The Real Story of the Global Warming Hoax

The Afghan Challenge

Democrats have long called it 'the central front.' Will they retreat from it?

FOR YEARS, Democrats excoriated the Bush administration for not devoting sufficient resources to Afghanistan. But now that Barack Obama has taken office, some seem to be having second thoughts. "Our original goal was to go in there and take on al-Qaeda. . . . It was not to adopt the 51st state of the United States," said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Kerry pioneered the Democratic argument to send more troops during his own presidential campaign in 2004. Now he says "the parallels" to Vietnam "just really keep leaping out in so many different ways."

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates seconded that skepticism at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose," he said, "because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest."

We're happy to agree that Afghanistan should not become the 51st state, or Valhalla -- but we're not sure who or what Mr. Kerry and Mr. Gates have in mind. So far as we know, the American objective in Afghanistan since 2002 has been pretty much what Mr. Gates says it should be: "an Afghan people who do not provide a safe haven for al-Qaeda, who reject the rule of the Taliban and support the legitimate government they have elected and in which they have a stake."

The problem, as Mr. Gates acknowledged, is that meeting that aim necessitates such tasks as stabilizing western Pakistan, rooting out the opium trade, vastly expanding the Afghan army and constructing a workable legal system. That, in turn, will require more money, more troops, many more years of commitment -- and higher American casualties.

"Bottom line is, it's going to be tough, it's going to be difficult, in many ways harder than Iraq," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) put it to Mr. Gates. "Do you agree with that?" "Yes," the secretary responded.

So why make it sound as if the Obama administration is scaling back U.S. ambitions? Part of this may be pure politics, to assure the antiwar left -- not to mention other Americans -- that the United States is not about to follow Russia and Britain into an Afghan quagmire. Yet the new administration, and supporters such as Mr. Kerry, ought to recognize a greater political need, which is to make clear to the country that the war against terrorism -- whatever it is now called -- did not end on Jan. 20 and that Afghanistan in particular will require years more patience and sacrifice to get right.

The way to avoid a quagmire is not to hold back on U.S. military reinforcements or development aid but to assemble a national civil-military plan that integrates war-fighting with reconstruction and political reconciliation. As Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) points out, such a plan was the foundation of the U.S. recovery in Iraq, but the model has never been applied in Afghanistan. That's largely because the United States must share authority with some 40 allies, many of which place strict limits on what their troops may do, insist on managing their own development programs, or both. The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, mired in corruption and increasingly at odds with U.S. commanders, is also not on board.

Afghanistan doesn't need to become the 51st state, but it does need a single, coherent, integrated plan to become a state strong enough to resist the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Creating one will require some aggressive diplomacy and maybe a little political china-breaking. That's something for which the State Department's new envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, is known. But low-balling the scale of the challenge, or the costs it may incur, won't help.

An $800 Billion Mistake

MARTIN FELDSTEIN

As a conservative economist, I might be expected to oppose a stimulus plan. In fact, on this page in October, I declared my support for a stimulus. But the fiscal package now before Congress needs to be thoroughly revised. In its current form, it does too little to raise national spending and employment. It would be better for the Senate to delay legislation for a month, or even two, if that's what it takes to produce a much better bill. We cannot afford an $800 billion mistake.

Start with the tax side. The plan is to give a tax cut of $500 a year for two years to each employed person. That's not a good way to increase consumer spending. Experience shows that the money from such temporary, lump-sum tax cuts is largely saved or used to pay down debt. Only about 15 percent of last year's tax rebates led to additional spending.

The proposed business tax cuts are also likely to do little to increase business investment and employment. The extended loss "carrybacks" are primarily lump-sum payments to selected companies. The bonus depreciation plan would do little to raise capital spending in the current environment of weak demand because the tax benefits in the early years would be recaptured later.

Instead, the tax changes should focus on providing incentives to households and businesses to increase current spending. Why not a temporary refundable tax credit to households that purchase cars or other major consumer durables, analogous to the investment tax credit for businesses? Or a temporary tax credit for home improvements? In that way, the same total tax reduction could produce much more spending and employment.

Postponing the scheduled increase in the tax on dividends and capital gains would raise share prices, leading to increased consumer spending and, by lowering the cost of capital, more business investment.

On the spending side, the stimulus package is full of well-intended items that, unfortunately, are not likely to do much for employment. Computerizing the medical records of every American over the next five years is desirable, but it is not a cost-effective way to create jobs. Has anyone gone through the (long) list of proposed appropriations and asked how many jobs each would create per dollar of increased national debt?

The largest proposed outlays amount to just writing unrestricted checks to state governments. Nearly $100 billion would result from increasing the "Medicaid matching rate," a technique for reducing states' Medicaid costs to free up state money for spending on anything governors and state legislators want. An additional $80 billion would be given out for "state fiscal relief." Will these vast sums actually lead to additional spending, or will they merely finance state transfer payments or relieve state governments of the need for temporary tax hikes or bond issues?

The plan to finance health insurance premiums for the unemployed would actually increase unemployment by giving employers an incentive to lay off workers rather than pay health premiums during a time of weak demand. And this supposedly two-year program would create a precedent that could be hard to reverse.

A large fraction of the stimulus proposal is devoted to infrastructure projects that will spend out very slowly, not with the speed needed to help the economy in 2009 and 2010. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that less than one-fifth of the $50 billion of proposed spending on energy and water would occur by the end of 2010.

If rapid spending on things that need to be done is a criterion of choice, the plan should include higher defense outlays, including replacing and repairing supplies and equipment, needed after five years of fighting. The military can increase its level of procurement very rapidly. Yet the proposed spending plan includes less than $5 billion for defense, only about one-half of 1 percent of the total package.

Infrastructure spending on domestic military bases can also proceed more rapidly than infrastructure spending in the civilian economy. And military procurement overwhelmingly involves American-made products. Since much of this military spending will have to be done eventually, it makes sense to do it now, when there is substantial excess capacity in the manufacturing sector. In addition, a temporary increase in military recruiting and training would reduce unemployment directly, create a more skilled civilian workforce and expand the military reserves.

All new spending and tax changes should have explicit time limits that prevent ever-increasing additions to the national debt. Similarly, spending programs should not create political dynamics that will make them hard to end.

The problem with the current stimulus plan is not that it is too big but that it delivers too little extra employment and income for such a large fiscal deficit. It is worth taking the time to get it right.

The writer, an economics professor at Harvard University, is president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

What is the Republican alternative to the stimulus?

By Philip Zelikow

The Republican leaders in Congress have not yet been able to offer an effective alternative to the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus package. The responses so far look like general unease about big government, mocking particular spending ideas, and calling for more tax cuts. Thus the administration's approach looks earnest and coherent, even if flawed. The Republicans are just nipping at the margins. The dogs will bark; the caravan moves on.

Republicans should do better. Their congressional leaders should develop a package that, while not endorsed by the whole caucus, might enjoy a significant and critical spectrum of support -- putting Republicans at the center. After all, experts as varied as Alice Rivlin and Jeffrey Sachs have now weighed in publicly with serious expressions of unease about the emerging package. Surely Republican leaders (acting as a kind of shadow government!) can see an opening to offer a creative, coherent alternative.

Here are some illustrative elements. Warning: Some of these are bound to make many individual Republicans unhappy, yet they add up to four messages:

1. Where the administration puts the financial crisis in second place, the Republicans will offer bipartisan answers to put the banking and housing crisis first.

• Another major federal effort to help banks, including debt for equity possibilities.

• Let bankruptcy judges redo mortgage terms. The banking industry will hate this. Most ordinary Republicans, and Democrats, will like it. They want to help citizens who will come to grips with their problems and resent that the creditors haven't been able to come to the table and deal.

2. Where the administration is acting unilaterally, belying its internationalist rhetoric, the Republicans prefer a global answer to a global crisis.

• Coordinate U.S. financial and fiscal answers in a global setting, with China and other surplus countries doing their part, using the April 2009 G-20 meeting as the target for a set of real initiatives, not like the November 2008 show horse. Show the world that the responsible stakeholders of an open world economy will "man up."

• Pick up World Bank president Robert Zoellick's suggestion that 0.7% of the stimulus plans in all countries be dedicated to funds that will expand availability of global credit. Show that globalization will be sustainable, despite this crisis.

3. Where the administration is treating serious investments in our infrastructure as a form of "helicopter money," the Republicans are ready to address real needs.

• Investments in bridges/highways may make sense, so might a national electric grid, or medical technology. Take Alice Rivlin's advice in her testimony yesterday to the House -- don't rush these plans. Do them right. Good investments will enhance our economic growth and thus be smart fiscally.

• But don't do investments in a rushed, fragmentary way, opening up long-term obligations with no plan for how to sustain them.

• And don't treat the creation of new entitlement programs as "stimulus," unless there is some plan that automatically cuts them off after 2010.

4. Where the administration thinks we can borrow our way out of a debt problem, the Republicans want to restore confidence in our fiscal strength and long-term economic health.

• Allow the Fed to be a lender of last resort to state and local governments, at concessionary terms. Thus the Fed can make up for balky municipal bond markets while still obliging state and local governments to take the policy lead, coming up with creditworthy proposals.

• Cut payroll taxes, offset by a tax penalizing greenhouse gas emissions (as the CEO of ExxonMobil recently proposed, as well as Lawrence Lindsay and others). The net effects should be very positive, especially for the current account deficit over the long haul.

Folks may like or dislike each of these ideas. But they sure do not fit a preconceived ideological cookbook. This is real pragmatism.

If asked how much this alternative would cost, there is an honest answer: There is no arbitrary target because the spending is not motivated by the desire to reach one. But the net spending will be much less, probably less than half as much in 2009. There will be a big federal effort to help banks that should be mostly repaid when financial paper is resold to private hands. The federal government will offset temporary state and local borrowing weakness. It will make some substantial and overdue public investments and reallocate tax incentives in a more sensible way. It will be coordinated with other major economic powers.

The net effect is show solidity, not desperation; sustainability, not a quick fix. Global, not unilateral. Those are the themes that will restore the confidence of Americans and of investors around the world. Our recovery, and our national security, may depend on it.

Why Benedict Has Hope

By John L. Allen Jr.

Despite a rocky start, the Vatican may have found a president it can work with in Barack Obama. Franco Origlia/Getty Images The public pontiff: How will Benedict XVI balance his campaign for traditionalism with his interest in social justice issues? The first week of U.S.-Vatican relations under the Obama administration did not, on first glance, seem very promising. In response to an executive order by President Barack Obama overturning the Bush administration's Mexico City policy, which prohibited the use of federal dollars to promote abortion in overseas family planning efforts, a senior Vatican official slammed the administration's "arrogance" for presuming that basic human rights can be overturned by presidential fiat. "If this is one of President Obama's first acts, I have to say, in all due respect, that we're heading quickly toward disappointment," Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life, said in an interview published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Pope Benedict XVI's recent decision to lift the 20-year-old excommunication of four traditionalist Catholic bishops, including one who's a Holocaust denier, also reinforced the perception that he aims to move the church in a decidedly more conservative, traditionalist direction. Responding to wide international criticism, particularly from Jewish groups, Benedict swiftly stressed the importance of never forgetting the Holocaust and expressed "full and unquestionable solidarity" with the Jewish people. The lifting of the excommunications was a victory for traditionalists within the church, but could also be seen as a prelude to a conflict with the progressive ex-community organizer who just moved into the Oval Office and enjoys overwhelming popularity in the very parts of the world where the church sees potential for growth. Unexpectedly, however, the prevailing view in the Vatican leadership, even among Benedict and his conservative supporters, seems to be cautious optimism. These leaders seem to think they have more in common with the new U.S. president than most observers realize. That's because other aspects of Catholic teaching, which Benedict helped expound during his 24-year stint as the Vatican's top doctrinal official, seem fairly close to positions Obama expounded on the campaign trail. Shortly before his death on Jan. 10, veteran Vatican diplomat Cardinal Pio Laghi, who served as Pope John Paul II's ambassador to the United States during the Reagan years, was surprisingly positive about the new president. "There are many points on which there will be agreement," Laghi told a Dec. 22 conference in Rome, pointing to poverty relief, healthcare, and immigration as areas where Obama's positions are "in consonance with the social doctrine of the church." He also praised Obama for running a campaign in the "spirit of national reconciliation of [Abraham] Lincoln." To be sure, Laghi predicted tension over life issues such as abortion, but nonetheless, Laghi's optimism reflects what has been a broadly upbeat tone from the Vatican in response to Obama, which began with a Nov. 5 telegram from Benedict hailing his election as a "historic occasion" and expressing desire to collaborate in building "a world of peace, solidarity and justice." That gesture was itself a notable tip of the cap because Vatican protocol usually dictates that popes do not address heads of state until they formally take office. Benedict's overture was also a subtle contrast with Catholic bishops in the United States, who swiftly warned Obama about cultural war should his administration move forward with the Freedom of Choice Act, which would repeal all federal and state restrictions on abortion. The pope, however, seems to be taking the long view. Although Benedict's doctrinal conservatism is certain to create major obstacles in relations with Obama on issues such as abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and gay rights, it might leave other doors open. At the top of the list would be global antipoverty efforts; during a 2007 trip to Brazil, Benedict said that the Catholic Church's "preferential option for the poor" flows from its faith in Jesus Christ, who was himself poor. Other areas where Vatican officials perceive at least the possibility of a meeting of minds include disarmament, peacemaking, and environmental protection. They've also signaled that Obama might be better positioned to make a difference in two regions of the world where the Vatican has strong interests: the Middle East -- including Iraq, where it clashed with George W. Bush over the war -- and Africa. The Vatican's desire to work with Obama is not only ideological, but eminently practical. For example, it's anxious to see the new administration move on immigration reform, not merely because of the justice issues involved, but because a massive share of the new immigrants in the United States are Hispanic and therefore Catholic. A recent Pew Forum study of religion in the United States found that the Catholic Church in the United States has a serious problem with retention, losing four existing members for every new convert it gains. Its share of the overall U.S. population is holding steady at 25 percent, however, due to the impact of immigration and higher-than-average Hispanic fertility rates. Africa offers another case in point. It's the greatest "growth market" for Catholicism in the world; the Catholic population in sub-Saharan Africa went from 1.9 million in 1900 to 139 million in 2000, an increase of over 7,000 percent. If Obama can promote development on the continent, the Vatican calculates, he would inadvertently help the church consolidate these gains. The drama of U.S.-Vatican relations in the Age of Obama is therefore likely to pivot on a tug of war between two forces: on the one hand, the basic cultural conservatism of Benedict's papacy and the tight focus of American bishops on life issues; on the other, the Vatican's humanitarian and practical interests in a whole range of social justice issues that Obama also advocates. Whichever way things go, it should be a fascinating show to watch. John L. Allen Jr. is senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and author of The Rise of Benedict XVI (New York: Doubleday, 2005). His article, "Think Again: The Catholic Church," appeared in the November/December 2008 issue of FP.

The Real Story of the Global Warming Hoax

President Obama and his fellow Dems are preparing to try and get us out of our economic slump by reproducing one of the key factors that DROVE US INTO the recession--Raising Gas Prices. They still wont commit to tapping the United States' vast petroleum reserves, the truth is they want to Keep it in the ground. Before they go ahead and legislate an even deeper recession I would like to bring up one salient point, ITS FREAKING COLD OUTSIDE !

Yesterday former Vice President Al Gore braved a major Ice storm to discuss global warming with congress. Maybe the ice storm was a message from Heaven "Hey Al, Enough of this Nonsense !"

After all, for most of the United States and much of the world, this has been one of the colder autumns in well over a decade, with reports of unseasonable snowfalls and plummeting temperatures from the American Great Plains to the Alps of Europe and into the inner reaches of Asia. Even China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever" in October. In the U.S., 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. In fact, it's likely that 2008 will go down as the coldest year since in the United States since 1997.

So what am I missing here. The world's average temperature is LOWER today than it was ten years ago Even the UN has admitted this, but the Environazis are ignoring the real truth.


Ever wonder how the Global Warming Hoax Got Started? How Fake Science began to drive government decisions? Well, it all started with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle...

The Amazing Story Behind The Global Warming Scam

By John Coleman
January 28, 2009

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have lead to a rise in public awareness that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a significant greenhouse gas that is triggering runaway global warming.

How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government we have to struggle so to stop it?

The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle saw the opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy for doing measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute’s areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago, who was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle tagged on to Suess studies and co-authored a paper with him in 1957. The paper raises the possibility that the carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. It seems to be a plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle’s mind was most of the time.

Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of Carbon dioxide. In 1960 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels.

These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.

Now let me take you back to the1950s when this was going on. Our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution from the crude internal combustion engines that powered cars and trucks back then and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. Cars and factories and power plants were filling the air with all sorts of pollutants. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution and a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action. Government accepted this challenge and new environmental standards were set. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed for cars, as were new high tech, computer controlled engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer big time polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. Likewise, new fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced, as well.

But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis issue. So the research papers from Scripps came at just the right moment. And, with them came the birth of an issue; man-made global warming from the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants began to flow and alarming hypothesis began to show up everywhere.

The Keeling curve showed a steady rise in CO2 in atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man. As of today, carbon dioxide has increased from 215 to 385 parts per million. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. While the increase is real, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about .41 hundredths of one percent.

Several hypothesis emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. Years have passed and the scientists kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on building up.

Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation’s bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meeting.

Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations, a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But, he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was not a pure climate study scientific organization, as we have been lead to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved the UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last 25 years they have been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, the UN IPCC has made its points to the satisfaction of most and even shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

At the same time, that Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950’s as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus.

He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students to become a major global warming activist. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming," That student was Al Gore. He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992.

So there it is, Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his move, his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business.

What happened next is amazing. The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause celeb of the media. After all the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling". The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.

But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer."

And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge negative impact on the economy and jobs and our standard of living. I have discussed this collaboration with Dr. Singer. He assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem.

Did Roger Revelle attend the Summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in the Summer of 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore onto this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is, "I think so, but I do not know it for certain". I have not managed to get it confirmed as of this moment. It’s a little like Las Vegas; what is said at the Bohemian Grove stays at the Bohemian Grove. There are no transcripts or recordings and people who attend are encouraged not to talk. Yet, the topic is so important, that some people have shared with me on an informal basis.

Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam.

Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s Mea culpa as the actions of senile old man. And, the next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate, From 1992 until today, he and his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when ask about we skeptics they simply insult us and call us names.

So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint which we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.

We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by no drilling and no new refineries for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that the whole thing about corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies. That also has driven up food prices. And, all of this is a long way from over.

And, I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.

Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a high jacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history.

Wilders and Limbaugh--> BEFORE and After?

This Past weekend, President Obama decided to get into the trenches with Rush Limbaugh

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration. "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package. NY Post

Rush Limbaugh is a media giant, I am the last person from whom he needs support, I will leave his defense in his own capable hands. I find the spat between the President of the United States and the Dean of Conservative Talk Radio quite disturbing on a different level. Folks this is the first step of the ruling Democratic party controlling speech in America.

The President's comment was immediately joined on by the rest of his Party. Democratic congressional campaign committee chairman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said in a statement:

Rush Limbaugh's reprehensible remark that he 'hopes' President Obama fails to meet the extraordinary economic challenges Americas face has no place in the public discourse.

Mr. Limbaugh's comments politicize the economic struggle of millions of hard working Americans. With the unemployment rate over seven percent, today's news that 62,000 more Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, and millions of Americans struggling to keep their health care and homes, all Americans, regardless of their ideology, hope that President Obama succeeds in getting people back to work and turning our economy around.

This was followed with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launching an online petition to express outrage at conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh for saying he wanted President Obama to "fail."

Some people think that the democratic response to Rush is the first stop to bringing back the fairness doctrine. I believe that their goals are much more nefarious--more like what Robert Spencer described today:

......The White House website pledges that “President Obama and Vice President Biden will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation…” The problem with this, of course, is that “hate” is in the eye of the beholder, so “hate crime” laws are essentially tools for enforcing officially-endorsed views. It’s another form of censorship. “Hate crimes” legislation begets “hate speech” legislation. A cautionary tale is unfolding in the Netherlands this week about how dangerous those can be.

“The insult of Islamic worshippers”? The very idea of trying someone for insulting someone else is absurd, and unmasks the Dutch initiative as an attempt by the nation’s political elites to silence one of their most formidable critics. The one who judges what is an actionable insult and what isn’t is the one who has the power to control the discourse -- and that’s what the prosecution of Wilders is all about. If insulting someone is a crime, can those who are insulted by hate speech laws bring suit against their framers?

The action against Wilders is taking place against the backdrop of the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference’s efforts at the United Nations to silence speech that they deem critical of Islam -- including “defamation of Islam” that goes under the “pretext” of “freedom of expression, counter terrorism or national security.”

If they succeed in doing this, Europeans and Americans will be rendered mute, and thus defenseless, in the face of the advancing jihad and attempt to impose Sharia on the West -- in fact, one of the key elements of the laws for dhimmis, non-Muslims subjugated under Islamic rule, is that they are never critical of Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an. Thus this initiative not only aids the advance of Sharia in the West, but is itself an element of that advance.

But of course, it couldn’t happen here: freedom of speech could never disappear in America, right? After all, we have the First Amendment. But the Fairness Doctrine initiative shows that its protections can be chipped away. And “hate speech” laws could be justified by a declaration that free speech is still a constitutional right, but after all, every right has its limits: “hate speech” will be specifically exempted from its protections -- and “hate speech” will be defined to encompass speaking honestly about the actual texts and teachings of Islam that contain exhortations to violence and assertions of supremacism, unless one is referencing such material approvingly as a believer.

For to speak of such things in any other way would be to “insult” Muslims, as has Geert Wilders.

Lovers of freedom should be watching the Wilders case very closely -- as President Obama is already making abundantly clear -- it could happen here. Source Robert Spencer Jailed For An Insult?

I disagree with Spencer on this one, its not that it could happen here..if we don't stop it now it WILL happen here, Geert Wilders today----Rush Limbaugh tomorrow.