CAMBRIDGE, MA - A new study has linked the traditional feasts associated with Thanksgiving and Christmas to increases in planetary temperatures. The report, to be released Wednesday, claims the additional energy required to fatten, slaughter, ship and roast tens of millions of turkeys causes a seasonal spike in greenhouse gasses. Scientists say the effects of these spikes could be devastating.

"Once the damage is done, it's difficult to reverse the effects." said Myron Finnister, professor of Climatic Endocrinology at Howyflyl University. "It's much like the person doing the feasting, who can never seem to shed those extra pounds. And pretty soon, it's time to feast all over again."

The report cites that energy consumption typically increases during the months of November and December, the peak of the turkey production season. Energy use beyond December is mainly due to cold weather, according to the report. "Temperature increases of up to 0.2 degrees over the next 100 years can be directly attributable to this spike." said Finnister.

Nutritionists and conservationists are quick to point out alternatives to the roast turkey dinner. "Vegetables, which are much lighter than turkeys and therefore more efficient to ship, are an excellent feast." said Lindy Hellman-Jones, a dietary specialist at Newhall Clinic. "But if people must eat turkeys, which is pretty gross, there are steps they can take to save the planet. If everyone would turn their ovens down from 350 to 345, it would be like taking 1 million cars off the road."

Heh!

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.

People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

BoingBoing

The Hispanic National Bar Association has just sent out a press release gently reminding Barack Obama that he owes them — and they are not going to let him forget it:

HNBA Congratulates President-Elect Barack Obama and Urges Appointment of Hispanics to the Federal Judiciary and Executive Branch

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Last week, Ramona E. Romero, the HNBA National President, formally congratulated President-Elect Barack Obama and Vice President-Elect Joe Biden for their victory in the 2008 presidential election. In her letter, Ms. Romero noted that two-thirds of the Latino electorate joined President-Elect Obama’s diverse base of supporters to contribute to his win on November 4th. The Latino vote was key in battleground states such as Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. In fact, at least 10 million Latino voters cast ballots, an increase in participation of 32% from the 2004 Presidential Election.

“The power of the Latino vote was evident during this election,” said Ms. Romero. She added that “we are both hopeful and confident that President-Elect Obama will select cabinet members and other advisors whose backgrounds reflect the rich diversity of our Country and of the voters who supported his candidacy.” She concluded by stating that “the HNBA has called on the President-Elect to appoint more Hispanics to the federal bench, and urged him to make history yet again by nominating a Hispanic to fill the first U.S. Supreme Court vacancy that occurs during his term.” No person of Latino origin has ever served on the U.S. Supreme Court.

A copy of the letter to President-Elect Obama is available at the HNBA website, www.hnba.com.

CAMBIO!!!

Helen Jones-Kelley, the suspended director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, "had no legitimate agency function or purpose to support her decision" to check on the newly minted political figure, the report states.

The investigation by the office of Inspector General Thomas P. Charles found that the reasons that Jones-Kelley offered for the checks "were not credible and they included contradictions, ambiguity, and inconsistencies."

The report reached no conclusion on whether Jones-Kelley's approval of the checks were politically motivated.

"However, the circumstances surrounding the unauthorized searches are exacerbated in light of the director's sending and receiving e-mail related to a political activity through state resources," the report said.

The report also faults other agency employees for their role in the computer checks on Toledo-area resident Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who was popularized as "Joe the Plumber" by Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

The report found that assistant agency director Fred Williams and Doug Thompson, a deputy child-support director, bore some responsibility for the checks.

"Thompson's conduct is further called into question" by his directing an ODJFS employee to send a "deceptive" e-mail to another agency official explaining the check she ran on Wurzelbacher was for child-support purposes.

Charles' report recommended more stringent steps and policies to govern access to confidential information on Ohioans in agency computer systems and called for the creation of an audit trail to determine who is running checks on whom.

Charles said his report would be sent to the office of Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien for review.

Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland placed Jones-Kelley on paid leave Nov. 7 after e-mails requested by The Dispatch revealed she used her state e-mail account to help raise campaign funds for President-Elect Barack Obama.

The inspector general's report found that the e-mails violated Strickland's policy on political activity and constituted a "wrongful act" as an inappropriate use of state resources.

The Dispatch reported earlier that Jones-Kelley had ordered a check on Wurzelbacher through her agency's child-support computer system.

She later revealed that checks on "Joe" also were run in public-assistance and unemployment-compensation -tax databases, but stressed that none of the confidential information was made public.

Wuzelbacher became a national political fixture after he questioned Obama's tax policies during the Democrat's campaign appearance in the man's neighborhood. Republican John McCain then frequently referred to "Joe the Plumber" during his Oct. 15 debate with Obama.

Jones-Kelley said there were no political motives behind the checks run the day after the debate. Jones-Kelley had contributed $5,000 to Obama campaign funds in late July.

Yeah, but it wasn't politically motivated, right?

The Columbus Dispatch

I woke up in the middle of the night after having a nightmare that the country of my birth, the country that I love had changed from a God fearing, free market, freedom loving country called the United States of America into a communist State, controlled by bad politicians, an ineffective police force, and a pissant media hell bent on demonizing traditional values.

My nightmare consisted of the following:

An innocent little old lady defending traditional marriage, being pushed around and encircled by a gang of thugs, with no one around to help her, crying because several men, at least twice her size, stomped on her cross of Christ Jesus, the world’s true Savior.

A presidential administration being excoriated for allegedly permitting torture of captured terrorists trying to kill American soldiers on a battlefield, and an organization purporting to protect American civil liberties claiming that these prisoners of War should be granted constitutional rights afforded to American citizens, that in effect will set all 250 of them free.

Meanwhile, just on the other side of the wall of this grand prison, in a communist country called Cuba that imprisons indefinitely those who disagree with government policy as a means to silence freedom of speech, in jails unfit for rats, not a peep from so called international peace keepers or civil rights defenders.

A place where school children are indoctrinated by school teachers to believe that America is evil, and recitation of our beloved Pledge of Allegiance should be banned, or relegated to a school gymnasium, where recitation of the same would be tolerated.

College students that happily wear t-shirts of the late Che Guevara, a murderous dictator, who killed innocent people for fun, yet that same college student is ridiculed for forming a pro-life group that defends innocent unborn life.

A group of college grads that do not have a clue what the United States Constitution entails, who ignore history and believe that socialism is a good thing, and that Republicans are evil.

Where an unrepentant terrorist who formed a group that made bombs and attempted to kill innocent Americans is a respected college professor who blames a semi-fair and balanced news organization for calling him the unrepentant terrorist that he is.

A country that thinks it can “fix” the free market economy by borrowing money from future tax payers and giving it to failed companies whereby rewarding bad economic behavior and punishing good economic behavior, and are surprised when the market crashes because of such intervention.

A country that purchases billions of dollars for oil from countries that hate America, but refuses to drill for oil on our own shores, because the “environmentalists& rdquo; who donate large sums of money to ineffective politicians have a stranglehold on public policy.

A country that seeks to spread freedom across the globe is looked upon as evil and intolerant, but spreading chemical contraception, abortion and sterilization to countries that may not agree with America’s socio economic policies is good for the world and should be forced upon them.

Will America take a huge step towards socialism, successfully remove God from society, and create a double standard between elitist liberals, and traditional conservatives, whereby the former group of citizens is free from criticism and the latter group of citizens is deemed brutish, or has this already happened while America was sleeping?

Raquel Okyay 

Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have.

An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann."

The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to fight.

Well, that's not acceptable.

Cooking the Figures

He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far overshadows all the other data.

He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants. Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random -- they have a very different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the results he wants.

All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and ... here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will assume it is, too.

But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.

If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.

The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be doublechecked. Anybody who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done. It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than good, if it's made public.

But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.

He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.

Second, he is given a big boost by the fact that another researcher -- we'll call him "Santer" -- had his own axe to grind. He was also the author of a questionable report and got himself appointed to a position that allowed him to get to the final report before it's published, delete all statements about how "there is no way to reach a definitive conclusion," and replace them with his own conclusion, which is absolute.

And it works. Santer's report is accepted, even though it has since been proven false. Mann's report continues to be relied on, and no one questions it. The government agency issues the report which they know has been altered to fit preconceived conclusions.

Vast sums of money are expended on the basis of what he claims to have found. People's live are put at risk.

Mann and Santer didn't do it for the money, though grants do flow in their direction.

They did it for the cause. It's a noble cause. And even though the data don't actually say what they wanted them to say -- in fact, they say the opposite -- they are untroubled by that. Because the government actions that are being taken are the Right Thing.

Santer and Mann are true believers. They don't need evidence. Evidence is just something you create to persuade other people.

Here's the amazing thing about Mann's original report: He's not the only researcher working in this field. In fact, it's the job of many hundreds of researchers to refuse to accept his data at face value. After all, his findings disagree with everyone else's. Before they accept his results, they have a duty to look at his software, look at his data, and try to duplicate his results.

But nobody does it. Not a soul.

Nor, when it goes public, does anyone in the press check the results -- because they want him to be right, too.

Steve the Canadian Businessman

Not until a Canadian businessman -- let's call him "Steve" -- took a look at the stats and got curious. Now, it happens that Steve is in the mining business; he also happened to be a prize-winning math student in college. He knows how to read number sets. He knows what good analysis looks like.

He also knows what cooked figures look like. He has seen the phony projections that companies use when they're trying to swindle people. Their results are too perfect. Mann's report looks too perfect, too.

So Steve starts digging. First, he read's Mann's original report. He finds it an exercise in obscurity. From what he published, it's very, very hard to tell just what statistical methods Mann used, or even what data he operated on.

This is wrong -- it's not supposed to be that way. Scientists are supposed to leave a clear path so other people can follow them up and replicate their research.

The fact that it's so obscure suggests that Mann does not want anyone checking his work.

But Mann used government grants in his research. Which means he has an obligation to disclose. Steve contacts him, asks for the information. He gets a runaround. He gets pointed to a website that does not have the information. He tries again, and again gets a runaround -- in fact, Mann sends him a very rude letter saying that he will no longer communicate with him.

Why should he? Steve isn't a legitimate researcher in that field. He's just a businessman.

But Steve is now sure there's something fishy going on, and he doesn't give up. He gets other people to help him. Finally they are pointed to a different website, where, to their surprise, they find that someone has accidentally left a copy of the FORTRAN program that was used to crunch the numbers. It wasn't supposed to be where Steve found it -- which is why it hadn't been deleted.

Also, there was a little more carelessness -- there is a set of data labeled "censored." Steve can't see, right away, what's significant about it, except that a score or so of data sets are left out of the censored data.

Steve looks at the program. He finds the glitch rather easily. He tries the program on random numbers and realizes that it always yields the distinctive shape that has caused all the stir.

Sorting out the data sets is much harder. He contacts a lot of people. He does what anyone checking these figures would have to do, and he realizes: If anyone had tried to check, a lot of this information would already have been put together.

He realizes: I am the first person ever to attempt to verify these astonishing, anomalous, politically hot results. Out of all the researchers in this field who had a responsibility to do "due diligence" before accepting the data, none of them has done it.

Finally he has all the original data put together. It includes more than just real numbers -- it includes "extrapolated" data, which means that sometimes, where there were holes, Mann just made the numbers up and plugged them in. This is sloppy and lazy -- but it's just the beginning.

What's crucial is that Steve now understands why the "censored" data sets are smaller than the ones Mann used. The full source data includes those misleading results that shouldn't have been used. But the "censored" data sets leave it out.

This means that Mann knew exactly what he was doing. This was not an accident. Mann ran the program on the data without the misleading numbers, and then he ran it with the misleading numbers. What he published was the results that made his ideological case.

Where's the Press?

This story is true.

Anybody who cares to can verify the story. In fact, one of the leading science journals was prepared to publish Steve's results. But then, before publication, they kept cutting back and cutting back on the amount of space they would let Steve's report take up in the journal.

Finally the space they were going to allot was so small that they concluded Steve could not tell his story in that number of words, and therefore they decided not to publish it at all.

Meanwhile, serious publications did publish Mann's savage response to what Steve was saying on the website where he was putting up his results for everyone to read.

Notice: Steve is making all his work transparent to the world -- anyone is free to check his data.

Mann is still hiding, denying, attacking -- but not providing the full information. You still have to do detective work to ferret it out.

Now, if you were a reporter -- you know, those brave guys and gals who are committed, body and soul, to "the public's right to know" -- wouldn't you smell a rat? Wouldn't you jump on the chance to expose such an obvious fraud?

After all, there are now governments all over the world basing their decisions on Mann's false report. Crucial decisions are being made. Schoolchildren are being terrorized with dire projections of what will happen if Mann's report is not believed and acted upon. Vast sums of money are being spent. People are treating Mann's cause as a crusade -- and his fake results are the chief weapon they use to prove their case.

Where's the press? Why am I able to tell you this story in full confidence that very few who are reading it will have ever heard it before?

Because Mann doesn't report to the Bush administration. The government agency for which the result was filed was a UN agency -- specifically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

And Mann's report is the famous "hockey stick" that "proves" that global warming not only is happening, but right now we're in the warmest climate period in the past thousand years.

Ah! You've heard of that report, haven't you! The press has been all over that one! Your kids are being taught about it in school!

You have friends who look at you like an idiot or the scum of the earth if you don't get energized by it, frightened by it, determined to act on that information. Don't you care about the future of the environment?

Why haven't you joined the cause? Why doesn't the Bush administration act to save the world from the most terrible threat imaginable?

It's like the opening of the "Talk of the Town" section of the February 12^th New Yorker: "Except in certain benighted precincts -- oil-industry-funded Web sites, the Bush White House, Michael Crichton's den -- no one wastes much energy these days trying to deny global warming."

This statement is not just false, it's stupidly false. It speaks of such deep ignorance at The New Yorker -- ignorance that they're actually proud of -- that it makes one despair, for this is a magazine that once prided itself on knowing what it was talking about.

"By the time the IPCC publishes an assessment, it has been vetted by thousands of scientists," says The New Yorker -- but we know that in fact nobody vetted the Mann paper, and nobody checked Santer except, of course, Santer -- while he went ahead and removed statements of some of those "thousands of scientists" (p. 27).

In other words, whoever wrote this New Yorker piece did not check. He or she just spouted.

What is really being said here is, "We believe in the IPCC and anybody else who supports Global Warming. We believe it so much that we refuse to listen to anybody who says otherwise."

The only difference between this and Jim and Tammy Baker on the old PTL Club is that nobody says "Jesus." It's all faith, no science.

They're like four-year-olds putting their fingers in their ears and chanting "La la la la" until the person talking to them goes away.

The Hockey Stick Hoax should be a scandal as big as the discovery of the Piltdown Man Hoax. Bigger, really, since so much more is at stake.

But because the media are dominated by True Believers, they are doing everything they can to maintain the hoax, to keep the public from learning the truth.

What were those bad numbers Mann plugged in to get his fake results? Modern bristlecone pine tree-ring data in which recent tree rings showed the widths that would normally mean unusually warm weather.

However, these trees were located near temperature recording stations that showed lower than usual temperatures. So instead of being a sign of warmer temperatures, the tree rings are actually responding to the increased CO₂ levels.

Even the heading on this bristlecone pine study clearly stated that the wider tree rings did not indicate higher temperatures. But Mann plugged them in as if they did, producing the one dataset that showed "warmer weather" (i.e., wider tree rings) in recent years, allowing the defective software to produce its hockey-stick result.

The bristlecone pine study was real science. Mann's use of it was deliberately fraudulent.

How Can We Know What's True?

All this can be checked. I didn't even change the names. "Mann" is Michael Mann; his co-writers on that hockey stick report are Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. "Steve" is Stephen McIntyre, and the writer of the report I'm working from is Ross McKitrick, who is a climate scientist. Their report is a chapter in Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, edited by Patrick J. Michaels.

Do you know how True Believer scientists respond to this? Just like the ignorant New Yorker writer. There's no attempt to answer any specific charge. They simply dismiss any disagreement by saying, "All the smart scientists agree that global warming is happening; anybody who denies it is just a crank, and you should ignore them."

This is exactly the kind of bias that President Bush's enemies accuse him of having during the run-up to the Iraq War. They claim that Bush and his people only believed the intelligence reports that told them what they wanted to hear, and ignored the rest, claiming that "everybody knew" things that were false.

That's not what happened with Bush (but you don't actually have to prove accusations against President Bush these days). But with the Hockey Stick Hoax it can be proved -- yet the very same reporters pay no attention at all. It's "not a story."

In other words, the very people who attack Bush as a liar are actually behaving exactly as they accuse Bush of behaving.

Global Warming vs. Climate Change

If you pay close attention, you'll find that Global Warming alarmists are not actually saying "Global Warming" lately. No, nowadays it's "Climate Change." Do you know why?

Because for the past three years, global temperatures have been falling.

Oops.

The thing is, we've had twenty years since the Alarmists first raised the banner of Global Warming. They told us that "If This Goes On" by 2010 or 2020, sea levels will be rising so high that coastal cities will be flooded, famines will cover the earth, and ...

Oh, you know the list. They're still making the same predictions -- they just move the dates farther back.

It's like those millennarian religious cults in the 1800s. Religious leaders would arise who would predict the Second Coming of Christ in 1838. When Christ didn't oblige them by showing up, they went back to their visions or scripture calculations or whatever they claimed and report that they miscalculated, now it was going to be 1843. Or whatever.

Here's the raw truth:

All the computer models are wrong. They have not only failed to predict the future, they can't even predict that past.

That is, when you run their software with the data from, say, the 1970s or 1980s, and project what should happen in the 1990s or 2000s, they project results that have absolutely nothing to do with the known climate data for those decades.

In other words, the models don't work. The only way to make them "work" is to take the known results and then fiddle with the software until it finally produces them. That's not how honest science is done.

Why are so many scientists so wrong?

First of all, there aren't all that many scientists. You hear about how "everybody" agrees about global warming. But who is "everybody"?

I had somebody at a conference get very angry with me for even raising a question. "I have a friend who's a climate scientist and he says that the Everglades are definitely drying up!"

But that's not the question, I said. Global warming isn't even the question. The question is, what is causing global warming or cooling or climate change? Is it human Carbon Dioxide emissions or something else? Your friend is studying aquifers in one specific area. In what way is he qualified to speak about global climate?

The only answer I got was the answer you always get when you challenge the roots of someone's religion -- fury, dismay, and a refusal to talk about it any more.

That's what happens over and over. Who are the scientists who are qualified to speak? There aren't that many. It's the relatively few scientists who are studying paleoclimate and those who are working on contemporary data collection and collation and analysis.

And here's where it almost gets funny. Even the IPCC, which was so heavily biased in favor of Global Warming alarmism, could not get its pet scientists to agree that Global Warming in recent decades is even probably caused by human activity.

...Global Warming "Solutions"

We can't stop global warming or cooling. We simply don't have the power to do it. We can't heat up or cool down the sun; we can't jiggle the Earth in its orbit or change its position. We'd be idiots to try, even if such unimaginable powers came within our reach.

So we'll continue, as long as the human race persists, to have ice ages and warm periods, with relatively minor oscillations (like the Little Ice Age and our current warm period) in between.

In fact, what we have right now, while we are not yet as warm as the peak of the Medieval Warming (a fact that Mann and others have tried to deny or obscure), is a superb climate that is making life better for people all over the world. It's the cold periods that cause famines and population drops, and promote plagues and floods.

We should be grateful.

Instead we are being hit with dire warnings, every one of which is either false or a normal part of the Earth's history; our business should be to adapt to the unavoidable solar-caused warming, not to destroy the worldwide economy in order to prevent something that human activity is not causing.

Because the "solutions" proposed by the alarmists do not solve anything -- and they admit it! The drastic proscriptions of the Kyoto Protocols, even if anybody were actually following them, would not have had any effect on Global Warming, even if it had been caused by human CO₂ emissions.

Do you understand that? When Al Gore goes on and on about what we must do to save the Earth, he knows -- and everybody involved with the Global Warming alarmist movement knows -- that none of their drastic proposals would have the slightest effect on Global Warming even if it worked they way their fantasies say it does.

So why do they propose it? There are many personal motives, of course, but when you look at the non-solution "solutions" they propose, the pattern is clear: They are not trying to stop global warming. They are trying to punish the Western democracies for being richer than the rest of the world.

There are solutions to that problem (and I believe it is a problem), but they involve stabilizing bad governments, increasing international trade, and making unsafe parts of the world safer so they can take part in the global boom.

Not only that, but many of the programs the alarmists advocate are actually needed for completely unrelated reasons. It is a mark of our folly and blindness that we continue to be so ridiculously oil-dependent all these years after the oil embargo of 1973.

For national security, environmental, futuristic, and personal-happiness reasons we should be working hard to change our automobile centered culture into more civilized patterns that invariably make people happier wherever they are tried.

It can't be done by cutting back on automobile emissions or even by raising taxes on gasoline -- especially because these changes are hardest on the poor and the marginal middle class.

But I'll write about how and why we need to cut back on our destructive love affair with that faithless mistress, the car, in another column.

What matters right here and now is that it is time for the world's scientists to apostatize from the Church of Global Warming. It is a false religion. It is based on lies, and its leading prophets know that it is because they're the ones faking the data or stretching it to ridiculous lengths to pretend that the real world hasn't already ruled against their claims.

It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data.

It is time for us to laugh at the ideologues who try to pretend that any criticism of Global Warming alarmism is idiotic and unscientific. They are the ones who ignore the data; they are the ones who believe on faith alone, without evidence; and, most important, they are the ones who are trying to stifle the opposition without answering it.

The Global Warming alarmists are the anti-science religion that is trying to forcibly indoctrinate and convert everyone while suppressing dissent. And the news media are their patsies, their stooges, their puppets.

Right now, let's start demanding that whenever the local newspaper or TV stations say anything about Global Warming, they back it up with actual data that takes into account the solar oscillations, the real climate history of the earth, and the facts about what CO₂ actually does in the atmosphere.

It's time to stop letting them pass along other people's lies. It's time for the news media to stop doing cocktail party "research" and dig down into the science and get it right.

Read It For Yourselves

I could not possibly array all the evidence here; you must read the books for yourself. Unstoppable Global Warming is a highly accessible book written for ordinary educated readers. It's the book I recommend most highly.

Shattered Consensus, on the other hand, uses the language of various disciplines of science to a degree that makes some chapters fairly difficult for untrained readers, though the key chapter I cited here, on the Hockey Stick Hoax, is quite readable and worth looking at by everybody.

Card knocks it out of the park again.  Go read the rest, 

... [a] surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

• The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.  

UPDATE AT END OF POST: this is the second person with ties to Boxer arrested in the past year on similar charges. 

Although Jeff Rosato was arrested and fired last Friday, this story has garnered very little attention from the mainstream press.

Do you think the media would have been equally disinterested if he worked for a Republican?

While you ponder, here are the details reported by the Associated Press Thursday:

A high-level aide to California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer has been charged in federal court with receiving and distributing child pornography.

The aide, Jeff Rosato, 32, was arrested last Friday. Boxer's office fired him that same day upon learning of the charges. [...]

"On Friday, the Justice Department informed our office of criminal charges made against a Senate employee. Sen. Boxer has zero tolerance for crimes against children, and the employee was immediately terminated," Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said in a statement Thursday. "Our office is cooperating fully with the Department of Justice in this matter."

Rosato had worked for Boxer since early 2005, beginning in her personal office as a legislative assistant and last year becoming a counsel to the Environment and Public Works Committee, which Boxer chairs. His areas of expertise included water policy, oceans and endangered species. [...]

According to an affidavit by FBI special agent Chad Gallagher supporting the criminal complaint and arrest warrant, Rosato was tracked through a now-defunct Google program called Google Hello. He allegedly exchanged hundreds of pornographic images with another user who'd been sharing child porn images and movies with an undercover detective posing as a 13-year-old boy. [...]

A preliminary review of Rosato's personal laptop computer, which was in his bedroom, found some 200 child porn images and some videos, according to the affidavit. "Many of the images and videos depict prepubescent boys engaged in sexual acts," the affidavit stated.

Disgusting and disgraceful to say the least. Yet, for the most part, this story has been ignored or buried.

From what I can tell via a LexisNexis search, only Fox News has reported this matter on television; I found no coverage by any of the broadcast networks, CNN, or MSNBC.

Think that would have been the case if the senator in question was a Republican?

As for print, it appears despite the AP's coverage, of the major newspapers, only the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post felt this story newsworthy, although neither gave it much space.

Most curious, Boxer's hometown paper the San Francisco Chronicle (she lives in Marin County just across the Golden Gate Bridge) felt this matter wasn't important enough to share with her most proximate constituents.

Liberal media bias? What liberal media bias?

*****Update: This is the second Boxer aide to be caught with child pornography in less than a year. As my colleague Richard Newcomb reported in May:

Famed left-wing radio personality Bernie Ward of San Francisco, a former priest who had one of the loudest and most consistently anti-George W. Bush voices in the entire nation, was found guilty of possessing and distributing child pornography on Friday and will serve at least five years in prison. 

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time of Ward's arrest, he used to work for Boxer (h/t NBer d4man):

From 1982 to 1985 he worked for then-Rep. Barbara Boxer as her chief legislative assistant.

So, this is the second incident in twelve months of a Boxer aide being involved with child pornography. Yet, for the most part, we hear crickets from the press.

In a new afterword to his 2001 book, Bill Ayers, former leader of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground, describes President-elect Barack Obama as a “family friend” and denies he wished his group had set off more bombs in the 1960s.

Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, adds few new details about his relationship with Obama in the afterword to Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist. The book is being reissued this month.

“We had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I’d made a small donation to his earliest political campaign,” he writes.

But right-wing commentators tried to use those connections to smear Obama, he says.

“Obama’s political rivals and enemies apparently saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest narrative about him, that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist, a sympathizer with extremism,” Ayers wrote.

Ayers was the purported “terrorist” Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was referring to when she claimed that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”

At a presidential debate, Obama described Ayers as engaging in “despicable acts with a radical domestic group,’’ adding that he “roundly condemned those acts."

He has also said that Ayers is “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.”

Yep.  Just a guy he knew from the neighborhood.

Chicago Sun-Times 

The mainstream press have been accused of being biased in favor of President-elect Barack Obama for months - a phenomenon now acknowledged by one of the nation's media heavyweights.

On Sunday, The Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, offered evidence of an "Obama tilt" in her own newspaper.

"Readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts," Ms. Howell wrote in her column.

"Now Howell gives the mea culpa in her first column after Election Day, when it's far too late to do anything about it. Where was Howell during the last three months? Why wait until the election is over to speak up? That's an answer in itself," countered Ed Morrissey of Hot Air.

"Now she tells us," quipped Byron York of National Review.

Revelations of a pro-Obama press are not new.

A Pew Research Center survey released in late October found, for example, that 70 percent of voters agreed that the press wanted Mr. Obama to win the White House; the figure was 62 percent even among Democratic respondents. The same analysis found a Democrat-friendly press dating back to the 1992 presidential election.

A current Harvard University analysis revealed that 77 percent of Americans say the press in(sic) politically biased; of that group, 5 percent said it skewed conservative.

With the help of an assistant, Ms. Howell examined The Post's political coverage since Nov. 11, 2007. "Numbers don't tell you everything, but they give you a sense of The Post's priorities," she said.

The number of Obama-centric stories was 946, compared with 786 centered on John McCain until the presidential nominations were completed in June, she found. From then to Election Day, the tally was 626 stories for Mr. Obama, 584 for Mr. McCain.

Mr. Obama was on the front page 176 times, Mr. McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both candidates.

"The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement," Ms. Howell said.

The Post also ran more photographs of Mr. Obama. Since June 4, Mr. Obama was in 311 Post photos and Mr. McCain in 282. The Democrat also got splashier treatment, garnering larger pictures (133 to 121, respectively) and more color shots (164 to 133).

She compared her results to a study of the national news media conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that from June 9 to Nov. 2, two-thirds of the campaign stories were about Mr. Obama compared with 53 percent for Mr. McCain.

Who'da thunk it?

Washington Times 

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  Yeah, well, you know what?  I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work, and I think that --

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Is that your job? You just talked about being a journalist!

MATTHEWS:  Yeah, it is my job. My job is to help this country.

Matthews wasn't done with his odd new job description . . . 

SCARBOROUGH: Your job is the make this presidency work?

MATTHEWS:  To make this work successfully.  This country needs a successful presidency.

News Busters

Obama's Cruel Tax on the Poor

Obama's "ideological" energy plan would cripple U.S. economy

Obama isn't cutting taxes for the poor, because they don't pay any.

Instead, he's planning to make it so expensive to generate electricity that only the rich can afford to use their appliances whenever they want.

Why? It's all in the name of Obama's True Belief in Global Warming. He says it himself -- he'll take coal off the table as an "ideological matter." Even if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, he's opposed to pursuing it.

He wants to put a huge penalty on companies that emit carbon -- which means that starting up new coal-powered electrical plants will be prohibitively expensive. In Obama's own words, "It will bankrupt them."

"Cap and trade" plans have already been tried, and they don't work -- they cost too much, and people find ways to get around them. But Obama promises us that he'll take that failed idea and be "as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else's" plan.

In other words, if it doesn't work, let's do more of it!

This is Obama the New Puritan. We've found his real religion: Political and Environmental Correctness.

It's more important to him to eliminate coal than to find practical solutions. Why? Because coal is "bad." Our groupthinking "intellectual" elite thinks they are post-religious -- but they believe in sin and hate the sinners.

(Real intellectuals are skeptical and look for evidence before they embrace an idea; global warming, like the rest of the dogmas of the extreme Left, are believed without proof, by faith alone.)

For the New Puritans, Global Warming is the vengeful god that must be placated. Our economy is the sacrifice to that deity. In the name of Global Warming, we must destroy our quality of life -- and, like sales tax, it will hurt the poorest people first and most.

Unfortunately, human-caused global warming exists only in the way Zeus exists -- in the imagination of believers who ignore obvious natural explanations. So this sacrifice of America's most bountiful and reliable energy source (until we can get solar and wind and nuclear up and running) is to a god that only seems real to people who are not serious about staying connected to reality.

Right now it is vital that we convert all our land transportation to electricity so we can wean ourselves from oil (and save that fuel for air transport). It will take far longer to convert away from coal as a source of that electricity -- so what we need right now, as a temporary measure, is to build more generating capacity.

Obama would freeze us where we are. Literally.

Our electrical system would be rationed, or as intermittent as in Saddam's Iraq or today's Nigeria -- oil-rich countries that did such a poor job of providing electricity to their citizens that it might go away for weeks, and when it comes back on, it's only for a few hours a day.

The poor would be hardest hit. When that electric bill is bigger than your house payment, something's got to go. What do you turn off? The fridge? The stove? Using the microwave is out of the question. Hair dryers? Gone. And you can forget watching DVDs or television.

It's Obama's first album: America Unplugged.

Orson Scott Card nails it again.  Read the rest.

The Ornery American

Personnel Board report

NOVEMBER 3, 2008 - 3:36 PM

Report on Monegan/Wooten

Report on complaint from Andree McLeod

"Summary of Public Findings and Recommendations":

1. There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act by making the decision to dismiss Department of Public Safety Commissioner Monegan and offering him instead the position of Director of the Alaska Beverage Control Board.

2. There is no probably cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in any other respect in connection with the employment of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten.

3. There is no basis upon which to refer the conduct of Governor Palin to any law enforcement agency in connection with this matter because Governor Palin did not commit the offenses of Interference with Official Proceedings or Official Misconduct.

4. There is no probable cause to believe that any other official of state government violated any substantive provision of the Ethics Act.

5. There is no legal basis or jurisdiction for conducting a “Due Process Hearing to Address Reputational Harm” as requested by former Commissioner Walter Monegan.

6. The Amended Complaint by the PSEA should be dismissed.

7. Independent Counsel recommends that the appropriate agency of State government address the issue of the private use of e-mails for government work and revisit the record retention policies of the Governor’s Office.

These findings differ from those of the Branchflower Report because Independent Counsel has concluded the wrong statute was used as a basis for the conclusions contained in the Branchflower Report, the Branchflower report misconstrued the available evidence and did not consider or obtain all of the material evidence that is required to properly reach findings.

And it was done by a Democrat with an agenda...

Alska Daily Newas

Madelyn Dunham, the grandmother of Senator Barack Obama, has died today from complications of cancer.  She passed away a day before voters go to the polls to determine whether Obama or John McCain will occupy the White House for the next four years:

A day before the presidential election, Barack Obama announced the death Monday of his grandmother, who helped raise him and who he praised as the cornerstone of his family. The Democratic presidential candidate announced the news in a joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. He said his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, had died peacefully after a battle with cancer.

He said: “She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances.”

The candidate learned of her death Monday morning while he was campaigning in Jacksonville, Fla. He planned to go ahead with campaign appearances.

It’s a good thing that Obama took a couple of days to see her last month.  Reports said that her health had seriously deteriorated, and Obama would not likely get another chance to see the woman who had been his primary guardian for a good portion of his childhood.  Unfortunately, those reports proved only too prescient.

Obama made the right decision at that time, and he’s making the right decision now.  With hours to go, both campaigns have to focus on getting out their message to voters in the battleground states and around the nation.  This country deserves a complete debate on the merits and demerits of each candidate, and there simply is no more time for delays.

Our prayers are with the Obama family and the candidate himself.  Mrs. Dunham sounds like a remarkable woman who led a good life.

Update: Those commenters “questioning the timing” need to get a life.  Those wishing ill on Senator Obama or his family (in the past or present day) will find their comments deleted.  Get classy and stay that way, please.

Indeed.  Leave the conspiracy garbage to DU and Kos.

Hot Air