Not Just Disgusting, Despicable.

From Pete Hegseth posted at The Weekly Standard:

Tomorrow--as General David Petraeus provides his Iraq assessment to Congress--the antiwar group MoveOn.org is running a full-page advertisement in the New York Times under the headline: "General Petraeus or General Betray us? Cooking the books for the White House."

Let's be clear: MoveOn.org is suggesting that General Petraeus has 'betrayed' his country. This is disgusting. To attack as a traitor an American general commanding forces in war because his 'on the ground' experience does not align with MoveOn.org's political objectives is utterly shameful. It shows contempt for America's military leadership, as well as for the troops who have confidence in him, as our fellow soldiers in Iraq certainly do.

General Petraeus has served this country for over 35 years with honor, distinction, and integrity. And this is not just about General Petraeus. After all, if General Petraeus is "cooking the books," then the entire military chain of command in Baghdad, and all the staff, military and civilian, who have been working with General Petraeus are complicit, since Petraeus did not write his report in isolation. They are all, apparently, 'betray[ing] us.'

MoveOn.org has been working closely with the Democratic congressional leadership --as an article in today's Sunday New York Times Magazine makes clear. And consider this comment by a Democratic senator from Friday's Politico: "'No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV,' noted one Democratic senator, who spoke on the condition on anonymity. 'The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us.'

Senators Reid and Durbin, the leaders of the Democrats in the Senate held a press conference to trash Petraeus's report before the general has even appeared before Congress.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in his party's weekly radio address today that he expects the Petraeus report to be nothing more than the Bush administration's selective take on the surge.

"Before the report arrives in Congress, it will pass through the White House spin machine, where facts are often ignored or twisted, and intelligence is cherry-picked," said Reid.

On Friday, Reid went so far as to question not only the true source of the report but also the four-star general's honesty.

"He has made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual," Reid said. "I have every belief that this good man will give us what he feels is the right thing to do in his report, but it's not his report anymore. It's Bush's report."

Reid's criticisms have been echoed by his fellow Democratic leaders in Congress.

In a speech Friday at the Center for National Policy, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said, "President Bush is preparing to tell the nation, once again, that his strategy in Iraq is succeeding. We know what the Bush-Petraeus report will say: The surge is working. Be patient. The reality is despite heroic efforts by U.S. troops, the Bush surge is not working."

Across the Hill in the House of Representatives, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., joined his Senate colleagues in claiming the Petraeus report would be little more than a work of fiction.

"

Instead of a new strategy for Iraq, the Bush administration is cherry-picking the data to support their political objectives and preparing a report that will offer another defense of the president's strategy," said Emanuel, the House Democratic Caucus Chair. "We don't need a report that wins the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction."

Joe Biden was on Meet the Press yesterday singing with the anti-Petraus chorus.

President Bush's war strategy is failing and the top military commander in Iraq is "dead flat wrong" for warning against major changes, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Sunday.

"The reality is that, although there has been some mild progress on the security front, there is, in fact, no real security in Baghdad or Anbar province, where I was dealing with the most serious problem, sectarian violence," said Biden, a 2008 presidential candidate who recently returned from Iraq.

As Pete Hegseth, an Iraq War veteran and founder of Vets for Freedom writes,

Let's be clear: MoveOn.org is suggesting that General Petraeus has 'betrayed' his country. This is disgusting. To attack as a traitor an American general commanding forces in war because his 'on the ground' experience does not align with MoveOn.org's political objectives is utterly shameful. It shows contempt for America's military leadership, as well as for the troops who have confidence in him, as our fellow soldiers in Iraq certainly do.

General Petraeus has served this country for over 35 years with honor, distinction, and integrity. And this is not just about General Petraeus. After all, if General Petraeus is "cooking the books," then the entire military chain of command in Baghdad, and all the staff, military and civilian, who have been working with General Petraeus are complicit, since Petraeus did not write his report in isolation. They are all, apparently, 'betray[ing] us.'

So, MoveOn.org, in effect, calls a highly respected general who was confirmed 81-0 by the U.S. Senate a traitor, but we can't question their patriotism? And, it seems, the Senate Democrats tacitly agree with the organization that said " "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." Sure enough, they were right.

Is Ron Paul and Unhinged Idiot Synonyms?

I know, it is a rhetorical question. To think that this poor excuse for a Legislator is in the government is bad enough but the amazing thing about him is that he has a few dozen supporters whose last name isn't Paul.

One answer

to my four questions. There is no such thing as the normal, ideal global temperature because it has changed continuously for millenniums but all you will get from the AGW crown is dogma and Al Gore as its oracle. The scream that skeptics have been paid 10 Million dollars for their studies and are willing to sell out their reputations for chump change yet they fail to mentions that AGW proponents have received 50 Billion dollars for their false research which is being disproven brick by brick everyday.

They will not mention that James Hansen, who claimed Bush was politicizing Global Warming, giving money to Kerry etal received $250,000 from Teresa Heinz Kerry through her Heinz Foundation. But don't accuse him of being a political hack just because he screwed up the latest data and refused to provide his algorithms to other researchers so they could simply check his work, hiding his own errors from them and distorting the science he claims to care about oh-so-much until some persistent researchers went to the great trouble of reconstructing his algorithms themselves. All with public Government funds. But anyone who tries to refute the findings and review the so-called consensus are vilified as "deniers' and threatened if they don't just STFU.

In the meantime, the common people are supposed to change their lifestyles and lower their standard of living while the the priest and priestesses of the Church of Gaia offer to sell the indulgences to the sinners in the form of Carbon Credits or Offsets so that they may continue to sin but feel better about it while telling the rest of us to walk and eat less.

Four Questions.

1. What is the accepted "Normal" temperature of the globe?
2. What is considered the "Ideal" temperature of the globe?
3. Why?
4. According to who based on what "Settled Facts"?

The answer to these questions would do a lot in convincing me to change my opinion. According to some of the AGW crowd, if I am reading it right, it is a damned good thing we killed off all those wretched CO2, methane producing Bison in the 1800s, otherwise we may have cooked long ago.

Wheels coming off of Global Warming Wagon...Updated

There is going to be a lot of egg on faces and crow consumed it seems. First let's take a look at this revealing study. The authors just don't know how really revealing it is.Natural forces offset global warming last two years: study

Natural weather variations have offset the effects of global warming for the past couple of years and will continue to keep temperatures flat through 2008, a study released Thursday said.

But global warming will begin in earnest in 2009, and a couple of the years between 2009 and 2014 will eclipse 1998, the warmest year on record to date [proven to be false just this week-ed. see below], in the heat stakes, British meteorologists said.

Existing global climate computer models tend to underestimate the effects of natural forces on climate change, so for this analysis, Met Office experts tweaked their model to better reflect the impact of weather systems such as La Nina, or fluctuations in ocean heat and circulation.

Instead of using approximations, they used real data on the state of the ocean and the atmosphere to generate forecasts of climate change for the decade beginning in 2005 and running through 2014.

The projections suggested that while man-made greenhouse gases would raise temperatures over the long run, cooler water in the tropical Pacific and a resistance to warming in the Southern Ocean would counteract the effect of global warming in the early years of the decade.

The findings fit with the weather patterns seen so far, said Doug Smith, a research scientist at the UK's national weather service, the Met Office, in Exeter, Devon.

To test the accuracy of their new and improved computer model, Smith and his colleagues decided to run a series of "hindcasts," or forecasts for the years 1982-2001.

The new model yielded far more accurate "projections" for global surface temperatures than the previous model, Smith said.

The paper appears in the journal Science.

The editors write this:

"Stirrings in the North Atlantic Ocean today that have nothing to do with the strengthening greenhouse-just natural jostlings of the climate system-could lead to drought in Africa's Sahel in a decade or two, they recognized. ... until now, climate forecasters who worry about what greenhouse gases could be doing to climate have ignored what's happening naturally. Most looked 100 years ahead, far enough so that they could safely ignore what's happening now. No more. In this week's issue, researchers take their first stab at forecasting climate a decade ahead with current conditions in mind. The result is a bit disquieting. Natural climate variability driven by the ocean appears to have held greenhouse warming at bay the past few years ..."

And then for good measure add this in order to not be excommunicated from the new Church.

"but the warming, according to the forecast, should come roaring back before the end of the decade..." [italics added]

Now about that statement that 1998 was the hottest year recorded. 1998 was not the hottest year; that distinction goes to the year 1934. Here's the nut of the whole thing from Anthony Watts:

Here's a story of scientific investigation and discovery I'm proud to have had a small part in.

Regular readers may remember that I posted about a climate station in Detroit Lakes MN last week, surveyed by volunteer Don Kostuch, and cross posted it to the website http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1828#comments that had two air conditioner units right next to it. It looked like an obvious cause and effect because in 1999 on May 5th, it was determined that the a/c units were moved off the roof of the radio station where this station resides and moved them to the ground where the temperature sensor is close by.

Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the "corrected" data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data..

Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is happening. "This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error."

He further refines his argument showing the distribution of the error, and the problems with the USHCN temperature data. He also sends an email to NASA GISS advising of the problem...

He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings of temperature are calculated separately.)

So James Hansen, who claimed Bush was politicizing Global Warming, refused to provide his algorithms to other researchers so they could simply check his work, hiding his own errors from them and distorting the science he claims to care about oh-so-much until some persistent researchers went to the great trouble of reconstructing his algorithms themselves. Need I say read the whole thing?

For even more thoughts on this hoax/scam/dogma/religion/science, try here, here and here. I have much more and am suffering from overload. This just keeps getting better and better. An aside to Al Gore, would you like that crow baked or fried?

Update: Coyote Blog has some more information and several good links in the post. He also points us to two more posts of his that are worth reading.
"For more, please see my Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming or, if you have less time, my 60-second argument for why one should be skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming theory." Good information there for all of us heretics and blasphemers.

NYT...Get your terrorist tips here in one handy spot.

Mind Boggling
Blog solicits ideas for terrorists on how to be the most effective. Truly freaking amazing.
Update: Some more mind boggling goodies, this time from the left coast LAT.

The Sky is falling. Slavery Returns!

Well, not exactly. The hyperbole coming from some of the left and the NAACP would make you think so however. Regarding the recent SCOTUS decision about forced integration in the K-12 schools for the purpose of "diversity", the Supremes made a minor adjustment. In his majority opinion, Justice Roberts said this..."The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." That should be in the next edition of Bartletts. But you would think that the world was coming to an end if you read this editorial in the NYT.

The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality...Yesterday, the court’s radical new majority turned its back on that proud tradition in a 5-4 ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. It has been some time since the court, which has grown more conservative by the year, did much to compel local governments to promote racial integration. But now it is moving in reverse, broadly ordering the public schools to become more segregated.

I call Bullshit. So does Juan Williams in the very same NYT.

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

Read both columns and tell me who is the Chicken Little here.

Bi-partisanship in Action

The overwhelming defeat of the Amnesty Bill can't be laid at the feet of just one party. 16 Democrats and 1 Independent voted Nay
12 Republicans and 1 Independent voted Yea
Sorry Harry, that dog won't hunt. I think even the Democrats were turned off by the back-room secret shenanigans going on and the heavy handed tactics used by Reid and company.

Amnesty Bill Goes Down in Flames

It wasn't even close. Apparently the grassroots efforts against this travesty was heard by many Senators. And there are some strange bedfellows on the nay side of the vote. Many of the former ayes switched because of the public outcry. Find the 53 nays and the 46 ayes here.Thank those who supported you. We should show our pleasure with the outcome just like we show our displeasure.

White House Report Hides the Real Costs

In another follow-up on the Heritage report about the costs of this amnesty bill, Robert Rector answers the White House.It is a long response but well worth reading. An excerpt:

Last week, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report entitled "Immigration's Economic Impact" which defended the President's promotion of the Senate's "comprehensive" immigration legislation (S.1348).[1] On June 25, the White House issued a follow-up editorial elaborating on the points made in the CEA report.[2] These publications criticized Heritage Foundation research on the fiscal costs of low skill immigration and amnesty.

The Heritage research criticized by the White House made the following basic points about immigration and its costs:

1. Individuals without a high school degree impose significant net costs (the extent to which benefits and services received exceed taxes paid) on taxpayers.
2. The net fiscal cost of families of immigrants who lack a high school degree is not markedly different from the net fiscal cost of families of non-immigrants who lack a high school degree.
3. Immigrants are disproportionately low skilled; one-third of all immigrants and 50 to 60 percent of illegal immigrants lack a high school degree.
4. Unlike low and moderate skill immigrants, immigrants with a college education will pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits; therefore. immigration policy should increase the number of high skill immigrants entering the country and sharply decrease the number of low skill, fiscally dependent immigrants.[3]

Heritage research has shown that low skill immigrants (those without a high school degree) receive, on average, three dollars in government benefits and services for each dollar of taxes they pay. This imbalance imposes a net cost of $89 billion per year on U.S. taxpayers. Over a lifetime, the typical low skill immigrant household will cost taxpayers $1.2 million.[4]

Future taxpayer costs will be increased by policies which increase (1) the number of low skill immigrants entering the U.S., (2) the length of low skill immigrants' stays in the U.S., or (3) low skill immigrants' access to government benefits and services. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the Senate immigration bill does:

• The bill would triple the flow of low skill chain immigration into the U.S.
• By granting amnesty to at least 12 million illegal immigrants, the bill would greatly lengthen their stay in the U.S., particularly during retirement years.
• The bill would grant illegal immigrants access to Social Security and Medicare benefits and, over time, to more than 60 different federal welfare programs.
• Although the bill does not currently permit Z visa holders to bring spouses and children in from abroad, this would likely be amended at some future point on humanitarian grounds, resulting in another 5 million predominantly low-skill immigrants entering the country.

Heritage research has concluded that the cost of amnesty alone will be $2.6 trillion once the amnesty recipients reach retirement age.

In an effort to defend the Senate bill, the White has contested these conclusions. As described below, many of the assertions made by the White House are inaccurate or misleading.