With three exceptions — FoxNews and the Washington Times (of course) and this brief single mention on CNN:
JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: There’s also something else that’s out there. Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia, the climate research unit, the guy that was at the center of this recent e-mail controversy late last year, has said in an interview with the BBC that he has not seen any, quote, “statistically significant warming since 1995,” though he says he still believes that the earth’s temperature has warmed. And he also said that he might be missing some of the data that is responsible for his climate models.
Of course, skeptics are jumping all over this, saying the whole thing is a farce. Global warming doesn’t exist.
What do you think of the Professor Jones situation, the lack of statistically significant warming, and the fact that he may have misplaced some of the records?
JOHN CHRISTY, PROFESSOR, ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE, UNIV. OF ALABAMA- HUNTSVILLE: Well, I think what Phil Jones is saying is that Mother Nature is perfectly capable of making the temperature rise and fall through the past several hundred years. And in terms of the data problems, well, we do have to be careful when we’re talking about public policy, that means trillions of dollars, and we haven’t had that very hard and critical situation where you take care of data and make it publicly available to everyone. And that needs to be done now.
We have a childish, petulant, insecure, unprofessional media. It has to be noted again that the British media is covering this story well — even left-wing outfits like the Guardian and the statist-establishment-left BBC.
My respect for the BBC and the Guardian has increased quite a bit. This story is obviously against their political agenda, but they covered it anyway, because it’s, you know, news.
Compare to the American Media, which is principally now in the business of blocking the reportage of news.
It seems like only last December, the Times’ “public editor” Hoyt was saying… “I think The Times has handled Climategate appropriately — a story, not a three-alarm story.
I think that any notion that The Times was trying to avoid publishing the e-mail messages is a manufactured issue. On Freeman’s advice, the paper linked to them — on a skeptic’s Web site as it happens — and they were a click away for anyone who wanted to examine them.
The biggest question is what the messages amount to — an embarrassing revelation that scientists can be petty and defensive and even cheat around the edges, or a major scandal that undercuts the scientific premise for global warming. The former is a story. The latter is a huge story. And the answer is tied up in complex science that is difficult even for experts to understand, and in politics in which passionate sides have been taken, sometimes regardless of the facts. –
also:
Dogs Do Bark at Obama Stimulus “No Jobs” Folly!
Reality barks at Obama’s phony jobs claim!
President Obama was in front of the cameras again on Wednesday (when is he not?)trying to gin up support for the failed $trillion stimulus bill which has been in effect for a year now.
Obama’s fighting a losing battle as people aren’t buying the phony claim that the stimulus bill saved or created two million jobs. If that were true then unemployment which rose 2.5% as nearly 4 million Americans lost their jobs during the first year of the Obama Administration would have been cut substantially. As the Congressional Budget Office said in early 2009, the Obama Stimulus plan really is “worse than doing nothing.”
From House GOP Leader John Boehner:
When Democrats rushed their massive 1,100 page, “stimulus” through Congress last year, they promised that unemployment would not rise above eight percent and that job creation would begin “almost immediately”. But one year later, more than three million more Americans have lost their jobs, the deficit is set to hit a record shattering $1.6 trillion, and Administration reports on how many jobs were “saved or created” have been “riddled with inaccuracies and contradictions,” noted USA Today.
By the metrics the Democrats themselves set, the “stimulus” hasn’t worked – it’s chock-full of wasteful government spending that’s funneled money to Congressional districts that don’t exist and claims of jobs “saved or created” were so exaggerated that the Administration quietly abandoned the metric at the end of last year.
Poll after poll confirms that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose the “stimulus” program. In fact, a CBS/New York Times poll released yesterday found that “just 6 percent of Americans think it has created jobs.” Any wonder that a CNN survey reported that “3 of 4 Americans say much of stimulus money wasted.”
No Earmarks, Projects on the Merits in Stimulus Bill?
In his stimulus celebration Wednesday, Obama also mentioned this:
And I just want to point this out — there has never been a program of this scale, moved at this speed, that has been enacted as effectively and as transparently as the Recovery Act. I’m grateful that Congress agreed to my request that the bill include no earmarks, that all projects receive funding based solely on their merits. And despite that, I was still concerned — Joe and I were just talking in the back — when this thing passed we said $787 billion — somewhere there’s going to be some story of some money that ended up being misspent; $787 billion spent out over 18 months, that’s a lot — that’s a lot of money. And it is a testimony to Vice President Biden and his team that, as Joe puts it, the dog, so far at least, hasn’t barked. (Laughter.)
The dog is barking. Here’s Ellie May with House Leader John Boehner:
And of course the bill was loaded with earmarks and special payoffs to liberal districts. By now, we’ve all got our favorite examples of government waste in the stimulus bill. My favorite is the National Endowment for the Arts stimulus grants to fund pornography in California. Talk about stimulating!
The Senate GOP web site has a fresh list of their favorites:
1. $100,000 IN STIMULUS FUNDS USED FOR A MARTINI BAR & BRAZILIAN STEAKHOUSE
2. $390,000 TO STUDY MALT LIQUOR AND MARIJUANA CONSUMPTION
3. $210,000 TO STUDY LEARNING PATTERNS OF HONEYBEES
4. $1 MILLION TO STUDY ANTS
5. $15,551 TO STUDY DRUNK MICE
6. $4,200-$5,500 TAX CREDIT FOR PURCHASING GOLF CARTS
7. $219,000 TO STUDY THE SEX LIVES OF FEMALE COLLEGE FRESHMEN
8. $1 MILLION TO RENOVATE “THE SUNSET STRIP”
9. $325,394 TO STUDY “MATING DECISIONS” OF CACTUS BUGS
10. $500,000 TO STUDY “SOCIAL NETWORKS LIKE FACEBOOK”
11. $3.4 MILLION FOR A TURTLE TUNNEL IN FLORIDA
12. $30 MILLION FOR A SPRING TRAINING BASEBALL COMPLEX FOR THE ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS AND COLORADO ROCKIES
13. $54 MILLION IN STIMULUS FUNDS USED FOR THE NAPA VALLEY WINE TRAIN
14. $50,000 IN STIMULUS FUNDS USED FOR A TENNIS COURT IN MONTANA
15. $250 STIMULUS CHECKS WENT TO PRISONERS
The Stimulus bill was never intended as a jobs bill. It was intended as a $trillion payoff to Democrats to fund their pet causes. It would have been much cheaper to put in place greater tax cuts and job growth measures that actually encourage job growth. But when GOP Congressmen took their ideas to Obama at the beginning of his Administration in 2009 their ideas were dismissed when he said “I won” I’ll do it my way. His way doesn’t work.
There is a better way to create jobs and the answer doesn’t lie in more government spending and bureaucracy. But it takes a president willing to put his ego and ideology aside for the good of the country. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
also:
The Clinton Surplus Myth
I’m here to blow a hole in the myth that Clinton created an amazing budget surplus that Bush squandered and turned into a huge deficit. The above chart shows the deficit/surplus since 1980, pay no attention to Obama’s first year. I’ve talked enough about his budget deficit recently.
The following is a chart of the Nasdaq from 1990 until now:
At the end of Clinton’s term ONE THIRD of ALL revenue came from capital gains taxes. This is pretty astounding. I’m certainly not giving Bush a pass, he raised spending a huge amount and that is the biggest thing that annoyed me about his Presidency. That being said he was not blessed with the same environment Clinton had to work with. There were no capital gains tax revenues, only losses. The tech bubble and subsequent bust was the cause of Clinton’s surplus and Bush’s initial deficit.
Clinton gets far too much credit for something he had no control over, and in the long run was very bad for our economy. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
The case of Rashad Hussain
Watching the speech given by Obama national security adviser John Brennan at the NYU Islamic Center this past weekend, one is struck by the extent of his abasement before his audience. Brennan’s speech is full of the apologetics, false equivalences and straw men that we have come to expect from the Obama administration in addressing these matters. As he instructs the faithful in the meaning of Islam, he doesn’t quite get around to the subject of jihad.
In the question and answer period, Brennan explains that to recognize the terrorists’ invocation of jihad wrongly dignifies the terrorists. And yet to pass over it in silence, as Brennan does in his remarks, is an act of willful blindness representative of the higher wisdom operative in the Obama administration.
Brennan testifies to the beauty and goodness of Islam. Brennan refers to having visited “Palestine.” Is that, as Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Authority textbooks have it, the country otherwise known as Israel? Or is it some part of the West Bank or Gaza? Where is Palestine?
Elsewhere in his speech Brennan decries “violations” of the PATRIOT Act (?!), surveillance that has been viewed as excessive, policies that have been perceived as profiling, and the creation of an “unhelpful atmosphere” around Muslim charities. The pandering and evasions that permeate Brennan’s speech have to be seen to be believed.
Now comes word via Fox News regarding attorney Rashad Hussain. Already serving as a high officer of the administration, Hussain is now Obama’s chosen envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. He is also a fan of Sami al-Arian, the convicted head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in North America. According to Hussain in 2004, al-Arian was the victim of “politically motivated persecutions.”
According to the Fox report, the White House says the controversial remarks defending al-Arian two years earlier were made by his daughter rather than by Hussain, who both appeared on a Muslim Students Association conference panel. As Fox also notes, however, the reporter covering the event stands by the quotes she attributed to Hussain, who was a Yale Law student and an editor of the Yale Law Journal at the time.
What does Hussain say? Hussain does not deny the remarks. A White House official who talked with Hussain on Tuesday said he acknowledged attending the event to discuss civil rights in a post-9/11 world but has “no recollection” when it comes to the comments attributed to him. He has not (yet) sought to explain away the remarks away as a youthful indiscretion. What does Hussain think of Sami al-Arian today? The White House doesn’t say.
The Muslim Students Association is itself an unsavory organization. Founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, MSA was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood’s likeminded “organizations of our friends” who shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation. These “friends” were described by the Brotherhood as groups that could help teach Muslims “that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ’sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”
The case of Rashad Hussain also casts retrospective illumination on John Brennan’s NYU Islamic Center speech. In Hussain’s case we see the depth of Brennan’s appeasement and flattery of his NYU Islamic Center audience.
PAUL adds: Hussain has an interesting bio. He’s a former high school debate star, but we won’t hold that against him.
The striking thing for me is that President Obama made Hussain his deputy associate counsel at a time when, as best I can tell, he had maybe a year of experience as a lawyer (plus some time as a House Judiciary Committee staffer). And now, a year later, he has given Hussain what appears to be a reasonably significant diplomatic-type job.
I guess there’s a fast track for Muslim-American lawyers, at least those with connections to Paul Soros [note: also a prominent liberal, Paul is the brother of George; I’m only speculating that Hussain’s connection with him is relevant] and sympathy for Palestinian jihadists.
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