They're STILL Doing It.

From Sunday's Tribune-Review:

In a less-than-landmark study certain to surprise no one, George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs has determined that -- drumroll, please -- comedians are fond of mocking politicians.

And then:

"Sex scandals and terrorists come and go," noted Robert Lichter, the George Mason professor who authored the study. "But politics is the gift that keeps on giving to comedians."

Missing in all this comedy is any mention of the Scaife money supporting the work of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Mediamatters reports that from 1992 to 2009 Scaife controlled foundations (Carthage and Sarah Scaife, to be precise) have granted $1.647 million to the CMPA.

But wait, there's more.

Robert Lichter, while he's president of the CMPA, he's also the president of the CMPA's related organization, the Statistical Assessment Service - itself the beneficiary of Scaife money. Media matters reporting that between 2003 and 2008, Carthage and Sarah Scaife foundations granted $1.15 million to it.

And so (drum roll, please) Scaife money's been used to support the research of two organizations that Professor Lichter is president of and yet (drum roll should be getting louder here) when his newspaper cites that research not one penny of that money is mentioned (cymbal crash!).

The tribbing (or circle-jerking, if you prefer) continues at the Tribune-Review.

Jack Kelly Debunked In The P-G

While I've been debunking Jack Kelly for some time now (and Ed Heath's been doing a bang up job over at Cognitive Dissonance as well), it's always good to read other debunkings - especially when they're by real honest to goodness experts.

Witness Wednesday's piece in the P-G from Brenda Ekwurzel (Ph.D. in isotope geochemistry from Department of Earth Sciences at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, by the way). No ambiguity in her point of view when she opens with:

Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly may feel comfortable using inaccurate statements and cherry-picked data to attack climate science and scientists ("Chicken Little Gore Goes on a Tirade," Aug. 24), but as one of those scientists, I can look at the Pittsburgh streets I grew up on and see how climate change is already shifting the baselines of "normal" weather.

"[I]naccurate statements and cherry-picked data"? Really?? That sound an awful lot like Jack to me.

Ekwurzel thumbnails the science and starts in on our Jack:

Scientists have been studying climate change for a very long time. The idea that adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could trap heat and drive climate change has been known by scientists since 1896. Over the past 150 years, burning coal and oil and destroying tropical forests has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 38 percent, to more than 385 parts per million, its highest level in more than 800,000 years.

The result is a warming world. The four scientific agencies that track global temperature all agree that the 2000s were the hottest average decade since reliable record keeping began in the late 1880s. Before that the hottest average decade was the 1990s and before that it was the prior decade. Scientists know it's better to take a long view to identify climate trends, but Mr. Kelly cherry-picked figures from 1998 to draw misleading conclusions about climate change.

That would be when Jack wrote:

Global temperatures peaked in 1998. People have noticed winters are getting colder.

Note he's using anecdotal evidence ("People have noticed...") to support his argument. Which people? When? Where?

Reminder to Jack: Anecdotal evidence is not scientific evidence.

Back to Ekwurzel:

That was just one of many misleading aspects of Mr. Kelly's column. He also pointed to previous eras in Earth's history when carbon dioxide levels and global temperature differed greatly. But he failed to acknowledge that natural climate change in the past was due to changes not only in carbon dioxide levels, but also in the planet's orbit, the sun's output of energy and even the shifting of continents over thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands and millions of years. Modern climate change is different because we are rapidly introducing extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and seeing resulting changes in our own lifetimes.

Whah? So Jack left stuff out?? Inconceivable! She addresses Jack's take on Climategate:

Further, Mr. Kelly personally attacks scientists based on a misreading of emails that hackers stole from a British university in late 2009. Yet he fails to mention that no less than six independent investigations have cleared the scientists involved, including a three-part investigation by Penn State University.

Like this one.

Dr. Ekwurzel ends with this:

In order to succeed with anything, we need to start with facts. Misleading columns like Jack Kelly's are a harmful distraction from the challenge we face when it comes to climate changes.

Unfortunately as we've seen over the years, Jack Kelly is more likely to mislead than he is to accurately reflect reality.

An Update On Dick Cheney, War Criminal

An astute reader emailed in this link from The Atlantic.

Ta-Nehisi Coates boils everything down into a bite sized paragraph :

It's amazing, though it shouldn't be, to see the former vice-president of the United States arguing that the government still should be torturing people, and that torture is one of the things he's proudest of. I think the worst thing about the Obama administration's "looking forward" doctrine is that it virtually guarantees that torture will happen again--perhaps even under the very next administration.

I could not agree more.

And on a recent edition of Democracy Now! Salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell discuss the real fallout of the Cheney book:

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the most significant aspects of the rollout of Dick Cheney’s book is that he’s basically being treated as though he’s just an elder statesman who has some controversial, partisan political views. And yet, the evidence is overwhelming, including most of what Colonel Wilkerson just said and has been saying for quite some time, and lots of other people, as well, including, for example, General Antonio Taguba, that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder—his word—of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about.

And yet, what we have is a government, a successor administration, the Obama administration, that announced that there will be no criminal investigations, no, let alone, prosecutions of any Bush officials for any of these multiple crimes. And that has taken these actions outside of the criminal realm and turned them into just garden-variety political disputes. And it’s normalized the behavior. And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is talking about?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I certainly do. And I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I agree with almost everything he just said. And I think that explains the aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words like "exploding heads all over Washington." This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will "Pinochet" Dick Cheney.

There's more from Wilkerson here:

"[Cheney]'s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him," Wilkerson added.

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested for war crimes.

As both Bush and Cheney should be.

Dan Simpson, in today's P-G, has a list of reasons why he won't buy or read Cheney's book:

1) He is a liar. Anyone who would take the United States to war based on two false reasons -- the claim of Iraq having nuclear weapons and of the Saddam Hussein regime having links to al-Qaida -- has no further right to be believed about anything. Mr. Cheney's approach to these deadly lies was to choose and interpret U.S. intelligence to reinforce his goal, as opposed to arriving at a truth upon which to base U.S. policy.

2) He is a killer. His deliberate actions, probably intended to get himself and President George W. Bush reelected in 2004, led to the deaths of more than 4,400 Americans and countless thousands of Iraqis. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, fine; George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, no way.

I would have added stuff about the torture and the non-existent WMDs and the domestic surveillance. But that's just me.

Many thanks to the Obama Administration! By taking any prosecution of the war crimes off the table, it's at least partially legitimized the crimes Cheney is so so proud of.

Here's to hoping that some country somewhere has the courage to "Pinochet" Dick Cheney - war criminal.

Why Hasn't Cheney Been Arrested?

From Realclearpolitics:

[NBC's Jamie] Gangel: "A conservative hero the his fans, Darth Vader to his critics, Cheney 's book is an unapologetic defense to his Vice Presidency and the controversial programs he's championed after 9/11. In your view, we should still be using enhanced interrogation?"

Cheney: "Yes."

Gangel: "Should we still be waterboarding terror suspects?

Cheney: "I would strongly support using it again if we had a high-value detainee, that was the only way we could get him to talk."

Gangel: "People call it torture. you think it should still be a tool?"

Cheney: "Yes."

Ok, ok, ok. Let me stop the "unbiased" Gangel right there. People don't call waterboarding torture. The Law calls waterboarding torture. US and International Law:

• United States Code Title 18, §2340(2)
• The UN Conventions Against Torture
• The Geneva Convention Relative To The Treatment of Prisoners Of War

In fact what Cheney said goes directly against the UN Conventions:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. [emphasis added.]

Ah, the joys of an "unbiased" interviewer! By putting it in "People call it..." rather than "The law says..." frame, she gets Cheney is off at least one rhetorical hook. Why couldn't she just say it was illegal (not to mention immoral and counterproductive)?

And that being the case, why isn't Dick Cheney in jail?

For that, I guess, we have our disappointing President to thank.

Doesn't change the fact that waterboarding is torture and torture is a war crime and George Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals.

Huh.

While I disagree with a lot of what he thinks, I always thought that Congressman Ron Paul was at least intelligent.

Now I know otherwise.

When asked about the theory of evolution in 2007, Paul reportedly said:

"Well, first i thought it was a very inappropriate question, you know, for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter," he said. "I think it's a theory...the theory of evolution and I don't accept it as a theory. But I think the creator that i know, you know created us, every one of us and created the universe and the precise time and manner and all. I just don't think we're at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side."

A spokesman for the Paul campaign did not immediately respond to calls for comment.

Here's the video.


The GOP: The Anti-Science Party.

You May Have Missed This

Whilst I was away on vacation (A stop to see mom in Connecticut and then a trip up to Bar Harbor, Maine where there was some wicked good laab-stah every night) I missed reading about yet another exoneration about some never happened scientific misdeads:

Michael Mann, the Pennsylvania climate-change researcher caught in the flap surrounding e-mails hacked from a U.K. university server, was cleared of wrongdoing by an agency that promotes science.

Finding no "evidence of research misconduct," the Arlington, Va.-based National Science Foundation closed its inquiry into Mann, according to an Aug. 15 report from its inspector general. In February, Penn State University, where Mann is a professor of meteorology, exonerated him of suppressing or falsifying data, deleting e-mails and misusing privileged information.

And:

The report confirms findings from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's inspector general and a separate panel of seven scientists based at universities in the U.K., United States and Switzerland.

The original reporting can be found here at Bloomberg.com and you can read the NSF report here. The NSF report says this about those hacked East Anglia emails:

We reviewed the emails and concluded that nothing contained in them evidenced research misconduct within the definition in the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. The University had been provided an extensive volume of emails from the Subject and determined that emails had not been deleted. We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence

On the charge of data falsification the NSF concluded:

There is no specific evidence that the Subject falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.

But back to the Bloomberg reporting. The interesting part about it is where it was posted: The Tribune-Review.

Perhaps this will be more evidence of how the editorial board doesn't bother reading the news published in the Trib, but this is what Scaife's braintrust said of Mann only last summer:

Speaking about his infamous "hockey stick" global-temperature graph, Mann also told the BBC: "I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate."

Funny, isn't it, how Mann only now objects to Al Gore making his "hockey stick" a household word via "An Inconvenient Truth" -- and to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change making such a big deal of that graph in its reports.

Only now -- after those Climategate e-mails documented improper data manipulation, and after other setbacks for the Church of Climatology's credibility -- does Mann border on 'fessing up. Perhaps his highly questionable "exoneration" by Penn State is loosening his lips.

Better late than never? Of course. But if he'd never warped genuine science to fit his predetermined "conclusions," he'd never have had to even think about, and wouldn't be verging on, full-blown backpedaling.

Given the Trib's news division has actually reported on Mann's exoneration, do you think the editorial braintrust will even bother to do some backpedaling itself?

Yea, me neither.

Good to be home, though.

"John McIntire Dangerously Live Comedy Talk Show" Tonight!

We may have had an earthquake this week, but we're not in the path of Hurricane Irene, so come on out tonight!


(Click to enlarge)
WHAT: John McIntire Dangerously Live Comedy Talk Show with Gab Bonesso
"How's Barry Obama doin'? As well as he could? Not nearly good enough? We're all screwed no matter what? Comedy and Yapping! With Featured Comedian Gab Bonesso, 2 Political Junkies Maria Lupinacci, Activist Khari Mosley, former GOP Mayoral candidate Mark DeSantis! Be there and be Theater Square!"

WHEN: Saturday, August 27 at 10:30pm - August 28 at 12:30am

WHERE: Cabaret At Theater Square, 655 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh (map)

COST: CHEAP! Tickets: $5.00 at the door / No Charge for District Patrons

More info here and here.

Song of the Day

As Hurricane Irene slams North Carolina, reality sets in in NYC and last minute panic shopping ensues.

Now that we're on the same page...

I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,
I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.

So let’s make the most of this beautiful day,
Since we’re together, we might as well say,
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?
Won’t you be my neighbor?


Via KDKA: "In Pittsburgh, only 19 percent of city
residents approve the mayor’s performance
— with 48 percent disapproving —
and 33 percent have no opinion."
OK, this is certainly not in the spirit of Mr. Rogers, but after years and years of not understanding why folks in this city gave a pass to Pittsburgh's Favorite Grandson Lil Mayor Luke, I finally feel at one with my city.