Amy Ridenour | Jan 22, 2004 at 11:21 AM Ni e article today in the Los Angeles Times on global warming. Not a long piece, but it covers the issue clearly and well. Author is James Schlesinger, who served in Cabinets for Nixon, Ford and Carter.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 22, 2004 at 1:15 AM The Washington Post comments favorably on how well the NFL is doing in its efforts to hire minority coaches.
Is the media desirous that black coaches do well?
Amy Ridenour | Jan 21, 2004 at 5:05 PM Two groups I really like, the National Legal and Policy Center and the Heartland Institute, have re-designed/updated websites.
NLPC has had major success recently in its efforts to curtail corporate support for Jesse Jackson, and its work to make labor unions more accountable to their memberships is really worth a look. Heartland has what it calls a "PolicyBot," which lets you research the work of 350 think tanks in one convenient spot. It's organized by topic and has over 12,000 papers. It is a great research tool.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 20, 2004 at 12:29 AM Despite public support, French legislators are beginning to reappraise the idea that Jews should not wear yarmulkes, Christians should not wear crosses, and Muslims should not wear veils in French public schools.
According to the Guardian, most French people support the ban, because they want to "defend" the republic against the demands of Islam.
(Regrettably, defending the right to wear yarmulkes is not so great an issue, although it should be, since men who wear them in France tend to get beaten up.)
Wake up, French folks. You can't defeat something with nothing. If you don't want France to become Muslim, get yourself (and your kids if you have them) to church or synagogue.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 20, 2004 at 12:17 AM A Gallup poll reports that Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to report that they are "very happy" with their lives.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 19, 2004 at 3:17 PM CNSNews.com has a nice article on Project 21's involvement in a protest of Jesse Jackson's activities outside of Jackson's Los Angeles office today.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 19, 2004 at 12:38 AM Britain's Prospect Magazine has an article in the January 2004 edition exposing just how corrupt the French government is.
Worth a read, unless you already know how bad it is over there, which I didn't.
Thanks to David Frum's Diary on National Review Online for pointing this article out.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 18, 2004 at 9:27 PM Went to the MoveOn.org website this evening and viewed some of the winners of their vaunted ad contest.
To my great surprise, the winning ad, called "Child's Play," has a conservative theme. It has one message: opposition to deficit spending. Every conservative group I can think of could have run it.
Who would've thunk?
Congrats to them, by the way, for having such a successful contest. They not only got people to volunteer to create ads for them, but got loads of free media coverage from the mainstream press for doing something that's not really all that remarkable: creating and reviewing political ads.
Too bad, though, that MoveOn.org's true agenda isn't fiscal conservatism. Maybe they thought their real agenda wouldn't sell.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 18, 2004 at 1:52 PM A nice profile of Dick Cheney in the Washington Post today.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 18, 2004 at 3:08 AM Here is an unintentionally funny story claiming liberal reporters try really, really hard to be objective, while conservative reporters don't even bother.
If you don't feel like reading the link 'cause it sounds like the story might be idiotic, I'll save you the effort and confirm what most of you expect: The guy who thinks this is a leftie. He's written a book about Bush called "Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You." (Original theme, guy. Haven't heard of anyone writing a book about Bush lying before.)
Meanwhile, catch this report from the Media Research Center about how the hyper-objective guys at NBC News covered Al Gore's January 15 speech on the topics of global warming, how evil and corrupt George Bush and conservative think tanks are, and the need for all of us to be more kind to one another. NBC news fawned over it, and then quoted other people fawning over it. That's it. Not even a pretense of objectivity.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 17, 2004 at 10:55 PM While reading this Washington Post story, IRS to Audit Nature Conservancy From Inside, it was hard not to think of Enron.
Will be interesting to see how it all turns out.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 16, 2004 at 10:42 PM Catch the wording on this news story, Mom Accused Of Injecting Human Waste Into Daughter: "Woman may suffer from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a disorder in which people harm their own children in an attempt to get attention."
No, assuming the facts are borne out, the mom doesn't suffer from it, the child does. The mom's just evil. How idiotic!
Amy Ridenour | Jan 16, 2004 at 4:15 PM An e-mail worth sharing on the subject of our comments on Al Gore's speech. We're getting a lot; some of it very thoughtful. We'll share several over the next few days. In my opinion, the American people are a lot smarter than Al Gore gives them credit for.
Thank you for your strong position. I am a retired research electrical engineer, and a life long devotee to astronomy. The data they are using to champion global warming is fraudulent. Cyclic temperature changes sometime exceed 400 years in period length. There is evidence to support the theory that the great flood of Biblical Times is believed to have been a period of global cooling, as evidence shows that the polar ice cap extended into Northern Europe, about 700 years BC. I am 80 years old, but as a young man I, and other young men, read the weather bureau gauges for the elderly guards on top our building, as getting to the weather station was dangerous for them. It was about a 30 foot wall-ladder climb to the roof, and another 12 or 14 foot climb to the weather station atop a quadrapod on our 11-story office building. Although the thermometers had Veniers for accuracy, we read them from the roof, and in rain from a slit in the hatch cover, probably thirty feet away. These data for the Weather Bureau downtown temperatures in St. Louis, MO, are undoubtedly being used as scientific evidence of global warming, by the uninformed pseudo-scientists trying to validate global warming.
Mercury and spirit thermometers are accurate at only two points, at freezing and at the temperature of boiling water, at sea-level. Even barometric pressure impacts these data. Glass, and now plastic tubes are drawn from a tubular extrusion of molten plastic state, to create the tubular shape of a mercury thermometer. The internal diameter of the tube is determined by the temperature of the material being drawn, during the drawing process. Temperature variations, cause diameter changes, resulting in inaccuracies of readings. Due to the variation of tube size, a calibration chart is used with all mercury laboratory thermometers to correct data to probably +/- 1/10th degree accuracy.
Data prior to the invention of the mercury thermometer by Fahrenheit in 1714 is highly questionable, but is sometimes used in justifying weather phenomena. Data from 400 years ago probably used the Galilean water thermometer. Thermistors were developed in the late 1950's, which could be used to calibrate mercury thermometers, leading to the proliferation of correction charts. Prior to that time, laboratory thermometers were calibrated, using a copper wire's changing resistance with temperature, measuring resistance with a Wheatstone Bridge. The data in our Weather Department archives, is of shotgun accuracy, and cannot be used for serious scientific work. Just imagine the accuracy of third world data which is often used in critical analysis. As the manager of R & D, I often pointed to the plaque on my office wall, saying; "Show Me The Data."
Thank you for keeping the single digit IQ guys at bay. You hit my hot button.
Respectfully,
Edward Kitsch
Amy Ridenour | Jan 16, 2004 at 2:58 PM A guy with an email address from the "United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime" wrote to whine. We haven't so far posted any of the many whine notes we received after we tried to hold Al Gore to an accuracy standard a self-respecting junior high-schooler could meet (we might later), but I thought I'd make an exception for a missive from the U.N.
Remember, folks, a quarter of this guy's salary comes from you the taxpayer.
From: John Doyle, john.doyle@unodc.un.or.th
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 15:13:29 +0700
To: Dalmasi@nationalcenter.org
Subject: disgusted
Very rare that I find the time or initiative to respond in writing to something I hear or read but ran across the below and cannot quite fathom how extreme and vile the tone is. All I can think of is that you very, very partisan boys and girls in Washington need to take a good, hard look at yourselves and what you are actually doing with your lives ... does it really need to be so disgusting?
Al Gore's Speech on Bush and the Environment is Demagoguery, Says National Center for Public Policy Research
Amy Ridenour | Jan 16, 2004 at 2:28 PM So is MoveOn.org in favor of going to Mars because there are potential military benefits to the U.S., or opposed? If opposed, why would the organization be opposed to American military dominance?
They must have an opinion one way or another, since they brought the topic up.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 16, 2004 at 12:10 AM The Washingtomn Post has an odd formulation in a story today about Gore's speech. It calls the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute the "anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute."
Wierd grammar, but also a wierd thing to say. What does the author expect the reader to conclude about CEI?
Amy Ridenour | Jan 15, 2004 at 2:42 PM I didn't like Gore's speech. You can tell, here.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 15, 2004 at 1:57 AM Another timely e-mail from Mike Catanzaro over at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, this time on the subject of Al Gore's scheduled January 15 speech for MoveOn.org and Environment2004:
On Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore, in a speech sponsored by MoveOn.Org, will attack President Bush's record on the environment. Undoubtedly, Gore's speech will be a bilious, thoughtless reiteration of the threadbare charges, most exhaustively crafted by radical environmental groups, leveled against the Administration: it is "Orwellian," it has the "worst environmental record in history," it is "censoring science for political ends," etc. In other words, it will be an exemplary, Gore-like exercise in factless, baseless demagoguery of the worst kind.
The following are some of the expected lines of attack from Mr. Gore:
GORE: President Bush recklessly walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, and because of the lack of U.S. involvement, effectively put the international treaty on life support.
FACT: First, EVEN HOWARD DEAN, AS HE ANNOUNCED LAST WEEK, OPPOSES KYOTO.
Second, EVEN THE WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL PAGE THINKS KYOTO IS A BAD IDEA, AND THAT PRESIDENT BUSH MADE THE RIGHT DECISION BY REJECTING IT: "The Bush administration may have been right to abandon the treaty, given its unrealistic targets and its failure to include developing nations such as China." [December 5, 2003]
Third, a bit of history: Mr. Gore never submitted Kyoto to the U.S. Senate, probably because he knew the treaty could never overcome the 95 to 0 vote on the Byrd-Hagel resolution that rejected Kyoto. The Senate spoke again last October, when the McCain-Lieberman bill -- a bill that resembles Kyoto in many key respects -- failed by a vote of 55 to 43. Simply put, even if President Bush supported Kyoto, it would never be ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Further, much of the failure to commence Kyoto was placed squarely on the Europeans. As the Vancouver Sun reported on April 9, 2001: "European intransigence, and not U.S. President George W. Bush, is behind the 'fallen down' Kyoto accord on reducing greenhouse gases, [Canadian] Environment Minister David Anderson said Thursday. 'This Kyoto (deal) had fallen down, had ceased to functioning effectively in November... Nothing that Mr. Bush has done since has altered that fact.'"
The Europeans, before President Bush came into office, pointed fingers at each other, as the BBC reported on November 26, 2000: "[British] Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has blamed the French for the failure of the global warming summit to agree on curbing greenhouse gas emissions." Prescott "attacked European colleagues for failing to back a deal on emissions which he had brokered with the United States."
The Europeans are now valiantly pressing ahead, pushing for reductions that, according to the EU Environment Ministry, they cannot, and will not, achieve. All but two EU countries will not meet their Kyoto targets. And now Canada, which ratified Kyoto last year, is expressing serious doubts that they can achieve their targets by 2010. Prime Minister Paul Martin, according to the Canadian Business Journal, points out that no clear framework exists to ensure that Canada meets its goal of cutting annual emissions by 240-million tons by 2010. Not to mention Russia, which has lambasted the treaty's scientific basis and its negative impact on the Russian economy.
So even now, in the face of overwhelming evidence of Kyoto's utter failure, Mr. Gore thinks this is a good idea?
GORE: We should be very afraid of global warming because, as the IPCC says, temperatures could increase by as much as 10 degrees F by 2100, unleashing a torrent of extreme weather events that pose catastrophic consequences for generations to come.
FACT: The IPCC's work has been systematically dismantled over the past year. Pursuant to a new study undermining the IPCC's temperature assumptions, the Economist accused the UN body of "dangerous incompetence."
As the Economist wrote: "Disaggregated projections published by the IPCC say that -- even in the lowest-emission scenarios-growth in poor countries will be so fast that by the end of the century Americans will be poorer on average than South Africans, Algerians, Argentines, Libyans, Turks, and North Koreans. Mr. Castles and Mr. Henderson can hardly be alone in finding that odd."
Dr. James Hansen of NASA recently threw cold water on extreme temperature scenarios. "Future global warming can be predicted much more accurately then is generally realized... we predict additional warming in the next 50 years of 0.75 ºC [plus or minus] 0.25ºC, a warming rate of 0.15ºC [plus or minus] 0.05ºC per decade." This warming rate is approximately 4 times less than the lurid top figure widely trumpeted by the IPCC, and, indeed, not a cause of concern.
GORE: The White House is ignoring the science of climate change, as there is a very clear consensus in the scientific community, reflected by the 2001 NAS study requested by the Administration, that man-made emissions are largely to blame for global warming.
FACT: Gore will most likely cite the now infamous line from the report's summary: "Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that a significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability."
To cite this is misleading and disingenuous, for on page 1 of the report the uncertainty surrounding climate change and global warming becomes clear: "Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments upward or downward."
The report states further: "A causal linkage between the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the observed climate changes during the 20th century cannot be unequivocally established."
GORE: The White House censored and suppressed climate change science from the EPA's "State of the Environment Report" for political ends.
FACT: This is nonsense. Nothing was censored. The report includes references to the Administration's 10-year strategic plan on climate change policy -- which, incidentally, was crafted pursuant to a 2001 National Academy of Sciences study on climate change -- and a statutorily required document called "Our Changing Planet."
Question: how can there be suppression of climate change when the Administration has put out hundreds of pages of documents on climate change research, including the Climate Action Report, released last summer?
GORE: A recent study in Nature shows that global warming, clearly a man-made phenomenon, will cause thousands of species to go extinct by 2050.
FACT: Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute penned a devastating critique of this study. Here's an excerpt: "[Researchers] have extrapolated to all species a model that looked at only 1,103 species in certain areas (243 of those species were South African proteaceae, a family of evergreen shrubs and trees). For one thing, we don't know how many species there are-estimates vary from 2 million to 80 million-and have only documented 1.6 million. However, assuming the 14 million figure widely used in the press reports is anywhere near accurate, the sample size is a mere 0.008 percent of the total species population of the planet, with certain species vastly over-represented (there are only 1,000 species of proteaceae on the planet). All the researchers have demonstrated is that, if their model is correct, certain species in certain habitats will run a risk of extinction."
GORE: President Bush is recklessly rolling back environmental protections in the Clean Air Act to pay back his corporate contributors. In December, he announced yet another rollback of reductions for mercury.
FACT: Greg Easterbrook, a senior editor with The New Republic, put it this way last year: "[N]othing you hear about worsening air quality is true. Air pollution is declining under President Bush, just as it declined under President Clinton." If you don't believe Easterbrook, just look at the most recent EPA data on air quality.
Question: did Gore, or former President Clinton, ever propose a 70 percent reduction in NOx, SO2, and mercury? No.
Did Gore, or former President Clinton, ever go forward with regulations to reduce off-road diesel emissions? No. NRDC called President Bush's proposal to reduce diesel emissions from off-road vehicles "the biggest public health step since lead was removed from gasoline more than two decades ago." According to the Washington Post, an NRDC official referred to the emissions plan as "the biggest health advance in a generation."
How about anything like President Bush's Interstate Transport Rule, largely modeled on Clear Skies, to reduce NOx and SO2 by 70 percent by 2018? No.
Did Gore, or former President Clinton, ever address mercury emissions? No. In fact, the Clinton Administration did nothing until, of all dates, December 15, 2000, two days after Gore conceded the election. On that day, after doing nothing for 8 years, EPA miraculously announced a settlement agreement with NRDC to regulate mercury. The Bush Administration went forward with a regulation that will reduce mercury emissions, using a proven market-based approach, by nearly 70 percent by 2018.
What about New Source Review? Yes, Carol Browner's EPA crafted a proposal in 1996 to reform it, but never followed through. President Bush did.
GORE: The Administration, at the behest of the White House, lied to New Yorkers about air quality after September 11.
FACT: On this issue, the New York Times editorial page said it best, dismissing the entire controversy as "retrospective nitpicking." The Times, no friend of the Bush Administration, also agrees with the most recent scientific findings about air quality since September 11: "The broader public faced little or no risk from breathing the outdoor air once the initial cloud settled."
The EPA IG report, the source of the controversy, was unequivocal about the Administration's intentions: "In regard to the monitoring data, we found no evidence that EPA attempted to conceal data results from the public." In a September 4 NBC interview with EPA IG Nikki Tinsley, Lisa Myers reported that Tinsley "stopped short of accusing anyone of lying or of knowingly providing false information." And EPA IG staff told aides from the Senate EPW Committee that there was no conspiracy or attempt to suppress information.
Amy Ridenour | Jan 15, 2004 at 1:23 AM A note from Project 21 member Michael King in Atlanta:In the January 14 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia state representative (and professional whiner) Tyrone Brooks wrings his hands and cries over the security arrangements for President Bush's visit to the Martin Luther King National Historic Site.
The President will lay a wreath at Dr. Martin Luther King's gravesite. Due to security arrangements for the President, some of the planned activities in the area may have to be altered.
"He has the right to come, but there should have been some consideration on what's going on locally," Brooks said in the AJC piece. "That's quite insulting. This is not the appropriate way to honor Dr. King."
Brooks and many of the same whiners have had natural conniption fits because the President has not attended the services the past three years. Now, when Bush decides to come, they can't stomach the security.
Well, Tyrone, which way do you want it?
Amy Ridenour | Jan 15, 2004 at 1:20 AM The following comes from Project 21 member Michael King, and an earlier version can also be found on his blog:Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, when introducing former VP Al Gore in New York, had the nerve and audacity to claim that the young girls that were killed 40 years ago in the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church "gave their lives" for the cause of civil rights.
What a load of used food! Those little girls did not "give" their lives! They went to church to worship the Lord.
They became symbols for the cause, certainly. But to say that they "gave" their lives -- as if to say that they willingly went to their deaths -- is insulting at best, and pandering to the primarily black audience that Dean seeks to court at it's very worst.
None of the mainstream media caught this insult. They are conforming to the pandering.