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Huffington Post, of all places, says an apology for his lies will be accepted from - - - Al Gore!
You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.
Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.
What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:
1. First, the expression “climate change” itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. During the Holocene there have been numerous sub-periods with dramatically varied climate, such as the warm Holocene Optimum (7,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., during which humanity began to flourish, and advance technologically), the warm Roman Optimum (200 B.C. to 400 A.D., a time of abundant crops that promoted the empire), the cold Dark Ages (400 A.D. to 900 A.D., during which the Nile River froze, major cities were abandoned, the Roman Empire fell apart, and pestilence and famine were widespread), the Medieval Warm Period (900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., during which agriculture flourished, wealth increased, and dozens of lavish examples of Gothic architecture were created), the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850, during much of which plague, crop failures, witch burnings, food riots — and even revolutions, including the French Revolution — were the rule of thumb), followed by our own time of relative warmth (1850 to present, during which population has increased, technology and medical advances have been astonishing, and agriculture has flourished).
So, no one needs to say the words “climate” and “change” in the same breath — it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. That is the redundancy to which I alluded. The lie is the suggestion that climate has ever been stable. Mr. Gore has used a famously inaccurate graph, known as the “Mann Hockey Stick,” created by the scientist Michael Mann, showing that the modern rise in temperatures is unprecedented, and that the dramatic changes in climate just described did not take place. They did. One last thought on the expression “climate change”: It is a retreat from the earlier expression used by alarmists, “manmade global warming,” which was more easily debunked. There are people in Mr. Gore’s camp who now use instances of cold temperatures to prove the existence of “climate change,” which is absurd, obscene, even. …
While we’re talking about fairy tales, WSJ Editors remind Dems of some facts about aggressive interrogation techniques.
Barack Obama’s choice of former Congressman Leon Panetta to lead the CIA at least puts a grownup, if also an intelligence rookie, in that crucial job. It also means that Mr. Panetta and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will soon have to decide if they want to join the left-wing crusade to purge their agencies of anyone who had anything to do with “torture.”
In particular, at their nomination hearings they’re likely to be asked to support a “truth commission” on the Bush Administration’s terrorist interrogation policies. We hope they have the good sense to resist. And if they need any reason to push back, they could start by noting the Members of Congress who would be on the witness list to raise their right hands.
Beginning in 2002, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats (as well as Republicans) on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were thoroughly, and repeatedly, briefed on the CIA’s covert antiterror interrogation programs. They did nothing to stop such activities, when they weren’t fully sanctioning them. If they now decide the tactics they heard about then amount to abuse, then by their own logic they themselves are complicit. Let’s review the history the political class would prefer to forget. …
Kathryn Jean Lopez with a great Corner post on Obama’s CIA pick.
“Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books. I asked him this morning what he thought of the Panetta pick and what Obama should be thinking about the CIA.
Q: Would Leon Panetta have been your CIA chief choice?
A: He’s an excellent choice because he will be loyal to the president first, not to the CIA. Mr. Obama needs someone who can be trusted, a person who will support him when the going gets tough.
A “safe” choice, viewed as inoffensive by the CIA’s top bureaucrats, would have been dangerous. Directors Tenet and Hayden were placid Washington civil servants of neutral loyalties, quickly coopted by the CIA’s bureaucracy. A military officer might have had good leadership experience but would have lacked sound partisan political connections.
The choice is a brave one because it can open Mr. Obama to charges of appointing a loyalist to a crucial post. But that is exactly what is needed at this time. …
Contentions post on worrying about the “Arab street.”
… “Inflamed” is a good description of the Arab street as is. They were “inflamed” over the Mohammed cartoons, they were “inflamed” over the bogus “Koran in a toilet” story Newsweek peddled, they were “inflamed” over Theo Van Gogh’s film, they were “inflamed” over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they were “inflamed” by a whole host of things. One time I distinctly remember the Arab street being happy instead of “inflamed” was on 9/11, when we saw images of people rejoicing and literally dancing in the streets. So it seems that “inflaming the Arab street” might be a good indicator that you’re doing something right.
So far Israel has seriously degraded Hamas’s weapons, leadership, and infrastructure and trisected the Gaza Strip in its drive to cripple the terrorist group. Hamas has lost hundreds of fighters and tremendous stockpiles of weapons. Its ability to wage war against Israel is seriously impaired. That is the only result Israel need note.
Words from David Warren on Gaza and Hamas.
… What has happened in Gaza is horrible. It is not even necessary to look at the sentimentalized atrocity pictures, which are the specialty of Gaza’s freelance photographers, to understand how horrible. Of course we condemn war, and do so most effectively through literature and art. But it is trite to condemn war without qualification — when everyone knows that war is hell. And, trite moral posturing is itself an evil.
Moreover, in the case of recent Israeli operations in Gaza, it is not enough to justify them, by mentioning the (literally) thousands of rockets Hamas has been pumping into every Israeli town within their range, expressly to massacre the defenceless. This, and this alone, necessitated decisive Israeli action. A government has a solemn duty to protect its people from gratuitous acts of violence. The Israeli government is unambiguously justified in taking whatever measures are necessary to make the rocketing stop. Hamas carries the entire moral responsibility for putting the people of Gaza in harm’s way.
But we should not stop at justifying Israeli action. As their allies against a common enemy — against Islamists who consider the West to be their ultimate target — we should be offering our help and encouragement for the completion of the stated Israeli task: the complete annihilation of the Hamas organization. For by no other means can peace be obtained across the Gaza frontier.
An organization that persistently declares Israel has no right to exist, and persistently acts upon this premise, cannot be negotiated with. The Israelis have the material means to destroy Hamas, and therefore the moral imperative to do so. …
Want to know why governments can’t pay their bills? The last paragraph in this pull quote from Bill McGurn nails it.
It seems not to have dented the consciousness of our political class that New Jersey’s dismal economic performance might be linked to the state’s tax policy. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, New Jersey is home to the most hostile tax environment for business in the nation. We also bear the nation’s highest burden of state and local taxes. And on the list of the 10 counties with the highest median property tax, we claim seven of them.
During the last recession, we began to feel the full weight of these burdens. Other states responded by cutting back on spending and getting their houses in order. Not New Jersey. Then-Gov. Jim McGreevey added to the burden by borrowing and spending and raising the corporate tax — including the imposition of an alternative minimum tax on business. And we’ve been paying for these bad choices ever since.
Mr. Obama might pay special attention to what these measures have meant for jobs, especially given his expressed concern for the struggling middle class. Though the state did ultimately emerge from recession in 2003, private-sector job creation since then has been a pale shadow of what we enjoyed after the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s.
Of course, there was one area where jobs did grow. From 2000 to 2007, says the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, the government added 54,800 jobs. To put that in proper perspective, that works out to 93% of all jobs created in New Jersey over those seven years.
Contentions on Thomas Friedman.
Pickerhead was criticized for yesterday’s News Biscuit satire about the Swiss man who, rather than committ suicide went to one of Great Britain’s hospitals for a minor procedure with the idea they’d kill him, instead of doing the deed himself. Today the Telegraph says it’s no joke.
NHS records show that 3,645 people died as a result of “patient safety incidents” – including botched operations and the outbreak of infections – between April 2007 and March 2008. The figure was 1,370 higher than two years earlier.
Patient groups have warned that the true toll is likely to be higher because some hospitals do not record all incidents. …