new government agency (the Medicare Advisory Board, Section 3403 of the senate bill, that is going to decide (ration) what kind of Medicare you are going to receive), cuts in Medicare, increase the health care costs for companies bybillions (and who do you think is going to pay for that?), etc. etc.
And then there were ALL these kickbacks, bribes and pork barrel spending in there to get the bill through at ALL COST.
And worst of all, the blatant hypocrisy from this new nomenklatura:
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health carelaw exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well.
Well, well, now some of the members of Congress and congressional staff have to their surprise “discovered” that they may be removed from their current coverage under the gold-plated Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
This came to light after the Congressional Research Service was besieged by calls from concerned congressmen who didn’t realize they might have to give up their own super-duper health care coverage.They only meant to strip us of our good health care coverage, not theirs.
Now they’re angry.
What is this! Do YOU REALLY MEAN THAT I HAVE TO FOLLOW THE SAME LAW THAT I PASSED AGAINST THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE? That it applies to me to? This is preposterous!
This is not what I signed up for!
Repeal! Repeal!At least that section that says that we ARE NOT EXEMPTED.
And as I have said before:
Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
And remember – They DELIBERATELY PULLED THE TRIGGER ON THIS LOADED GUN knowing fully well “most” of the consequences.
Health Overhaul: Many thought Nancy Pelosi was joking when she said, ”We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.” But the more we learn about her 2,400-page horror, the more we realize the joke’s on us.
Barely a day goes by without some new revelation of what the health care bill contains — and how its provisions are already starting to hurt millions of people. The overhaul has already begun tearing down our old health care system — the best in the world — and replacing it with something mediocre, bureaucratic, costly and even dangerous.
Here’s just a sample of how, as the speaker of the House put it, we’re now ”finding out what’s in it”:
• Despite promises that ObamaCare would cut costs for average Americans, we now see a front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times that tells us ”Health care overhaul won’t stop premium increases.” Why? ”Although Democrats promised greater consumer protection, the overhaul does not give the federal government broad regulatory power to prevent increases.”
If it did, the health insurance industry would soon go the way of the Dodo bird. Contrary to overhaul supporters’ propaganda, the industry’s profit margin is tiny — just 3.5% of sales. Premiums are rising not because of insurers’ greed, but due to higher health care costs driven by out-of-control government spending, which is growing twice as fast as the private sector.
• An IBD/TIPP Poll last summer showed that as many as 45% of practicing physicians would consider retiring or giving up their practice if ObamaCare was passed. That’s bad enough. Now comes this tidbit from the Wall Street Journal: ”At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
It’s no surprise that fewer smart, talented, driven people want to become doctors. Why should they? To face an endless barrage of bureaucratic paperwork? To be second-guessed on every procedure they perform or prescription they write? To have their incomes capped forever?
Government already makes up half the $2.5 trillion spent last year on health care. What reasonable person would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on schooling and more than a decade on training just to work for a government bureaucracy? The answer is obvious. And the numbers show it.
• Along with fewer doctors, we’re now about to see fewer hospitals — all thanks to ObamaCare.The new law essentially forbids doctor-owned hospitals from expanding, and makes it nearly impossible for doctors to open new hospitals.
As Molly Sandvig, executive director of Physician Hospitals of America, told CNSNews.com, more than 60 doctor-owned hospitals being developed around the country will be canceled. ”That’s a lot of access to communities that will be denied,” she said.
• The rules of the new bill (with 2,400 pages plus 153 of amendments) are byzantine in their complexity — so much so that even members of Congress still have no idea what they passed.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that, to the surprise of many lawmakers,one provision states that members of Congress and congressional staff may be removed from their current coverage under the gold-plated Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
Serves them right. This came to light after the Congressional Research Service was besieged by calls from concerned congressmen who didn’t realize they might have to give up their own super-duper health care coverage.They only meant to strip us of our good health care coverage, not theirs. Now they’re angry.
• Then there’s the promise that only those earning over $200,000 — you know, the ”rich” — would be taxed for Obama-Care. In fact, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, those making less than $200,000 will pay taxes of $15.2 billion over the next 10 years — despite what was promised.
By 2019, the JCT says, 14.8 million taxpayers will be affected by the health care overhaul’s limits on tax deductions of medical expenses. Of those, 14.7 million will earn less than $200,000.
If you’re wondering what the overhaul hath wrought, you’re not alone. It’s less than a month after passage of the bill that seized control of 17% of the economy with nary a congressman reading it, and already Americans are being hurt. Another few months of this, and repeal may not be an option, but a necessity.
“Carbon dioxide is first and foremost a plant food. In fact, plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use the energy from sunlight to combine the CO2 with water to yield glucose, the simplest sugar molecule. Carbon dioxide is also the source of all organic — this word just means “contains carbon” — molecules synthesized by plants.Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there would be no organic molecules synthesized by plants. The less carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the fewer organic molecules synthesized by plants. All animals depend on plants to synthesize essential organic molecules. Without the organic molecules synthesized by plants, the animal world could not exist. Without plants, there would be no biosphere.
Several million years ago, a disaster struck the terrestrial biosphere: there was a drastic reduction in the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The flowering plants evolved to be most efficient when the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 1,000 parts per million.”
“The 100 ppm carbon dioxide increase since the beginning of industrialisation has been responsible for an average increase in plant growth rate of 15% odd.”
And remember, the present level of CO2 is around 389 ppm. Which is 61 ppm BELOW the lowest figure in the video.
Also remember that commercial greenhouse operators often enrich greenhouse air with CO2 , also known as nature’s fertilizer, to levels of 1500 parts per million, or four times that of our current atmosphere.
And the cooling continues. Sorry – I mean that Global Warming is an imminent treat to humankind.
And remember, these are the official figures. With the poor placement of stations (91 % of the stations are CRN3 to 5 = bad to very poor); where they have purposely taken away the urban heat island effect etc.
“The average temperature in March 2010 was 44.4 F. This was 1.9 F warmer than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 32nd warmest March in 116 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. “
This year, the March temperature is-6.13 F cooler than1910, the warmest March. And if we compare this year’s March with 1921 it is -3.16 F cooler.
If we compare with 1946 this year’s March is -3.48 F cooler.
And the recent 12 Month period (Apr-Mar) 1895-2010
This year, 2009 /2010 (Apr-Mar), the temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1898! AND 1909. In fact it is 0.12 F COOLER. One tenth of a degree cooler in 112 years.
Puh, that what I call an eminent treat to humankind!
1/10 of a degree COOLER in 112 years
And the recent 3 Month period (Jan-Mar) 1895-2010.
This year, 2009/2010 (Jan-Mar), was the 60th coolest January-March in 116 years.
This year, the Jan-Mar temperature is -2.17 F cooler than for example 1907. And if we compare this years Jan-Mar temperature with 1921 it is -4.17 F cooler.
Another glorious example of the catastrophic warming in the last 116 years!
More on these “representatives” that rammed through the Obama Care against the will of the people. And who openly admit they don’t care about the constitution.
These are the “representatives” that rammed through the Obama Care against the will of the people. They don’t care about the constitution; they don’t know the difference between the declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and they don’t give a sh.. that they don’t know.
And this guy claims that he read the whole text (nearly 3 000 pages) 3 times!
Sure!
And even worse, if he did, how in the he.. could he then vote for it KNOWING ALL the kickbacks, bribes and pork barrel spending in there. And the limitations, the new government agency (the Medicare Advisory Board, Section 3403 of the senate bill) that is going to decide (ration) what kind of Medicare you are going to receive, cuts in Medicare, enforced by IRS agents, the higher taxes etc.
And worst of all, the blatant hypocrisy from this new nomenklatura:
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health carelaw exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well.
Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
Judge Andrew Napolitano gives a very good overview why Obama Care is unconstitutional. Together with Bill Mccollum (Attorney general FL), Rany Barnett (Law Professor) and John Tamny (Real Clear).
Der Spiegel, a magazine that long has promoted the Global Warming Hysteria, today has a reasonably god and long piece called “A Superstorm for Global Warming Research”.
They would not even 3 months ago have written a piece like this.
James Delingpole, The Telegraph, writes about it here:
When the Germans give up on AGW you really do know it’s all over…
Ramifications of health care bill already surfacing
Since the passage of ObamaCare, several major U.S. companies — so far, they include AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, Deere, Valero Energy, AK Steel and 3M — have announced that they expect the law to cost them billions of dollars in higher health care expenses.
This has prompted an angry Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and one of many Democrats who swore up and down that the measure would actually cut costs, to summon some of the executives to Capitol Hill to defend their assessment.
Rep. Waxman is also demanding that the executives give lawmakers internal company documents related to health care finances, a move one committee Republican describes to Byron York of the Washington Examiner as ”an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents” of ObamaCare.
Perhaps these Democrats really are surprised – perhaps (as Republicans consistently warned) they never actually read and comprehended what was in their nearly 3,000-page social engineering experiment.
”Most of these people (in the administration) have never had a real job in their lives,” a senior lobbyist for one of the firms told the American Spectator over the weekend. ”They don’t understand a thing about business, and that includes the president. My CEO sat with the president over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the president what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general.First the president didn’t understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying.”
Nor is this just coming from Republicans. One Democratic staffer affiliated with the Waxman committee told the magazine that neither Rep. Waxman nor Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, had anything more than a cursory understanding of how the many sections of the bill would impact business or even individuals before they voted on the legislation.
”We had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them,” says the staffer. ”When they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them. … They just didn’t understand what they were voting on.”
So the wave of corporate writedowns—led by AT&T’s $1 billion—isn’t caused by ObamaCare after all. The White House claims CEOs are reducing the value of their companies and returns for shareholders merely out of political pique.
A White House staffer told the American Spectator that ”These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general. Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative Web sites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It’s BS.” (We called the White House for elaboration but got no response.)
In other words, CEOs who must abide by U.S. accounting laws under pain of SEC sanction, and who warned about such writedowns for months, are merely trying to ruin President Obama’s moment of glory. Sure.
Presumably the White House is familiar with the Financial Standard Accounting Board’s 1990 statement No. 106, which requires businesses to immediately restate their earnings in light of their expected future retiree health liabilities. AT&T, Deere & Co., AK Steel, Prudential and Caterpillar, among others, are simply reporting the corporate costs of the Democratic decision to raise taxes on retiree drug benefits to finance ObamaCare.
When the Medicare prescription drug plan was debated in 2003, many feared that companies already offering such coverage would cash out and dump the costs on government. So Congress created a modest subsidy, equal to 28% of the cost of these plans for seniors who would otherwise enroll in Medicare. This subsidy is tax-free, and companies used to be allowed to deduct the full cost of the benefit from their corporate income taxes (beyond the 72% employer portion).
Democrats chose to eliminate the full exclusion and said they were closing a loophole. But whatever it’s called, eliminating it ”will be highly destabilizing for retirees who rely upon employer sponsored drug coverage” and ”will impose a dramatic and immediate impact on company financial statements.”
That’s how the AFL-CIO put it in a December 10 letter. The Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers—also known as the AT&T and Verizon workforce—were opposed too. So much for White House claims that reporting these facts is partisan.
As for whether this change is better tax policy, the new health-care bill creates a similar $5 billion fund that will subsidize health costs for early retirees between the ages of 55 and 64. These payments won’t be subject to taxation, and companies will likely be able to deduct the full cost of such coverage. (The language is vague and some experts disagree.) The Democrats now feigning tax outrage—but who are really outraged by political appearances—didn’t think twice about writing the same loophole back into the tax code. This new reinsurance program was a priority of the United Auto Workers.
The deeper concern—apart from imposing senseless business losses in a still-uncertain economy—is that companies will start terminating private retiree coverage, which in turn will boost government costs. The Employee Benefit Research Institute calculates that the 28% subsidy on average will run taxpayers $665 in 2011 and that the tax dispensation is worth $233. The same plan in Medicare costs $1,209.
Given that Congress has already committed the original sin of creating a drug entitlement that crowds out private coverage, $233 in corporate tax breaks to avoid spending $1,209 seems like a deal. If one out of four retirees is now moved into Medicare, the public fisc will take on huge new liabilities.
Meanwhile, Democrats have responded to these writedowns not by rethinking their policy blunder but by hauling the CEOs before Congress on April 21 for an intimidation session. The letter demanding their attendance from House barons Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak declared that ”The new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern.”
Perhaps Mr. Waxman should move his hearing to the Syracuse Carrier Dome. The Towers Watson consulting firm estimates that the total writeoffs will be as much as $14 billion, and the 3,500 businesses that offer retiree drug benefits are by law required to report and expense their losses this quarter or next. But ’twas a famous victory, ObamaCare.
The Obama administration – the new American nomenklatura a la Soviet style. One rule for the “masses” another for the “elite”.
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course. I mean there are limits to democracy and the rule of law. Do you REALLY have to follow the rules and laws that you yourself enacted?
I mean come on – we are “liberals” and on your side. Isn’t that enough?
Meanwhile, we are still awaiting Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
Government: With the passage of health care reform and the ongoing boom in federal hiring, it’s becoming increasingly clear that America is now run by a new, privileged class of bureaucrats.
For those who remember the old Soviet Union, it was a grim place — at least for average citizens. But not so for those in government. Contrary to the official ideals of equality and a classless society that the ruling communist regime espoused, the USSR created a privileged class of party members inside government —the nomenklatura.
This semipermanent bureaucracy earned higher incomes, got better health care, ate better food and had greater job security than average Russians, the much-despised proletarians. Today, our bloated federal government seems, in significant ways, to be creating this same dynamic.
Take the just-passed health care bill that carefully excluded the White House, congressional leaders and their staffs from having to live under the reforms’ restrictions.
”President Obama will not have to live under the Obama health care reforms, and neither will the congressional staff who helped to write the overhaul,” said Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. ”The message to the people at the grass roots is that it’s good enough for you, but not for us.”
The hypocrisy of these officials and the contempt they show for average Americans is bad enough. But Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public can also go to jail or be fined up to $250,000 for not buying insurance. And the government is spending $10 billion to hire 16,500 new IRS agents to make sure they don’t escape the new system.
Under current budget plans, this won’t end soon. With $45 trillion in new government spending planned over the next decade, this new privileged governing class can only grow.
Today, as we witness a massive shift of resources from the private to the public sector, the only place adding jobs is government. Since the start of last year, the federal government has added 81,000 jobs. By contrast, private-sector payrolls have shed 4.71 million.
Big government is the place to be these days. Federal workers are some of the country’s best-paid, earning far in excess of their counterparts in the private sector. A recent report in Politico.com, for example, noted that 2,000 congressional staffers now have incomes in excess of $100,000, and that 43 make the $172,500 maximum.
But the bureaucrats — that silent, permanent government that now exceeds 2.8 million in number — make out just as well. USA Today recently looked at federal pay vs. private pay in 2008 for specific occupations ranging from airline pilot and cook to computer manager and registered nurse. What they found was more than a little disquieting for those in the private sector.
The average federal worker that year took home on average $67,691 in salary, compared with $60,046 in the private sector — a difference of $7,645. Not that much, you say? Well, that was before benefits are factored.
The average government worker gets a whopping $40,785 a year in health care, pension and other benefits compared to $9,882 for a private worker. The difference in total compensation widens to $38,548 a year — for the same job with the same duties.
Anyone who has visited the slow-moving Post Office, talked to the surly and often hostile IRS agent or even gone to the local DMV to spend time in waiting-room hell can tell you that pay gap doesn’t represent productivity, training or ability.
What it does represent is the new Nomenklatura — the privileged apparatchiks who now run our government and with it, sadly, much of our lives. This is very much a result of years of ”progressive” thinking that has pushed the Democratic Party sharply leftward across the political spectrum.
Since the Civil War, the so-called Progressive Movement’s dream has been to exalt bureaucratic expertise and control over free-market efficiency. With the new administration, their dream has become our nightmare.
The health care bill that President Obama signed last week bears little resemblance to the reform package he once touted from the campaign trail.
With the final legislative product in hand, it’s worth evaluating how it compares to the promises Mr. Obama made to voters regarding the plan’s cost, its features and the reform process itself. The difference between then and now couldn’t be more stark.
Candidate Obama repeatedly assured the public that his health care plan would cost between $500 billion and $650 billion. This modest amount was to be covered entirety by discontinuing the George W. Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 a year.
Today, we know that Obamacare will cost at least double that amount. The basic price tag is $940 billion over 10 years, to which one must add the $208 billion ”doc fix.” This adjustment to the reimbursement doctors receive under Medicare was separated out from the main package to hide Obamacare’s true cost.
Obviously, eliminating the Bush tax cuts isn’t what’s going to cover these enormous sums. Obamacare must cut Medicare and raise taxes on high-quality health insurance, medical devices, drugs and insurance companies.These increaseswill hit anyone who gets sick or buys insurance, regardless of income. So much for the promised ”middle-class tax cut.”
Mr. Obama is still trying to hide the extent of the bait-and-switch. During the campaign he said, ”If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you won’t have to do a thing…. You keep your plan; you keep your doctor.” While he repeated this claim in a speech in Iowa last week, he also reluctantly admitted when questioned more closely that, yes, people may well lose their plan or their doctor.
Even aspects of reform that candidate Obama sharply criticized in a 2008 primary debate with then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton have become law. Mr. Obama claimed he was offended by the idea that every American should be forced to buy a government-approved health policy or face a fine. ”When Clinton says mandate, it’s not a mandate on government – it’s a mandate on individuals,” he said. ”… In some cases, people are paying fines, which means they can’t afford premiums, which means they don’t have coverage. … Both of us seek to get to universal health care. I have a substantive difference … on how to get there.”
The ”differences” between Sen. Clinton’s and Sen. Obama’s health care plans have disappeared. Households without a government-approved health care plan face a fine of $2,085. The promised transparency in the legislative drafting process also has disappeared despite the pledge, ”These negotiations will be on C-SPAN.” A one-day presidential infomercial hardly counts.
President Obama’s deals were cut behind closed doors without input from the public or even congressional Republicans – and for good reason. Lawmakers rushed through a plan that bears no resemblance to what voters once were promised.
The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!
It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.
This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or ”political.”
Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, ”In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said ”for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”
Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment ”appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”
In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.
On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.
As Joe Biden might put it, this is a big, er, deal for shareholders and the economy. The consulting firm Towers Watson estimates that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion, unless corporations cut retiree drug benefits when their labor contracts let them.
Meanwhile, John DiStaso of the New Hampshire Union Leader reported this week that ObamaCare could cost the GraniteState‘s major ski resorts as much as $1 million in fines, because they hire large numbers of seasonal workers without offering health benefits. ”The choices are pretty clear, either increase prices or cut costs, which could mean hiring fewer workers next winter,” he wrote.
The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog:Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.
The Last Line of Defense between ObamaCare and Kansans
By Milton R. Wolf, MD
I am Milton Wolf. After this last week, you probably know me as the doctor who is Barack Obama’s cousin.
Like millions of other Americans, I watched with bafflement and frustration as Congress wrestled with the onerous task of reforming our health care system. After studying both the House and Senate’s health care plans, and a lot of sleepless nights, I knew I had to take a stand for my patients, my profession, my state, and my country. I made the decision to ”go public” with my opposition to ”ObamaCare.”
I wish my cousin well, but my oath is to my patients.
What began as a humble blog led to a Washington Times op-ed. Then a massive media storm erupted. Morning news with a visit to the Curvy Couch, radio interviews, ruffled feathers at Media Matters & Democratic Underground, another op-ed, an army of Davids carrying my questions to their representatives in Congress, Hannity, more FOX & Friends, radio, and more print and internet opinions than I could ever read. Last Saturday, it all culminated in an address to thirty thousand patriots who set their lives aside long enough to rush to the Capitol and try one more time to be heard by their elected leaders in Washington.
My message is simple: Patients will suffer under ObamaCare.
This plan goes ”all in” on the government failures that have already had a tremendously detrimental effect on medicine. It’s not that health care rationing might happen under the plan; it’s that it will. In fact, it’s already written into the plan.
Section 3403 of the Senate bill creates the Medicare Advisory Board, the express purpose of which is to reduce funding for Medicare.These unelected, unaccountable officials are required to make recommendations for Medicare cuts.These recommendations will have the effect of law, even if the Congress does not act on them.
We are given a preview of what this rationing board will try in section 3007 of the Senate bill. This portion of the health care bill addresses a scheme that actually penalizes your primary care doctor for providing the care he has determined that your family needs. The top ten percent of doctors who refer patients to specialists, no matter how valid the reason, will be penalized. This ignores the expertise of the family care physician. It does not care if your daughter hurt her arm and needs an orthopedic surgeon. It does not care if your mother is short of breath and needs a pulmonologist. It matters to them only how many of your doctor’s patients are sick enough to need a specialist.
There’s no other way to say it: ”ObamaCare” penalizes your doctor for providing medical care. This is rationing.It will get worse as costs continue their upward climb and more doctors opt out of Medicare and medicine altogether.
After my experience in Washington, D.C., I understand that the reality is that the only ones who can save Kansas are Kansans.
Washington, D.C. may be satisfied with government taking over the health care system, but Kansans have a choice. The Kansas Health Care Freedom Amendment was supposed to be the final firewall to protect the citizens of Kansas from being forced into a government-run health care system that would rob them of their freedom to make their own health care decisions. The Kansas House defeated the amendment, but the Kansas State Senate has yet to act. Any Kansas legislator who opposed this amendment will be held directly answerable for foisting ”ObamaCare” upon Kansans. We should hold them just as responsible as Barack Obama himself.
Milton R. Wolf, M.D., is a practicing diagnostic radiologist and second cousin to President Barack Obama. He has spoken and written publicly against ObamaCare. He operates the website TheWolfFiles.com.
Democrats exempt themselves from socialist medicine
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health carelaw exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well.
Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
Staffers who wrote the health-care bill exempted themselves from the requirement to join the state-run insurance exchanges.
By ALLYSIA FINLEY
Congressional leaders apparently not only made quid pro quos with congressmen who voted for ObamaCare, but also with congressional staff who crafted the legislation.
A key loophole is how the bill defines ”congressional staff” as ”employees employed by the official office of a member of Congress, whether in the district office or in Washington.” That phrase has been interpreted by the Congressional Research Service to exclude various professional staff and those working for leadership offices — the very staffers who wrote the bill.
In the name of solidarity with the voting public, legislators required themselves and their office staffs to join the bill’s newly created state insurance exchanges. But the loophole exempts high-level leadership and committee staffers. For example, staffers who work in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate office would be required to join.Those who work under him as Senate Majority Leader would not. In their own cases at least, key staffers obviously were prepared to make sure President Obama kept his promise that those happy with their current coverage can keep it.
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who has led the charge in publicizing what he calls a double standard, says: ”The message to grassroots America is that it’s good enough for you, but not for us.”
Democrats call the loophole unintentional, but both Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn and Mr. Grassley say they tried to close it last year but were stymied by Mr. Reid. Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz told Politico.com: ”Obviously staffers are anxious about it. The whole bill is full of loopholes, it’s such a mess.”
And what does it say about ObamaCare that the warriors on the frontline in writing and passing it wanted no part of it?
First he is abandoned by Alfred E Neuman (i.e. MAD). And since his motto is “”What, me worry?” we should REALLY be worried when Alfred E Neuman is worried.
Then the kiss of death – an endorsement from Cuban marxist dictator Fidel Castro.
“Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform ”a miracle” and a major victory for Obama’s presidency, but couldn’t help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago. “
Massachusetts‘s pilot program has been a fiscal train wreck.
By TIMOTHY P. CAHILL
White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod hailed the Massachusetts health-care program as ”the template” for the national health-care reform legislation the president signed into law earlier this week. That should be cause for serious concern about this law’s ability to improve our health-care system at an affordable cost.
As state treasurer, I can speak with authority about the Massachusetts pilot program. It has been a fiscal train wreck.
The universal insurance coverage we adopted in 2006 was projected to cost taxpayers $88 million a year. However, since this program was adopted in 2006, our health-care costs have in total exceeded $4 billion. The cost of Massachusetts’ plan has blown a hole in the Commonwealth’s budget. Just last Thursday, Gov. Deval Patrick’s office announced a $294 million shortfall related to health-care costs.
If not for federal Medicaid reimbursements and commitments from Washington to prop up this plan, Massachusetts would be broke. The only reason MassCare has survived is that we have been repeatedly bailed out by the federal government. But that raises the question: Who will bail America out if we implement a similar program?
While everyone should have access to affordable health care, our experience in Massachusetts tells us that the new federal entitlement will burden future taxpayers with unfunded liabilities they cannot afford. Health-care inflation will continue. Mandates will increase insurance premiums. And the deficit will reach frightening levels as the law’s costs greatly exceed the projections of its advocates.
As lawmakers push for changes in the bill, they should start by being honest about its costs and focus on making health care more affordable without bankrupting the country.
Mr. Cahill is the state treasurer of Massachusetts. He is currently running as an independent for governor.
Democrats exempt themselves from socialist medicine
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health carelaw exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well.
Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
A new army of IRS agents will enforce medical mandates
President Obama’s nationalization of health care is bad enough on its own, but the plan’s implementation will require drastic measures that are just as troubling to those who value freedom. Of particular concern is the bill’s expansion of the Internal Revenue Service.
A report released last week by House Ways and Means Committee Republicans estimated that the dreaded agency’s ranks would swell by 16,500. The newly sworn agents would be charged with ensuring the public’s obedience to Mr. Obama’s health care directives. The IRS also would enjoy the enhanced powers and budgetary authority required for monitoring the health care status of 300 million Americans on a month-to-month basis. The total cost of the effort is likely to exceed $10 billion.
The investigations will gradually ramp up until 2016, when the individual mandate tax kicks in fully. After that, if the O Force wins a second term, the unprecedented levy will fall upon citizens who fail to purchase health care coverage acceptable to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. IRS agents would conduct the audits and impose a fine of either $2,085 or 2.5 percent of income – whichever is greater – on disobedient households. According to Congressional Budget Office figures, this tax will generate $17 billion by 2019.
Of course, not everyone will pay. The Democrats carved out exemptions for two of its favorite constituencies: illegal aliens and imprisoned criminals. Only law-abiding citizens will face the wrath of the IRS – a wrath that can be substantial.
Consider the case of Aaron Zeff, owner of Harv’s Metro Car Wash in Sacramento, Calif. Mr. Zeff paid his taxes on time and did everything he was supposed to do. Nonetheless, a team of IRS agents descended on his business earlier this month. ”They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending,” Mr. Zeff said in describing the incident to the Sacramento Bee. His crime? Mr. Zeff reportedly owed 4 cents on his taxes in 2006.
That’s the type of overzealous enforcement and lousy customer service we can look forward to as IRS agents are handed more power to terrorize law-abiding Americans. The president’s plan moves us in the wrong direction. We need to dismantle, not expand, the most hated agency of the federal government. Fundamental tax reform and repeal of Obamacare would go a long way toward restoring American freedoms.
California could take big hit from healthcare overhaul
The landmark federal reforms could cost the state $2 billion to $3 billion annually. State officials say there needs to be more of a partnership with the U.S. government.
George Skelton, Capitol Journal
5:04 PM PDT, March 24, 2010
From Sacramento
Figure $2 billion to $3 billion. That’s the state of California’s rough estimate of what national healthcare expansion ultimately will cost it each year.
Forget the Washington gobbledygook about it saving the federal treasury money over the next 10 or 20 years. Nobody seems to be able to predict federal spending over a two-month period, let alone two decades.
But if the feds do realize a net gain, as backers of the legislation predict, it will be at the states’ expense.
While Democrats in Washington have been rejoicing in victory and Republicans have been predicting Armageddon, California officials have been quietly pondering the numbers.
And it isn’t necessarily contradictory to both support a national healthcare overhaul and acknowledge that it’s likely to be another hit on California’s bleeding budget. That’s just intellectually honest.
As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put it after the U.S. House passed the legislation Sunday night:
”I have always supported the need for comprehensive health reform. However, for healthcare reform to succeed, states must either have the flexibility to live within the revenues that are available to them or the federal resources to fully fund its mandates.”
On Wednesday the governor told reporters that Washingtonhas ”shifted the funding from the federal government and said, ‘Hey, you state, we want to cut down on our deficit. So you pick up the difference. . . .’ And it will cost us $3 billion more.”
Schwarzenegger has been trying to tread lightly, expressing dissatisfaction with Congress’ final product, but not criticizing President Obama, whose goal of reform he strongly supports.
The governor struck out taking a big swing at passing his own healthcare reform for California in 2007, partly because legislators concluded the state couldn’t afford it as the economy began tumbling.
Now the burden of implementing the federal healthcare expansion will fall on the states through their various Medicaid programs. In California, it’s called Medi-Cal.
”States are in such deep financial straits that not only have we already made [Medicaid] cuts, but we’re looking to make even deeper cuts,” says Kim Belshe, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency.
”Now we’re being asked to begin planning for the biggest implementation of a social program since Medicaid was created. . . . Medicaid is crumbling. It makes no sense to be building on a house that’s falling apart. . . .
”This needs to be a partnership with the federal government. If Medicaid is going to be the foundation for broad healthcare expansion — and right now it’s very fragile — we need changes in program flexibility and equitable financing,” Belshe says.
The Schwarzenegger administration has been seeking flexibility from Washington to pare back certain benefits, such as In-Home Supportive Services, and to tighten eligibility requirements for such programs as Medi-Cal and Healthy Families.
The $2-billion to $3-billion rough estimate of net state costs for the federal program comes from Belshe’s shop. It’s $1 billion less than the price tag calculated in December for a Senate-passed bill.
In a letter then to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Schwarzenegger warned that ”this crushing new burden will be added to a [state] safety net that is already shredding under billions of dollars in unfunded federal mandates.”
The House gave states more money than the Senate did for Medicaid expansion, which will begin in 2014.
Under the final version, the feds will pay 100% of the cost for new Medi-Cal enrollees for two years, reduce it to 95%, then permanently kick in 90% starting in 2020. That’s a good deal, but not the whole story. The largesse will cover only those new recipients who qualify under the overhaul’s looser eligibility rules.
The feds won’t be nearly as generous for another group of new enrollees, providing only 50% of the cost. These are the people who currently are eligible for Medi-Cal and for whatever reason — perhaps stigma — haven’t signed up. But under the new law, they’ll be forced to obtain insurance. And it’s estimated that half will go into Medi-Cal.
Actually, as part of the federal economic stimulus, the feds now are paying 60% of Medi-Cal costs, rather than 50%. But that’s only temporary.
Nobody in Sacramento pretends to thoroughly understand the complex new legislation or its potential impact on the state budget. Only that it will be a drain.
The federal government will fund higher reimbursements for primary care physicians who treat Medi-Cal recipients, but only for two years. Who pays after that?
There’ll be start-up costs of many millions in an administration strapped by civil service furloughs, vacancies and layoffs — while the front-running Republican candidate for governor, Meg Whitman, vows to eliminate 40,000 more jobs.
”Fundamentally, we all know that the state budget situation is dire and financing for Medi-Cal is precarious,” says Marian Mulkey, senior program officer for the California Healthcare Foundation.
”On balance, if the reform is fully realized, a huge number of Californians will get better care.
”But at the same time, the state cost issues are very real. It’s hard to imagine this being implemented as envisioned unless we get on a more secure state fiscal footing.”
Anthony Wright, executive secretary of Health Access California, calls the overhaul ”a boon rather than a burden.”
”I don’t disagree with the fact that this may cost something,” Wright adds, ”but the benefit is so much greater.”
Yes, this may be a terrific and historic program, but it is going to cost the state money. We shouldn’t kid ourselves.
It wasn’t the Tea Partiers and conservative radio hosts who had the harshest things to say about Obamacare. Left-wing bloggers offered some of the sharpest attacks – and some of them made lots of sense.
From the beginning of the debate a year ago, Jane Hamsher of the influential blog Firedoglake insisted that no ”reform” without a public option would be acceptable. Her fetish for a public option was misguided, but some of her reasoning was solid.
The day after the bill passed, for instance, Ms. Hamsher wrote: ”This bill fundamentally shifts the relationships of governance in order to achieve its objectives. … We have empowered another quasi-governmental, ‘too big to fail’ industry with alarming nonchalance.”
On March 17, four days before the vote, Ms. Hamsher was even harsher:
”The claims made by the administration about the virtues of the health care bill are outright fabrications. As Marcy Wheeler has documented in her post entitled ‘Health Care and the Road to Neofeudalism,’ it does not control either insurance premiums or health care costs.Forcing 31 million people to buy a product they don’t want and can’t afford to use does not constitute health care reform.”
She’s right, of course. The ”individual mandate” that forces every American to purchase health insurance is an assault on liberty and clearly unconstitutional. It must be repealed.
The next sentences from Firedoglake get even tougher: ”Once again, the poor get used as human shields so corporations can be the beneficiaries of massive government bailout. Rather than actually helping the poor, this bill is a dangerous and unprecedented step on the road to domination of government by private corporate players who use it to suppress competition and secure their profits – the textbook definition of fascism.”
Ms. Hamsher helpfully provided an online link to the very definition of fascism in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: ”Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the ‘national interest’ – that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it.”
One need not sling around labels or endorse such a loaded term as fascism to understand that Obamacare is anathema to the American system of free enterpriseand limited government. Also anathema were the bait-and-switch, strong-arm, kneecapping tactics used to ram this bill into law against the wishes of an overwhelming public majority. Again, here is Firedoglake: ”Members of Congress are dealing their seats away, planning to retire after the vote is cast in exchange for appointments or other sinecures from the administration.” And ”the corruption, lies and lack of affordability that were the hallmarks of the bill” helped demonstrate ”the bad faith with which the president engaged in the health care debate.”
From right, left and center, almost anybody could see how bad a bill and distasteful a process this government takeover of health care was. It must not stand.
Companies are already warning about higher health-care costs..
Democrats dragged themselves over the health-care finish line in part by repeating that voters would like the plan once it passed. Let’s see what they think when they learn their insurance costs will jump right away.
Even before President Obama signed the bill on Tuesday, Caterpillar said it would cost the company at least $100 million more in the first year alone. Medical device maker Medtronic warned that new taxes on its products could force it to lay off a thousand workers. Now Verizon joins the roll of businesses staring at adverse consequences.
In an email titled ”President Obama Signs Health Care Legislation” sent to all employees Tuesday night, the telecom giant warned that ”we expect that Verizon’s costs will increase in the short term.” While executive vice president for human resources Marc Reed wrote that ”it is difficult at this point to gauge the precise impact of this legislation,” and that ObamaCare does reflect some of the company’s policy priorities, the message to workers was clear: Expect changes for the worse to your health benefits as the direct result of this bill, and maybe as soon as this year.
Mr. Reed specifically cited a change in the tax treatment of retiree health benefits. When Congress created the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003, it included a modest tax subsidy to encourage employers to keep drug plans for retirees, rather than dumping them on the government. The Employee Benefit Research Institute says this exclusion—equal to 28% of the cost of a drug plan—will run taxpayers $665 per person next year, while the same Medicare coverage would cost $1,209.
In a $5.4 billion revenue grab, Democrats decided that this $665 fillip should be subject to the ordinary corporate income tax of 35%. Most consulting firms and independent analysts say the higher costs will induce some companies to drop drug coverage, which could affect about five million retirees and 3,500 businesses. Verizon and other large corporations warned about this outcome.
U.S. accounting laws also require businesses to immediately restate their earnings in light of the higher tax burden on their long-term retiree health liabilities. This will have a big effect on their 2010 earnings.
While the drug tax subsidy is for retirees, companies consider their benefit costs as a total package. The new bill might cause some to drop retiree coverage altogether. Others may be bound by labor contracts to retirees, but then they will find other ways to cut costs. This means raising costs or reducing coverage for other employees. So much for Mr. Obama’s claim that if you like your coverage, you can keep it—even at Fortune 500 companies.
In its employee note, Verizon also warned about the 40% tax on high-end health plans, though that won’t take effect until 2018. ”Many of the plans that Verizon offers to employees and retirees are projected to have costs above the threshold in the legislation and will be subject to the 40 percent excise tax.” These costs will start to show up soon, and, as we repeatedly argued, the tax is unlikely to drive down costs. The tax burden will simply be spread to all workers—the result of the White House’s too-clever decision to tax insurers, rather than individuals.
A Verizon spokesman said the company is merely addressing employee questions about ObamaCare, not making a political statement. But these and many other changes were enabled by the support of the Business Roundtable that counts Verizon as a member. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg’s health-reform ideas are 180 degrees from Mr. Obama’s, but Verizon’s shareholders and 900,000 employees and retirees will still pay the price.
Businesses around the country are making the same calculations as Verizon and no doubt sending out similar messages. It’s only a small measure of the destruction that will be churned out by the rewrite of health, tax, labor and welfare laws that is ObamaCare, and only the vanguard of much worse to come.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Democrats exempt themselves from socialist medicine
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health carelaw exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well.
Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI): “So This Is What Change Looks Like”
“So this is what change looks like. If he were here, Mr. Speaker, in this time of momentous national distress, I would remind the President of the United States that he is not the leader of a party or an ideology; he is the leader of our country—one founded, not to emulate others, but to inspire the world.
As families lose their jobs, their homes, and their dreams for their children; as our troops fight and sacrifice in foreign fields for our liberty and security, President Obama’s obsessive-compulsive pursuit of an abominable government takeover of health care has defied the public’s objections, despoiled this, “The People’s House,” and further alienated Americans from their representative government.
As President Obama’s campaign mantra of “hope and change” has degenerated into “tax and hate,” reputable surveys prior to this vote report: the public overwhelmingly thinks that the U.S. Government is broken. Only 21 percent of the public thinks it is being governed with its consent. Only 26 percent of the public trusts the Federal Government most of the time or always; 56 percent of Americans think the Federal Government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedom of ordinary citizens; 70 percent believethe government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors; and 71 percent of Americans think the Federal Government is a special interest.
In the wake of this health care debate’s despicable, dysfunctional process and product, it is clear: The most dangerous special interest is Big Government and President Obama is its lobbyist.
In contrast to Americans’ faith in themselves, every major piece of legislation proffered by the President and his Democratic Congress expands and empowers Big Government at the expense of the people.Possessed of a smug, cynical, patronizing view of Americans as dependents desiring State benefits, this arrogant administration and its enablers have defied the American people and bi-partisan opposition in Congress to unilaterally jam through a trillion-dollar government takeover of health care.
Why? For so many Americans, the answer is that this President and his Democratic Congress think they are smarter than you; want to run your life; and want to make government your ruler, not your servant.
Such hubristhreatens not only our health care system but it tears the social fabric and political contract of our Nation. Instead of working for a more perfect Union, the President’s ideological obstinacy exacerbated the disorder and divisions within our Nation, and wrought a crisis of consent—one that puts America’s exceptional experiment in human freedom and self-government on the precipice of implosion.
To do so the President has the power, but not the right. Thus he has merely scored a Pyrrhic victory over the American people. Ultimately, his government-run medicine scheme will be repealed and replaced with free- market, patient-centered wellness, because America’s strength and salvation remains her free people, not a person.
And this November, America’s sovereign citizens will remind the President and his Democratic Congress that We the People do not work for government; the government works for us.
No, the President and his Democratic Congress will not break us beneath Big Government. Devoted to our freedom and a more perfect Union, we will keep the faith, trust the public, calm the times, and heal our country.”
Democrats exempt themselves from socialist medicine
March 23, 2010
President Obama declared that the new health care law ”is going to be affecting every American family.” Except his own, of course.
The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well. A weasel-worded definition of ”staff” includes only the members’ personal staff in the new system; the committee staff that drafted the legislation opted themselves out. Because they were more familiar with the contents of the law than anyone in the country, it says a lot that they carved out their own special loophole. Anyway, the law is intended to affect ”ordinary Americans,” according to Vice President JoeBiden (who – being a heartbeat away from the presidency – also is not covered), not Washington insiders.
Mr. Obama frequently tossed around the talking point that the new law gave people the same type of coverage as Congress enjoyed. In his March 20 health care pep talk to wavering Democrats on Capitol Hill, the president said one of the advantages of the health care legislation was that ”people will have choice and competition just like members of Congress have choice and competition.” At yesterday’s signing ceremony, Mr. Obama said Americans will be ”part of a big pool, just like federal employees are part of a big pool. They’ll have the same choice of private health insurance that members of Congress get for themselves.” But the American people will have a public pool; the executive branch and congressional staffers kept their country-club pool private.
Last year, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, spearheaded efforts to have all Americans included in the plan, but he ran into heavy opposition from unions representing federal workers – the same unions that were pro-Obamacare stalwarts. In September, the Senate approved a scaled-down amendment that covered members of Congress and their staff. When this provision later emerged from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office, the leadership and committee staff loophole had appeared.A move in December by Mr. Grassley and Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, to close this loophole and to extend the law to senior members of the executive branch – including the president, vice president and Cabinet members -was blocked by Senate Democratic leaders.
Mr. Grassley has introduced an amendment to the Senate health care reconciliation bill that also will apply the law to the upper tier of the executive branch and all Capitol Hill staffers, but it remains to be seen whether Democrats will let this measure move forward.
The special exemptions slipped into the health care law are another example of how those statists who rule consider themselves a privileged class, imposing burdens on the country that they will not accept themselves. Candidates for office in 2010 should pledge to close these and other loopholes in the law that impose unequal burdens and create exclusive privileged classes in America.Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama’s explanation why if his ”historic” health care law is so great for America, it’s not good enough for him and his family.
If there is anything good to say about Democrat control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, it’s that their extraordinarily brazen, heavy-handed acts have aroused a level of constitutional interest among the American people that has been dormant for far too long.
Part of this heightened interest is seen in the strength of the Tea Party movement around the nation. Another is the angry reception that many congressmen received at their district town hall meetings.
Yet another is seen by the exchanges on the nation’s most popular radio talk shows such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and others. Then there’s the rising popularity of conservative/libertarian television shows such as Glenn Beck, John Stossel and Fox News.
Cost Of Office
While the odds-on favorite is that the Republicans will do well in the fall elections, Americans who want constitutional government should not see Republican control as a solution to what our founders would have called ”a long train of abuses and usurpations.”
Solutions to our nation’s problems require correct diagnostics and answers to questions like: Why did 2008 presidential and congressional candidates spend over $5 billion campaigning for office?Why did special interests pay Washington lobbyists over $3 billion that same year? What are reasons why corporations, unions and other interest groups fork over these billions of dollars to lobbyists and into the campaign coffers of politicians?
Don’t Believe It
One might say that these groups are simply extraordinarily civic-minded Americans who have a deep and abiding interest in elected officials living up to their oath of office to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Another response is that these politicians, and the people who spend billions of dollars on them, just love participating in the political process.
If you believe either of these explanations, you’re probably a candidate for some medicine, a straitjacket and a padded cell.
A far better explanation for the billions going to the campaign coffers of Washington politicians and lobbyists lies in the awesome government power and control over business, property, employment and other areas of our lives. Having such power, Washington politicians are in the position to grant favors and commit acts that if committed by a private person would land him in jail.
Here’s one among thousands of examples: Incandescent light bulbs are far more convenient and less expensive than the compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL) that General Electric now produces. So how can General Electric sell its costly CFLs?They know that Congress has the power to outlaw incandescent light bulbs.
General Electric was the prominent lobbyist for outlawing incandescent light bulbs and in 2008 had a $20 million lobbying budget.Also, it should come as no surprise that General Electric is a contributor to global warmers who helped convince Congress that incandescent bulbs were destroying the planet.
The greater Congress’ ability to grant favors and take one American’s earnings to give to another American, the greater the value of influencing congressional decision-making. There’s no better influence than money. The generic favor sought is to get Congress, under one ruse or another, to grant a privilege or right to one group of Americans that will be denied another group of Americans.
On The Edge
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, covering up for a corrupt Ways and Means Committee chairman, Charles Rangel, said that his behavior was ”a violation of the rules of the House” but it ”was not something that jeopardized our country in any way.” Pelosi is right in minimizing Rangel’s corruption. It pales in comparison, in terms of harm to our nation, to the legalized corruption that’s a part of Washington’s daily dealing.
Hopefully, our nation’s constitutional reawakening will begin to deliver us from the precipice. There is no constitutional authority for two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress does.
Our Constitution’s father, James Madison, explained: ”The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined … (to be) exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce.”
The Vote: Conned by the promise of an ephemeral executive order, the last holdouts cave and ObamaCare advances. It doesn’t add a single doctor or hospital room, but needs 17,000 new IRS agents to enforce it.
Congressman Bart Stupak, D-Mich., spent months spelling out in minute detail how the Senate version of the health care overhaul permitted federal funding of abortion through its failure to expressly prohibit it.
In the end, he cashed in his principles for an unenforceable executive order that is trumped by the Senate bill he voted to pass.
An executive order is not the law of the land. Neither can you amend a law via executive order. The Senate version of socialized medicine will be the law of the land. It trumps any executive order, a ruling every court will make every time. As Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., reminded Stupak before the vote, this executive order can also be erased by another executive order at any time. It has the strength of gelatin and the life expectancy of a fruit fly.
Stupak was had. So was a bare party-line majority of the House of Representatives, in the face of bipartisan opposition, which proved the adage about everyone having a price, whether it be increased water rations for California’s San Joaquin Valley or a bank in Rep. Earl Pomeroy’s North Dakota that’s now the only one in the country that can still issue student loans.
Such bribes were necessary because the Democrats’ ”reform” doesn’t improve care, expand coverage or reduce costs. As GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin recently stated, ”If you take all the double counting out of the bill, which the (Congressional Budget Office) can’t do because that’s the way it’s put in front of them, this thing has a $460 billion deficit in the first 10 years, a $1.4 trillion deficit in the second 10 years.”
With accounting tricks that would make Bernie Madoff blush, revenue and savings from the feds taking over student loans is counted as medical savings. A $250 billion dollar ”doctor fix” to compensate for $500 billion in Medicare cuts is not counted as an increased cost.
This legislation will cause doctors to flee in droves. The New England Journal of Medicine just released a survey, confirming our own polling, finding that 46% of primary care physicians would consider quitting medicine under this bill.
House Subcommittee on Oversight ranking member Charles Boustany, R-La., said the Internal Revenue Service provision in the bill ”dangerously expands, in an ominous way the tentacles of the IRS and its reach into every American family.”
The IRS now can make sure everyone buys health insurance acceptable to the federal government and collect the fines of up to $2,250 per family or 2% of income if it doesn’t.
The CBO expects the IRS will need roughly $10 billion over the next 10 years and nearly 17,000 new employees to meet its new responsibilities under socialized medicine.The American people will be faced with fines, even possible imprisonment, if they don’t comply with this unique federal mandate. Now an IRS agent will come between you and your doctor.
These IRS agents will have the job of enforcing a new and unconstitutional mandate.The Constitution specifically enumerates the powers given to each branch of governmentand says that any power not mentioned revert to the states and to the people. Nowhere does it say the feds can compel you to buy health insurance.
A swarm of state attorneys general is ready to march into federal court to defend the Constitution and the 10th Amendment in particular from this assault on democracy and freedom. The law officials have behind them the support of an American electorate overwhelmingly opposed to this expansion of government power being rammed down their throats.
Constitution: Republicans vow to repeal health care reform. But no social entitlement, once signed into law, has ever been overturned. The way to stop this federal overreach is through the courts.
Fox pundit Bill Kristol predicts that Republicans will repeal the law in 2013. Rep. Jim DeMint and other GOP leaders have already pledged to do so.
But that assumes a lot. Republicans must first regain control of both houses of Congress, which will require sustaining the current level of public outrage for six months after the fact.
That won’t be easy. While additional negative details about the 2,074-page bill will come out over the coming months, the worst parts won’t go into effect for years. And the White House is already reselling the few positives, such as covering pre-existing conditions, which go into effect right away.
Yes, Republicans won Congress for the first time in 50 years after Clinton tried to socialize medicine. And yes, this bill is arguably worse, with 732 more pages, 109 more bureaucracies and just as many new taxes.
But HillaryCare failed, and was cast as a major Democrat defeat. ObamaCare, on the other hand, will be hailed as a big Democrat win. Even in the off chance that they do take back Congress, Republicans seeking repeal will have to fend off all the lobbyists who will cement around new health care rules, programs and benefits.
Then they’ll have to override President Obama’s veto.
The nation’s best chance to kill this monstrosity before it can ruin the best health care system in the world is to get the courts to declare it unconstitutional.
The ”individual mandate” is a violation of the 9th and 14th amendments. The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate the health care industry on issues of interstate trade.It does not give it the authority to force individuals to buy a service from private industry. This is unheard of. Even in World War II, the feds did not make citizens buy war bonds, for instance.
Already Virginia, Florida and South Carolina are preparing constitutional challenges.
The high court — which thankfully (for now) is led by strict constructionists — will not let stand this violence against the Constitution, which the framers designed to limit federal powers.
If the bench were to uphold mandated universal participation in a federal health system, it would give Congress license to do anything it wants under the Commerce Clause. Nothing would be out of bounds.
Health Overhaul: Sunday’s vote exposed the ugly truth that ObamaCare is not really about health care at all. It’s all about who pays for it and who controls it — in effect a massive wealth-redistribution scheme.
Those who believe this will lead to some medical nirvana will likely be disappointed. Fact is, this poorly designed monstrosity will lead to lower-quality care, higher costs, fewer practicing physicians, higher taxes and fewer jobs.
We’ve done more than 150 editorials in the past year or so documenting these problems. Democrats surely understand them. Yet, despite a recent CNN poll showing that 59% of Americans oppose ObamaCare, Congress approved it anyway.
Why? Because it’s not really about health care. It’s the largest wealth grab in American history, masquerading as health care ”reform,” another step in the socialization of Americans’ income in the name of ”fairness” and ”spread(ing) the wealth around,” as Obama himself has put it.
That’s why we call the program a lie.
The idea behind all this, simply put, is control. This is a vast expansion of government that will require as much as $3 trillion in added spending over a decade. All claims of deficit neutrality are a joke.
This is socialization through the tax code. That $3 trillion has to be paid for. As we showed last week, the health care bill levies $569.2 billion in new taxes over the next 10 years alone.
At the same time, as noted by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, it will increase U.S. budget deficits by $562 billion.
Who’ll pay all these taxes? Those deemed ”rich” by Democrats, and businesses. Specifically, the bulk of the money comes from a special 3.8% Medicare tax on 5 million people earning more than $200,000 a year. That tax is imposed on capital gains, dividends, rents, royalties and interest — that is, investment income.
Obama already has proposed boosting these taxes in his budget. So the top tax take on dividends and cap gains will rise to 23.8% from 15%, an increase of nearly 59%, while top rates on interest and rents will soar from 15% to nearly 44%, a 193% jump.
About 50% of this higher-taxed group reports small business or partnership income. So don’t be fooled: These aren’t taxes on the ”rich,” but on small businesses and jobs.
In ObamaCare, the taxes will be ruinous. Unlike real insurance, where individuals pay to cover their risks, this program covers everyone — including 32 million uninsured — and pays for it by a ”mandate” ( read: ”tax” ) and by taking money from other people to subsidize those who can’t pay. And this just scratches the surface of the new taxes — we literally don’t have room to list them here.
Hmm. Taking money from one group, and giving it to another. That’s called welfare — or, perhaps, health-fare. It’s not insurance.
Once the new program is finished wrecking what remains of the private health insurance industry — as it ultimately will — we’ll be stuck with the government declaring that ”the market doesn’t work” and forcing all of us into a single-payer government plan.
That’s what those Democrats who back ”Medicare for all” want — to kill what’s left of the private market for health care, which has created the best medical system on earth, and use ”reform” to expand an already-bankrupt Medicare system.
The math behind this is ugly. Medicare’s long-term liabilities now total $89 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. Based on projected deficits, the just-passed health reform will take that to $136 trillion.
It will take a lot more than the ”rich,” as defined today, to make up such unfathomable tax shortfalls. That’s when they’ll come for the rest of us — poor, middle-class and rich alike — and we all will be paying vastly higher taxes for vastly inferior medical care.
Obama and the Democratic leadership have nationalized healthcare by proxy.
By Jonah Goldberg
March 23, 2010
First: Congratulations to President Obama and the Democratic leadership. You won dirty against bipartisan opposition from both Congress and the majority of Americans. You’ve definitely polarized the country even more, and quite possibly bankrupted us too. But hey, you won. Bubbly for everyone.
Simply, you have nationalized healthcare by proxy. Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington! They will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when healthcare costs rise — and they will — Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame and out from thisObamacare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer.
The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.
That’s always what Obama had in mind. During the now-legendary healthcare summit, Obama, who loves to talk about ”risk pools,” ”competition,” ”consumer choice” and the like, let it slip that he actually doesn’t believe in insurance as commonly understood. The notion that Americans should buy the healthcare ”equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car” seemed preposterous to him. ”I’m buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation,” he explained. ”Otherwise, I’m just paying out of pocket. I don’t go to the doctor. I don’t get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don’t go bankrupt.” Apparently, people are just too stupid to go to the doctor — or maintain their homes — if they have to pay much of anything out of pocket.
The endgame was to get the young and healthy to buy more expensive insurance than they need or want. ”Expanding the risk pool” and ”spreading out the risk” by mandating — i.e., forcing — young people to buy insurance is just market-based spin for socialist ends. A risk pool is an actuarial device where a lot of people pay a small sum to cover themselves against a ”rainy day” problem that will affect only a few people. Such ”peace of mind” health insurance is gone. What we have now is health assurance. With health assurance, there are no ”risk pools” really, only payment plans.
Under the new law, all the exits from the system are blocked. You can’t opt out or buy cheap, high-deductible Acme Car-type insurance, even if that’s what you need. Ultimately, even that coercion won’t be enough to make the whole thing work because the ”cost curve” will not be bending.
Profit-hungry insurance companies were never the problem. (according to American Enterprise Institute economist Andrew Biggs, industry profit margins are around 3%and the entire industry recorded profits of just $13 billion last year, close to a rounding error in Medicare fraud estimates.) Rather, healthcare costs have been skyrocketing because consumers treat health insurance like an expense account. Putting almost everyone into one ”risk pool” doesn’t change that dynamic; it universalizes it. And eventually, the only way to cut costs will be to ration care.
In September, Obama got into a semantic argument with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who noted that requiring all Americans to pay premiums for a government-guaranteed service sounds an awful lot like a tax. ”No. That’s not true, George,” Obama said. ”For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is . . . that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you.” Stephanopoulos invoked a dictionary definition of a tax: ”a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.” Obama laughed off the idea that a dictionary might outrank him as the final arbiter of a word’s meaning.
”George, the fact that you looked up . . . the definition of tax increase indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.”
OK, put aside your dictionaries. The legislation allocates $10 billion to pay for 16,500 IRS agents who will collect and enforce mandatory ”premiums.” Does that sound like the private sector at work to you?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)
“If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn’t call it a ‘failure of swimming’. So, when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a ‘failure of capitalism’?”
George Mason University professor Peter Boettke,
“America was founded on the principle of individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The first round of the political battle over health care has gone to those who would violate those rights. But this is still our country. If Americans commit to fighting for their lives and their freedom, then the final victory can still be ours.”
Paul Hsieh, MD, practices in the south Denver metro area. He is co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (MD).
And of course there is the “example” of Massachusetts Model which was the precursor to Obama Care. So let’s see what happened during it’s 4 years in practice, AND THEN MULTIPLY THE RESULTS WITH 50 TO GET A ROUGH FIGURE FOR THE WHOLE COUNTRY:
“The Massachusetts treasurer said Tuesday that Congress will ”threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years” if it adopts a health care overhaul modeled after the Bay State’s.
Treasurer Timothy Cahill — a former Democrat running as an independent for governor — said the 2006 law has succeeded only because of huge subsidies and favorable regulatory changes from the federal government.
”Who, exactly, is going to bail out the federal government if this plan goes national?” He asked.”
”If President (Barack) Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistake of the health insurance reform adopted here in Massachusetts on a national level, they will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years,” the treasurer said.
Cahill’s comments came as the Patrick administration launched three days of hearings on rising health care costs. Insurance premiums in Massachusetts rose more than 12 percent over a two-year period.
At the hearing, Attorney General Martha Coakley released a study that found prices paid by health insurers to hospitals vary widely within the same geographic area and cannot be explained by the quality of care.
Massachusetts Miracle or Massachusetts Miserable
What the Failure of the “Massachusetts Model” Tells Us about Health Care Reform
All these kickbacks and bribes to get this legislation through AT ALL COSTS.
A STUPAK PAYOFF “U.S. Congressman Bart Stupak (D-Menominee) announced three airports in northern Michigan have received grants totaling $726,409 for airport maintenance and improvements. The funding was provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration.”
Just a coincidence wouldn’t you say?
STUPAK ANNOUNCES $726,409 FOR AIRPORTS IN ALPENA, DELTA AND CHIPPEWA COUNTIES
Give Rep. Bart Stupak, D-MI, credit, the guy knows how to act. He kept up the charade of opposing Obamacare on principle – no abortion funding with tax dollars – right to the end, then switched once he was satisfied he’d found a sufficient fig leaf to be able to work the issue both ways.
This is classic political hypocrisy. But it’s not like Stupak didn’t tell us that’s what he would do before. Speaking in a constituent meeting in Cheboygan Oct. 24, 2009, Stupak laid out a scenario that is eerily like what just transpired in the nation’s capitol. Substitute ”Executive Order” for ”Amendment” in Stupak’s description, and you’ve got it.
“First there was the ”Louisiana Purchase,” $100 million in extra Medicaid money for the Bayou State, requested by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).
Then came the ”Cornhusker Kickback,” another $100 million in extra Medicaid money, this ti me for Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).
This was followed by word that Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) had written into the legislation $100 million meant for a medical center in his state. This one was quickly dubbed the ”U Con.”
Earlier, when GOP staff member mistakenly thought the medical center was destined for Indiana rather than Connecticut, they named it the ”Bayh Off” for Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.).
For Democratic leaders, this created an appearance problem. Fortunately, they had removed from the bill the tax on cosmetic procedures (the ”Botax”) and replaced it with a tax on tanning (which would primarily impact House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio).
”I don’t know if there is a senator that doesn’t have something in this bill that was important to them,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reasoned when asked at a news conference Monday about the cash-for-cloture accusation. ”And if they don’t have something in it important to them, then it doesn’t speak well of them.”
Indeed, the proliferation of deals has outpaced the ability of Capitol Hill cynics to name them.
Gator Aid: Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) inserted a grandfather clause that would allow Floridians to preserve their pricey Medicare Advantage program.
Handout Montana: Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) secured Medicare coverage for anybody exposed to asbestos — as long as they worked in a mine in Libby, Mont.
Iowa Pork and Omaha Prime Cuts: Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) won more Medicare money for low-volume hospitals of the sort commonly found in Iowa, while Nebraska’s Nelsonwon a ”carve out” provision that would reduce fees for Mutual of Omaha and other Nebraska insurers.
Meanwhile, Sens. Byron Dorganand Kent Conrad, both North Dakota Democrats, would enjoy a provision bringing higher Medicare payments to hospitals and doctors in ”frontier counties” of states such as — let’s see here — North Dakota!
Hawaii, with two Democratic senators,would get richer payments to hospitals that treat many uninsured people. Michigan, home of two other Democrats, would earn higher Medicare payments and some reduced fees for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) held out for larger Medicaid payments for his state (neighboring Massachusetts would get some, too).
As news of the agreements proliferated, Republican senators went to the floor to protest. ”This will not stand the test of the Constitution, I hope, because the deals that have been made to get votes from specific states’ senators cannot be considered equal protection under the law,” argued Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Tex.).
Her Texas colleague, Sen. John Cornyn, took issue with White House strategist David Axelrod‘s claim that such deals are ”the way it will always be.” Said the Texan: ”Maybe in Chicago, but not in my state, and not in the heartland.”
Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) even disavowed Nelson’s Cornhusker Kickback. ”Nebraskans are frustrated and angry that our beloved state has been thrust into the same pot with all of the other special deals that get cut here,” he reported. “
“Top prosecutors in South Carolina and Florida said Friday they are ready to sue if health care reform legislation passes this weekend as expected.
South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said he and Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum will file a federal lawsuit challenging the bill’s constitutionality.
”We are ready to kill it,” McMaster said. ”When the national government and Congress start going wild, it’s up to the states to rein them in.”
“On Thursday, McMaster said he and McCollum had a conference call with those other attorneys general, whom they expect to sign onto the lawsuit next week.
”It’s essentially a direct tax on the people for which there is no authority,” McMaster said. ”It’s the national government requiring a citizen to buy something that he may or may not want to buy. There’s no authority in the Constitution that allows the Congress to do that.”
McCollum’s office confirmed Friday their participation in the legal action.
”Like all of these people, I swore an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution and the constitution of South Carolina,” McMaster said. ”It is difficult to understand how the president and the Congress can believe that this is constitutional. It is harmful, and that’s why we’re going to kill it.”
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
With the House set to vote on health-care legislation, the congressional debate on the issue seems to be nearing its conclusion. But if the bill does become law, the battle over federal control of health care will inevitably shift to the courts. Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, has said he will file a legal challenge to the bill, arguing in a column this month that reform legislation ”violate[s] the plain text of both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.” On Friday, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced that they will file a federal lawsuit if health-care reform legislation passes.
Will these cases get anywhere? Here is a guide to the possible legal challenges to a comprehensive health-care bill.
The individual mandate.
Can Congress really require that every person purchase health insurance from a private company or face a penalty? The answer lies in the commerce clause of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power ”to regulate commerce . . . among the several states.”Historically, insurance contracts were not considered commerce, which referred to trade and carriage of merchandise. That’s why insurance has traditionally been regulated by states. But the Supreme Court has long allowed Congress to regulate and prohibit all sorts of ”economic” activities that are not, strictly speaking, commerce. The key is that those activities substantially affect interstate commerce, and that’s how the court would probably view the regulation of health insurance.
But the individual mandate extends the commerce clause’s power beyond economic activity, to economic inactivity. That is unprecedented. While Congress has used its taxing power to fund Social Security and Medicare, never before has it used its commerce power to mandate that an individual person engage in an economic transaction with a private company. Regulating the auto industry or paying ”cash for clunkers” is one thing; making everyone buy a Chevy is quite another. Even during World War II, the federal government did not mandate that individual citizens purchase war bonds.
If you choose to drive a car, then maybe you can be made to buy insurance against the possibility of inflicting harm on others. But making you buy insurance merely because you are alive is a claim of power from which many Americans instinctively shrink. Senate Republicans made this objection, and it was defeated on a party-line vote, but it will return.
The Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, Gator Aid and other deals.
Some states are threatening lawsuits to block the special deals brokered by individual senators in exchange for their votes. Unless the reconciliation bill passes the Senate, such deals could remain in place. Article I of the Constitution allows Congress to tax and spend to ”provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Normally, this is no barrier to legislation benefiting a particular state or city. Congress can always argue that, say, an Air Force base in Nebraska benefits the United States as a whole. But the deals in the Senate bill are different. It is really hard to identify a benefit to all the states from exempting one state from an increase in Medicare costs or allowing only the citizens of Florida to get Medicare Advantage.
The Slaughter House rule.
A far graver threat to the bill would have been to declare it unconstitutional because it was never formally voted on by the House and therefore never became law. Article I requires that every bill ”shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” to become law, and that ”the votes of both houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered in the journal of each House respectively.”
The whole purpose of the ”deem and pass” procedure — which was advocated by Rules Committee Chairman Louise Slaughter — was to avoid a separate vote on the Senate bill, which many House members find objectionable, and instead vote on the reconciliation bill and simultaneously ”deem” the Senate measure passed. Although Democrats cited prior examples of deem and pass, ”the Republicans did it” is not a recognized constitutional argument –especially if the public and the justices have never heard of such a thing. This constitutional objection seems to have succeeded, as House leaders decided on Saturday to take a separate vote on the Senate version, rather than ”deeming” it passed.
State sovereignty provisions.
Several states are considering measures attempting to exempt their residents from an individual health insurance mandate. While such provisions may have a political impact, none is likely to have any effect on the legislation’s constitutionality. Under the 10th Amendment, if Congress enacts a law pursuant to one of the ”powers . . . delegated to the United States by the Constitution,” then that law is supreme, and nothing a state can do changes this. Any state power to ”nullify” unconstitutional federal laws has long been rejected.
Constitutional amendments.
Of course, there is one additional way for states to win a fight about the constitutionality of health-care legislation: Make it unconstitutional. Article V of the Constitution gives state legislatures the power to require Congress to convene a convention to propose an amendment to the Constitution. If two-thirds of state legislatures demand an amendment barring the federal regulation of health insurance or an individual mandate, Congress would be constitutionally bound to hold a convention. Something like this happened in 1933 when Congress proposed and two-thirds of the states ratified the 21st Amendment, removing from the Constitution the federal power to prohibit the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol. But the very threat of an amendment convention would probably induce Congress to repeal the bill.
Ultimately, there are three ways to think about whether a law is constitutional: Does it conflict with what the Constitution says? Does it conflict with what the Supreme Court has said? Will five justices accept a particular argument? Although the first three of the potential constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution, and no Supreme Court precedents clearly bar their success, the smart money says there won’t be five votes to thwart the popular will to enact comprehensive health insurance reform.
But what if five justices think the legislation was carried bleeding across the finish line on a party-line vote over widespread bipartisan opposition? What if control of one or both houses of Congress flips parties while lawsuits are pending? Then there might just be five votes against regulating inactivity by compelling citizens to enter into a contract with a private company. This legislation won’t go into effect tomorrow. In the interim, it is far more vulnerable than if some citizens had already started to rely upon its benefits.
If this sounds far-fetched, consider another recent case in which the smart money doubted there were five votes to intervene in a politicized controversy involving technical procedures. A case in which five justices may have perceived that long-established rules were being gamed for purely partisan advantage.
You might have heard of it: Bush v. Gore.
Randy E. Barnett teaches constitutional law at GeorgetownUniversity. He is the author of ”Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty.”
A landmark of liberal governance whose price will be very steep.
MARCH 21, 2010
House Democrats last night passed President Obama’s federal takeover of the U.S. health-care system, and the ticker tape media parade is already underway. So this hour of liberal political victory is a good time to adapt the ”Pottery Barn” rule that Colin Powell once invoked on Iraq: You break it, you own it.
This week’s votes don’t end our health-care debates. By making medical care a subsidiary of Washington, they guarantee such debates will never end. And by ramming the vote through Congress on a narrow partisan majority, and against so much popular opposition, Democrats have taken responsibility for what comes next—to insurance premiums, government spending, doctor shortages and the quality of care. They are now the rulers of American medicine.
Mr. Obama and the Democrats have sold this takeover by promising that multiple benefits will follow: huge new subsidies for the middle class; lower insurance premiums for consumers, especially those in the individual market; vast reductions in the federal budget deficit and in overall health-care spending; a more competitive U.S. economy as business health-care costs decline; no reductions in Medicare benefits; and above all, in Mr. Obama’s words, that ”if you like your health-care plan, you keep your health-care plan.”
We think all of this except the subsidies will turn out to be illusory, as most of the American public seems intuitively to understand. As recently as Friday, Caterpillar Inc. announced that ObamaCare will increase its health-care costs by $100 million in the first year alone, due to a stray provision about the tax treatment of retiree benefits. This will not be the only such unhappy surprise.
While the subsidies don’t start until 2014, many of the new taxes and insurance mandates will take effect within six months. The first result will be turmoil in the insurance industry,as small insurers in particular find it impossible to make money under the new rules. A wave of consolidation is likely, and so are higher premiums as insurers absorb the cost of new benefits and the mandate to take all comers.
Liberals will try to blame insurers once again, but the public shouldn’t be fooled. WellPoint, Aetna and the rest are from now on going to be public utilities, essentially creatures of Congress and the Health and Human Services Department. When prices rise and quality and choice suffer, the fault will lie with ObamaCare.
While liberal Democrats are fulfilling their dream of a cradle-to-grave entitlement, their swing-district colleagues will pay the electoral price. Those on the fence fell in line out of party loyalty or in response to some bribe, and to show the party could govern. But even then Speaker Nancy Pelosi could only get 85% of her caucus and had to make promises that are sure to prove ephemeral.
Most prominently, she won over Michigan’s Bart Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats with an executive order from Mr. Obama that will supposedly prevent public funds from subsidizing abortions. The wording of the order seems to do nothing more than the language of the Senate bill that Mr. Stupak had previously said he couldn’t support, and of course such an order can be revoked whenever it is politically convenient to do so.
We have never understood why pro-lifers consider abortion funding more morally significant than the rationing of care for cancer patients or at the end of life that will inevitably result from this bill. But in any case Democratic pro-lifers sold themselves for a song, as they usually do.
Then there are the self-styled ”deficit hawks” like Jim Cooper of Tennessee. These alleged scourges of government debt faced the most important fiscal vote of their careers and chose to endorse a new multitrillion-dollar entitlement.They did so knowing that the White House has already promised to restore some $250 billion in reimbursement cuts for doctors that were included in yesterday’s bill to make the deficit numbers look good. Watch for these Democrats to pivot immediately and again demand ”tough choices” on spending—and especially tax increases—but this vote has squandered whatever credibility they had left.
Mrs. Pelosi did at least abandon, albeit under pressure, the ”deem and pass” strategy that would have passed the legislation without a vote on the actual Senate language. We and many others criticized that ruse early last week, and the House decision to drop it exposes the likes of Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and other analysts who are always willing to defend the indefensible when Democrats are doing it.
All of this means the Senate’s Christmas Eve bill is ready for Mr. Obama’s signature, though only because rank-and-file House Members also passed a bill of amendments that will now go back to the Senate under ”reconciliation” rules that require only 50 votes. Those amendments almost certainly contravene the plain rules of reconciliation, and the goal for Senate Republicans should be to defeat this second ”fix-it” bill. It’s notable that Democrats didn’t show yesterday for a meeting with the Senate parliamentarian to consider GOP challenges, no doubt because they fear some of them might be upheld.
Though it’s hard to believe, the original Senate bill is marginally less harmful than the ”fixed” version, not least because the middle-class insurance subsidies are less costly and it would avert the giant new payroll tax. That’s the White House increase in the Medicare portion of the payroll tax to 3.8% that Democrats cooked up at the last minute and would apply to the investment income of taxpayers making more than $200,000.
If the reconciliation bill goes down, Big Labor and its Democratic clients would be forced to swallow a larger excise tax on high-cost insurance plans, and it would also forestall the private student-loan takeover that Democrats included as a sweetener. In other words, they’d be forced to eat the sausage they themselves made as they have abused Congressional procedure to push ObamaCare into law.
We also can’t mark this day without noting that it couldn’t have happened without the complicity of America‘s biggest health-care lobbies, including Big Pharma, the American Medical Association, the AmericanHospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, the Business Roundtable and such individual companies as Wal-Mart. They hope to get more customers, or to reduce their own costs, but in the end they have merely made themselves more vulnerable to the gilded clutches of the political class.
While the passage of Obama Care marks a liberal triumph, its impact will play out over many years. We fought this bill so vigorously because we have studied government health care in other countries, and the results include much higher taxes, slower economic growth and worse medical care. As for the politics, the first verdict arrives in November.
Taxes: If ObamaCare becomes permanent, no one will suffer more than U.S. businesses. They’ll face higher taxes, more regulations and a higher cost of capital. But don’t take our word for it. Go ask Caterpillar.
The heavy-equipment giant reckons its insurance costs will go up 20%, or $100 million, the first year after the health care system is overhauled, and may go even higher. Multiply that by literally tens of thousands of companies nationwide, large and small, and you can see how costs will soar.
”We can ill-afford cost increases that place us at a disadvantage versus our global competitors,” said Greg Folley, a Caterpillar vice president. ”We are disappointed that efforts at reform have not addressed the cost concerns we’ve raised throughout the year.”
If you don’t care how this affects businesses, you should. Some 15 million people in this country don’t have jobs — and another 12 million work part-time but want full-time positions.
If America‘s major employers are hit with huge, government-mandated cost increases during an economic downturn, do you really think they’ll hire more when the economy starts growing on its own again? Of course not.
Despite this, the White House predicts its plan will ”cut costs” for businesses. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even makes the bizarre prediction that passage of health reform will lead to 400,000 new jobs ”immediately,” and millions more down the road.
Such claims don’t hold water because health reform includes $569.2 billion in new taxes, at last count 160 new bureaucracies and regulations, and 16,500 new IRS agents to collect all those taxes. Tax hits on businesses and industries include:
• $52 billion on companies that do not provide what the government deems ”acceptable” or ”affordable” insurance for workers.
• $60.1 billion on health insurers.
• $27 billion on drugmakers and importers.
• $20 billion on makers and importers of medical devices.
• $2.7 billion on the tanning industry.
And of course the companies themselves don’t pay. You do — both as a consumer, through higher prices, and as an employee, through lower wages.
As the Tax Policy Center, a center-liberal think tank, noted recently, ”Economists generally believe that the burden of payroll taxes is borne by workers in the form of lower wages, regardless of whether the tax is levied on the employer or employee.”
But that’s not the end of it.
A new Medicare tax on capital gains, dividends and other investment income has been raised from 2.9% to 3.8%. Supposedly, this is a tax on the ”wealthy,” those with $200,000 or more in income. It’s really a tax on small business, entrepreneurs and investors.
This provision will push the top cap-gains rate from 15% to almost 24%, while the dividend rate will rise from 35% to 43.4%.
This amounts a big new tax on the very people who are most likely to own or start a new business and hire workers. Health reform will tax large numbers of job creators out of business — and no one in the White House seems to know, or even care.
But it will have an enormous impact. As a result of the Obama-Care taxes on successful individuals and companies, investment in new companies will slow, and old companies will face a higher cost of capital. New jobs will be created offshore in places such India and China.
Economist Steve Entin of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation estimated the Medicare tax would reduce GDP by 1.3%, capital formation by 3.4% and after-tax incomes of those who don’t pay the tax directly by 1.2%.
And those estimates came when the tax was ”only” 2.9% — not the 3.8% it is in the current bill. So the economic losses would in fact be even larger than Entin estimated.
Because of these taxes and other faults in the plan, a group of 130 economists last Thursday sent President Obama a letter imploring him not to sign the bill, saying that it would be a job-killer.
”In our view,” the economists wrote, ”the health care bill contains a number of provisions that will eliminate jobs, reduce hours and wages, and limit future job creation.”
Health reform’s taxes and huge new costs will lead to semi-permanent stagnation in the U.S. economy, marked by higher unemployment and lower standards of living.
Is this how Americans see their future? Based on the Tea Party movement and growing anger at the government for seizing control of the economy’s high ground, we doubt it.
The only real question is, are the White House and Congress listening?
Health Reform: Not since the heyday of Bill Clinton have we had a leader play so fast and loose with the facts as President Obama. And as the health care debate reaches a crescendo, he’s been especially reckless.
Tired of waiting for the major media to take note, here’s a small sampling of whoppers we took from the president’s speeches last week in Ohio and Virginia, plus his interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier:
• ”We have incorporated the best ideas from Democrats and from Republicans.” Far from it. Some of the biggest omissions include tort reform, health savings accounts, portable insurance, expanding consumer access to plans across state lines and posting provider prices for services so patients can shop around.
Republicans were almost completely shut out from the process and at the early stages last summer, were not even permitted to read the bill. In an atmosphere like this, it’s little wonder the bill isn’t drawing a single vote of support from Republicans of either house. It’s fully a creature of the Democratic Party.
• (”This is not a) government takeover of health care.” How is it that government can dictate to private insurance companies what they can offer, to whom, under what circumstances and at what prices, and yet still not own it? Every basic business decision a private company can make has effectively been expropriated.
Even as Obama denied his health care plan was a government takeover, his vice president, Joe Biden, laid out the real deal: ”You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.” We’ll take him at his word.
• ”If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” That’s if your doctor chooses to remain in the profession. Unfortunately, our own IBD/TIPP Poll found that up to 45% would consider quitting if they’re going to be dictated to by unaccountable bureaucrats who couldn’t get into medical school.
Price controls will slash doctor salaries and raise workloads, mandating that doctors make up for losses with volume. Bureaucrats will crack the whip on costs by lowering payments and penalizing doctors who refer patients to specialists. All this, and zero tort reform relief,will drive many doctors out of the profession just as 32 million new patients enter the market.
• ”Our proposal is paid for … our cost-cutting measures would reduce most people’s premiums and bring down our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades.” Government programs always cost more than projected. Medicare, which has $86 trillion in unfunded liabilities, was supposed to cost $10 billion within 25 years of its implementation. It actually cost $107 billion.
The real cost of the Democrats’ reform plan, according to the Cato Institute, which isn’t handcuffed in its estimates like the Congressional Budget Office, is $2.5 trillionover the first decade.
• ”If this vote fails, then insurance companies will continue to run amok.” They’re not exactly wildcatting as it is. Health plan providers boast a profit margin of 3.4% — placing them 88th of 215 industries in Morningstar rankings. More than 2,000 state mandates dictate what coverages they provide.
• ”By the time the vote has taken place … you’ll know what’s in it because it’s going to be posted and everybody’s going to be able to evaluate it on the merits.” The final bill wouldn’t available to the public until Saturday morning, the day before the vote, congressional sources told us Friday. So in fact, nobody would have time to digest the 2,500-page leviathan.
• ”We’re not transforming one-sixth of the economy in one fell swoop.” Yes, Obama wants to take over the health care sector, but in pieces. In 2007, he said that ”economically it is better for us to start getting a system in place, a universal health care system, signed into law by the end of my first term as president.” Canada, he noted, ”did not start off immediately with a single-payer system, they had a similar transition step.” He’s been on record since at least 2003 as a ”proponent of single-payer, universal health care.”
• ”(This will be) the largest middle-class tax cut in the history of the country.” Tax cut? New taxes on prescription drug sales, medical devices, tanning services and an annual tax on health insurers for being health insurers will all end up on middle-class shoulders.
Then for families earning $250,000 there are taxes of 0.9% for hospital insurance, 2.9% on ”unearned income,” plus a tax on high-premium policies. The ”middle-class tax cut,” in the president’s misleading words, amounts to ”tax credits to help you afford” the more expensive insurance of the new (also misleadingly named) ”competitive marketplace.”
• ”$3,000 your employer doesn’t have to pay … maybe she can afford to give you a raise.” Premiums will not go down, but way, way up. The Associated Press last week found that $3,000 to misrepresent a Business Roundtable analysis last year that ”didn’t consider specific legislation.”
Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation told the AP ”it would be miraculous” if premiums went down under the legislation set to be passed. Using the HIS/Global Insight U.S. Macroeconomic model, a Heritage Foundation analysis found that with the new government-regulated exchanges ”crowding out the employer-sponsored market,” there will be ”an overall increase in the absolute amount of health spending on premiums.”
• ”Small business owners … can purchase more affordable coverage in a competitive marketplace.” In fact, small businesses will be slapped with new taxes — including a penalty if they don’t provide the level of health coverage Washington dictates. As owners of modest-sized firms cope with the new burdens, their employees may find themselves with substantially reduced coverage — or with pink slips.
As to the promised financial assistance for new employer mandates, it remains unknown what ”small business” will mean under ObamaCare. Will the definition apply only to micro-businesses of a couple dozen workers?
• (The reform legislation is) ”about the character of our country.” Let’s hope not. Never in American history have politicians sunk to lower depths than in the push to thrust this massive expansion of government down an unwilling America‘s throat.
From the unconstitutional ”Slaughter solution” that would pass it without a vote of the people’s representatives, to the taxpayer-funded bribery of the ”Cornhusker kickback” and ”Louisiana Purchase,” to the pretense of passing it as a budget item bypassing Senate filibusters, Democratic leaders have shown they will stop at nothing to set us on the road to European socialized medicine.
Obamacare is an historic moment – like the Black Plague
Sunday, March 21, 2010
The government takeover of health care will go down in history as the worst piece of legislation to emerge from a Congress held in general disdain by the American people. The only bipartisanship on the health bill was in the opposition.
Usually autopsies are reserved for after the patient has died, but in this case it is useful to get ahead of the matter. The malformed health legislation is not the only reason Democrats are facing political extinction in November, but it is one of the most dramatic. The legislative process in this country has never been so unseemly. Arm twisting, backroom deals, special privileges and potentially criminal ”government jobs for votes” agreements became a normal way of doing business. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fixated on the mantra that the Democrats’ health plan is ”historic,” but so was the Black Plague.
President Obama went to Capitol Hill on Saturday to give a final pep talk to Democrats, where he absurdly called his socialist health care measure ”one of the biggest deficit reduction measures in history.” This contradicts the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who says his staff currently has no idea what the impact of the plan is ”due to the complexity of the legislation.” Democrats have been hoodwinked into believing they won’t pay a political price for their actions, but they will soon discover they miscalculated.
The new system will suffer a tsunami of bad publicity when states sue the federal government over unfunded mandates,when the IRS begins enforcing the aspects of the bill that voters never knew existed, when small businesses start firing employees because they cannot afford the higher costs of the new system, when new and unforeseen costs blow out the already record federal budget deficit, and when seniors begin to feel the impact of Medicare cuts. All of this is what Mr. Obama euphemistically calls ”bending the curve” but which seniors will find out is better termed ”denial of care.” Whether the formal ”death panels” will convene before the November elections is still to be determined.
Many members of Congress probably don’t know exactly what is in the bill. The 2,300 pages of ”fixes” to the Senate bill presented last week were only a draft, and no member can be certain what has been slipped in. A frantic Democratic Party memo sent out Thursday instructed members — twice, in italics – not to ”get into a discussion of details of the [Congressional Budget Office] scores and the textual narrative” with the bill’s opponents. But the devil was in those details. Mrs. Pelosi’s offhand statement that members would learn what was in the bill after it was passed should have been a warning.
The majority party was even having problems over the weekend determining if they could vote to amend a law before it was signed by the president. It is a sad day for America when senior members of Congress either dont understand the Constitution or no longer think it applies.
Democrats in Congress refuse to believe the contempt with which the American people hold them. Gallup shows congressional approval ratings in the teens and headed downward. Gallup also found that ”more Americans believe the new legislation will make things worse rather than better for the U.S. as a whole, as well as for them personally.”
Democrats are in much worse shape than in 1994 when they lost power, and the opposition is far more energized. Once voters have a chance to tell the most irresponsible government in American history that enough is enough, the Democrats’ brief reign will expire, and be deemed death by suicide.
The Tenth Amendment (Amendment X) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Key Democrat and impeached judge Rep. Alcee Hastings said this during a House Rules Meeting today (March 20) in defense of the Democrats’ health care approach:
“I wish that I had been there when Thomas Edison made the remark that I think applies here: ”There ain’t no rules around here, we’re trying to accomplish something.” And therefore, when the deal goes down, all this talk about rules, we make them up as we go along.
It should be noted that in 1981, Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribein exchange for a lenient sentence. Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury becoming only the sixth federal judge in the history of the United Statesto be removed from office by the Senate.
Michael Ramirez (Click on the cartoons and they get bigger):
“…oceanographer Dr. Robert Stephenson of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and NASA to say, “Even when exposed, the IPCC leaders claimed it was their “right” to change scientific conclusions so that political leaders could better understand the report.” “To the world’s geophysical community, these unethical practices and total lack of integrity by the leadership of the IPCC have been enough to reveal that their collective claims were – and are – fraudulent.”
Aesop (620-564 BC) the Greek writer famous for his fables told of the boy who falsely cried wolf. Environmentalists have falsely cried wolf and effectively undermine environmentalism the need to live within the confines of a finite planet. They misled, exaggerated and made a multitude of false predictions to the detriment of the environment and people’s willingness to be aware and concerned. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a major starting point that blamed DDT for many things including thinner eggshells none of which proved correct.
Indeed, as Paul Driessen identified in Eco-imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, banning DDT led to millions of unnecessary deaths from malaria that exceed deaths from AIDS in Africa.
A myriad of false stories made headlines over the last 40 years. All are conditional that is they’re prefaced by words like, ‘could’ and ‘maybe’, but the public generally remembers the terse and unconditional headlines. Ultimately almost all the stories were subsequently proved incorrect, but that never makes the headlines. Remember such stories as sheep and rabbits going blind in Chile because of thinning ozone.
Well as scientists at Johns Hopkins showed it was due to a local infection.
We heard of frogs born deformed and humans were blamed because of pollution. Biologist Stan Sessions showed it was due to a natural parasite.
Each week some natural phenomenon is presented as unnatural and by implication due to human activity. A book is needed to list all the claims and threats made that have not occurred, have proved false or are unfounded.
Global warming and latterly climate change, became the major plank of environmentalist’s religious campaign.They used it to dictate and control how everyone else should live and behave, as a survey of the web pages of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth show. The level of commitment is a real problem. It’s exaggerated by the declining economy and people experience the economic impacts of their tactics and extremism.
Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) disclosed what several scientists had suspected for a long time about the corruption of climate science. Subsequent exposure of the problems with the IPCC Reports led distinguished oceanographer Dr. Robert Stephenson of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and NASA to say, “Even when exposed, the IPCC leaders claimed it was their “right” to change scientific conclusions so that political leaders could better understand the report.” “To the world’s geophysical community, these unethical practices and total lack of integrity by the leadership of the IPCC have been enough to reveal that their collective claims were – and are – fraudulent.” But Bruce Cox, the executive director of Greenpeace “blamed the hacked emails to being politically motivated.”
John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, made the same argument, saying: “Mann and his colleagues were simply speaking in their own high-level code, and a number of things were taken out of context.
His remarks underscore lack of understanding of climate science, the serious limitations of the IPCC Reports and what the emails actually disclose. It is not surprising because on March 10 UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said, “Let me be clear: the threat posed by climate change is real. Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change. Nor does it diminish the unique importance of the IPCC’s work.”
Environmentalism was what academics call a paradigm shift. Thomas Kuhn defined them as “a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.” Some attribute the composite photo of the Earth, taken by astronauts in Apollo 8 as the symbolic start of the new paradigm of environmentalism.
Environmental groups grabbed the concept and quickly took the moral high ground preaching that only they cared about the Earth. They went to extremes putting any plant or animal ahead of any human activity or need. Extreme environmentalists profess an anti-humanity, and anti-evolution philosophy. Humans are an aberration according to Ron Arnold, Executive Vice-President of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. “Environmentalism intends to transform government, economy, and society in order to liberate nature from human exploitation.” David Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service claims Darwin’s evolution theory doesn’t apply to humans. “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line – at about a billion years ago – we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
Climate scientists at the CRU used the IPCC, a political vehicle established by the UN, to provide the false scientific basis for all energy and environmental policies. They created what Essex and McKitrick called the Doctrine of Certainty in their book Taken by Storm. They define this as, “The basic not-to-be-questioned assertions of the Doctrine are:
The Earth is warming.
Warming has already been observed.
Humans are causing it.
All but a handful of scientists on the fringe believe it.
Warming is bad.
Action is required immediately.
Any action is better than none.
Claims of uncertainty only cover the ulterior motives of individuals aiming to stop needed action.
Those who defend uncertainty are bad people.
They conclude, “The Doctrine is not true. Each assertion is either manifestly false or the claim to know it is false.” Remember this was written before disclosure of the emails and the many IPCC errors.
But the most devastating proof of the scientific inadequacies of the IPCC Reports is the complete failure of every prediction they have made.They were as wrong on every issue as the Club of Rome Limits to Growth predictions. Ability to predict weather accurately is difficult in 24 hours and virtually impossible beyond 72 hours. AGW proponents claimed weather was different than climate and predictable with a degree of certainty. This is false because climate is an average of the weather. If their claim was correct forecasts in the brief 20 years since their first Report in 1990 would be correct.Every one is wrong. They tried to avoid the problem by switching to a range of scenarios but even the lowest wrong. These are facts Ban Ki Moon and environmental groups can understand. By ignoring them and crying wolf when the wolf is already in the flock undermines the logical and reasonable adoption of environmentalism.
Environmentalists took over environmentalism and preached to everyone how they knew best and only they cared. How dare they? We are all environmentalists. With blind faith they, deceived, misdirected, threatened, destroyed jobs, careers, opportunities and development. Now those who paid the price will be less willing to listen or support genuine environmental concerns.
And these charlatans are spending billions and trillions of our tax money.
“In response to Wigley’s warning, Jones now counselled him to suppress and conceal his concerns and acted as an advocate for Wang’s defence despite the “valid” evidence against his claims.In an email, Jones appealed to Wigley to “keep quiet” about his apparent backing for Keenan’s concern. In order to obviate any further critique or action by Wigley, Jones speciously told him that SUNY was about to take action against Keenan: “Just for interest! Keep quiet about both issues. In touch with Wei-Chyung Wang. Just agreed with him that I will send a brief response to Peiser. The allegation by Keenan has gone to SUNY. Keenan’s about to be told by SUNY that submitting this has violated a confidentiality agreement he entered into with SUNY when he sent the complaint. WCW has nothing to worry about, but it still unsettling!””
“The following day, (Sept. 11), Michael Mann responded to the new development. In an email to Jones, he suggested that Wang should threaten E&E with a libel suit: “Wei Chyung needs to sue them, or at the least threaten a lawsuit. If he doesn’t, this will set a dangerous new precedent. I could put him in touch w/ anleading (sic) attorney who would do this pro bono. Of course, this has to be done quickly. The threat of a lawsuit alone my (sic) prevent them from publishing this paper, so time is of the essence. Please feel free to mention this directly to Wei Chyung, in particular that I think he needs to pursue a legal course her independent of whatever his university is doing. He cannot wait for Stony Brook to complete its internal investigations! If he does so, it will be too late to stop this.”
“The concerted efforts by a group of eminent climate scientists to prevent the publication of the Keenan paper had been unsuccessful. However, this was mainly due to the fact that I was prepared to resist peer pressure and to be open-minded regarding Keenan’s evidence and argumentation. I doubt that mainstream science editors would have dared to reject the opposition by leading climate scientists who had targeted an amateur researcher. As Phil Jones fittingly put it to me in an email: “How would any journal ever contemplate publishing such a paper?”
“On Feb. 1, 2010, The Guardian reported that Doug Keenan’s E&E paper “may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN’s top climate science body. [...] The [CRU] emails suggest that [Phil Jones] helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming. The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.”
“At no time since Keenan and Wigley raised significant doubts about the reliability of Chinese climate data has Jones taken public steps to clear up the discrepancies regarding Wang’s claims and data. It is unacceptable that the scientist who disseminates a data product on which international treaties are based, as well as IPCC reports and countless government policies, should actively seek to suppress information that calls the quality of the data into question, especially after one [of] his colleagues and a leading authority has advised him that Keenan’s evidence about the data appeared to be legitimate. Comparable behaviour in the private sector would be subject to severe sanction.
The revelations exposed by the CRU emails require the full disclosure of all documents and correspondence in this alleged fraud case. Until the whole affair is fully and publicly investigated, the reputation and integrity of leading climate scientists will remain to appear tainted and discredited.”
When asked for the data behind one study ‘proving’ global warming, CRU scientists instead planned to sue. Following the release of the Climategate emails from East Anglia University`s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), the U.K.’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee decided to investigate its implications “for the integrity of scientific research.” Benny Peiser of the Faculty of Science at Liverpool John Moores University submitted a memorandum, which appears below in edited form.
By Benny Peiser
I am the editor of CCNet and the co-editor of the journal Energy & Environment (E&E).
I will outline the chronology of the CRU-Keenan affair as documented in the published CRU emails and according to unpublished email correspondence between me and Dr. Jones. [at CRU].
On Aug. 29, 2007, I received an email from Doug Keenan with his paper titled “The Fraud Allegations against Wei-Chyung Wang.” In this paper, Keenan accused Wei-Chyung Wang (State University of Albany, SUNY, New York) of scientific fraud. In his paper, Keenan documented evidence that Wang had fabricated information about Chinese meteorological weather stations. His allegations concern two publications, one by Jones et al (1990) that has been a cornerstone in multiple IPCC reports about the allegedly minimal role of the effect of urban heat islands on the global temperature record. One of the key papers to underpin this conclusion is the study by Jones et al. To refute Keenan’s claims of scientific fraud would have only required the release of documentary information about the Chinese weather stations in question which Wang has long claimed to possess.
In the afternoon of the same day (Aug. 29) I sent Phil Jones [then-director of the CRU] an email with a copy of Keenan’s paper attached. In my email, I asked Jones whether he would be prepared to comment on the content and factual accuracy of the Keenan paper.
Later that day, Jones circulated the paper to Dr. Wei-Chyung Wang and Dr. Tom Wigley (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research), informing both his colleagues that he “won’t be responding” to my request, but that he would be prepared to do so if his colleagues thought he should.
The next day, Aug. 30, Wang emailed Jones to say that Jones needed to respond “by providing E&E with a simple answer of ‘false’ to Keenan’s write-up, based on the communication with me.[...] We are facing a tricky person and group, and the only way to do it is to follow the procedure to drive them crazy. [...] We are not going to let Keenan doing things his way. [...] We should be thinking, after the whole odeal (sic) is over, to take legal (or other) actions against Keenan. [...]”
In his response to Wang on the same day, Jones wrote: “Libel is quite easy to prove in the U.K. as you’re not a public figure. Perhaps when you’re back you ought to consider taking some legal advice from SUNY. Assuming the paper is published that is. [...].”
Later the same day, Jones emailed Wang and Wigley to inform them that he would not respond to my request “until the SUNY process has run its course.”
Later still, Dr. Michael E. Mann (Pennsylvania State University) contacted Jones: “With respect to Peiser’s guest editing of E&E and your review, we think there are two key points. First, if there are factual errors (other than the fraud allegation) it is very important that you point them out now. If not, Keenan could later allege that he made the claims in good faith, as he provided you an opportunity to respond and you did now. Secondly, we think you need to also focus on the legal implications. In particular, you should mention that the publisher of a libel is also liable for damages — that might make Sonja B-C be a little wary. Of course, if it does get published, maybe the resulting settlement would shut down E&E and Benny and Sonja all together! We can only hope, anyway. So maybe in an odd way its (sic) actually win-win for us, not them. Lets (sic) see how this plays out…”
On Aug. 31, Tom Wigley (a former CRU director) emailed Jones to notify him that he believed Keenan’s paper raised a valid issue: “Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect. Whether or not this makes a difference is not the issue here.” Jones was now in possession of authoritative information that undermined his claims about the integrity of CRU data products for which he is responsible. Confronted with the evidence from Keenan, and, most importantly, Wigley’s advice that Keenan appeared to have a point, Jones should have been insistent on getting the data and facts out rather than keeping them secret.
In response to Wigley’s warning, Jones now counselled him to suppress and conceal his concerns and acted as an advocate for Wang’s defence despite the “valid” evidence against his claims.In an email, Jones appealed to Wigley to “keep quiet” about his apparent backing for Keenan’s concern. In order to obviate any further critique or action by Wigley, Jones speciously told him that SUNY was about to take action against Keenan: “Just for interest! Keep quiet about both issues. In touch with Wei-Chyung Wang. Just agreed with him that I will send a brief response to Peiser. The allegation by Keenan has gone to SUNY. Keenan’s about to be told by SUNY that submitting this has violated a confidentiality agreement he entered into with SUNY when he sent the complaint. WCW has nothing to worry about, but it still unsettling!”
On Sept. 5, Jones emailed me a list of objections to the Keenan paper. Ignoring the expert advice he had received from Wigley, Jones called on me to reject the paper: “My view is that the claims are unsubstantiated.”
I informed Jones that I would forward his objections to Keenan and stressed: “I know this is a very sensitive matter and I will not rush any decision. I will keep you updated and informed.”
On Sept. 10, I received Keenan’s response which I forwarded to Jones on the same day. I emailed Jones: “As far as I can see, his [Keenan’s] basic accusation seems unaffected by your criticism. Unless there is any compelling evidence that Keenan’s main claim is unjustified or unsubstantiated, I intend to publish his paper in the forthcoming issue of E&E. Please let me know by the end of the week if you have any additional arguments that may sway me in my decision.”
On the same day, Jones forwarded my email to Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt, concluding: “It seems as though E&E will likely publish this paper.”
The following day, (Sept. 11), Michael Mann responded to the new development. In an email to Jones, he suggested that Wang should threaten E&E with a libel suit: “Wei Chyung needs to sue them, or at the least threaten a lawsuit. If he doesn’t, this will set a dangerous new precedent. I could put him in touch w/ anleading (sic) attorney who would do this pro bono. Of course, this has to be done quickly. The threat of a lawsuit alone my (sic) prevent them from publishing this paper, so time is of the essence. Please feel free to mention this directly to Wei Chyung, in particular that I think he needs to pursue a legal course her independent of whatever his university is doing. He cannot wait for Stony Brook to complete its internal investigations! If he does so, it will be too late to stop this.”
Later that day, I received three emails by Phil Jones with additional references and objections to the Keenan paper. Jones put additional pressure on by stressing: “I don’t see how any journal would ever contemplate publishing such a paper. I hope you’ll reconsider.”
After minor revisions of the paper following peer review, I informed Keenan on Oct. 8 that I had accepted his paper for publication with the modified title “The Fraud Allegation Against Some Climatic Research of Wei-Chyung Wang.” It was published in E&E volume 18, number 7-8, pp. 985-995 in December, 2007.
The concerted efforts by a group of eminent climate scientists to prevent the publication of the Keenan paper had been unsuccessful. However, this was mainly due to the fact that I was prepared to resist peer pressure and to be open-minded regarding Keenan’s evidence and argumentation. I doubt that mainstream science editors would have dared to reject the opposition by leading climate scientists who had targeted an amateur researcher. As Phil Jones fittingly put it to me in an email: “How would any journal ever contemplate publishing such a paper?”
On Feb. 1, 2010, The Guardian reported that Doug Keenan’s E&E paper “may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN’s top climate science body. [...] The [CRU] emails suggest that [Phil Jones] helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming. The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.”
At no time since Keenan and Wigley raised significant doubts about the reliability of Chinese climate data has Jones taken public steps to clear up the discrepancies regarding Wang’s claims and data. It is unacceptable that the scientist who disseminates a data product on which international treaties are based, as well as IPCC reports and countless government policies, should actively seek to suppress information that calls the quality of the data into question, especially after one [of] his colleagues and a leading authority has advised him that Keenan’s evidence about the data appeared to be legitimate. Comparable behaviour in the private sector would be subject to severe sanction.
The revelations exposed by the CRU emails require the full disclosure of all documents and correspondence in this alleged fraud case. Until the whole affair is fully and publicly investigated, the reputation and integrity of leading climate scientists will remain to appear tainted and discredited.
Climategate: Three of the Four Temperature Datasets Now Irrevocably Tainted
With today’s revelation on Pajamas Media, only the Japan Meteorological Agency is left to save the warmists. Don’t bet on it. (Click here to see Horner discuss this article on PJTV.)
March 11, 2010 – by Christopher Horner
The warmist response to Climategate — the discovery of the thoroughly corrupt practices of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) — was that the tainted CRU dataset was just one of four independent data sets. You know. So really there’s no big deal.
Thanks to a FOIA request, the document production of which I am presently plowing through — and before that, thanks to the great work of Steve McIntyre, and particularly in their recent, comprehensive work, Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts — we know that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) passed no one’s test for credibility.
Not even NASA’s.
In fact, CRU’s former head, Phil Jones, even told his buddies that while people may think his dataset — which required all of those “fudge factors” (their words) — is troubled, “GISS is inferior” to CRU.
NASA’s temperature data is so woeful that James Hansen’s colleague Reto Ruedy told the USA Today weather editor:
“My recommendation to you is to continue using … CRU data for the global mean [temperatures]. … “What we do is accurate enough” — left unspoken: for government work — “[but] we have no intention to compete with either of the other two organizations in what they do best.”
To reiterate, NASA’s temperature data is worse than the Climategate temperature data. According to NASA.
And apparently, although these points were never stressed publicly before, NASA GISS is just “basically a modeling group forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data.” But now, however, NASA GISS “happily [combines the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) data] and Hadley Center’s data” for the purpose of evaluating NASA’s models.
So — Climategate’s CRU was just “one of four organizations worldwide that have independently compiled thermometer measurements of local temperatures from around the world to reconstruct the history of average global surface temperature.”
But one of the three remaining sets is not credible either, and definitely not independent.
Two down, two to go.
Reto Ruedy refers his inquiring (ok, credulous) reporter to NCDC — the third of the four data sets — as being the gold standard for U.S. temperatures.
But NCDC has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere — Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts have found NCDC completely incredible, having made a practice out of not including cooler temperature stations over time, exaggerating the warming illusion.
Three out of the four temperature datasets stink, with corroboration from the alarmists. Second-sourced, no less.
Anyone know if Japan has a FOIA?
Christopher Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Climategate Stunner: NASA Heads Knew NASA Data Was Poor, Then Used Data from CRU
New emails from James Hansen and Reto Ruedy (download PDF here) show that NASA’s temperature data was doubted within NASA itself, and was not independent of CRU’s embattled data, as has been claimed.
March 10, 2010 – by Charlie Martin
Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).
The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the NationalClimateDataCenter Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.
These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.
Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.
The reporter never published it.
—————————————
There are only four climate datasets available. All global warming study, such as the reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), must be based on these four.
They are: the NASA GISS dataset, the NCDC GHCN dataset, the CRU dataset, and the Japan Meteorological Agency dataset.
Following Climategate, when it became known that raw temperature data for CRU’s “HADCRU3″ climate dataset had been destroyed, Phil Jones, CRU’s former director, said the data loss was not important — because there were other independent climate datasets available.
But the emails reveal that at least three of the four datasets were not independent, that NASA GISS was not considered to be accurate, and that these quality issues were known to both top climate scientists and to the mainstream press.
In a response to reporter Doyle Rice of USA Today, Dr. Reto Ruedy — a senior scientist at NASA — recommended the following:
Continue using NCDC’s data for the U.S. means and Phil Jones’ [HADCRU3] data for the global means. …
We are basically a modeling groupand were forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data in the 70s and early 80s. …
Now we happily combine NCDC’s and HadleyCenter data to … evaluate our model results.
This response was extended later the same day by Dr. James Hansen — the head of NASA GISS:
[For] example, we extrapolate station measurements as much as 1200 km. This allows us to include results for the full Arctic. In 2005 this turned out to be important, as the Arctic had a large positive temperature anomaly. We thus found 2005 to be the warmest year in the record, while the British did not and initially NOAA also did not. …
It should be noted that the different groups have cooperated in a very friendly way to try to understand different conclusions when they arise.
Two implications of these emails: The data to which Phil Jones referred to as “independent” was not — it was being “corrected” and reused among various climate science groups, and the independence of the results was no longer assured; and the NASA GISS data was of lower quality than Jones’ embattled CRU data.
The NCDC GHCN dataset mentioned in the Ruedy email has also been called into question by Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts. D’Aleo and Watts showed in a January 2010 report that changes in available measurement sites and the selection criteria involved in “homogenizing” the GHCN climate data raised serious questions about the usefulness of that dataset as well.
These three datasets — from NASA GISS, NCDC GHCN, and CRU — are the basis of essentially all climate study supporting anthropogenic global warming.
Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from DukeUniversity, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, DukeUniversityMedicalCenter. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.
“We are being asked, commanded, to change the basic ways that we produce and use energy. The reason for this change is also different from what you might think.
The environmental movement uses a speculative opinion about carbon dioxide to arm its fight against you. When they say they are “fighting global warming,” what they really mean is they are fighting your prosperity. Your prosperity is directly related to the production of affordable energy with fossil fuels. China understands this. India understands this. The environmental movement understands it as well, but does not care.”
“What you must always keep in mind is that the only goal of the environmental movement is to save nature from you. There is no other reason for its existence. The environmental movement does not care what happens to your job, your family, your future, the future of your children, this country, any country.
Another subtle mission of the “go green” slogan is to have you participate in their war without you knowing it. In a very real sense “go green” is the war cry of the environmental movement — vilifying a gas we can’t live without to arm their anti-civilization war machine.”
Despite the sales pitch, ”going green” is not remotely about you or your children’s future.
Posted By Art Horn On March 10, 2010
It’s omnipresent now, appearing in every form of media, in grocery stores, on any sort of product. Smiles and earth tone images greet us as we are told over and over again to “go green,” it’s the right thing to do. Don’t be left out, everyone’s doing it! Green is in, save the earth. It’s in all the schools — green is good, kind, and moral. Green is our future. Without it there will be no future.
To “go green” is a metaphor for a cause, but the cause is not the one you might think it is. Green is not about saving energy. It is not about conservation or living more efficiently by recycling. It’s not about electric cars or hydrogen power or solar panels.
Green is not about you. Green is about saving nature.From you.
We are told that going green is the way to create a more eco-friendly and responsible world, but the real meaning is more subtle and sinister. To go green means to change what we are doing, and implies that if we don’t change what we are doing we will inflict terrible harm on the planet and future generations. So what are we to change from, and to what?
We are being asked, commanded, to change the basic ways that we produce and use energy. The reason for this change is also different from what you might think.
The environmental movement uses a speculative opinion about carbon dioxide to arm its fight against you. When they say they are “fighting global warming,” what they really mean is they are fighting your prosperity. Your prosperity is directly related to the production of affordable energy with fossil fuels. China understands this. India understands this. The environmental movement understands it as well, but does not care.
Roughly 87 percent of everything we make energy from produces carbon dioxide gas. “Go green” looks to reduce the output of that gas. The problem is there is nothing “green” on any scale remotely near what is needed to replace fossil fuels in the foreseeable future.They know that there will never be enough windmills or solar panels to power even a tiny fraction of the world we know today, much less the future. The leaders of the environmental movement know this.
The phrase “go green” seems harmless enough — what’s so wrong with being more efficient and looking for new ways of producing energy? It’s true, there’s nothing wrong with looking for new energy sources. But going green has been promoted as the answer to all of our energy needs, the idea being that if we “go green” we can save the earth and still produce plenty of energy and create new jobs. This is part of the lie.
What you must always keep in mind is that the only goal of the environmental movement is to save nature from you. There is no other reason for its existence. The environmental movement does not care what happens to your job, your family, your future, the future of your children, this country, any country.
Another subtle mission of the “go green” slogan is to have you participate in their war without you knowing it. In a very real sense “go green” is the war cry of the environmental movement — vilifying a gas we can’t live without to arm their anti-civilization war machine.
The opportunities of “going green” have not been lost on corporate America. Corporations have joined in a strange alliance of sorts with the environmental groups. Some very large companies are promoting “go green” in their ad campaigns — you can’t watch a commercial from General Electric without seeing a windmill. Insurance companies promote “going green” as a responsible and eco-sensitive way to insure your car or house. Solar panels are ubiquitous in advertising, lighting our way to a brighter future. Yet corporations could care less about the environmentalist goal of “going green” — the phrase is, again, meant to sucker, to make the consumer feel good about buying the product from the company. It’s no different than the use of words like “new,” “improved,” or “natural.” “Green” is just another marketing tool, and the act of “going green” in the corporate world is the same as it has always been, even if the color of money is not always green anymore.
“Go green” stands for reduced economic activity. The idea is to change the world — scale down the world’s economies to save the climate and the world from prosperity seeking humans. Why else would all these eco-groups demand we meet the now defunct Kyoto Protocol carbon emission reductions? Why else would they demand we reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050? Because they know the only way to meet those carbon reductions is to radically change everything. The environmentalists fully intend to beat down the economies of developed nations and to stamp out any hopes of the third world.
The next time you see or hear or read “go green” remember it means “go back” — to a time when people lived half as long as today. To a time when humans were at the mercy of nature.
“Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Obama Department of Energy is using the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) — the lobbying arm of “Big Wind” in the U.S. — to coordinate political responses with two strongly ideological activist groups: the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and the George Soros funded Center for American Progress (CAP).”
“The emails expose active coordination between the Obama administration, the DoE and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the AWEA. These emails show the Obama DoE using the AWEA as a conduit to both the CAP and the UCS, and taking steps to ensure that aspects of its coordination were not committed to paper (or email) because the emails might be revealed later.”
Examining the GreenJobsGate Emails: Obama Administration Takes Direction from Wind Lobby, Soros Group
The Department of Energy’s scientific conclusions were instigated — even dictated — by Big Wind’s lobbyists and leftists. Read here for the timeline and the key figures involved.
March 9, 2010 – by Christopher Horner
Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Obama Department of Energy is using the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) — the lobbying arm of “Big Wind” in the U.S. — to coordinate political responses with two strongly ideological activist groups: the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and the George Soros funded Center for American Progress (CAP).
This is further proof that Obama has betrayed his promise to ban lobbyists. Further, this incident suggests yet another questionable appointment — Cathy Zoi, assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the DoE, injected politics into public policy. Cathy Zoi also happens to be the former CEO of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.
This incident began when an economic paper published by a Spanish university concluded that Spain’s “green jobs” program has cost the country about $800,000 and 2.2 jobs per each job created. Spain’s program had been cited eight times by the Obama administration as being the model for its vision of a U.S. “green jobs” program.
The emails privately describe the Spanish paper as “damaging.”
The emails expose active coordination between the Obama administration, the DoE and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the AWEA. These emails show the Obama DoE using the AWEA as a conduit to both the CAP and the UCS, and taking steps to ensure that aspects of its coordination were not committed to paper (or email) because the emails might be revealed later.
The emails reveal three principal issues in the 900 pages received so far. (“So far,” because the Competitive Enterprise Institute is appealing NREL’s withholding of many more pages, and reviewing the DoE’s recent production to see if those withholdings should be challenged.)
The three principle issues:
1. The Obama DoE’s relationship with the Big Wind lobby and left-wing ideological activists. What role did those groups play in producing an official administration response to the Spanish “green jobs” study?
2. Apparently misleading — or false — statements made to Congress by the DoE. Particularly the statements made by Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi. What was her role in developing the response to the Spanish report?
3. Career DoE staffers’ and scientists’ confusion, then concern, then scrambling, and finally dissembling regarding how the response was initiated and at whose request. Was the report — which cost taxpayers around $5000 to prepare — instigated and directed by an industry lobby?
The difficulty in reconciling the internal discussions revealed by the emails with statements made to congressional committees — by DoE’s legislative affairs staff, and by Ms. Zoi specifically — raise questions that should interest those congressional committees. It seems inescapable from these emails that the AWEA actually instigated the DoE report. It is also clear that AWEA played a role in crafting it, along with the far-left UCS.This is important, because DoE and NREL are both on record saying it was the other guy’s idea.
More troubling, DoE followed up with a specific letter from Ms. Zoi to Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) that failed to answer his inquires, though the emails demonstrate that Ms. Zoi’s staff had the information Congressman Sensenbrenner was seeking. In fact, the emails show great consternation regarding what to say about this question, and a reluctance to put in writing who the “unnamed sponsor” was. The email trail I received concludes with a September 22, 2009, email, calling for a huddle in the office of Zoi’s Chief Operating Officer Steven Chalk to get things straight.
The DoE emails show the following sequence of events:
1. The AWEA was unnerved by the Spanish report.
2. AWEA went to DoE’s NREL with its anxieties, asking what the Obama administration would do to respond.
3. NREL began putting together an internal “talking points” memo on the paper, working with AWEA.
4. AWEA’s chief lobbyist told Cathy Zoi that NREL was producing the internal memo with AWEA.
5. Upset by a George Will column citing the Spanish paper, and now aware that AWEA was crafting the memo with NREL, Zoi contacted NREL. She asked if the memo could be published as an official Obama administration response, rather than an NREL response.
6. NREL and DoE staff showed worry, because the paper was never intended to be — and does not meet DoE requirements to be — an external report.It was only suited to be an internal memo, as it reflected no actual research.
7. The paper was completed and sent to AWEA, with a request that AWEA send it to the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists. This was done at the request of DoE officials, who wanted the two leftist groups to offer comments on the paper prior to its release.
8. At this time, internal DoE and NREL discussion ensued about toning down the partisan nature of the paper. Oddly, this discussion had been accompanied by a request for CAP involvement.
9. Zoi’s office made sure the paper was issued with its status upgraded to be a more formal document than regulations indicate is proper. Emails reveal NREL and DoE staff worrying about pressure from Zoi to make this exception.
The emails fall into three categories, each raising interesting questions:
1. Emails discussing how to spin the Spanish report: how to respond to this challenge to one of the Obama administration’s cherished programs?
2. Emails telling of pressure being put on DoE staffers by Cathy Zoi.
3. Emails describing the DoE’s relationship with Big Wind, the Soros-funded CAP, and the leftist UCS.
You might expect this to be a story of great interest to the mainstream media.
But I have excellent information pointing to at least one national newspaper being given these same emails by DoE, upon request, only to have its editors spike the story. In addition to being a case-study in Obama-style governance, this incident reaffirms the role and the importance of new media (such as PJM).
As of today, the NREL and DoE are still withholding the comments from CAP and AWEA, and apparently are also withholding other communications that should have been provided following the appeal of other AWEA communications withheld.
Even so, the documents produced so far tell us much about the Obama administration and its dealings with favored lobbyists and ideological activists. As the investigation continues, we expect to discover much more of what the American people deserve to know regarding the current administration’s manner of governance.
The South African president’s office yesterday announced the nomination of its tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk for the United Nations’ top climate post. Ashead of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC).
Seems like the right guy for this UN ”scientific” job. He worked as a student spy for the apartheid government. And he sold out his own political party for a junior cabinet seat in ANC. After that he started helping ANC to smear its democratic opposition and to encourage opposition politicians to defect.
Jepp, here we have another perfect example of a Global Warming Hysteric. And an excellent school book example of people that get appointed at high positions at UN.
This is the kind of people they, the Global Warming Hysterics, want to PUT IN CHARGE OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT. Or the embellishment they use “Global governance”. (See also my previous post)
Nice people, wouldn’t you say. With the interest of the common people first in mind
Here is what Patrick Bond of South Africa’s Centre for Civil Society has to say about this charming guy:
“Director of the Centre for Civil Society Professor Patrick Bond questioned Van Schalkwyk’s ”integrity”, saying quality was required to head the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).
”The UNFCC post must be headed by someone of integrity, and that’s not a characteristic associated with Van Schalkwyk, thanks to his chequered career as an apartheid student spy and a man who sold out his political party for a junior cabinet seat,” said Bond.
He added the nomination ”doesn’t make sense, because if Van Schalkwyk was a world-class climate diplomat, why did (President Jacob) Zuma demote him by removing his environment duties last year?”
“Spokesman for Earthlife Africa Tristen Taylor said Van Schalkwyk did not have a good record in cutting carbon emissions while environmental affairs minister.”
The nomination here:
South African Government nominates Minister van Schalkwyk for top UN post
“Climategate, named after Watergate by James Delingpole, refers to emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that exposed the corruption of climate science. Many, including scientists and politicians who liked the message that humans were destroying the planet, supported them. Watergate’s downfall was the cover up not the original actions, although they were illegal and outrageous. The cover up is now occurring in Climategate as those involved and benefiting financially and politically attempt to minimize the damage.
People directly involved in the CRU corruption are acting as they did all along, brazenly staring down the world with an arrogance evidenced on the propaganda web page, Realclimate, set up to protect and perpetuate their fraud.”
“The 1974 Club of Rome report titled, Mankind at the Turning Point says, “The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”Their solution was dramatic reduction in population and a complete change in the socio-economic system through total government control. They chose global warming as “a new enemy to unite us.”A major architect of these ideas was Paul Ehrlich author of the Population Bomb (1968). He continues to predict apocalypse but consider some previous predictions.
1968 – The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines… hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death.
1969 – I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
1969 – By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.
1969 – By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million.”
For more on the Club of Rome and the persisten drive from these people for a world government see my posts:
Political Agendas Continue to Drive Climate Fiasco
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, March 8, 2010
The greatest scandal connected to global warming is not exaggeration, fraud or destruction of data to conceal the weakness of the argument. It is those who are personally profiting from promoting this fantasy at the expense of the rest of us.
The comment is absolutely wrong because by far the greatest scandal is the continued political exploitation, fraud and destruction of the economy.
Exploitation of global warming underscores a fundamental difference between left wing ideology from communism through socialism, and free market capitalism.
The former pursue political agendas regardless of failures and cost. Obama pursues green jobs or cap and trade that have failed elsewhere. The latter, if not too shackled by government, flexes, adapts, innovates, invents and advances the human condition and improves the environment (check pollution levels in communist countries). The left who used global warming as their Trojan Horse continue despite complete exposure of the fraudulent means used to build the horse.
The Cover Up Tells the Tale
Climategate, named after Watergate by James Delingpole, refers to emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that exposed the corruption of climate science. Many, including scientists and politicians who liked the message that humans were destroying the planet, supported them. Watergate’s downfall was the cover up not the original actions, although they were illegal and outrageous. The cover up is now occurring in Climategate as those involved and benefiting financially and politically attempt to minimize the damage.
People directly involved in the CRU corruption are acting as they did all along, brazenly staring down the world with an arrogance evidenced on the propaganda web page, Realclimate, set up to protect and perpetuate their fraud.
Others claim they’re victims, but both vow to fight back. Benjamin Santer was caught changing the wording in Chapter 8 of the 1995 Report, and claimed he was suffering a nervous breakdown. Phil Jones, deposed Director of the CRU said he was suicidal for a while after the news leaked.
Governments and universities are covering up. The University of East Anglia appointed a committee under Muir Russell to investigate. Russell’s own impartiality is under question, but additionally because two people chosen to assist him have serious conflicts of interest.
One, Philip Campbell, editor of Nature magazine was part of the corruption of peer review, selective publications and editorials supporting the CRU. He was forced to withdrawafter his conflict was disclosed.
Another member, Geoffrey Boulton, was appointed because of his “expertise” and independence required to meet Russells’ claim that, “None have any links to the Climatic Research Unit, or the United Nations’ Independent Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” One newspaper explains Boulton’s prejudice. “The Scotsman can reveal that only a few months ago, Prof Boulton, from the University of Edinburgh, was among a number of scientists who, in the wake of the climategate scandal, signed a petition to show their confidence that global warming was caused by humans. And for at least five years, he has made clear his strong views on global warming. He has given interviews and written articles – including in The Scotsman – that have spelled out his firmly held beliefs.”Muir is retaining Boulton despite his duplicity.
In the US a similar whitewashed inquiry occurred at Penn State with Michael Mann’s activities. And nobody else connected with CRU is being called to account.
Consistently and Horrendously Wrong
The 1974 Club of Rome report titled, Mankind at the Turning Point says, “The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”Their solution was dramatic reduction in population and a complete change in the socio-economic system through total government control. They chose global warming as “a new enemy to unite us.”A major architect of these ideas was Paul Ehrlich author of the Population Bomb (1968). He continues to predict apocalypse but consider some previous predictions.
1968 – The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines… hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death.
1969 – I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
1969 – By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.
1969 – By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million.
Now he, Steven Schneider and Paul Falkowski claim they’re the persecuted as their support of the falsified of climate science is undermined. Like the CRU gang, it is emails that expose them. The Washington Times obtained emails between scientists associated with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
It, as well as other National Academies, were used politically to ‘prove’ consensus. Now the world is aware of their use of environmentalism and climate change. Schneider defends their actions, “This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, ‘God, can’t we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,” It’s typical hypocrisy from a man who says spinning the truth is acceptable to achieve the goal. Consider his 1998 Discover magazine comment. “On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind, which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” It is not an ethical bind; there is no choice between “being effective’ and “honest”.The statement describes exactly what they’ve done, the complete lack of ethics while the leaked emails provide the method.
Climate scientist Judith A. Curry, of the Georgia Institute of Technology says, “Sounds like this group wants to step up the warfare, continue to circle the wagons, continue to appeal to their own authority, etc. Surprising, since these strategies haven’t worked well for them at all so far.” Curry should add they continue to attack people who sought the facts. James Inhofe, Oklahoman Republican, was consistent in his opposition despite ridicule and persecution. Now he is a bigger threat as he seeks answers and accountability. Schneider takes on the task by making the distasteful comment that Inhofe is showing “McCarthyesque” behavior.
Pursue the goal of total government control
Paul Ehrlich pursues the victim theme, “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,”
The problem is this statement applies more to the members of the Club of Rome and those who support and pursue its goal of total government control.
“The average temperature in February 2010 was 32.41 F. This was -2.24 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 29th coolest February in 116 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.”
This year, the February temperature is-3.74 F cooler than for example 1898. And if we compare this year’s February with 1896 it is -3.55 F cooler.
If we compare with 1930 this year’s February is -8.51 F cooler. And if we compare with the warmest February (1954) it is -9.85 F cooler
And the recent 12 Month period (Mar-Feb) 1895-2010
This year, 2009 /2010 (Mar-Feb), the temperature is EXACTLY THE SAME AS IN 1898! AND 1902. The difference is ah HUGE 0.02 F. One fiftiethof a degree in 112 years.
Puh, that what I call an eminent treat to humankind!
1/50 of a degree in 112 years.
And the recent 3 Month period (Dec-Feb) 1895-2010.
This year, 2009/2010 (Dec-Feb), was the 18th coolest December-February in 116 years.
This year, the Dec-Feb temperature is -2.41 F cooler than for example 1896. And if we compare this years Dec-Feb temperature with 1907 it is -3.26 F cooler.
Another glorious example of the catastrophic warming in the last 114 years!
More on the Himalayan glaciers from someone who knows what he is talking about, Dr A K Dubey. But it is all voodoo science according to Pachauri, head of IPCC.
Global Warming has no impact on Himalayas claims Wadia Director
Ashwani Maindola, Hindustan Times
Dehradun, March 06, 2010
First Published: 12:08 IST(6/3/2010),Last Updated: 12:09 IST(6/3/2010)
Senior scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WITG) has rejected the Global Warming Theory and told that the Himalayas are quite safer zone on earth, where Global Warming has no role in controlling the conditions.
In an exclusive chat with HT, Director WIHG Dr AK Dubey has said that the conditions of Himalayas are controlled by the winter snowfall rather than external factors like much hyped Global Warming. He told that for a concrete result, at least 30 years of continuous research with steady outcome is needed to confirm the actual impact.
”According to a data for over 140 years available with a British weather observatory situated in Mukteswar (2311m) in Almora has actually revealed that temperature in that region witnessed a dip of .4 degrees,” he said.
Since 1991, the institute is monitoring the Himalayas extensively with focusing the glacial studies and last twenty year data has never witnessed a continual retreat. Sometimes, the recession rates have gone up but on an average the rate is very much safer, he added.
Whatever predictions about Himalayas are being made are based on short-term studies conducted on glaciers, which have no comparison with Himalayan Glaciers, he told. ”Our glaciers are giant high altitude glaciers above 4000m altitude with a permanent temperature below 20 degrees Celsius. And has no comparison with the Alps Glaciers or Alaskan Glacier which are at sea level,” he said.
Dr. DP Dobhal, eminent glaciologist added that however there is a change in climate in terms of shrinking of winter period but still a lot is dependent upon the snowfall occurs. Currently the rate of recession is in between 16-20 meters a year for glacial retreat in Himalayas, whereas 30 percent of the glaciers are more than 10km in length, he said.
“Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way,hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global ”carbon trading” market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions.Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd ”carbon-saving” energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.
With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager ”renewables” developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white ”global warming” continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein’s monster.It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.”
The emerging errors of the IPCC’s 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker
Published: 7:49PM GMT 27 Feb 2010
The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.
The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other ”extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The ”science is settled”, the ”consensus” is intact.
But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga.Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists.Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.
Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.
In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all – the notorious ”hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report,it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)
In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC’s 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world’s politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December’s Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.
What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by ”Climategate”, the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC’s 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).
Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU’s suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.
The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated.The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds.And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael ”Hockey Stick” Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world’s politicians will be very different.
Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way,hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designednot to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global ”carbon trading” market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions.Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd ”carbon-saving” energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.
With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager ”renewables” developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white ”global warming” continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein’s monster.It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.
This is a post i didn’t have time to publish a couple a days ago so here it comes:
The Institute of Physics (IOP), a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics, has delivered a very interesting memorandum to the UK Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee. Who are doing an inquiry into the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
This is a very harsh critic and a devastating assessment of the “science” behind the Global Warming Hysteria.
Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)
The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.
The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry, ‘The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia’.
The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute’s Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group.
What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?
1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.
2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.
3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:
· those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and
· historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of ‘proxies’, for example, tree-rings.
4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.
5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.
6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails.This impedes the process of scientific ‘self correction’, which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.
7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.
8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much ‘raw’ data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.
9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.
Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?
10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.
11. The first of the review’s terms of reference is limited to: ”…manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice...” The term ‘acceptable’ is not defined and might better be replaced with ‘objective’.
12. The second of the review’s terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU’s policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.
How independent are the other two international data sets?
13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.
“The enormous costs and hypocrisy of all the UN conferences.
I have written extensible about the UN pack, this travelling circus that fly around the globe in first class, or private jet, stay in hotel rooms at £400-500 per night in spa resorts, and gets wined and dined at expensive restaurants.
All of this of course paid by us, the normal people.
While they at the same time preach austerity, frugality and sacrifice from us, the taxpayers.
This blatant hypocrisy is so mind numbing that it would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these people have the power to force us to obey them.
They are a truly parasitic class in the sense that Karl Marx wrote about it.
How ironic that today most of this class is leftists and so called “liberals”.
Well, they the Global Warming Hysterics continuous as nothing have happened. The latest UN UNEP conference in Bali continues FULL SPEED AHED the march to Global Government. And GIGANTIC “TRANSFERS” OF MONEY from the industrialized western countries.
As I have been saying all along, this has nothing to do with science, facts or saving the environment or the Earth. It has always been a political agenda – anti human, anti freedom, anti development and anti capitalism.
They are now continuing with the Copenhagen goals (which was rejected remember) – a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That, the paper says, will requirea staggering $45 trillion dollarsto accomplish.
All of this, as always, paid by the common people in the form of taxes, high energy costsand reduce our living standard back to the Stone Age.
As I said, these guys will spend TRILLIONS $ of our tax money.
Do you know what anENORMOUS, STAGGERING FIGURE a $1 trillion is?
To give you an idea, here is a graphic presentation of $1 Trillion dollars.
Notice those palletsare double stacked. And remember those are $100 bills.
So our field of pallets is roughly 224ft x 432ft x 7ft high with $100 bills.
At 96,768 square feet, it’s about 2.2 acres and well over the size of a football field.
And now multiply that by 45 to arrive at the figure UNEP want to “transfer” from us, the common people.
For comparison here is $1 Billion dollars.
And for more comparison here is $1 Million dollars(100 packets of $10,000).
The pile is 12″ wide, 12.5″ deep and 4.3″ high.
In 2007, the real median annual American household income was $50,233.00 according to the Census Bureau
Bali-Hoo: U.N Still Pushing for Global Environmental Control
By George Russell
“Despite the debacle of the failed Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the United Nations is pressing full speed ahead with a plan for a greatly expanded system of global environmental governance and for a multitrillion-dollar economic transfer scheme to ignite the creation of a ”global green economy.”
In other words: Copenhagen without the authority — yet — of Copenhagen.
The world body even has chosen a time and a place for the culmination of the process: a World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the famed ”Earth Summit” that gave focus and urgency to the world environmentalist movement.
The 2012 summit date is significant for another reason: It marks the end of the legal term of agreement for the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, which includes carbon reduction targets, and provided the legal basis for an international cap-and-trade market for carbon, centered in Europe. The U.S. first signed then backed away from the Kyoto deal without ratifying it; until its apparent collapse, the comprehensive Copenhagen deal was intended to include the U.S. and supplant Kyoto with a new, legally binding regime.
The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a ”focused political document” presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order.
Just exactly what that environmental order will look like, and the extent of the immense financial commitments needed to produce it, are under discussion this week at a special session in Bali, Indonesia, of the United Nations Environment Program’s 58-nation ”Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environmental Forum,” which oversees UNEP’s operations.”
“But the major topics are a global system of governance and what amounts to the next stage of a radical transformation of the world economic and social order, in the name of saving the planet.
Alongside that, as always, are discussions of vast sums of money that should flow to developing nations to help them make the transition to the new, greener world. As one of the papers written in advance of the meeting to ”stimulate discussion” puts it, ”the situation … presents genuine opportunities for a dramatic shift from what can be termed ‘business as usual.’”
”Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities.”
The discussion paper, published — but not distributed — on Dec. 14, 2009, assumes that the goal of the green economic transformation is the same as that of the ill-fated Copenhagen conference: a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That, the paper says, will require a staggering $45 trillion dollar to accomplish — much of it in transfers from rich nations to poorer ones.
The paper, however, paints that as a bargain — ”an average yearly investment of just over $1 trillion.” About half of that would go for ”replacing conventional technologies with low-carbon, environmentally sound alternatives.”
Climategates, Glaciergates, Amazongates, Pachaurigates and Africagates may come and go, but as far as the UN is concerned the caravan must roll on regardless. (Hat tip: Will8Ace)
Just have a look at this terrifying document unearthed by George Russell at Fox News – the one which paves the way for the New World Order destined to be imposed on us in the name of ecological righteousness.
It talks – as, inter alia, does Dave Cameron – of green jobs and green investment and the marvellous benefits which will accrue from the brave new green economy.
For the most part it’s vague, but in places the mask slips and the true horror reveals itself.
“Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities.”
Bye bye democracy, in other words. Oh, and bye bye your job, your money and your children’s economic future too.
The discussion paper, published — but not distributed — on Dec. 14, 2009, assumes that the goal of the green economic transformation is the same as that of the ill-fated Copenhagen conference: a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That, the paper says, will requirea staggering $45 trillion dollarto accomplish — much of it in transfers from rich nations to poorer ones.
The paper, however, paints that as a bargain — “an average yearly investment of just over $1 trillion.” About half of that would go for “replacing conventional technologies with low-carbon, environmentally sound alternatives.”
These people talk about trillions as if it’s handy small change. Do you want to know what a trillion looks like?
Here’s what a trillion dollars looks like. Now multiply that by 45. Remembering all the while that the crisis which it is designed to alleviate exists only in the imagination of your New World Governors.
I have written extensively about how the temperature is measured, the “adjustment” of the raw data, the cherry picking of stations, the urban heat island effect which officially doesn’t exist according to the Global Warming Hysterics etc.
Here is more on that subject from retired NASA scientist Edward Long – the ”adjustment” of the raw rural data byNOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).
This my friends is another example of the “science” that the Global Warming Hysteria is based on.
Our study of data-massaging by the U.S. government agency charged with collecting temperature information raises uncomfortable questions.
We have been repeatedly told (perhaps ”lectured” is a better word) the past twenty years that global warming is occurring. With Climategate and subsequent confessions and bailouts by scientists at the CRU, Penn State, Arizona State, IPCC, et al., we are learning that little to none of the factual content in their ”peer reviewed” articles is true. The Medieval Warming Period did occur, and it was warmer than currently; the oceans are not going to flood the plains; and the Arctic Ocean may not be turning into a summer water park. Of course, the mainstream media, especially in the United States, has reported little of this news, and President Obama appears not to be well-informed. But now the global warming story grows more interesting because here in America, we may have our own little ”gate.” I will call it ATG, for ”American Temperaturegate.”
NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) informs us, based on their ”Adjusted Data” for the period from the last decade of the 19th century to 2006, that the temperature for the contiguous U.S. has increased at a rate of 0.69oC/century. Click here. NCDC arrives at this conclusion by massaging raw data from a set of meteorological stations located in the contiguous U.S. which they selected on the basis of a 2.5-degree latitude- and 3.5-degree-longitude grid. For more on this, click here and here. The most-asked question, most recently by D’Aleo and Watts, is whether the NCDC’s reported increase is correct. Perhaps the value is due to a dominant use (over-selection) of stations in urban locations or because of other issues, such as leaving out stations at higher altitudes for the more recent history and retaining them for the more distant past.
Here, one aspect is considered — that of the Urban Heat Island Effect, which is tagged as UHIE.
We selected two sets of meteorological stations (48 each, with one station per each of the lower 48 states) from the NCDC master list. The stations in one set were at rural locations — a rural set. The stations in the other set were at urban locations — an urban set. The NCDC latitude and longitude station coordinates were used to ”fly over” the locations on a computer, using a GPS map application to confirm the rural and urban characteristics. For each of the 96 stations, the NCDC’s raw and adjusted temperature data were entered into a spreadsheet application and studied. The ”raw” data are the annual average temperatures of the measured data. The ”adjusted” data are the annual average temperatures the NCDC derived from the raw data by making a set of ”corrective” assumptions for time of day, type of instrument, etc. and guessing the temperature at stations for missing data based on temperatures of other stations at the same latitude and/or region. For a more in-depth understanding of the NCDC protocols for converting raw data to adjusted data, click here. A summary of the findings is in the following table. The values in the table show that the NCDC’s rate of increase of temperature, 0.69oC/century, is based on an over-selection of stations with urban locations.
Station Set
oC/Century, 11-Year Average Based on the Use of
Raw Data
Adjusted Data
Rural (48)
0.11
0.58
Urban (48)
0.72
0.72
Rural + Urban (96)
0.47
0.65
The values in the table highlight four important considerations:
1) The rate of increase for rural locations, based on as-measured (raw) values, is small (if not, in effect, zero) at 0.11 oC/century.
2) There is definitely a UHIE in that the urban raw data has a rate of increase of 0.72oC/century. This tells us that man has caused warming in urban locations. This finding should not surprise anyone. On the other hand, because the rural value is 15% of the urban value, the UHIE has not caused warming in the rural locations, and it certainly has not caused a global sense of warming other than the aspect that the urban location values when averaged with the rural values produce an average increase which is larger than that of the rural alone.
3) The rural + urban value for the adjusted data, 0.65oC/century, is still less than the 0.69oC/century published by the NCDC.Thus, likely, there are more urban than rural sites used by the NCDC.
4) And this is the ”Temperaturegate” aspect: The NCDC’s massaging — they call it ”adjusting” — has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11oC/century to an adjusted value of 0.58oC/century, and no change in the urban values.That is, the NCDC’s treatment has forced the rural value to look more like that of the urban. This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the growth of the sizes of and activities within urban locations, unless deception is the goal.
The criticism this makes of the NCDC’s treatment of historical data for the contiguous U.S. is the same as a recent Russian paper made of the HadCRUT treatment of historical temperature data for Russia. For a thumbnail of the points made in that paper, click here.
Edward R. Long holds a Ph.D. in physics. He is a retired NASA scientist who is a consultant on radiation physics for space flight and on energy/climate in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Climategate: What We Should Be Doing About Natural Climate Change
Just because AGW is a fraud doesn’t mean that we should ignore the natural and cyclical changes in the Earth’s temperature.
February 24, 2010 – by Harrison Schmitt
Earth’s climate changes are extraordinarily complex phenomena. They represent decadal, to millennial, to epochal changes in weather patterns as nature continuously attempts to compensate for solar heating imbalances in and between the atmosphere and oceans.
Nature’s attempts to restore heat balance take place under the complicating influences of the Earth’s inclined daily rotation, movement and release of heat stored in the oceans, aerosol production by many natural processes, water and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and periodically changing orbital position and orientation relative to the sun. In spite of all these variables and more, the Earth currently controls its temperature in a very narrow range as shown by satellite measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere (troposphere) since 1979.
Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660.Multi-decade intervals of more rapid warming and cooling have occurred during this current, centuries-long general warming trend as they have for over 10,000 years since the last major ice age.
Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, glaciers had advanced over valley farmlands cultivated as those same glaciers receded during the preceding Medieval Warm Period (about 800-1300). Since the last major ice age, decades long periods of warming and cooling have been superposed on longer cycles, the longest repeating about every 1500 years.
All of this has occurred without any significant human activity. Cooling between 1935 and 1975 and since 2000, and warming between 1975 and 1995 have been the most recent such variations and correlate strongly with variations in solar activity.
In contrast to these facts, climate change assumptions and computer modeling, rather than real-world observations, underpin the government’s efforts to restrict American liberties and confiscate trillions of dollars of American income in the name of “doing something” about climate change.The scientific rationale behind this proposed massive intrusion into American life requires more than a “consensus” of like-minded climate analysts and bureaucrats. It needs to be right.
Recent disclosures and admissions of scientific misconduct by the United Nations and advocates of the human-caused global warming hypothesis shows the fraudulent foundation of this much-ballyhooed but non-existent scientific consensus about climate.
Still, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other government agenciespersist in over-stepping their regulatory authority to jam climate related regulations into our lives and economy at the expense of liberty, jobs, and incomes. Federal control of energy production and use, advocated by special “climate” interests, will have a vanishingly small effect on slowing three and a half centuries of very slow, erratic, but natural global warming.
A long-term federal and commercial agenda to gather power and profit in the name of “environment” at the expense of liberty has no constitutional foundation. The Tenth Amendment leaves to the states all governance responsibility for environment as no direct or indirect mention of it exists in the Constitution. Prudent protection of local environments by the states and the people does have justification in the Ninth Amendment’s protection of natural rights, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as formalized in the Declaration of Independence. The Feds need to butt out!
So, what should the people do now about climate, if anything? We must prepare to adapt to inevitable change, however unpredictable it may seem. We can recognize that production and use of our own domestic oil, gas, coal, and nuclear resources buys us time to meet these challenges and, at the same time, preserve our liberty.
We can develop far better surface and space observational techniquesand use them consistently over decades to better understand the science of our Earth. On political time scales, we can quit taking actions with unknown and unintended consequences.We can choose sustained research and development of energy alternatives, those with clear paths to commercialization, rather than continue tax dollar subsidies and loan guarantees for premature or flawed introduction of politically motivated concepts. We can provide investment and business environments that will advance new sources of energy, particularly through reduction of personal and business income tax rates.
Basically, instead of being ideologically greedy and ignoring good science and economics, we can start being wise and truly concerned about our children, and their children, and the society in which they will live.
Harrison Schmitt is a a former senator from New Mexico and a geologist. He walked on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17.
More on NASA’s manipulation of facts and science to spread the Global Warming Hysteria. In this case targeting children.
And remember, they are funded by our taxes.
“Utterly false.Heated masses always emit light (infrared). Always. That’s a direct consequence of molecules in motion. And while it’s true that some substances may be transparent to infrared light, it doesn’t follow that they can’t be heated or, if heated, might not emit infrared. Yet NASA’s misleading formulation implies precisely that. “
“Heat is transferred and absorbed in several ways, then, and no substance is immune from being heated, which means that all gases absorb heat — contrary to what NASA tells children.
So how does NASA go wrong? By consistently confusing light and heat, as you see in the illustration below, where infrared light is depicted as heat. Elsewhere, NASA expresses heat transfer in terms that pertain to radiant transfer alone:”
“Nowhere in its teacher’s guide are conductive and convective heat transfer even mentioned.By selective context and vagueness, then, NASA paints an impression that only light-absorbing substances can be heated. Thus, since nitrogen and oxygen don’t respond to infrared, NASA feels justified to say that ”only some gases have the unique property of being able to absorb heat.”
Astonishing.
But a mix-up like this raises a deeper question: why does NASA go wrong? Because it has a flimsy yet lucrative theory to foist on the tax-paying public, that’s why. As the space agency explains in the Main Lesson Concept, the core idea of greenhouse theory is that downward radiation from greenhouse gases raises the earth’s surface temperature higher than solar heating can accomplish.
To make this idea seem plausible, therefore, it’s crucial to fix people’s attention on the 1% of the atmosphere that can be heated by radiant transfer instead of the 99% and more that is heated by direct contact with the earth’s surface and then by convection. NASA is stacking the cards, you see. If they made it clear that every species of atmospheric gas gets heated mainly by conductive transfer, and that all heated bodies radiate light, then even a child could connect the dots: ”Oh. So the whole atmosphere radiates heat to the earth and makes it warmer. All of the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas.”
Crash, boom, there goes the theory. And there goes the abundant funding that this fear-promoting ”science” attracts so well. For what CO2 and water vapor emit is miniscule compared to the buzzing multitude of heated nitrogen, oxygen, and even argon, all of it radiating infrared too.Keep in mind that thermal radiation from this forgotten 99% has never been proposed or imagined to increase the earth’s temperature, although by the theory’s very tenets it should.
Insulated by an outer crust, the surface of the earth acquires nearly all of its heat from the sun. The only exit for this heat to take is through a door marked ”Radiation.” And therein lies a tale…
Recently, I chanced upon an Atmospheric Science Educator Guide [PDF] published by NASA. Aimed at students in grades 5 through 8, it helps teachers explain how so-called ”greenhouse gases” warm our planet Earth.
These guides are interesting on a number of levels, so I recommend you look them over. But what caught my eye was this:
Question: Do all of the gases in our atmosphere absorb heat?
Answer: (Allow students to discuss their ideas. Don’t provide the answer at this time.)
Indeed, that’s a good one to think over, yourself. Almost all of what we’re breathing is nitrogen and oxygen — do these gases absorb heat? Lakes and rocks absorb heat, after all, and thereby reach a higher temperature. So can nitrogen and oxygen molecules do the same?
Well, I won’t keep you hanging. After allowing students to discuss it, the instructor is instructed to give them the final verdict.
Answer: No. Only some gases have the unique property of being able to absorb heat.
These are the infrared-absorbing ”greenhouse gases,” of course, substances like carbon dioxide and water vapor, not nitrogen and oxygen.
Now, is something wrong here? Most definitely, for NASA has a finger on the scale. Let’s review a few basics that NASA should have outlined.
Heat consists of vibrating and colliding molecules. The motion of these molecules jostles their electrons around, and this emits light. Heat and light are thus strongly related, but aren’t the same. For instance, heat can’t actually be radiated, only the light that heat brings about. By the same token, light itself has no temperature because temperature is an index of molecular motion, and a beam of light isn’t composed of molecules. In short, ”heat” can be regarded as molecular excitement and light as electromagnetic excitement.
Observe how NASA describes this relationship, however.
Question: What is the relationship between light and heat?
Answer: Things that are hot sometimes give off light. Things under a light source sometimes heat up.
Utterly false.Heated masses always emit light (infrared). Always. That’s a direct consequence of molecules in motion. And while it’s true that some substances may be transparent to infrared light, it doesn’t follow that they can’t be heated or, if heated, might not emit infrared. Yet NASA’s misleading formulation implies precisely that.
There are three ways for heat (better to say thermal energy) to move from one zone to another: by conduction, convection, and radiation. Conductive heat transfer involves direct contact, wherein vibrations spread from molecule to molecule. Convective transfer involves a mass in motion: expanded by heat, a fluid is pushed up and away by the denser fluid that surrounds it. Radiative transfer arises when molecules intercept the light that warmer molecules are emitting, which brings about a resonant molecular vibration, i.e., heating.
Heat is transferred and absorbed in several ways, then, and no substance is immune from being heated, which means that all gases absorb heat — contrary to what NASA tells children.
So how does NASA go wrong? By consistently confusing light and heat, as you see in the illustration below, where infrared light is depicted as heat. Elsewhere, NASA expresses heat transfer in terms that pertain to radiant transfer alone:
The Earth first absorbs the visible radiation from the Sun, which is then converted to heat, and this heat radiates out to the atmosphere, where the greenhouse gases then absorb some of the heat.
Nowhere in its teacher’s guide are conductive and convective heat transfer even mentioned.By selective context and vagueness, then, NASA paints an impression that only light-absorbing substances can be heated. Thus, since nitrogen and oxygen don’t respond to infrared, NASA feels justified to say that ”only some gases have the unique property of being able to absorb heat.”
Astonishing.
But a mix-up like this raises a deeper question: why does NASA go wrong? Because it has a flimsy yet lucrative theory to foist on the tax-paying public, that’s why. As the space agency explains in the Main Lesson Concept, the core idea of greenhouse theory is that downward radiation from greenhouse gases raises the earth’s surface temperature higher than solar heating can accomplish.
To make this idea seem plausible, therefore, it’s crucial to fix people’s attention on the 1% of the atmosphere that can be heated by radiant transfer instead of the 99% and more that is heated by direct contact with the earth’s surface and then by convection. NASA is stacking the cards, you see. If they made it clear that every species of atmospheric gas gets heated mainly by conductive transfer, and that all heated bodies radiate light, then even a child could connect the dots: ”Oh. So the whole atmosphere radiates heat to the earth and makes it warmer. All of the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas.”
Crash, boom, there goes the theory. And there goes the abundant funding that this fear-promoting ”science” attracts so well. For what CO2 and water vapor emit is miniscule compared to the buzzing multitude of heated nitrogen, oxygen, and even argon, all of it radiating infrared too.Keep in mind that thermal radiation from this forgotten 99% has never been proposed or imagined to increase the earth’s temperature, although by the theory’s very tenets it should. You simply take the NASA formulation:
Greenhouse gases absorb heat that radiates from Earth’s surface and release some of it back towards the Earth, increasing the surface temperature
And make allowance for conductive transfer too…
All gases in the atmosphere absorb heat from the Earth’s surface and radiate infrared back towards the Earth, increasing the surface temperature.
Consider too that since most air molecules are infrared-transparent, they can’t be heated by the infrared that CO2 and water vapor emit.This means that downward radiation from ”greenhouse gases” can only explain how the earth’s surface might get warmer, not the rest of the atmosphere. Which underscores, of course, how much the surface is heating this 99% by conduction and convection alone, since radiative transfer can’t do the job.
To repeat: Irrespective of the manner of transfer, all gases absorb heat and all heated gases radiate heat (infrared light) in close proportion to their temperature. Major gases like nitrogen and oxygen, then, do not just radiate heat to the earth below, but the total of this radiation vastly exceeds what minor players like carbon dioxide and water vapor contribute.Ironically, another NASA publication [PDF] reinforces this point.
In solids, the molecules and atoms are vibrating continuously. In a gas, the molecules are really zooming around, continuously bumping into each other. Whatever the amount of molecular motion occurring in matter, the speed is related to the temperature. The hotter the material, the faster its molecules are vibrating or moving.
Electromagnetic radiation is produced whenever electric charges accelerate – that is, when they change either the speed or direction of their movement. In a hot object, the molecules are continuously vibrating (if a solid) or bumping into each other (if a liquid or gas), sending each other off in different directions and at different speeds. Each of these collisions produces electromagnetic radiation at frequencies all across the electromagnetic spectrum.
… Any matter that is heated above absolute zero generates electromagnetic energy. The intensity of the emission and the distribution of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum depend upon the temperature of the emitting matter.
Accordingly, any heated gas emits infrared. There’s nothing unique about CO2.Otherwise, substances like nitrogen and oxygen would truly be miracles of physics: heat ‘em as much as you wish, they’d never radiate in response.
Yet this amounts to a double whammy. For meteorologists acknowledge that our atmosphere is principally heated by surface contact and convective circulation. Surrounded by the vacuum of space, moreover, the earth can only dissipate this energy by radiation. On one hand, then, if surface-heated nitrogen and oxygen do not radiate the thermal energy they acquire, they rob the earth of a means of cooling off — which makes them ”greenhouse gases” by definition. On the other hand, though, if surface-heatednitrogen and oxygen do radiate infrared, then they are also ”greenhouse gases,” which defeats the premise that only radiation from the infrared-absorbers raises the earth’s temperature. Either way, therefore, the convoluted theory we’ve been going by is wrong.
An idea has been drummed into our heads for decades, that roughly 1% of the atmosphere’s content is responsible for shifting the earth’s surface temperature from inimical to benign.This conjecture has mistakenly focused on specifically light-absorbing gases, however, ignoring heat-absorbing gases altogether. Any heated atmospheric gas radiates infrared energy back toward the earth, meaning that the dreadful power we’ve attributed to light-absorbing molecules up to now has been wildly exaggerated and must be radically adjusted, indeed, pared down perhaps a hundred times. Because all gases radiate the heat they acquire, trace-gas heating theory is an untenable concept, a long-held illusion we’d be wise to abandon.
Scientific scandals and record snowfalls have begun to melt away the congressional appetite for more global-warming regulations. On Sunday, to take the latest example, a major scientific journal admitted that ”oversights” compelled the retraction of its conclusion that sea levels were rising as a result of increased worldwide temperatures.Reports of this sort make it increasingly difficult for members of Congress to enter iced-over districts to ask their constituents to make economic sacrifices in an attempt to appease Mother Earth into favoring us with colder weather.
This does not mean, however, that the left has given up on global warming as a means of exerting more government control over the economy.
To avoid a potentially messy vote, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has turned to the administrative rule-making process to impose climate-control regulations. In December, the agency made an ”endangerment finding” that declared that six gases – including the carbon dioxide you are exhaling as you read this – are putting the planet’s well-being in peril. The first major rule based on this finding will be finalized next month.
President George W. Bush’s EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, warned that such a finding would result in a major government power grab. ”[T]he potential regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land,” he explained.
Fortunately, Mr. Obama’s team might not get away with it. So far, 40 senators have signed on to an effort by Sen. Lisa A. Murkowski, Alaska Republican, to nullify the EPA endangerment finding. Three Democrats have been willing to co-sponsor the legislation, but Senate sources suggest a number of others may be willing to vote for the bill when it comes to the floor.
Mrs. Murkowski, who takes a moderate stand on the issue, is key to lining up the bipartisan support required for passage. In the past, the Alaska senator has embraced government efforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, including a limited form of cap-and-trade. Her resolution is evidence that both sides of the global-warming issue can agree that such a fundamental public-policy question should not be decided by unelected bureaucrats. Both sides also should be troubled by the EPA’s twisting of the Clean Air Act, which originally was designed to cut down on actual pollutants, into regulating so-called greenhouse gases.
Instead of preventing smokestacks from belching noxious fumes and toxic chemicals harmful to the health of human beings, the agency has made its new enemy No. 1 a cow chewing grass in a field. Citing U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the EPA declared ”enteric fermentation” – a fancy phrase to refer to a cow’s natural emissions in the field – to be the primary source of methane, which is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in planetary warming.
The EPA placed what it called a ”primary reliance” on reports like those of the IPCC instead of conducting independent research to make its finding. Given the retractions and revelations of faulty science surrounding the global-warming religion, especially at the IPCC, it’s time to take the issue out of the EPA’s hands so Congress can address it in the open. The Senate should pass Mrs. Murkowski’s disapproval resolution when it comes for an expected vote next month.
Climate Fraud: The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels — this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up.
We’ve not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses.
Perhaps he’s off reading how scientists were forced to withdraw a study on a projected sea level rise due to global warmingafter finding two ”technical” mistakes that undermined the findings.
The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, allegedly confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that sea levels would rise due to climate change. The IPCC put the rise at 59 centimeters by 2100. The Nature Geoscience study put it at up to 82 centimeters.
Many considered the study and the IPCC’s estimates too conservative in their warnings. After all, Al Gore, in his award-winning opus, ”An Inconvenient Truth,” laughingly called a documentary, foretold an apocalyptic vision of the devastation caused by a 20-foot rise in sea levels due to melting polar ice caps ”in the near future.”
Now Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at England’s University of Bristol, has formally retracted the study. ”One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years,” he said.
According to Siddall, ”People make mistakes, and mistakes happen in science.” They seem to be happening a lot lately, and more than just mistakes. We are talking about outright fraud, the deliberate manipulation and destruction of data.
Last November, Al Gore was hailed by Newsweek as ”The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.”
Since then we and he have been given much to think about, starting with the damning e-mails from researchers associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The e-mails revealed an organized attempt to ”hide the decline” in global temperatures, to manipulate data to fit preconceived conclusions, and to discredit and shun reputable skeptics.
A key finding of the IPCC, which along with Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, was revealed last month to be utterly bogus. The IPCC claimed glaciers in the Himalayas would likely disappear by 2035. The only thing they had to back it up was a 1999 non-peer reviewed article in an Indian mass-market science magazine.
It’s been revealed that researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been systematically eliminating weather stations, with a clear bias toward removing colder latitude and altitude locations. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35, with only one station used bythe NOAA as a temperature gauge for Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
The past is prologue. Two years ago, Justice Michael Burton of London’s High Court ruled Gore’s film could be shown in British schools only if material explaining its errors were included in the curriculum. Burton documented nine significant errors in Gore’s film and wrote that some of Gore’s claims arose from ”alarmism and exaggeration.”
The first error Gore made, according to Burton, was in his apocalyptic vision of the devastation caused by a rise in sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps. Burton wrote that Gore’s predicted 20-foot rise could occur ”only after, and over, millennia” and to suggest otherwise ”is not in line with the scientific consensus.”
One by one, Gore’s prophecies of doom and those of the climate charlatans he inspired are being exposed as the work of con artists.From the CRU to the IPCC, the climate dominoes are falling one by one. His silence speaks volumes.
Climate Fraud: A senator wants an investigation of the false climate testimony before Congress and wants Al Gore to reappear. The illegalities may involve more than just lying to Congress.
At a hearing Tuesday by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, ranking Republican James Inhofe told EPA head Lisa Jackson that man-induced climate change was a ”hoax” concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who ”cooked the science.”
More than that, Inhofe, in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast criminal enterprise designed to bilk governments, taxpayers and investors while enriching those making the false claims.
In asking the administration to investigate what he called ”the greatest scientific scandal of our generation,” Inhofe called for Gore to be summoned to explain and defend his earlier testimony in light of the Climate-gate e-mail scandal and admissions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was essentially a work of fiction.
Since AR4 was released, Gore claims such as rising seas and endangered coastlines have been debunked. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has been revealed as a collector of anecdotes and student dissertations who had to retract the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.
Murari Lal, an editor of IPCC’s AR4 report, has admitted to Britain’s Daily Mail that he had known the 2035 date was false, but included it in the report ”purely to put political pressure on world leaders.”
Even Phil Jones, head of Britain’s tainted Climate Research Unit, has conceded that, yes, the Earth was warmer in medieval times and there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years.
As Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media reports, Inhofe is asking the Department of Justice to look into possible research misconduct or even outright criminal actions by scientists involved in questionable research and data manipulation. These include Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Inhofe’s report suggests that the products of such scientific misconduct, used by the EPA and Congress to support draconian legislation and regulations, may violate the Shelby Amendment requiring open access to federally funded research, as well as the Office of Science and Technology Policy rules on scientific misconduct.
The report notes potential violations of the Federal False Statements and False Claims acts, which involve both civil and criminal penalties. Charges of obstructing Congress in its official proceedings are possible as well.
We should also follow the money. Researchers have lived off grants spawned by their claims of climate fraud. Oil and coal companies have suffered financially, as have their stockholders. Consumers have faced higher energy prices. Those who’ve made great sums are the very people who promote green energy and green companies in which they’re invested based on the false claims they’ve made.
When you add up the costs of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill and EPA’s finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, all in the name of fighting climate change, you have a scam that dwarfs Bernie Madoff’s.
Vast sums are being made and will be made through the sale of carbon offsets and carbon credits. Perhaps the Securities and Exchange Commission should investigate the claims of such enterprises.
Gore himself has achieved a net worth estimated by some to be in excess of $100 million by persuading investors to get involved in his enterprises. He’s been touted as possibly the world’s first ”carbon billionaire.”
What if it’s all been a fraud all along? Inhofe may not get his investigation, but certainly it is well warranted.
Senator James Inhofe, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has today formally called for an investigation into research misconduct and potential criminal acts by the scientists involved – Michael Mann and James Hansen.
Climategate Meets the Law: Senator Inhofe To Ask for DOJ Investigation (Pajamas Media/PJTV Exclusive)
Inhofe intends to ask for a probe of the embattled climate scientists for possible criminal acts. And he thinks Gore should be recalled to explain his prior congressional testimony. (Click here for the just-released Senate Environment and Public Works report behind Inhofe’s announcement.)
February 23, 2010 – by Charlie Martin
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate Files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).
Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.
“In [Gore's] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.
Just prior to a hearing at 10:00 a.m. EST, Senator Inhofe released a minority staff report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which he is ranking member. Senator Inhofe is asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether there has been research misconduct or criminal actions by the scientists involved, including Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science.
This report, obtained exclusively by Pajamas Media before today’s hearing, alleges:
[The] Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works believe the scientists involved may have violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, federal laws. In addition to these findings, we believe the emails and accompanying documents seriously compromise the IPCC -backed “consensus” and its central conclusion that anthropogenic emissions are inexorably leading to environmental catastrophes.
As has been reported here at Pajamas Media over the last several months, the exposure of the Climategate Files has led to a re-examination of the IPCC Assessment Reports, especially the fourth report (AR4), published in 2007. The IPCC AR4 report was named by Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson as one of the major sources of scientific support for the agency’s Endangerment Finding, the first step towards allowing the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
Since the Climategate Files were released, the IPCC has been forced to retract a number of specific conclusions — such as a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 — and has been forced to confirm that the report was based in large part on reports from environmental activist groups instead of peer-reviewed scientific literature.Dr. Murari Lal, an editor of the IPCC AR4 report, admitted to the London Daily Mailthat he had known the 2035 date was false, but was included in the report anyway “purely to put political pressure on world leaders.”
Based on this Minority Staff report, Senator Inhofe will be calling for an investigation into potential research misconduct and possible criminal acts by the researchers involved. At the same time, Inhofe will ask the Environmental Protection Agency to reopen its consideration of an Endangerment Finding for carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Federal Clean Air Act, and will ask Congress to withdraw funding for further consideration of carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
In requesting that the EPA reopen the Endangerment Finding, Inhofe joins with firms such as the Peabody Energy Company and several state Attorneys General (such as Texas and Virginia) in objecting to the Obama administration’s attempt to extend regulatory control over carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Senator Inhofe believes this staff report “strengthens the case” for the Texas and Virginia Attorneys General.
Senator Inhofe’s announcement today appears to be the first time a member of Congress has formally called for an investigation into research misconduct and potential criminal acts by the scientists involved.
The staff report describes four major issues revealed by the Climategate Files and the subsequent revelations:
The emails suggest some climate scientists were cooperating to obstruct the release of damaging information and counter-evidence.
They suggest scientists were manipulating the data to reach predetermined conclusions.
They show some climate scientists colluding to pressure journal editors not to publish work questioning the “consensus.”
They show that scientists involved in the report were assuming the role of climate activists attempting to influence public opinion while claiming scientific objectivity.
The report notes a number of potential legal issues raised by their Climategate investigation:
It suggests scientific misconduct that may violate the Shelby Amendment — requiring open access to the results of government-funded research — and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) policies on scientific misconduct (which were announced December 12, 2000).
It notes the potential for violations of the Federal False Statements and False Claims Acts, which may have both civil and criminal penalties.
The report also notes the possibility of there having been an obstruction of Congress in Congressional Proceeds, which may constitute an obstruction of justice.
If proven, these charges could subject the scientists involved to debarment from federally funded research, and even to criminal penalties.
By naming potential criminal offenses, Senator Inhofe raises the stakes for climate scientists and others involved. Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has already been forced to step aside because of the Climategate FOIA issues, and Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State is currently under investigation by the university for potential misconduct. Adding possible criminal charges to the mix increases the possibility that some of the people involved may choose to blow the whistle in order to protect themselves.
Senator Inhofe believes that Dr. Hansen and Dr. Mann should be “let go” from their posts “for the good of the institutions involved.”
The question, of course, is whether the Senate Democratic majority will allow this investigation to proceed, in the face of the Obama administration’s stated intention to regulate CO2 following the apparent death of cap and trade legislation. The Democratic majority has blocked previous attempts by Inhofe to investigate issues with climate science.
Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from DukeUniversity, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, DukeUniversityMedicalCenter. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.
“Most Americans are unaware how the leading green advocacy groups feed at the public trough, collecting legal fees and grants from the federal government. It amounts to millions. Take four minutes to learn about it.”
By simply ignoring the massive scandal, American journalists are making the inevitable public backlash against them worse.
February 22, 2010 – by Dennis T. Avery
Where are the American journalists who should be covering the collapse of the man-made warming scare — the biggest hoax in human history? The public, shoveling snow amid blizzard winds, wants to know. The stock market, laboring under the threat of trillion-dollar energy taxes, urgently needs to know. Even the Columbia Journalism Review, complicit in fostering the global warming scare for 20 years, is prodding America’s Mainstream Media to finally do their duty.
The press in England, Australia, and even India is already breaking the story:
– “The Professor’s Amazing Climate Change Retreat,” London Daily Mail, Feb. 13. “Professor Phil Jones of East Anglia University confesses on the BBC that the world hasn’t warmed since 1995, and the Medieval Warming was perhaps warmer than today.”
– “World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists,” Sunday Times of London, Feb. 14.
– “The Hottest Hoax in the World,” Ninad Sheth, India’s Open Magazine, Jan. 30.
– “The Great Global Warming Collapse,” Margaret Wente, Canada’s Global & Mail, Feb. 20.
Also eagerly awaiting the media confessions is that little band of hardy souls who have been telling us for years inconvenient truths about gaps in the greenhouse theory while insisting that “the science isn’t settled” by a long shot. They’ve been accused of treason, likened to Holocaust deniers, and threatened with jail and with death for telling us that the evidence didn ’t stack up. They could get no hearing — not on university campuses, not in the press, not even in their own communities. While falsely accused of “shilling for corporations,” they lost jobs, tenure, and reputations.
Professor Jones, himself a leader of the plot, has confessed that the Medieval Warming might have been global and warmer than today. Now we can look at that remarkable seabed sediment core dug up from the Atlantic floor by Boston College’s Maureen Raymo. The plankton microfossils in the mud layers go back a million years,and tell of more than 600 long, moderate, natural global warmings: Medieval, Roman, Holocene, and on back through the ages. The wildlife has all been through sudden climate change many times.
Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, pioneers of the Greenland ice cores who discovered the 1,500-year cycles named after them, can once again be science heroes, as they deserve.
What will Al Gore finally say if he ever grants an interview? Will he admit he misled us about the Antarctic ice records, which show temperatures have historically changed 800 years before the CO2 levels? That makes CO2 no more than a lagging indicator of solar changes.
As a mere economist and history buff, I will take some credit. I helped Fred Singer write a New York Times bestseller: Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1,500 Years. We presented the historic and physical evidence of the world’s past global warmings. We credited Henrik Svensmark’s demonstration that the sun’s variability is linked to earth’s temperatures by cosmic rays, which create more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cyclically warm and cool our planet. And we poked holes in the scare stories being fed to the public.
Most of the world’s citizens will never realize how close they came to revisiting the Stone Age, with precious little help from solar panels, wind turbines, or biofuels.
Right now the journalists’ dereliction of duty is mainly hurting themselves. The public already fears it can’t trust its newspapers and TV networks. Any carbon taxes imposed now will be quickly rescinded. American journalists are simply building a bigger head of steam for the angry backlash when the public finally learns (probably through the internet) that they’ve been had.
The enormous costs and hypocrisy of all the UN conferences.
I have written extensible about the UN pack, this travelling circus that fly around the globe in first class, or private jet, stay in hotel rooms at £400-500 per night in spa resorts, and gets wined and dined at expensive restaurants.
All of this of course paid by us, the normal people.
While they at the same time preach austerity, frugality and sacrifice from us, the taxpayers.
This blatant hypocrisy is so mind numbing that it would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these people have the power to force us to obey them.
They are a truly parasitic class in the sense that Karl Marx wrote about it.
How ironic that today most of this class is leftists and so called “liberals”.
One of these places where you can have extremely”frugal” accommodation and REALLY “save” the taxpayer’s money while you do all the hard work to save the world on the beach.
Why is it never… say DanyangCity (China) where you can study “UNsound management of hazardous chemicals and wastes.” DIRECTLY? (see pictures below)
Chemical waste from Jiangsu Taixing Chemical Industrial District (江苏泰兴化工园区) dumped on top of the Yangtze River bank. May 15, 2009
A Large amount of the chemical wastewater discharged into Yangtze River from Zhenjiang Titanium mill (镇江市钛粉厂) every day. Less than 1,000 meters away downstream is where the water department of Danyang City gets its water from. June 10, 2009
For folks terrified of warmer weather, the UN climate commissarssure do have a strange affinity for the balmy climes of Bali.
Recall that in December, 2007, as the common folk shivered in the wintry vicinity of the UN’s well-appointed offices in New York, Bonn and Geneva, a horde of UN climateers decamped to the far side of the globe for a fortnight of conferencing by the Indonesian beaches of Bali’s ritzy Nusa Dua resort (and convention center). There, up close and personal, they braved the preview of a world beset by warm temperatures and ocean waters, as you can see in this virtual tour of the adjacent beach resort — complete with its freshwater pool, beachside cocoons, seafood buffets and winding paths beneath the palm trees.
Now they’re at it again. The UN Environment Program, which is based in Nairobi, is convening a set of meetings this week – not in Nairobi, or New York, but at the same Bali beach resort (and convention center) where they sacrificed all that time for the greater good in 2007. Never mind the UN’s continuing campaign — in the face of its crumbling “climate science” — to restrict and control carbon emissions. Yet again, we are asked to believe the UN deserves special exemptions from its own preachings.Its conferees are jetting to Bali for the greater good of all the little folk,whose job is merely to pay the bills for such pleasures, and live with any resulting rationing and regulation.According to the Jakarta Post, some 1,500 people from 192 countries are expected to attend this shindig — where UNEP claims that envoys of some 140 governments will be present. The pre-session events (the UN goes in for a lot of those on Bali) have already begun.
This gathering is on a somewhat different theme from the grand “global warming” jamboree of 2007 (or the UN anti-corruption convention at the same Bali beach resort in 2008). The main topic of discussion this time is supposed to be the “sound management of hazardous chemicals and wastes.” Unlike carbon dioxide, that actually is worth worrying about. But do you trust this crowd to handle it?These folks are from the same UNEP (launched and initially run by Maurice Strong, who went on to godfather the Kyoto Treaty)that has been one of the big purveyors of UN climate alarmism. This is the same UNEP which, together with the UN’s Geneva-based WMO (World Meteorological Organization) established the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which under the leadership of UN climate guru Rajendra Pachauri is now embattled over one revelation after another of missing data, faulty data and cooked results in its politicized findings of climate “consensus.”
And in the UNEP press announcement of this conference, there is already a strong flavor of yet more alarmism, calculated to bring in yet more funding for these folks, as — I’m not making these names up— the United Nations Body Burden Forum gets ready to sound alarms about “the toxic chemical burden increasingly borne by the life of the planet.” Again — it’s a great idea to actually clean up toxic chemicals. But do you trust this UN crowd to decide what those are? Or to find a reasonable way to do it?
Part of this UN bash will be a special session of the UNEP governing council. That council includes not only such members as the U.S., Canada and Japan, but also Russia, China, Cuba, and Iran – Iranian government officials being free to join in overseeing and attending such shindigs, despite Iran’s being under UN sanctions for its continuing pursuit of nuclear weapons (which, in Iran’s hands, would be terrible for a lot of things, including the environment).
There’s lots here that bears watching, but I’ll round this off with a note that at this plush pow-wow the UN’s propaganda engines will be roaring full steam ahead. On Feb. 22-23, this Monday and Tuesday, UNEP will put together a media workshop, on “Reporting Green — The Environment as News.” What fun for the media! A two-day workshop on Bali, by the beach.Will this workshop be teaching the media how to ask hardball questions about things like IPCC findings, UNEP conflicts of interest, or, for that matter, repeat UN mega-eco-conferences on Bali? I’d say, don’t hold your breath.
“But the creature called man has the capacity to worry, and worry he does. He worried about global cooling in the 1970s and then later about global warming. Then it became ”climate change.” He worried about causing rising seas, even though we know that the ocean around Florida was once three hundred feet lower and at another time a hundred feet higher. He worried that CO2 — a naturally occurring gas necessary for life and conducive to plant growth (which is why botanists pump it into greenhouses)– would spell our end. Never mind how it’s said that CO2-level changes follow temperature changes, not the reverse. A hypothesis needed its data.”
“Ah, that’s the ticket. Before, we had to do something because of certainty; now we have to do something because of uncertainty”
“Yet amidst this exposition of fact and exposure of fiction, one point never changes: We have been had. And one question remains: Will justice be done?
Let us be clear on the gravity of the Climateers’ crime: They have used billions of our tax money to fund fraudulent science. And why?
For the purposes of promoting policies that would steal billions more.“
At one time, some would call them ”deniers.” The more generous called them ”skeptics.” But now, increasingly, it appears that they can be called something else: sane. Yes, the climate has certainly changed.
Even in the mainstream media, the less liberal organs are waking up. There is now a never-ending barrage of articles on the climate scam, with The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post firing some recent salvos. And these inconvenient truths are just adding to a case against the Climateers that has become dizzying.
Really, those issuing Chicken Little warnings had a tough sell from the get-go. We’re told that our world has seen at least five major ice ages, but then again, I’ve also heard four. It has experienced numerous minor ones, although I’m not sure if anyone knows precisely how many. In fact, we hear that the pattern is to have 100,000-year glacial periods followed by 12,000-year interglacials, with 1,500-year cycles of warming and cooling embedded within them. We’re told that during part of the Cryogenian Period — otherwise known as ”Snowball Earth” — the world was completely blanketed with snow and ice, and that during another period, glaciers were almost or completely gone. Furthermore, we’re informed that during the latter, there was still, believe it or not, dry land and creatures to tread upon it.
But the creature called man has the capacity to worry, and worry he does. He worried about global cooling in the 1970s and then later about global warming. Then it became ”climate change.” He worried about causing rising seas, even though we know that the ocean around Florida was once three hundred feet lower and at another time a hundred feet higher. He worried that CO2 — a naturally occurring gas necessary for life and conducive to plant growth (which is why botanists pump it into greenhouses)– would spell our end. Never mind how it’s said that CO2-level changes follow temperature changes, not the reverse. A hypothesis needed its data.
Then, oh, boy, did we hear about that data. First there was Climategate, with e-mails showing that ”scientists” had schemed to suppress inconvenient truths and had refused to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.Then came the admission that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was dead wrong about Himalayan ice melt. And other shoes have dropped as well. Remember the IPCC warning that climate change could cause the loss of 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest? It was based on a report by an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund, that misrepresented a study. Then we learned of other notable IPCC sources as well, such as a student’s master’s dissertation and a sporting magazine.
Next, notorious University of East Anglia head and central Climategate figure Phil Jones may not yet be starting to sing truly, but he is at least singing a different tune. He now admits that the Medieval Warm Period might have been toastier than today, meaning that current temperatures ”would not be unprecedented.” To those of us who vaguely remember stories about dinosaurs andMesozoic CO2 levels five to ten times today’s and temperatures 11 to 22 degrees greater, this isn’t exactly earth-shattering.Jones also admits that there has been no ”statistically significant” warming since 1995, something that, when asserted mere months ago, got one branded a flat-earther. In addition, he now says that the Gorelesque view that ”the debate is over” is ”not my view.” Interestingly, though, he never made this known until he was caught green-handed.
Then we heard how the 6,000 weather stations that collected temperature data had mysteriously been reduced to 1,500, and that those eliminated just happened to be in cooler regions. As for examples of those used, journalist Wesley Pruden writes, ”Several were located near air-conditioning units and on waste-treatment plants; one was next to a waste incinerator. Still another was built at Rome‘s international airport and catches the hot exhaust of taxiing jetliners.”That’s almost as bad as positioning one in front of Al Gore’s mouth.
But, hey, while the Chicken Little Climateers had a tough sell, they had the Government-Media-Academia-Entertainment Axis on their side and a tight little theory.If it got warmer, it was man’s fault. If it got cooler, it was man’s fault. If it got warmer in places it was cooler and cooler in places it was warmer, it was man’s fault. If the weather became more volatile, it was man’s fault. The only thing that could have disproven their theory was if the weather stayed precisely the same henceforth, anywhere and everywhere. Of course, this actually would be unprecedented.
The Climateers, however, can change as quickly as what they claim to care about. For example, robbed of settled-science sleight-of-hand, MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel now states, ”We do not have the luxury of waiting for scientific certainty [before acting].”
Ah, that’s the ticket. Before, we had to do something because of certainty; now we have to do something because of uncertainty.
Well, my head is spinning. Trying to process all these twists and turns, my mind has become a hodgepodge of information resembling Phil Jones’ office.
Yet amidst this exposition of fact and exposure of fiction, one point never changes: We have been had. And one question remains: Will justice be done?
Let us be clear on the gravity of the Climateers’ crime: They have used billions of our tax money to fund fraudulent science. And why?
For the purposes of promoting policies that would steal billions more.
And what happens now? Do they just get to say ”oops” and slink away?
Unfortunately, this prospect is better than what may actually happen, as the Climateers may very well be able to wait out the current storm. Take Phil Jones, for instance. Although little more than a criminal with a science degree, he is avoiding a criminal investigation because it’s too late under the law to prosecute.Moreover, he has not been fired from his position as head of the University of East Anglia‘s Climatic Sciences Unit; he has merely stepped aside temporarily. And while recent revelations that he was contemplating suicide may evoke sympathy in some, cry me a rising ocean. If you’re a good man with the courage of your convictions, you don’t think about ending it all upon meeting opposition; as Kipling said, you rather ”trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” No, Jones is better explained by Sir Walter Scott and something about a ”tangled web.” His is the depression of a man who has been living a lie, and now, as some slings and arrows come his way, doesn’t even have the might born of being right to sustain him. Yet, if I may offer some unsolicited counsel, suicide is no solution, Dr. Jones. The answer is to become a better man, come clean, and make amends.
Then there is the deafeningly silent Al Gore, who, just as Punxsutawney Phil did after seeing his shadow Feb. 2, seems to have scurried into a hole. Will he, like the reluctant rodent, emerge again when the climate changes? Will he rise again along with the mercury as the weather warms and memories fade?
Along with many other hucksters such as IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, these men make Bernie Madoff look like a piker. And what recourse do we, the victims, have? Well, here are a few suggestions.
First, we need to adopt an aggressive stance. We should cast from office any politician who facilitated the climate-change fraud. Next, we need to press for criminal investigations into and charges against Climateers whenever possible. And when such a remedy isn’t possible, we should resort to civil-court action when feasible.
Lastly, just as Senator Ben Nelson was driven from a pizza shop by angry patrons after finagling the cornhusker kickback, the Climateers should be treated as pariahs and not allowed a moment’s rest. Some may say this is out of bounds, but scorn and ostracism are powerful corrective forces. Besides, if the law cannot hold these elites to account, then the peasants with pitchforks must step into the breach.
Of course, the Climateers don’t really fear this, as they take the peasants for serfs. Let’s just hope they’re as wrong about this as they are about their science.
“It’s been called the “biggest scientific scandal in history.” It has everything to earn Pulitzer consideration: lies and misconduct in high places, political implications, even massive financial transactions that may or may not be legitimate or even legal. It’s big news … as long as you read the Telegraph, the Guardian, the London Times, or even major Indian papers.
It’s no news at all if you read the U.S. mainstream media.”
“Inhofe’s igloo? Yes. Biggest scientific scandal? Not so much.”
“After the London papers covered the collapsing credibility of the IPCC, after the LA Times made fun of Inhofe’s igloo, after the Washington Post ran a story reassuring its readers that the climate science was still sound even if there were some procedural errors, the New York Times has run, apparently, nothing.”
“I contacted all three papers — the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — asking for comment, or for a pointer to the stories I had missed. Only one of the three replied, and they wouldn’t speak for attribution or on the record.
It’s truly a puzzle. This is a story that affects the future of human civilization, if some of the believers are right. It ties financially to people right up to the top of American politics, as well as major industries throughout the U.S. and the world. What’s more, the story would seem to be all wrapped up, ready for aggressive investigative reporters with the resources of the Times to expose. Some of the perpetrators have even begun to confess. Why wouldn’t the Times cover it at all?”
“Or perhaps, it’s just that the wrong people have turned out to be the bad guys.”
Climategate: The World’s Biggest Story, Everywhere but Here
The biggest scandal of our times is a non-story to U.S media. Why are the London papers covering the Climategate collapse, but not ours?
February 21, 2010 – by Charlie Martin
It’s been called the “biggest scientific scandal in history.” It has everything to earn Pulitzer consideration: lies and misconduct in high places, political implications, even massive financial transactions that may or may not be legitimate or even legal. It’s big news … as long as you read the Telegraph, the Guardian, the London Times, or even major Indian papers.
It’s no news at all if you read the U.S. mainstream media.
In the ninety days — three months exactly at the time of this writing — since the Climategate files story broke, there has been an amazing amount of breakout in the climate science story, with major error after major error being uncovered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report IV (AR4).
There has been the discovery of suspicious conflicts of interest on the part of the chair of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, and the expanding story of the financial connections between the carbon trading cabal and the scientific climate clique in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has “stepped aside” while under investigation, after which the UK government said it appeared there may have been criminality in CRU’s refusal to fulfill Freedom of Information requests. Scientist members of the IPCC have resigned, not wishing to continue to be associated with the poor quality of work being revealed.
And the UN chief diplomat in charge of climate change matters, Yvo de Boer, resigned in a sudden move that shocked UN climate watchers.
But search the major U.S. papers. There is a story in the Washington Post that at least mentioned some of the recent problems, prompted by Senator James Inhofe’s recent floor speech. What do they have to say about the biggest scientific scandal? The Post quotes U.N. Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth, whose nonprofit group has highlighted the work of the IPCC, saying that the pirated e-mails gave “an opening” to attack climate science, and that the scientific work “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”
That would, by the way, be the same Timothy Wirth who was the original negotiator of the Kyoto Protocol.
So, is the massive dumping of snow from the Mid-Atlantic to New England proof positive that climate change is untrue, as doubters such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) have taken the opportunity to trumpet? (His family built an igloo, declared it Al Gore’s new home and put up signs asking people to honk if they liked global warming).
…
To be sure, the IPCC has been forced to acknowledge errors and unsubstantiated statements in one of its landmark 2007 reports. The irregularities had to do with predictions of the expected effects of warming. None of them, however, undermined the report’s consensus that the planet has warmed and that man’s activities have contributed to the warming.
Inhofe’s igloo? Yes. Biggest scientific scandal? Not so much.
The New York Times — can we still say “paper of record” with a straight face? — hasn’t covered the recent developments at all.
After the London papers covered the collapsing credibility of the IPCC, after the LA Times made fun of Inhofe’s igloo, after the Washington Post ran a story reassuring its readers that the climate science was still sound even if there were some procedural errors, the New York Times has run, apparently, nothing. What we do have is a piece in NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog on February 12, taken from “a prolonged exchange of e-mail messages Thursday with a heap of authors from past and future reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with some stray experts” that gives a lot of space to a prolonged fantasy of what science historians might say in 2210, that includes:
But this was the first time the media reported that an entire community of scientists had been accused of actual dishonesty. Such claims, if directed for example at a politician on a matter of minor importance, would normally require serious investigation. But even in leading newspapers like the New York Times, critics with a long public record for animosity and exaggeration were quoted as experts. As we know, the repetition of allegations is sufficient to make them stick in the public’s mind, regardless of whether they are later shown (or could easily be shown at the time) to be untrue.
I still have problems with this whole business of debating the levels of certainty associated with global warming science. My view is that ultimately it’s a waste of mental energy, since we’ve already got enough certainty to know that it’s a good idea to take out an insurance policy against the worst-case scenario — and by the time you’ve got the hindsight to have “no error bars,” it’s already too late to do anything about GHGs.
Are there any mentions of Professor Phil Jones’ admission in a BBC interview that he isn’t good at keeping records, that his notes were so disorganized that he couldn’t comply with the Freedom of Information requests, that there had indeed been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and that there was still significant uncertainty about the Medieval Warm Period and even about climate science in general?
Not that I can find.
I contacted all three papers — the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — asking for comment, or for a pointer to the stories I had missed. Only one of the three replied, and they wouldn’t speak for attribution or on the record.
It’s truly a puzzle. This is a story that affects the future of human civilization, if some of the believers are right. It ties financially to people right up to the top of American politics, as well as major industries throughout the U.S. and the world. What’s more, the story would seem to be all wrapped up, ready for aggressive investigative reporters with the resources of the Times to expose. Some of the perpetrators have even begun to confess. Why wouldn’t the Times cover it at all?
Are there any mentions of Professor Phil Jones’ admission in a BBC interview that he isn’t good at keeping records, that his notes were so disorganized that he couldn’t comply with the Freedom of information requests, that there had indeed been no statistically significant warming since 1995 and that there was still significant uncertainty about the Medieval Warm Period, and even about climate science in general?
Thanks to Gerard Vanderleun of the American Digest blog — and his link to Tom Nelson, one of my new favorite climate aggregators — we might have an answer. Nelson ran into this audio recording (warning: 105MB mp3 file) of the first Shorenstein Center/Belfer Center seminar on news coverage of climate change. One of the speakers was Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. Here’s part of what Revkin had to say, transcribed by Tom Nelson:
One thing that’s interesting to note … in this administration shift is that all the coverage that I did of all those obfuscations, editing, censorship and stuff that the Bush administration got involved in was a no-brainer getting that on the front page of the New York Times … Now, theoretically, should I be just as aggressively writing about these revelations? [nervous laugh]. There’s total … complete differences between what was going on then and some of the things you’ve heard about recently in terms of the scientific integrity of the IPCC …The bottom line is, there was a predisposition at my newspaper to say hey, that’s a great get; there’s a major front page story … when Phil Cooney … editing climate reports and all that stuff … it fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there’s bad guys and good guys. Shame on you, shame on you.
Could it possibly be that the Times would sit on a story of this magnitude simply because it doesn’t say “shame on you” to the right people?
There may be some some additional insight to be gained by reading two pieces from Columbia Journalism Review: “MIA on the IPCC,” published January 29, and and “U.S. Press Digs Into IPCC Story,” two weeks later.
The January 29 piece says, reasonably:
In the days after the story first broke, The New York Times and The Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.
Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the UK, India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.
It then runs through some of the other IPCC issues that had come to light by then, and concludes:
So, yes, an “old row” it is, but a very important one, to which the American press should pay more attention (taking a cue perhaps from the Guardian, which thought the flap between the Sunday Times, the IPCC, Ward, and Pielke was newsworthy enough). For, indeed, the row continues. Over the last week, Pielke has posted a number of entries on his blog revisiting his criticisms of the IPCC’s work on disaster losses and responding to Ward’s defense of the panel. … Today, he announced that next Friday he will debate Ward at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The event is titled, “Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?”
That’s a great question. Unfortunately, the debate is in London, which probably means we’ll be hearing crickets in the U.S. media while coverage of this momentous topic continues elsewhere.
But by the 15th, CJR wrote:
Last Tuesday, The New York Times ran a front-page article by Elisabeth Rosenthal under the headline, “U.N. Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility.” On Wednesday, the Associated Press ran one over the wire headlined, “Scientists seek better way to do climate report.” The difference between the two headlines — the Times focused on the panel’s faults, the AP on its attempts to address them — is important. Each tells half the story, but it is the latter that should lead.
In two weeks, CJR has moved from saying that U.S. media should cover the controversy to specifying what the “right” lead should be. CJR continues:
Bearing this in mind, it is easy to see why — as Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm first pointed out — Rosenthal buried her lede in the ninth paragraph, which reads:
The panel, in reviewing complaints about possible errors in its report, has so far found that one was justified and another was “baseless.” The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions.
That is something that needs to be mentioned in the first few paragraphs. From there, a reporter can explain that errors were nonetheless made, which should remind the world of three things: that the exact timing and scale of certain impacts of climate change are subject to a lot of uncertainty; that some scientists will behave defensively, even to the point of negligence, when they feel threatened; and that all quality control-systems sometimes fail. Thereafter, the question becomes: what is being done about these problems?
That is, the “correct” view is that these problems don’t call the science into question, and the “right” question is to ask “what can be done about these trivial little problems?”
This appears to be one of the rare occasions on which we can observe the “consensus narrative” being shaped.
The CJR observes, correctly, that “outlets in the U.K., India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis.” But it then concludes that there are no substantial problems; the “correct” view is that the scientific issues, and even more so the way that shoddy science was put together for political impact, aren’t particularly important and don’t call any of the conclusions into questions. Except, one assumes, the ones that have been determined to be false, like the impending doom of the Himalayan glaciers in 2035, or even the claim that the IPCC reports represented the best peer-reviewed science.
Which is, sure enough, the message being presented in the U.S. media. No scandal, no scientific misconduct, and certainly no actual fraud or criminality.
Motivations are slippery things, but consider just the facts: we have a mysterious lack of coverage of the repercussions and debate over Climategate in the world media.
Along with that, we have Revkin’s admission that for an environmental story to be of interest at the Times, it must ” … fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there’s bad guys and good guys.”
Finally, over the span of two weeks, the CJR — which may be less influential than it once was, but is still widely read between Harlem and Times Square — starts by saying that the U.S. media should be reporting this story, and moves to saying what the right reporting should be.
What the CJR has done, by accident, is answer its own question. The story has been covered the way it was, and to the small degree it was, because it doesn’t have a good guy to cheer and a bad guy to which the media can say “shame, shame.”
Or perhaps, it’s just that the wrong people have turned out to be the bad guys.
Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from DukeUniversity, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, DukeUniversityMedicalCenter. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.
Left-Wing European Press Attacks IPCC, UN Climate Change “Dilettentes”
The meltdown of the climate change movement is entering a new phase as the European left turns on the UN climate change office and the IPCC.
The German left wing press, one of the world’s strongest supporters of the ‘climate change movement’ is turning against the scientists and UN bureaucrats responsible for leading the movement. A round-up of German press coverage over the unexpected resignation of UN climate chief Yvo de Boeroffers a perspective on the failures of the climate change movement that is both more scathing and more frank than anything the mainstream US press has yet brought itself to utter.
“De Boer’s Resignation is Catastrophic,” runs the headline on Der Spiegel’s English language website. Die Tageszeitung, a leftish daily, says that De Boer’s resignation may signal the collapse of the effort to stop climate change by treaty:“a signal that world diplomacy is not the way to win the struggle against climate change.”
The German press is also wondering why de Boer has resigned while Pachauri, widely seen as bearing more individual responsibility for the IPCC’s failings than de Boer, still clings to his job. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung, considered another left leaning newspaper has a much harsher assessment:
At last even the UN is drawing consequences from the disgrace of its climate politics over the last few months. Scientific documents were suppressed; the summit was prepared with such unbelievable dilettantism that it had no chance to succeed; then there was the bitter argument over false predictions about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. The resignation of Yvo de Boer — chief of the UN’s climate secretariat and one of the responsible figures — is overdue.
In France, the left wing Le Monde — the New York Times of France — wrote about a “total confusion” in the global climate change movement following De Boer’s resignation.According to Le Monde, the diplomatic process has broken down completely;De Boer’s resignation at least brings this out in the open. Le Figaro, a more conservative newspaper, offers an article on the proposal to reform the IPCC made by 5 leading scientists in Nature. Figaroquotes a leading French scientist who attacks the current process as biased and unfair, given IPCC’s status as a quasi-official body. In another piece, Figaro describes the climate skeptic movement’s attacks on the mainstream consensus (Sorry, the links are to articles in French).
When the British press attacked the IPCC, the US media insofar as they noted the British attacks at all, dismissed newspapers like the Telegraph and the Times as right wing outlets — Fox News in print. What do they say about this latest inconvenient truth: that left wing papers on the Continent increasingly believe that the movement to get a global climate treaty is dead and that the follies, dilettantism and errors of the climate change advocates rather than the churlishness of their critics is to blame?
Nothing.
The blogosphere has shamed some leading US newspapers into paying perfunctory attention to one of the biggest stories in several years. But there’s still no sign that the US press is ready to pursue this still unfolding story with anything like the determination it deserves. Until then, Americans will have to rely on the internet to watch this story unfold — and every day that goes on, the mainstream US media lose readers and respect.
Major Update: As quickly pointed out by one of my readers (thank you Skip Smith), the statement referred to in this article was in fact uttered by Gavin Schmidt, principal contributor to Real Climate, and not his colleague Michael Mann as I originally stated. My apologies to Mr. Mann for the error. Mr. Schmidt, shame on you.
One of the most bizarre statements in the history of science came out of the mouth of Gavin Schmidt Friday.
In an interview published Friday in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, Schmidt remarked of Steve McIntyre, ”“He could be a scientific superstar,” Mr. Schmidt says. “He’s a smart person. He could be adding to the sum total of human knowledge, but in effect he adds to the reduction of the sum total of human knowledge.” The last part of his statement should go down in history as the most anti-scientific sentence ever recorded.
Contrast this statement with one of history’s greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, who stated ”to kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact”. (Hat tip to Lefty Martin in the comments below.)
A little context, please… Gavin Schmidt works for NASA, although we know him best for his blogging efforts on Real Climate, the establishment voice for climate science. Schmidt is referring to mistakes in his colleagues’ papers that were, in part, highlighted by Steve McIntyre, who publishes his number checking efforts on the website Climate Audit. Schmidt and other members of the climate ‘establishment’ use the website Real Climate to defend themselves.
Schmidt and McIntyre were both interviewed (although separately–it’d be fun to see them in the same room, though) about Climategate and the various other ‘gates’ afflicting the IPCC and other bastions of global warming orthodoxy. McIntyre has found numerous errors in data handling, archiving and analysis in the work of Mann and other scientists. The errors all were in one direction–making global warming look both more severe and more certain. The reaction to McIntyre’s critiques has been hostile, obfuscatory and verges on the paranoid.
It was to keep data out of the hands of McIntyre that the crew at CRU deleted emails and violated the UK Freedom of Information Act. In fact the emails were released anonymously the day after one of McIntyre’s requests for information was denied, leading to speculation that opinion of McIntyre’s work is not unanimous at CRU. It was to counter-act McIntyre’s criticisms that the website Real Climate was formed, which delights in attacking McIntyre and trying to minimize the very real effects of McIntyre’s work.
So it’s natural that Schmdit would have a low opinion of McIntyre. McIntyre ripped Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick to shreds and has been finding holes in research papers by Mann and his fellow scientist-bloggers ever since.
But to baldly state that McIntyre’s work is leading to a reduction in human knowledge is not just wrong, it goes against the basic organising principles that have made science such a powerful force for good in this world.
Finding error is just as important as finding truth. You don’t get the Nobel Prize for it, but it is at least as valuable a contribution to science and society as coming up with an important hypothesis or finding supporting evidence. Many will argue that it is more important, as sadly there is more error than truth floating around this universe, and for the way we do science to work we need eagle-eyed critics willing to not only note discrepancies but dig into the data and illustrate the error and how it was made.
Schmidt is worse than wrong–he is moving outside of science completely with his statement.
Had the climate science establishment made any sort of gesture of inclusion to Steve McIntyre, he would probably be working with them today. It’s crucially important to understand that McIntyre is not what Joe Romm would term a ‘denialist.’ McIntyre does not dispute the fundamental tenets of climate science or climate change. But given that climate science is in its infant stages and major mistakes are a dime a dozen,auditing the data is key to maintaining credibility, especially on an issue where so much is at stake.
McIntyre is doing for free what climate scientists should have been doing themselves–the number checking and replication that makes science trustworthy. McIntyre is not being paid by anybody for this work, while climate scientists are the recipients of large sums of public money, which is certainly not going towards the verification his work needs.
They should be grateful for McIntyre’s contribution to reducing the noise level in the science so we can see the real signals that are there. Instead, as he has done since he first began commenting in public, Schmidt tries to insult McIntyre, minimize what he has done and defend his own shoddy work.
Steve Mosher and I have written a book about the leaked emails that have caused so much controversy. The title is Climategate: The CRUtape Letters. It is available on Create Space here, Amazon here, Kindle here and Lulu here. One Amazon reviewer wrote, ”Mosher and Fuller do a good job putting the ClimateGate documents in context, and the book is a riveting read. I received my copy yesterday, and find the book to be faithful to the climate war events that I have followed over a period of years. It reports actual email communications of a small group of paleoclimatologists and their roles in perhaps the biggest scientific hoax since Piltdown Man.”
“The climate change fraud also affected major U.S. corporations, none of whom wanted to appear to be opposed to it. However, on Tuesday, February 16th, BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar all announced they were dropping out of the Climate Action Partnership that advocated energy-rationing. Some of the millions squandered on various global warming and “environmental” projects and groups came from the bottom line of corporations across the nation.
At this point, any corporation that speaks of “climate change” in its advertising and other public statements is part of the global fraud that originated in the United Nations Environmental Program.”
“According to a recently released study by the National Association of Utility Regulatory Commissioners, the U.S. gross domestic product would lose $2.36 trillion and American consumers will pay an additional $2.35 trillion for energy if the oil and gas on federal lands remain off-limits through 2030. This constitutes a form of energy and economic suicide!”
He is right you know. We should as consumers boycott, where possible – some companies have near monopolies which make it harder, all these companies that continue to propagate the Global Warming hysteria, and makes money from it.
It is a very simple and effective way. And it is going to hurt their bottom line. It is the only way to make these politicized companies take notice.
As the massive global warming fraud implodes, the one aspect of it that has not been explored in depth is the equally massive waste of billions of dollars spent by the United States and nations around the world, we were told, to avoid global warming.
Whole industries such as automobile manufacture had demands and limits put on them. Some states required utilities to buy “carbon credits” to offset their use of “fossil fuels.” The list of things attributed to global warming expanded to the point of total absurdity.
The codification of the fraud into law began with the Kyoto Protocol, an element of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change whose purpose was to fight a global warming that we now know was not happening.
The data to support the fraud came out of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that specialized in distorting climate data in every way possible to emphasize a normal warming cycle and then to minimize any indication of a new cooling cycle dating to around 1998 or earlier.
The IPCC data, released periodically in reports purporting to be the work of some 2,500 scientists from around the world, were actually based the handiwork of a few academic centers such as the Climate Research Center (CRU) at East Anglia University in England, Penn State University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and climate modeling from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Other participants in the fraud were NASA’s Goddard Institute and NOAA, both of whom produced claims, predictions, and questionable data to support “global warming.”
In the U.S. alone, I have heard figures in the area of $50 billion that have been spent on “climate change” over the course of administrations dating back to Clinton. In England, between 2006 and 2008, the government spent the equivalent of nearly $14 million (U.S.) on publicity stunts to convince Brits that global warming was real.
It is legitimate to ask if global warming has not in effect been a criminal enterprise.
The Kyoto Protocol required the nation states that signed onto it to commit to a reduction of four “greenhouse” gas, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride, and two groups of gases, hydrofluorocarbons and perflourocarbons. These gases occur in minimal amounts in the Earth’s atmosphere which is composed primarily of 95% to 97% water vapor!
The cost of accepting this commitment is measured in several ways, not the least of which was the sale of “carbon credits” to utilities and to industrial enterprises that would permit them to function outside the limits imposed. The exchanges created for this purpose prospered but it increased the cost of providing electrical energy and the manufacture of all manner of products.
The limitations, however, did not apply to either China or India, both of which were exempted, as were undeveloped Third World nations.
The climate change fraud also affected major U.S. corporations, none of whom wanted to appear to be opposed to it. However, on Tuesday, February 16th, BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar all announced they were dropping out of the Climate Action Partnership that advocated energy-rationing. Some of the millions squandered on various global warming and “environmental” projects and groups came from the bottom line of corporations across the nation.
At this point, any corporation that speaks of “climate change” in its advertising and other public statements is part of the global fraud that originated in the United Nations Environmental Program.
The carbon emissions limitations also served to justify huge public subsidies for U.S. producers of wind and solar energy, called “clean” energy. Several nations, such as Spain, Germany and Great Britain, invested heavily in these alternative energy sources only to discover that they were massively inefficient and unreliable.
At the same time, the global warming fraud in the United States limited the building of coal-fired plants to generate electricity when, in fact, coal provides 50% of the nation’s electricity needs. Combined with fears of nuclear energy dating back to the 1970s, the United States has essentially starved itself of the energy it needs.
According to a recently released study by the National Association of Utility Regulatory Commissioners, the U.S. gross domestic product would lose $2.36 trillion and American consumers will pay an additional $2.35 trillion for energy if the oil and gas on federal lands remain off-limits through 2030. This constitutes a form of energy and economic suicide!
A British newspaper, the Daily Mail in a recent interview with CRU Prof. Phil Jones, revealed he knew there had been no “statistically significant” warming for the past fifteen years.Little wonder Prof. Jones and the CRU refused to honor UK Freedom of Information requests for the data on which the IPCC claims were based. He and others who provided IPCC data are under investigation.
In essence, the IPCC reports were all fraudulent and all were used to advance the global warming fraud. That is why President Obama’s claim of “overwhelming evidence” of climate change, i.e., global warming is particularly troubling.
It is essential to understand that the “Cap-and-Trade” legislation passed by the House and waiting for a vote in the Senate is based on the IPCC reports and the threat by the Environmental Protection Agency to begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions throughout the nation have no legitimate basis in science.
There are still billions at stake if global warming-related laws, projects such as wind farms or the requirement that ethanol be added to every gallon of gas purchased are permitted to proceed or continue.
Global warming as an issue or basis for any law or expenditure of public funding no longer exists.
It’s long passed the time when the nation’s news media should stop referring to it as anything other than a fraud perpetrated on the people of the world.
Remember, weather is not the same thing as climate … unless David Suzuki says it is
By Lorrie Goldstein, Senior Associate Editor
Last Updated: February 21, 2010 2:15am
Other than their grating self-righteousness, the most annoying thing about global warmists is their double standards.
Case in point. All over North America for the past few weeks, they’ve been screaming how dare the Republican right and Fox News in the U.S. suggest the recent wave of record snowfalls and cold temperatures south of the border are evidence man-made global warming is a hoax.
Indeed, warmist piling on has been almost as impressive as the snow drifts that recently paralyzed Washington, D.C.
Now, before the warmists have a stroke, let it be said they have a point.
Weather isn’t climate and no single weather event, or season, or several cold and snowy seasons, can fairly be used to discount the theory of man-made global warming.
Indeed, in a warming world, precipitation increases (at least where it doesn’t decrease) and thus, heavy snowfalls aren’t automatic evidence of global cooling. To the contrary, warmists contend, record snowfalls are a sure sign of global warming.
Thus, when the family of Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, considered the anti-Christ by global warmists, builds an igloo near the U.S. Capitol declaring it “Al Gore’s New Home” that’s not fair … It’s funny, but it’s not fair.
Ditto Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, tweeting the snow would fall “until Al Gore cries uncle.” Again, unfair … Still funny, though.
Ditto Fox News — whose pundits express similar views, only more loudly.
After all, global warming is a complex issue and the public’s understanding is not helped by simplistic, sensationalistic portrayals of it.
Of course, global warmists — who have condemned Republican tactics — would never stoop to them, right? Wrong.
We whisk you to Vancouver just before the Olympics where — shocking, this — there wasn’t any snow, because, as all Canadians know, Vancouver is always buried in about, what,— a metre of the white stuff, at this time of year? (Insert laughter here.)
So, given the somewhat unsurprising news Olympic officials were trucking in snow to Cypress Mountain, site of the freestyle skiing and snowboard events, how did Canadian warmists respond?
Well, here’s our most famous environmentalist, David Suzuki, calmly commenting.
“I’ve watched in horror as the snow just melted away from Cypress Mountain and it’s even more horrifying to me to think of helicopters airlifting snow from Manning Park to fill it back up again.”
In addition to Suzuki’s apparently low tolerance for horror, climatically speaking, his foundation chimed in man-made global warming clearly had a hand in the lack of snow.
So, just to review the warmist perspective:
(1) North of the 49th parallel —global warming explains the lack of snow.
(2) South of the 49th parallel —global warming explains the snow.
Plus:
(1) Warmists can use single weather events to prove global warming.
(2) Opponents can’t use single weather events to disprove global warming.
Does it not occur to warmists that stuff like this is one of the reasons more and more people are starting to think of them as the intellectual heirs of Chicken Little?
As for Canada’s warmist media, if you’re wondering why fewer people are buying your argument neither climategate nor the growing scientific controversies engulfing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is news, ask yourself this.
How many of you (justifiably) criticized Inhofe, DeMint and Fox for what they said? Now, how many of you criticized Suzuki and his foundation for what they said? Oops.
A final assignment for warmists. Go to your video bible, Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and find in all those dramatic visual images linking global warming to present-day heat waves, droughts, floods, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and hurricanes, one image — just one — linking global warming to record snowstorms.
Trust me, you won’t find any, because that would have gotten in the way of Gore’s painfully simplistic argument that more greenhouse gas emissions simply means more heat.
And the problem is, when you live by the sword, you die by the sword, as the warmists are now discovering.
More on Pachauri and background of Glacier gate in this article from Forbes India Magazine (05 March, 2010).
“Pachauri has been resisting calls for stepping down from the IPCC chair. For the rest of us who don’t want to confuse ‘science’ with ‘kazoombaa’, Gray has some advice, “There’s one (scientific study) born every minute. If somebody tells you what is going to happen in 100 years’ time I suggest kicking him out of the door.”
“The dissenting lot believes that while the Survey of India has prepared accurate maps for the rest of the country, its maps for Himalayan glaciers are incorrect. Raina recalls the time he was the director general of the glaciology division at Geological Survey of India (GSI) in the 1980s. The maps were based on aerial photography done in November because of clear skies. Now measurements are taken during September but because of monsoon clouds aerial photography is not possible.
However simple this may sound, it makes a lot of difference to the authenticity of the data collected. By November, the first snowfall has already taken place because of which it is very difficult to identify the outline of the glaciers. That’s why many glaciers outlined in the maps show much larger outlines than actually present. So, when the SAC compared the current size of glaciers using satellite imagery with the 1962 maps they obviously found a lot of shrinkage.“We told the minister that we do not agree what SAC says. At least that is our experience of the glaciers we have gone to,” adds Raina. “
“On August 4, 2009, Raina submitted his report. It contained 150 years of data collected by the GSI of 25 Indian glaciers. It said that the Himalayan glaciers and glaciers in the rest of the world have retreated and advanced irregularly with no direct link to warming or cooling of the earth’s climate. “This is one of the many issues of climate change science that we do not fully understand,” says Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a scientist based out of Canada who has been an expert reviewer of the 2007 IPCC report.
On November 9, 2009, Jairam Ramesh released the Himalayan glacier document at a press conference in New Delhi. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening with the Himalayan glaciers,” he said.
Hell Breaks Loose
Raina vividly remembers the day the report was released. “It is surprising that even on the day when this document was released by the minister, a lot of press asked me questions but nobody bothered to put them in the papers because probably at that time they thought this fellow knows nothing… yeh to mantriji ne kar diya,” he says. He was partially correct. Not many took the statement too seriously in the beginning, except for some stray critics writing in the media. But the one man who took immediate note of it and reacted bitterly was R. K. Pachauri, chairman of IPCC
Pachauri came down strongly on the report. The following day, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he questioned the minister’s intentions behind releasing such a report terming it as ‘an extremely arrogant statement’.And he didn’t refrain from taking pot shots at Raina either. “With the greatest of respect, this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”He went on to say that such claims were those of “climate change deniers and school boy science.” Scientists across the world and six of them who shared their perspective on this issue with Forbes India say that Pachauri’s comments were out of order because they were very personal.”
An account of how a retired geologist took apart the alarmist climate claims of a Nobel Prize winning organisation
by Ashish K Mishra | Feb 22, 2010
V ijay Kumar Raina is amused. The 76-year old retired geologist who lives in Sector 17, Panchkula in Haryana has been blitzkrieged by the media, government, world scientist community and the average citizen since December 2009.
Why? Because he blew the lid off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), headed by the charismatic R.K. Pachauri, claims that the Himalayan glaciers will be extinct by 2035.
Raina’s life has taken a complete turnaround in the last six months. Like most retirees, Raina had followed a routine: Early morning walks, discussing politics, attending to his plants and working religiously on his book devoted to ‘tracing the work done on Indian glaciers’.
He was on the receiving end of jibes from Pachauri who dismissed his claims as school-boy science. Now Pachauri has been keeping a low profile, his reputation at stake. However, neighbours call on Raina non-stop. There is no time to work on his book. But Raina laughs off the publicity. “The last one month has been absolutely maddening. Morning to evening, I am either talking to the press or answering questions on email and I haven’t been able to even touch my book. [But] so far I am concerned, the case is closed,” he says.
What case? In its 4th Assessment Report released in 2007, the IPCC said, ‘the Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if it continued, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.’ This was the same year that the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
Now it has emerged that none of it was true. IPCC, which employs top scientists in the world didn’t do its homework and made unsubstantiated, alarmist claims. The organisation is on the defensive and its credibility is diminishing by the day.
How It Unravelled
The whole chain of events started on another ordinary day in Raina’s life when he received a phone call.
Raina, along with his wife Mohini, 73, was driving to a bakery shop specialising in Kashmiri sweets in Sector 23, Chandigarh when his mobile phone rang. “I get this call from some gentleman by the name of Dr. Subramaniam from the Ministry of Environment who says that ‘the honourable minister wants you to attend a meeting on Himalayan glaciers’. I hung up saying that I am driving and will talk to you later,” says Raina. Once back home, he called the number. “I told him that I am a retired man and I don’t know where I come into the picture,” adds Raina.
He wasn’t sure he would go. But after much coaxing by his wife and the promise of the trip being sponsored by the ministry of environment & forests (MoEF), he finally agreed.
On July 10, 2009, Raina went to the Paryavaran Bhawan, headquarters of the MoEF in Delhi. He wasn’t alone. There were around forty other scientists at the meeting. The Space Application Centre (SAC) had prepared a report on a few Himalayan glaciers based on satellite imagery which had been funded by the MoEF.
Environment minister Jairam Ramesh wanted to know the view of all the scientists gathered in the room on the findings of SAC. “There was an open discussion where everybody was given the opportunity to air their views and most of the people didn’t agree with their findings,” says Raina.
The dissenting lot believes that while the Survey of India has prepared accurate maps for the rest of the country, its maps for Himalayan glaciers are incorrect. Raina recalls the time he was the director general of the glaciology division at Geological Survey of India (GSI) in the 1980s. The maps were based on aerial photography done in November because of clear skies. Now measurements are taken during September but because of monsoon clouds aerial photography is not possible.
However simple this may sound, it makes a lot of difference to the authenticity of the data collected. By November, the first snowfall has already taken place because of which it is very difficult to identify the outline of the glaciers. That’s why many glaciers outlined in the maps show much larger outlines than actually present. So, when the SAC compared the current size of glaciers using satellite imagery with the 1962 maps they obviously found a lot of shrinkage.“We told the minister that we do not agree what SAC says. At least that is our experience of the glaciers we have gone to,” adds Raina.
Ramesh took notice and asked Raina if he would prepare a ‘white paper on the status of work done on Himalayan glaciers’. He was given a window of three weeks to complete the white paper. Raina claims he had no idea what a white paper meant. But he checked. “I found that a white paper means truthful expression of facts,” he says.
On August 4, 2009, Raina submitted his report. It contained 150 years of data collected by the GSI of 25 Indian glaciers. It said that the Himalayan glaciers and glaciers in the rest of the world have retreated and advanced irregularly with no direct link to warming or cooling of the earth’s climate. “This is one of the many issues of climate change science that we do not fully understand,” says Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a scientist based out of Canada who has been an expert reviewer of the 2007 IPCC report.
On November 9, 2009, Jairam Ramesh released the Himalayan glacier document at a press conference in New Delhi. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening with the Himalayan glaciers,” he said.
Hell Breaks Loose
Raina vividly remembers the day the report was released. “It is surprising that even on the day when this document was released by the minister, a lot of press asked me questions but nobody bothered to put them in the papers because probably at that time they thought this fellow knows nothing… yeh to mantriji ne kar diya,” he says. He was partially correct. Not many took the statement too seriously in the beginning, except for some stray critics writing in the media. But the one man who took immediate note of it and reacted bitterly was R. K. Pachauri, chairman of IPCC.
Pachauri came down strongly on the report. The following day, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he questioned the minister’s intentions behind releasing such a report terming it as ‘an extremely arrogant statement’.And he didn’t refrain from taking pot shots at Raina either. “With the greatest of respect, this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”He went on to say that such claims were those of “climate change deniers and school boy science.” Scientists across the world and six of them who shared their perspective on this issue with Forbes India say that Pachauri’s comments were out of order because they were very personal.
In December, 2009, however, Dr. Murari Lal, a scientist and one of the authors of the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report spilled the beans at a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) conference held in New Delhi at the headquarters of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). He said that he had cited the ‘Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035’ claim from a 2005 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.
The implication of this “confession” was serious. Lal was saying his data was from a secondary source. The events quickly unravelled. WWF quickly responded and said it had, in turn, take the information from a quote in the New Science Journal given by Dr. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, who was then at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and who later became the head of glaciology at TERI. Hasnain, on his part, denied making any such statement.The source of the claim in IPCC’s report thus entered a blackhole.
The moment this story made headlines, scientists and policy makers across the world started questioning IPCC’s credibility. Dr. Vincent Gray, a scientist based out of New Zealand who has been an expert reviewer on all IPCC reports ,puts IPCC’s current state of affairs in perspective. “This Himalayan story is so obviously fraudulent that it is surprising that people have only just noticed it. I blame myself that I should have noticed it long ago,” says Gray. But, quite a few people including the IPCC believe that the ‘error’ is not such a big deal. Mark Kenber, Policy Director at The Climate Group, is one such person. “The IPCC does not claim anything with 100 percent certainty. Clearly there hasn’t been sufficient scrutiny of all work covered, but that only two pieces out of tens of thousands have slipped through is remarkable,” says Kenber.
However, others like Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book The Skeptical Environmentalist believe that over the years IPCC had assumed the status of almost a god-like organisation. “People thought that if it is in the IPCC, it is true. The guys were very sure about themselves. All three reports of the IPCC would do a lot of good with more transparency,” says Lomborg.
It is the IPCC’s motivation and hand-in-glove nature with policy makers that have come into question. “It is not a scientific body and it has become a political body, dedicated to distorting evidence to support the view that human emissions are dangerous,” says Gray. Kenber, on the other hand, believes that it is inevitable that a scientific body so closely aligned with a political process will come under intense scrutiny.
In reply to an email quesionnaire from Forbes India, IPCC said “there was regrettably a poor application of the IPCC Rules and Procedures” in drafting the paragraph on Himalayan Glaciers. “We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring that the author teams apply the IPCC procedures at every stage of the writing and review process in order to fulfil the IPCC mandate,” it said.
The Aftermath
In early 2010, Pachauri dismissed Raina’s report as ‘voodoo science’. But Pachauri himself is no scientist. In his earlier avatars, Pachauri indulged in more prosaic activities like overseeing operations at Diesel Locomotive Works, Varanasi and imparting lessons in economics to management students.
This in no way undermines the man’s achievement though. He had done a very good job building TERI.
Ever since the IPCC won the Nobel, Pachauri has acquired a celebrity status of sorts in the global warming scientific community. He is always on the move; either making speeches, attending conferences, presiding IPCC meetings or meeting policy makers. “The Nobel had its spillover. Earlier, he used to keep to himself but now he’s become more outspoken and sees himself more globally,” says another source who is a member of a TERI committee.
As for Raina, he is unhappy that the work of so many scientists was trashed. “There are people working from Geological Survey, people working from Jammu University, people working from Jawaharlal Nehru University, IITs who had been working on this subject and this is the remark. That’s the tragedy,” he says.
He knows what it is to be a field scientist. A Kashmiri Pandit by birth, Raina has spent more than 35 years studying Himalayan glaciers. And life as a glaciologist hasn’t been easy. He’s walked on foot for months to reach inaccessible glaciers, spent more than three months at a stretch living on glaciers surviving on ‘potatoes and onions’, led two expeditions to Antarctica, broken his leg when he fell into a crevice while coming down from the ‘Gara’ glacier in Himachal Pradesh with the nearest hospital available after five days march. He retired in 1991 with a last-month salary of Rs. 9,000.
Ask his wife about how he feels about the whole thing and Mrs. Raina does. “He says that I just gave the facts of science; and I didn’t mean to confront anybody. Many people wrote to us saying that this is not right. Let him (Pachauri) say what he likes but after all I know what my capabilities are…Waise bhi jo bechara gir gaya hai, use laat kyon maarni,” she adds.
The debate isn’t over but Raina is done with it. He still has plans to demolish a few myths. One of them is that the Gangotri Glacier in Uttarakhand gets affected by pilgrims taking bath in the Ganges or by army vehicles passing through. However, his next big thing is his book.
Pachauri has been resisting calls for stepping down from the IPCC chair. For the rest of us who don’t want to confuse ‘science’ with ‘kazoombaa’, Gray has some advice, “There’s one (scientific study) born every minute. If somebody tells you what is going to happen in 100 years’ time I suggest kicking him out of the door.”
“Mr. Cuccinelli argues that the EPA failed to meet its responsibility to conduct appropriate cost-benefit analysis, and that the economic harm to American citizens – including Virginians – would outweigh any purported benefits of the new regulations. As the AG put it,”We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground.” Of course, he’s spot on.”
Virginia attorney general questions global warming red tape
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli took a gutsy and intelligent step Feb. 17 when he petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its ill-advised ”finding” that carbon dioxide creates an endangerment for human health. The endangerment finding would let the EPA battle alleged global warming by regulating emissions of CO2, which of course is the gas that every animal and person exhales with every breath. The finding was ludicrous from the start, and now Mr. Cuccinelli makes a reasonable case that it also was unlawful.
”Attorney General Cuccinelli believes that the EPA acted in an arbitrary and capricious fashion and failed to properly exercise its judgment by relying almost exclusively on reports from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an arm of the United Nations] in attributing climate change to [human-caused] greenhouse gas emissions,” the AG’s office explains. ”The IPCC is an international body that is not subject to U.S. data quality and transparency standards and the IPCC prepared their reports in total disregard to U.S. Standards.”
Since the EPA finding was issued, the IPPC’s reports have become subject to scandal on multiple fronts. Those scandals reached a crescendo when a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, reported Feb. 14 that ”The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information. … And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.”
Obviously, if the EPA were relying on bad data like all of the other climate-change fanatics, it ought to reconsider its plans to further strangle our struggling economy with more unnecessary red tape.
Mr. Cuccinelli argues that the EPA failed to meet its responsibility to conduct appropriate cost-benefit analysis, and that the economic harm to American citizens – including Virginians – would outweigh any purported benefits of the new regulations. As the AG put it,”We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground.” Of course, he’s spot on.
This is the fourth part of the story on NASA:s refusal to comply with FOI requests. And their active and willingly participation in the Global Warming Hysteria.
Climategate 2.0 — The NASA Files: U.S. Climate Science as Corrupt as CRU (PJM Exclusive — Part Four)
Who pitches in to cover for NASA’s FOIA release? Al Gore’s cable TV station.
(Don’t miss Parts One, Two, and Three of Christopher’s report, and watch his PJTV interview, here.)
February 20, 2010 – by Christopher Horner
(On December 31, 2009, NASA finally provided the Competitive Enterprise Institute with the documents I requested from them with an FOIA in August 2007. My request asked NASA to release their internal discussions regarding a series of errors in their claims of warming U.S. temperatures caught by Steve McIntyre. NASA had stonewalled my request for more than two years.)
In August 2007, I submitted two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by long-time Gore advisor James Hansen and his right-hand man Gavin Schmidt (co-founder of the climate alarmist website RealClimate.org).
I did this because Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre — a man with professional experience investigating suspect statistical claims in the mining industry and elsewhere, including his exposure of the now-infamous “Hockey Stick” — noticed something unusual with NASA’s claims of an ever-warming first decade of this century. NASA appeared to have inflated its U.S.temperatures beginning in the year 2000. My FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.
NASA stonewalled my request for more than two years, until Climategate prompted me to offer notice of intent to sue if NASA did not comply immediately. On New Year’s Eve, NASA finally provided CEI with the documents I requested in August 2007.
When I was almost finished reviewing the FOIA documents, I noticed that Al Gore’s Current news network was reporting that NASA had simultaneously published the documents. No press release had been issued — which NASA has also eschewed when correcting their cooked temperatures (after being caught). Yet in general, not issuing a press release on anything global warming-related is quite unlike NASA.
It was a tactic. What better way to take the sting out of revelations you hid for two years than to simply publish them at the same time — in non-searchable form, naturally — without a press release?And then have your allies dismiss the explosive data? “That’s old news … move on already!”
Indeed, for this and for reasons more specific to the “green” media, no one has yet written a story on the documents which achieved so much attention (and prompted so much green fury) less than a month prior. But there is no way to credibly claim “old news!” to avoid a discussion of these revelations — the emails include noteworthy admissions explaining NASA’s reticence to let the public see what the public is paying for.
Our litigation, which we plan to file when NASA, as we expect given their record of behavior, deny our appeal in this case, will expose more of these practices, in detail.
The Current “defense”
Al Gore’s web network ran a rather silly blog post to minimize the NASA release, titled: “It’s ClimateGate 2.0 ( … Not)”. The post invites further scrutiny — now unfolding through the legal process — by anxiously stating:
Clearly there was no metaphorical “smoking gun” in the emails, because the CEI didn’t crow about a likely Climategate 2.0 following the emails’ release.
Deliberate procession is alien to the global warming alarmist. We’ve thoroughly examined the emails, and we’re crowing now.
The Current post takes pains to portray Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre as the bad guy, rather than the deliberate professional he has been in uncovering inappropriate behavior. Revealingly, the Current TV author tips his hat to inspiration provided by Howard University’s Joshua Halpern (who hides as the source of his often vitriolic missives behind the name “EliRabbett”). The author of the Current post selects innocent passages from the NASA emails and presents them as somehow being representative proof that the hundreds of pages are benign. And this does not appear to be because he simply failed to encounter the damning information — rather, he clearly implies that he has read all of the emails.
Yet the Current TV author says something that is, at least in part, the truth:
Put simply, the emails show the GISS scientists acting professionally and in an open and transparent manner with reporters and McIntyre himself.
Yes, when dealing with McIntyre directly they were professional — though this followed internal, often nasty deliberations revealing a desire to deflect his legitimate inquiries.When dealing with the media they were quite unprofessional, showing either evasiveness (dodging very specific questions from reporters from New York to Brazil) or a too-cozy relationship with reporters friendly to their cause (as noted here).
Regarding any implication that these emails reveal these scientists acting professionally outside of their direct dealings with McIntyre, I see no need to further rebut this point by drawing additional attention to the alarmists’ preferred approach of focusing on ad hominem attacks and name-calling, of which there is plenty in the revealed pages. Because that is not the primary story the emails expose, though directing attention to such behavior was the preferred tactic to distract from Climategate, the original.
But why change the subject to the prurient when the subject itself is so fascinating?
Check with PJM in coming weeks for our update and specifics when we announce the litigation against NASA and one other taxpayer-funded climate office refusing the taxpayer access to that for which the taxpayer paid 100%.We will reveal numerous tactics which NASA and others used to hide public information from the public, protecting their highly lucrative franchise of global warming alarmism.
Climategate 2.0 — The NASA Files: U.S. Climate Science as Corrupt as CRU (PJM Exclusive — Part Three)
When they show cooling, NASA dismisses temperature anomalies much larger than those hailed as ominous. (This is Part Three of a four-part series. Read Parts One and Two.)
February 19, 2010 – by Christopher Horner
(On December 31, 2009, NASA finally provided the Competitive Enterprise Institute with the documents I requested from them with an FOIA in August 2007. My request asked NASA to release their internal discussions regarding a series of errors in their claims of warming U.S. temperatures caught by Steve McIntyre. NASA had stonewalled my request for more than two years.)
A principal theme of these NASA emails — and one that is illuminating in its exposition of advocacy and hypocrisy at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) — is the insistence that what turned out to be a false warming of 0.15 degrees in the U.S. record is meaningless, even if covering merely seven years (2000-2006, as opposed to a decadal or longer trend).
In an August 7, 2007, email from GISS’ Dr. Reto Ruedy to GISS director Dr. James Hansen, Ruedy says the correction had “little impact” on the U.S. record. In an email to New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin on August 9, 2007, Hansen characterizes the error as having been “well within the uncertainty bar we give” for the U.S. and “entirely negligible” globally. In an email to Dr. Donald E. Anderson — program manager, Earth Science Enterprise, NASA Headquarters — on August 14, 2007, Hansen used the terms “minor,” “negligible,” and “less than the uncertainty” to describe the previously touted warming which was now shown to be an error.
This did not explain why the warming merited all of the hype in the preceding seven years.
Further, a week later Hansen privately wrote to Revkin that “[we] can add an uncertainty” to actually do what Hansen had been spinning to Revkin that they already do:
Indeed we already include a bar at several points on our temperature curve, but we note that it only includes the largest source of uncertainty in the temperature change (incomplete spatial coverage).
To add some further, curious texture to Hansen’s remarkably flexible view of what magnitude of warming is meaningful, note how in an August 14, 2007, email to GISS’ Makiko Sato and Ruedy, Hansen describes a claimed, much smaller warming between 1934 over 1998 of 0.02 degrees Celsius — which Hansen’s own 2001 paper had shown to be 0.5 degrees Celsius, a full half degree — as being “slightly warmer.” It is fair to assume from the record of NASA GISS that, because 1934 is an older year, the disparity must be downplayed. But it is also rather troubling that Hansen had forgotten his own work, serially rejecting the notion that he ever said 1934 was warmer than 1998, and his newer, operative claim that the difference is actually only 0.02 degrees Celsius, “much less than the accuracy” of their instruments. Therefore, he says: “Of course, scientifically, this is all nonsense.”
There is indeed nonsense in the various double standards that the emails reveal about NASA GISS, over how much and what kind of anomalies (warm or cool) are meaningful. Though not as he suggests.
Hansen also dismisses what had previously been the substantial relative warmth of 1934 over 1998 in the rankings of temperatures in an email to Bloomberg journalist Demian McLean on August 14, 2007:
In our 2001 paper we found 1934 slightly warmer, by an insignificant hair over, 1998.
But in fact that paper declared 1934 to be a whopping half a degree warmer than 1998. This couldn’t, and didn’t, last.
In an August 9, 2007, email from Ruedy to Hansen, Ruedy suggests an alternative method of bringing their data in line — internally, at least — which would cool the claimed twentieth century warming of under a degree by nearly one-third of that (0.3C). This suggestion was repeated by Ruedy the same day in an email to Gavin Schmidt. Both missives revealed NASA’s new preferred tactic of not emphasizing the impact of U.S. temperatures in favor of emphasizing global temperatures, in order to diminish the importance of their U.S. temperature problem. This reveals a bias towards advocacy and activism as opposed to objective science, a highly questionable practice for a taxpayer-funded science office staffed with career employees.
Hansen emailed Times reporter Revkin on August 9, 2007:
[In fact] it is unclear why anyone would try to make something out of [the differences], perhaps not a light on upstairs?
This perspective ignores how Hansen’s office had for years aggressively made quite a lot out of such differences, smaller ones, in fact. Now, when caught overstating the warming, changing and even losing historical data, he claims the differences are immaterial — and only someone not possessing full mental faculties would try to do such a thing as Hansen’s office had long done, with much smaller anomalies. Because those earlier, smaller anomalies were in support of the desired warming and related agenda that requires there to be warming.
Ruedy also spun for Revkin, trying to diminishing the magnitude of Hansen’s error:
To be remarkable, an observed change has to be a multiple of that standard deviation; compared to that, the errors caused by “bad” stations, urban heat island effect, etc., are of little importance.
Here we see how one can learn, and even grow, on the job.
From yesterdays special report – Global Warming: Meltdown by John Coleman from Kusi News in San Diego
“Global Warming: Meltdown digs deeply into the strong differences of positions about global warming; It answers the negative responses by several key institutions to our first global warming telecast* in January.
The “Climategate” revelations that began in mid December have crescendoed into a series of almost daily embarrassments for the UN IPCC. This telecast covers as many of them as we can cram into an hour. The program can be viewed in segments. With the intro to each segment you will find links you may use to find more information on the topics covered. If this is the first time you are hearing about my efforts to debunk the bad science behind the global warming frenzy, you will find a wealth of information, videos and links to sites on the colemanscorner page of KUSI.com/weather/.”
