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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (38997)	11/24/2009 11:35:08 AM
From: lorne	2 Recommendations Respond to of 71588

BREAKING: San Diego ACORN Document Dump Scandal by Derrick Roach biggovernment.com

To: lorne who wrote (38997)	11/27/2009 10:57:25 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Cap and Trade Is Dead' The recently disclosed emails and documents from University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit compromise the integrity of the United Nations' global warming reports. By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL NOVEMBER 26, 2009, 11:41 P.M. ET.' So declares Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, taking a few minutes away from a Thanksgiving retreat with his family. "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in." If any politician might be qualified to offer last rites, it would be Mr. Inhofe. The top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee has spent the past decade in the thick of Washington's climate fight. He's seen the back of three cap-and-trade bills, rode herd on an overweening Environmental Protection Agency, and steadfastly insisted that global researchers were "cooking" the science behind man-made global warming. This week he's looking prescient. The more than 3,000 emails and documents from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have found their way to the Internet have blown the lid off the "science" of manmade global warming. CRU is a nerve center for many of those researchers who have authored the United Nations' global warming reports and fueled the political movement to regulate carbon. Their correspondence show a claque of scientists massaging data to make it fit their theories, squelching scientists who disagreed, punishing academic journals that didn't toe the apocalyptic line, and hiding their work from public view. "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," glumly wrote George Monbiot, a U.K. writer who has been among the fiercest warming alarmists. The documents "could scarcely be more damaging." And that's from a believer. This scandal has real implications. Mr. Inhofe notes that international and U.S. efforts to regulate carbon were already on the ropes. The growing fear of Democrats and environmentalists is that the CRU uproar will prove a tipping point, and mark a permanent end to those ambitions. Internationally, world leaders finally acknowledged that the recession has sapped them of their political power to impose devastating new carbon-restrictions. China and India are clear they won't join the West in an economic suicide pact. Next month's summit in Copenhagen is a bust. Instead of producing legally binding agreements, it will be dogged by queries about the legitimacy of the scientists who wrote the reports that form its basis. The next opportunity to get international agreement is in Mexico City, 2010—a U.S. election year. Democrats were already publicly acknowledging there will be no domestic climate legislation in 2009 and privately acknowledging their great unease at passing a huge energy tax on Americans headed for a midterm vote. Add to that the CRU scandal, which pivots the focus to potential fraud. Republicans are launching investigations, and the pressure is building on Democrats to hold hearings, since climate scientists were funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars. Mr. Inhofe's office this week sent letters to federal agencies and outside scientists warning them not to delete their own CRU-related emails and documents, which may also be subject to Freedom of Information requests. Polls show a public already losing belief in the theory of man-made global warming, and skeptics are now on the offense. The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell argues this scandal gives added cover to Blue Dogs and other Democrats who were already reluctant to buck the public's will and vote for climate legislation. And with Republicans set to pick up seats, Mr. Ebell adds, "By 2011 there will hopefully be even fewer members who support this. We may be close to having it permanently stymied." Continued U.S. failure to act makes an international agreement to replace Kyoto (which expires in 2012) a harder sell. There's still the EPA, which is preparing an "endangerment finding" that would allow it to regulate carbon on the grounds it is a danger to public health. It is here the emails might have the most direct effect. The agency has said repeatedly that it based its finding on the U.N. science—which is now at issue. The scandal puts new pressure on the EPA to accede to growing demands to make public the scientific basis of its actions. Mr. Inhofe goes so far as to suggest that the agency might not now issue the finding. "The president knows how punitive this will be; he's never wanted to do it through [the EPA] because that's all on him." The EPA was already out on a legal limb with its finding, and Mr. Inhofe argues that if it does go ahead, the CRU disclosure guarantees court limbo. "The way the far left used to stop us is to file lawsuits and stall and stall. We'll do the same thing." Still, if this Democratic Washington has demonstrated anything, it's that ideology often trumps common sense. Egged on by the left, dug in to their position, Democrats might plow ahead. They'd be better off acknowledging that the only "consensus" right now is that the world needs to start over on climate "science." Write to kim@wsj.com online.wsj.com

To: lorne who wrote (38997)	9/21/2010 8:53:50 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Nation on the brink of financial disaster Sep 19, 2010 \| Comments In the next 30 seconds, this nation will add more than $1 million to our debt. By day's end, the United States will owe another $2.88 billion. And the mountain continues to rise, minute by minute, day by day, year after year -- to the point where the nation now is in the red by more than $13 trillion (and that's not counting Social Security or Medicare liabilities). The key issue driving this year's elections is the still-weak economy, but concerns about the surging national debt also weigh on Americans' minds, from Washington, D.C., to Washington, Ind. A bipartisan consensus is growing that the federal government must confront its addiction to debt as soon as possible or risk an economic meltdown that would severely punish the vast majority of Americans. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently suggested that the debt has become a national security issue, threatening to constrain the United States' ability to respond to international threats. Indiana's Sen. Richard Lugar, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agreed with that assessment in a meeting with The Star's Editorial Board on Friday. He noted that it's particularly difficult to confront China on trade and human rights abuses because that nation holds so much of the U.S. debt. Political candidates from both parties have vowed to finally take on the problem if elected this fall. But it will be a daunting task no matter who is victorious in November. As The Star's Maureen Groppe documented in a series of stories last week, stock political answers -- cut wasteful spending, end earmarks, tax the rich, bring the troops home -- won't be enough to dramatically reduce the federal deficit and bring the accumulated debt back into a healthy proportion in relation to gross domestic product. Instead, Americans will have to accept that some pain is necessary now to avoid much worse difficulties in the future. That pain likely will include an increase in the retirement age and reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits for younger workers. It will mean deep spending cuts in nearly all federal agencies, including the Pentagon. It will mean cleaning up the budget process. The long and dishonored tradition on Capitol Hill of tucking special-interest appropriations into legislation needs to end. If a project, no matter how worthwhile, has a strictly local reach, it shouldn't receive federal dollars. It also will mean overhauling the tax code to close loopholes, eliminate breaks for special interests and reduce the amount of fraud. And once Congress and the president show that they have the discipline to significantly cut spending, and once the tax code is rewritten to promote fairness and capture lost revenues, then Americans will need to accept the fact that taxes either will have to increase or be assessed more evenly. The nation can't continue to run a system in which half of wage earners pay no federal income taxes. The looming debt crisis that faces this nation if it doesn't alter course has risen because both major political parties have failed to be honest with Americans about reality. Part of that reality is that the nation can't continue to spend well beyond its income year after year without serious consequence. But another part, one that will be hard for many to accept, is that services will have to be slashed even as taxes may have to rise to pull this nation back from the brink of a fiscal disaster. indystar.com