#1
Destroying or deleting documents/files requested under FOIA - Criminal activity. It's not the crime, it's the cover up. Now Sen. Imhofe wants to hold hearings. Get the popcorn at the ready.
Posted by: Albert Ebbager8936 ||
11/24/2009 6:42 Comments ||
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#2
I don't think they were missing the plot, they were in on it.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/24/2009 7:03 Comments ||
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#3
they were in on it
Yep. Crisis sells columns and airtime. It hasn't changed in over a hundred years.
The year was 1897 and tensions were high in the United States due to the growing conflict between our close neighbor Cuba and Spain. William Randolph Hearst, already an established newspaper owner in San Francisco was engaged in a fierce battle for readers between his newly acquired paper the New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's highly successful New York World. Hearst knew that a war, particularly a war with the involvement of the United States would increase his newspaper distribution dramatically. Hearst championed the Cuban rebels and welcomed a U.S. declaration of war. He launched a scathing series of attacks in his daily editorials aimed at the Spanish government for its hostile actions and towards the United States government for not doing anything about it. He called for war at a time when the country was just healing from the wounds of the Civil War and was itching for an excuse to flex some military muscle. He spent untold sums of money to send reporters and corespondents to Cuba to capture the stories of Cuban insurrection. When his artist correspondent, Frederick Remington,arrived in Cuba to cover the anticipated Spanish-American war only to find there were no visible signs of war and cabled Hearst for permission to come home,Hearst reportedly cabled back, ''You provide the pictures, and I'll provide the war.''This strategy worked, as the Journal sold more than a million copies during theheight of the crisis. It also foretold of what was to come in Hearst's newspapers,the fact that a publisher and the President had an equal right to act for the nation.
Talk about corrupt and evil insurance companies. They're minor leaguers compared to the media.
#4
When I downloaded the pirated docs last Friday, I was truly shocked at them. They were obviously too good to be fakes.
This stuff is straight out of Thomas Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions', about how ego, careers and politics can influence even the scientific process in the hard sciences.
The trick is to get the political class to listen.
I tripled my popcorn order as soon as I read about this mess, Albert. :-D
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
11/24/2009 8:55 Comments ||
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#6
The thing is, all the true-believers, which includes all of the MSM, academia, and the elite ruling political class, write all of this off as "no big deal" and a "conspiracy" by AGW deniers. So they ignore it. I doubt this will change any minds. Those entrenched in the AGW hysteria will simply look the other way, just as they do with the most recent climate data that confirms the planet has not been warming in the last 11 years the way the "experts" said it would. They just fire back with some convoluted explanation about ice caps melting, ocean temperatures, and gulf stream cycles creating a "false positive" that global warming is not happening when it's actually a lot worse than we think.
#7
Jeebus, Al Gore is resembling Boss Hogg more and more each day. I guess the $100M sheared from the unwary sheep buys lots of good eating.
Posted by: ed ||
11/24/2009 10:32 Comments ||
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#8
I don't think they were missing the plot, they were in on it.
Deacon Blues nailed it. All I can add is that you're not going to see a shred of honest reporting in the American MSM (for ex., the NYT climate reporter who's one of the people in this email chain, or the WaPo reporter who's married to one of the Beltway's most prominent AGW alarmists). Hit the UK's newspapers for the straight scoop...even the Guardian's doing better than any of our fishwrappers.
Posted by: Ricky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) ||
11/24/2009 15:51 Comments ||
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#9
There will be investigations, at least at the universities, because they can't have allow bad science to be done in one department if they want to attract and keep good scientists in other departments. It's one thing to push a bit, that happens everywhere. It's quite another to collude in fudging and faking the data.
Scientists are aware that eventually History will know all, and they don't want to be associated with a Piltdown Man or a Lysenko.
It's East Anglia polytechnic were talking about here. It wasn't ever highly rated. That's why it was always called the Hadley centre, rather than the center for climate scamming, East Anglia poly.
ESPN? They don't usually comment on etiquette issues...
The right-wing wing-nut faction is blasting Barack Obama for bowing to His Imperial Majesty the Emperor. That's how you are supposed to address the guy; you are not supposed to speak his name, Akihito. The wing-nuts are correct in this case: Americans, do not bow before royalty! That has pretty much been our policy for the past 233 years. Only the Japanese can say why Japan should still have a royal figurehead, much less with the goofy title "emperor." The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden and other nations can say why figurehead royalty still exists. But Americans don't bow to aristocrats. Our national spirit rejects the legitimacy of inherited positions.
Local custom, you say? TMQ does not much like Dick Cheney, but when he met Akihito in 2007, they shook hands. When Norman Schwarzkopf received an honorary knighthood in 1991, he said he would do so only if he were not required to kneel, because Americans do not prostrate themselves before royalty, even the royalty of good friends. Elizabeth II gave Schwarzkopf a box containing emblems of his knighthood, then they shook hands. If Akihito had bowed back to Obama, maybe that would have been OK as local custom. (You take turns bowing in Japanese culture.) If Obama had bowed to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, the democratically elected leader of Japan, and Hatoyama had bowed back, that would have been fine -- Hatoyama represents the free choice of his people. For the democratically elected leader of the United States to humble himself before a royal who acquired his wealth and status entirely by accident of birth, while the "emperor" looks on smiling, is outlandish.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/24/2009 12:37 ||
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#1
> Our national spirit rejects the legitimacy of inherited positions.
#2
You've got a semi-point, BP - but there's an essential difference.
Royalty is royalty just by being born. The Kennedys, Bushes, et al., had to at least do the rubber chicken circuit to get their posts - and the people can (with the Kennedys, probably won't, but can) toss 'em out on their ears.
I think most countries with figurehead royalty can't vote out the royals quite so easily.
Don't get me wrong - I love England (at least the one I knew) and think if y'all want royalty, it's y'all's business.
Queen Elizabeth is quite impressive (though I can't say the same for her No. 1 son). The anecdote in the story about her and Schwarzkopf says a lot about her character, as did her behavior during WWII. But she doesn't have to run every few years for her office, as even the most entrenched American pol has to (even it's pretty much a slam dunk).
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
11/24/2009 13:25 Comments ||
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#3
It's not inherited here. It's the family business. The record of the Adams in Massachusetts predates the Kennedys. Ohio has its Tafts. Shorter runs on the Browns in California and Cuomos in New York. Not much different than families with a history of some military service, though most don't make it a lifetime career. It's done because we've had other opportunities to apply our energies to that reaped acceptable rewards and have left the political arena to others. The danger for the present ruling caste is that if they keep the economy down, others far more competent will turn to their venue to seek their fortune at their expense.
#5
"The danger for the present ruling caste is that if they keep the economy down, others far more competent will turn to their venue to seek their fortune at their expense."
What's the downside, P2k?
And can we hurry it up a little?
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
11/24/2009 14:33 Comments ||
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#6
Yall are assuming he thinks of himself as an American.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/24/2009 18:49 Comments ||
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Adopting the snottiest tone imaginable, the New York Times pronounces with an almost audible sniff:
The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they wont be posted here.
What documents? Revelations about Stalin's famines? Classified information about wiretapping terrorists? The Pentagon Papers? That ultra-leftist Unibomber Manifesto?
Why no, you silly! They're talking about those hacked emails between scientists that strongly suggest that, as many of us have been saying all along, Al Gore's highly touted "global warming" is actually the Loch Ness Monster of weather.
You know? The emails that posit that the IPCC record of temperatures during the last millenium were based on a "crude fax". The ones that "appear to reveal not one, not two, but three real scandals, of increasing importance."
All the news that's fit to print. Except when it isn't. Clear?
#1
Rasmussen: The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 27% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15. This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama (see trends).
Overall, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. That matches the lowest level of total approval yet measured for this president. Eighty-one percent (81%) of Democrats approve as do 33% of unaffiliated voters. Eighty-three percent (83%) of Republicans disapprove.
Among all voters, 54% now disapprove.
Posted by: ed ||
11/24/2009 13:38 Comments ||
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#2
Does anyone actually watch O-no on the TV or listen to his speeches? Seeing his photographs in the newspaper, bowing to filthy dictators and monarchs is about as much fun as I can stand.
Rich Lowry There was real drama Saturday -- the same drama playing out every day the Democrats persist in the political and fiscal heedlessness that characterizes their push for ObamaCare. It's as if they don't realize that they're led by a marginally popular president (dipping below 50 percent public approval in the Gallup poll last week for the first time), are deeply unpopular themselves and are pushing for legislation that is opposed by more people than support it in almost every single opinion poll.
But they do realize it -- they just don't care. They've talked themselves into the ludicrously self-delusional notion that what ails them and the president is that they haven't yet passed the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and Medicare cuts that finance (albeit incompletely) ObamaCare.
This will long be a case study in the annals of abnormal political psychology. Tax hikes undid George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Bush lost his presidency, Clinton his congressional majority), and Medicare cuts undid Newt Gingrich (taking the air out of his "Republican revolution"). Obama's Democrats are prescribing themselves a strong dose of both, in an exercise in self-destructive quackery.
They believe that Obama can't afford failure, that's it's the defeat of ClintonCare that killed the Democrats in 1994. But such are the grave political and substantive flaws of ObamaCare that Democrats can't afford success or failure.
If they pass it, they have tax hikes and Medicare cuts around their necks, as well as the increased insurance premiums the bill is sure to cause. If they fail, they've demonstrated their own ineffectual ideological fervor, while still putting themselves on record in favor of tax increases and Medicare cuts.
The Democrats got themselves into this hellish dilemma by not taking the obvious step of scaling back the bill once it became clear it engendered fierce public resistance. Take half a loaf, disarm your critics, call it victory, hail yourselves at the signing ceremony -- and come back for more later. It's not complicated.
Instead, they've stayed on a maximalist course. They've pushed to the point where the effort could collapse -- and, even if they succeed, they'll have done themselves and the nation's fiscal future grave harm.
This is the other element of the drama that inheres in the health-care debate: If it passes, people years and even decades from now will look back and ask, "What were they thinking?" It's a rare opportunity to see a train wreck at its inception, as the conductors make the decisions with malice afterthought that will ramify disastrously.
Everyone agrees that the nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path. So Democrats will add a $2.5 trillion entitlement to hurry us further along the path. Tax hikes that could go to reducing the deficit they'll plow into the new entitlement. Medicare cuts that could shore up Medicare's own shaky finances, they'll plow into the entitlement too (if the cuts happen at all). The new entitlement will grow at a projected 8 percent a year, and it's only through gimmickry it's made to look deficit neutral in the first decade. The cost curve of health care will be bent up, and insurance premiums, too, will rise. For all of this, ObamaCare will still leave 24 million people without health insurance.
If nothing else, watching the Democrats sacrifice so much on behalf of this monstrosity is fascinating, appalling -- and dramatic. Common sense suggests that they shouldn't do it. The basic laws of political physics say they can't do it. And yet on they march.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/24/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
"What were they thinking?"
It's about power, control, and self worship, stupid. The rest is all show.
Six years ago I wrote a book called Uncle Sam's Plantation. I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside the welfare state and my own transformation out of it.
I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas -- a poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism.
I talked about government programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF), Section 8 Housing, and Food Stamps.
A vast sea of perhaps well-intentioned government programs, all initially set into motion in the 1960s, that were going to lift the nation's poor out of poverty.
A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mindsets from "How do I take care of myself?" to "What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?"
Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems -- the kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.
The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken black families.
Through God's grace, I found my way out. It was then that I understood what freedom meant and how great this country is.
I had the privilege of working on welfare reform in 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed 50 percent.
I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of our poor black communities and replacing it with wealth-producing American capitalism.
But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction.
Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich American on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.
Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation and they have said, "Thank you, Suh."
Now, instead of thinking about what creative things need to be done to serve customers, they are thinking about what they have to tell Massah in order to get their cash.
There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president on the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
Worse, socialism seems to be the element of our new young president. And maybe even more troubling, our corporate executives seem happy to move onto the plantation.
In an op-ed on the opinion page of the Washington Post, Mr. Obama is clear that the goal of his trillion dollar spending plan is much more than short term economic stimulus.
"This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, healthcare, and education."
Perhaps more incredibly, Obama seems to think that government taking over an economy is a new idea. Or that massive growth in government can take place "with unprecedented transparency and accountability."
Yes, sir, we heard it from Jimmy Carter when he created the Department of Energy, the Synfuels Corporation, and the Department of Education.
Or how about the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 -- The War on Poverty -- which President Johnson said "...does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty."
Trillions of dollars later, black poverty is the same. But black families are not, with triple the incidence of single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births.
It's not complicated. Americans can accept Barack Obama's invitation to move onto the plantation. Or they can choose personal responsibility and freedom.
Does anyone really need to think about what the choice should be?
#1
Well presented relating of the Dem's favorite tool of individual destruction.
How else can we explain third-generation welfare recipients. Their dependancy has become a family "trade" with generational transference of how the business of welfare, er, works.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Adopting the snottiest tone imaginable, the New York Times pronounces with an almost audible sniff:
There was real drama Saturday -- the same drama playing out every day the Democrats persist in the political and fiscal heedlessness that characterizes their push for ObamaCare. It's as if they don't realize that they're led by a marginally popular president (dipping below 50 percent public approval in the Gallup poll last week for the first time), are deeply unpopular themselves and are pushing for legislation that is opposed by more people than support it in almost every single opinion poll.
