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Why is our president going to Copenhagen?

Chuck Norris has the evidence that questions why anybody would want to be at Copenhagen:

Copenhagen is on fire this week, and there's far more heating up than just the climate.

While heads of state and others gather this week at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (Dec. 7-18), bonfires have already been blazing for weeks on that European front.

Let me see if I can summarize the chestnuts roasting on that Copenhagen fire.

Shocking e-mail exchanges from scientists at an eminent global-warming research center in the United Kingdom have proven that key climate-change scientists have suppressed evidence to "trick" or "hide the decline" of global temperatures.

Rather than focus on the audacity of the climate-gate cover up, Obama's top science adviser, John Holdren, downplayed the e-mails, telling Congress that the controversy involved a small group of scientists. And others like Sen. Barbara Boxer blamed the hackers who exposed the e-mails rather than the scientists who deceived the world with false global climate reports.

Similarly, the U.N. was caught recently deleting documents that would disclose how member states are leading (or not leading) the way in self-greening efforts.

The scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters documented that ice melt on Antarctica was the lowest in 30 years during the 2008-2009, a fact being intentionally ignored by NASA.

A U.S. scholar is threatening to sue NASA to prompt the agency to release climate-change data, which he says has been manipulated just like over in Britain.

Officials in the Environmental Protection Agency gagged one of their own senior researchers after the 38-year employee submitted an internal critique of the EPA's climate change position.

Unlike the U.S., China and India have already opposed foreign climate governance because it would jeopardize their national sovereignty.

Nearly two months ago Lord Christopher Monckton, once science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, warned us that the real purpose of the conference was more about global government than global warming.

In my former column, titled "Obama's one-world government," I've already detailed more than a dozen actual statements in the proposed summit treaty that threatens our national sovereignty, could severely cripple our already depressed economy and are so globally socialistic that they would make even a communist blush.

Al Gore actually made statements in July 2009 at Oxford that change will be driven through "global governance."

Based upon the cover-up of declining global temperatures at the leading British research center, two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released a statement Thursday calling for the Academy to revoke Al Gore's Oscar for his global warming treatise, "An Inconvenient Truth."

The U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, reported that $10-12 billion annually will be needed from developed countries (like the U.S.) through 2012 to "kick-start" things. According the World Bank, adapting for global warming (like building larger dams or higher bridges) will cost an additional $75 billion to $100 billion a year over the next 40 years. (A business professor at the University of Cambridge says it could be as high as $200-$300 billion.)

WND reported that the Coca-Cola corporation is spearheading its own coalition of more than 100 companies "pushing a United Nations climate treaty to bind the U.S. to cap-and-trade emissions regulation, commit the world's wealthiest nations to a potential $10 trillion in foreign aid and, possibly, form a proposed international 'super-grid' for regulating and distributing electric power worldwide."

Japan's Energy Commission revealed the majority of Japanese scientists reject U.N. and Western-backed theories of climate change.

Thousands of leading international scientists from premier scientific and academic institutions (like MIT, Harvard, USC, Princeton, Carleton University in Canada, University of Bologna, Pulvoko Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Danish National Space Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Geophysics in Paris, University of Auckland, etc.) oppose what are being called mainstream scientific assessments on global warming.

Despite calls from U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, for members of Congress to consider the joint opinion of more than 32,000 U.S. scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who believe humans likely have little or no part in the creation of "global warming," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs justified the White House position and waved away opposition by tritely retorting "most people believe in global warming," despite Americans' belief in global warming has declined and is at a 12-year low.

With 16,500 delegates descending upon Copenhagen, including 140 aircraft carrying world leaders, heads of state and VIPs, the U.N. estimates the 12-day conference will create 40,584 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. And could it be merely coincidental that all these planes are amassing on one place on Dec. 7 – the very anniversary date of Pearl Harbor? Or are these all signs that our real enemies are looming on the horizon?

As I consider all of these chestnuts roasting on the Copenhagen fire, the questions that keep coming to my mind are:

Why is our president going to Copenhagen?

The inner workings at Copenhagen

Henry Lamb provides us with what will happen at Copenhagen:

More than 14,000 people have pre-registered to attend the shindig in Copenhagen next week, none of whom are delegates. The facility, which accommodates only 15,000 people, will be overrun by special-interest groups, all clamoring for attention and a piece of the $94 billion pie that is divided annually among the global-warming congregation.

The number of delegates that attend these meetings usually reaches 4,000, and the press adds another thousand or so. The conference is an economic boon to the host city, an opportunity to party for the attendees – and a potential disaster for everyone else in the world.

The Copenhagen meeting is the 15th official meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is the annual "biggie"; delegates and special-interest groups meet four or more times each year, each meeting drawing 5,000 to 10,000 people. The U.N. actually pays a per diem to the majority of the delegates; expenses for most of the special-interest groups come from grants from various governments, or from major foundations.

The U.N. works hard to see that a good time is had by all; they screen attendees tighter than the Secret Service screens state dinners at the White House. WorldNetDaily, for example, is not allowed to attend; they may report something that the U.N. does not want reported. The press that is allowed to attend may not film or record the meetings. They may not even carry their equipment into the area where the meetings are held without an official U.N. "minder" with them. Everyone is free to photograph and record in the public areas such as the restaurants and the exhibit area.

The actual meetings are another matter. Much of the time the delegates are divided into different groups, working to remove the [brackets] from the brain-numbing language that may eventually evolve into a treaty. The brackets indicate language that some, but not all, delegates want in the treaty. These sessions are interrupted by mass meetings where all the delegates assemble to listen to translators reveal the speaker's latest vision of cataclysmic eschatology dispersed by the despicable demons in the West. These "hate America" sessions provide the inspiration for the delegates to endure another day of bracket-removing.

By the end of the meeting, all the brackets will be removed and the delegates will produce some kind of a document in which they all agree to something. Everyone will hug, wave, say goodbye and go home to begin preparing for the next meeting.

The new state religion

Vox Day also sees the religous aspect of the Global Warming church:

In his book, "Liberal Fascism," Jonah Goldberg explains that the primary mechanism utilized by progressives in restructuring society to their liking is to disassociate every step in the program from the preceding and following ones. "It's just this one little brick," they explain to the conservative who is opposed to the idea of the proposed wall. "Don't be so paranoid ... you didn't mean to take it seriously when we said we intended to build an entire wall. What's the matter with this one brick?"

Of course, the minute that the conservative foolishly accedes to progressive blandishments and allows the brick to be placed, the progressive immediately declares the pressing need to move on to the next brick in the wall. Climategate notwithstanding, Al Gore must feel that the present brick is being satisfactorily laid at Copenhagen, because he has already moved on to declaring the need to further handicap the global economy by reducing the carbon emissions 25 percent more than the climate agreement that will be announced next week.

Even if a deal is reached at the U.N. climate change talks in Copenhagen next week, it will only be the first step toward the far more radical cuts that are needed in global carbon emissions, Al Gore, former vice president, told the Times last night. Gore said that to avoid the worst ravages of climate change world leaders would have to come together again to set more drastic reductions than those now planned. …

He insisted that the present goal set for Copenhagen of stabilizing world emissions of carbon dioxide at or below 450 parts per million – enough to prevent a rise in average global temperatures of no more than 2 degrees Celsius – was insufficient and a safer target would be 350 parts per million.

This is insane from historical, scientific, economic and political perspectives. It is historically insane because we know the planet was more than two degrees warmer as recently as 500 years ago. It is scientifically insane because we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the world is not warming according to any of the predictions based on models which are based on the idea that higher carbon dioxide levels produce higher temperatures. It is economically insane because it strengthens the contractionary forces that are already in the process of plunging the world into the greatest depression of the modern era. It is politically insane because it reverses more than 300 years of advancing human liberty and democracy.

The global climate-change crusade is nothing more than the latest in a very long line of schemes permitting the governing elite to maintain and expand their power. It will likely succeed, since the larger part of the population that is in a position to stop the crusade is too fat, unimaginative and apathetic to have much interest in what their nominal public servants have in mind for them. The beauty and the curse of a representative democracy is that the people usually get the government they deserve, and what comes out of Copenhagen should accurately testify to what the last 50 years of European and American democracy have merited.

Republics, like empires, rise and fall over time. What we appear to be witnessing this week as the global leaders go through the ritualized dance of reaching a public agreement is a significant step toward the fall of the American republic and the rise of what increasingly looks like one of the mightiest empires the world has ever known. This is not the first brick in the great pyramid of the new state religion, nor, as Al Gore has made abundantly clear, will it be the last one. We can only hope that this new secular priesthood is more circumspect and less bloody-minded than their historical predecessors.

The Church of Global Warming

Found the church that Cory Heidelberger worships:

I'm sure you've all heard about the scandal coming out of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, in which some bozos cooked the raw data on temperatures from around the world when those data didn't reflect their global-warming agenda.

These guys apparently weren't hamstrung by the Scientific Method, which has the audacity to suggest that the process of establishing a theory (such as global warming) be "objective to reduce biased interpretations of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called 'full disclosure,' also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established."

Unencumbered by such quaint scientific protocol, these guys knew the raw data they obtained were an inconvenient truth, so they "lost" them. These "scientists" were determined to prove global warming by faith alone, not by any credible methodology or empirical evidence.

To those of us who have long been skeptical about man's influence on global temperatures, the timing of these leaked e-mails just ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit couldn't be better. But wait, something's wrong. The damning evidence hasn't raised a peep of alarm from the global-warming cultists.

Professor Trevor Davies of the East Anglia CRU called the hacked e-mails "the latest example of a campaign intended 'to distract from reasoned debate' about global climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit."

Reasoned debate. Ha ha, that's a good one. It's well-documented that any scientist who argues against global warming is ridiculed and discredited. Global warming has gone beyond the realm of science into the mysticism of religion. It can only be believed on faith, not facts. No one dares question the Church of Global Warming. Reasoned debate has no place in climate change discussions for the simple reason that its believers aren't scientists – they're religious converts who think altering the data and silencing critics is fine if it advances the cause.

The Church of Global Warming's goal is to pass laws that will make your life miserable. This church wants you to be fined and/or jailed if you don't obey its precepts to live as the High Priests have determined you should live. Conveniently, these High Priests are exempt from similar restrictions and can still live lavish consumerist lifestyles (Al Gore, anyone?) while preaching the gospel of poverty to save Gaia.

Just like a true religion, the Church of Global Warming has its (ahem) "Sunday" school. But this isn't a one-hour class once a week. It's seven hours a day of compulsory indoctrination (otherwise known as public schools) where little kids are brainwashed into believing humans are a blot on the planet. They learn to sing catchy ditties that "scold … selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees."

Will the South Dakota GOP turn itself over to the Tea Party movement?

On Saturday another Tea Party gathering formed in Pierre:

Hofer was one of more than 100 conservatives and curious locals who filled the Capitol Lake Visitors Center Saturday for a “tea party” rally featuring prominent conservative activists and politicians. Bearing signs and clothing attacking progressive health care and environmental policies, attendees heard speakers lay into the Obama administration and the political left.

“Today the greatest enemy of our country is not an outside enemy, it’s a philosophy — a philosophy that says the individual is no longer economically responsible for his welfare, nor is he morally responsible for his own conduct,” said Dr. Allen Unruh, a conservative activist who spoke at the rally. “That philosophy will destroy America.”

...

The rally was part of the national “tea party” movement, a network of conservative, anti-tax protests around the country since President Barack Obama’s inauguration. While tea party protests — including Saturday’s — draw on Revolutionary War themes, Sheehan branded his rally as the “New Pony Congress” after the first Dakota Territory legislature.

Here is Pat Powers' take:

You’d have thought they were burned in effigy (or at the stake) as much as some of the looneyleftblogs were whining about this rally.

But note what the organizer had to say about it – “the event was designed to get people talking about issues and to get them involved.” No wonder they were complaining. Conservatives getting involved and called to action.

They’re terrified that conservative voters see their offerings – socialized medicine, porkulous, cap and tax, and the like – for what they really are. Big government solutions that take money out of their pockets at the same time they reduce our rights, and they chip away at our liberties.

Best of all, they’re terrified that conservatives are experiencing a resurgence the likes that have not been seen since Ronald Reagan.  And they’re right.

I’ve said on several occasions that we had to go through Jimmy Carter before we would elect Ronald Reagan. We had to have the worst of the worst before we’d find our way out of the wilderness.

Well, under the current administration, the wilderness is looking pretty think.

But we can hear the calls in the distance. And we’re starting to cut a path.

I thought it was only in the land of the hillbillies that the wilderness was "think". But I digress.

If Pat Powers thinks that this is a sign of a GOP return to power, this Rasmussen report should give him reason for pause:

Running under the Tea Party brand may be better in congressional races than being a Republican.

In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.

Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Tea Party comes out on top. Thirty-three percent (33%) prefer the Tea Party candidate, and 30% are undecided. Twenty-five percent (25%) would vote for a Democrat, and just 12% prefer the GOP.

Among Republican voters, 39% say they’d vote for the GOP candidate, but 33% favor the Tea Party option.

For this survey, the respondents were asked to assume that the Tea Party movement organized as a new political party. In practical terms, it is unlikely that a true third-party option would perform as well as the polling data indicates. The rules of the election process—written by Republicans and Democrats--provide substantial advantages for the two established major parties. The more conventional route in the United States is for a potential third-party force to overtake one of the existing parties.

So will the South Dakota GOP allow itsef to be taken over by those of us who are true Tea Party cponservatives? If not, then Heidelberger's thought of a third party is an option. Perhaps I will test them by seeing if they are willing to reject far-left Progressive Mike Vehe and push forward a true Tea Party conservative.

Rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28

This should cause concern among the Progressives of both parties:

Now, Beck has announced a massive rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, which gives the socialist oligarchy in Washington nine months to think about it. Unless they do something to stop him, that massive gathering of anti-government-corruption folks – I'm guessing it will be at least 1-2 million strong – will overwhelm the lies and treasonous acts of Obama and his progressive allies in Congress.

The repression of truth by the progressive fascists is becoming shakier by the day. Let's make sure that it spreads throughout the land before they resort to iron-fist tactics and establish an outright dictatorship in place of the shadow dictatorship that is now in place.

Anyone who fails to take seriously the greatest threat to America's liberty in our history is not only making a naïve mistake but a grave one. You can be sure that I'll be at the D.C. rally on Aug. 28. Will you?

Progressive GOP establishmemt oppose Glenn Beck

This Robert Ringer column supports my theme that the Progressive Movement has control of both parties and Glenn Beck is not liked by either party leadership. Kind of like the South Dakota Conservative action Council and me:

After the League of American Voters ran ads in Arkansas, North Dakota and Maine, the under-30 crowd changed its tune and now opposes the Democrats' Orwellian legislation by an eye-opening 65-25. Which proves again that what I first wrote about in 1979 in "Restoring the American Dream" is true: Short of a violent counterrevolution, education of the masses is the key to defeating the progressive movement to socialize America.

Informed people know that government-run health care has nothing to do with helping those who are uninsured … that global warming is a scam … that the purpose of cap-and-trade is to raise taxes and control people's lives … that most members of Congress are totally corrupt and that a large number of them are guilty of treason … to name but a few of the more egregious items. Yet the government keeps inundating us with its trickle-down lies.

But the times they are a changin'. The progressives are now getting it from all sides, thanks to Fox News, conservative talk radio, conservative and libertarian bloggers, and, above all, a strange humanoid by the name of Glenn Beck to whom God handed a divine mission.

Though the Republican establishment (that's right, Republican) is up in arms over Beck, they're too late. The only thing that can stop him is an assassin's bullet, and let's hope that doesn't happen. And if it did, it might just trigger an acceleration in the citizen revolt that is now well under way.

Foolers: Keynsian economists & Global Warming scientists

From David Limbaugh:

Despite the unfolding international "climate change" scandal involving the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, President Barack Obama's ideological presuppositions on global warming remain unshaken, and he will still happily attend the Copenhagen global-warming conference.

This unprecedented fraud by a "team" of politicized scientists whose research has generated some $20 million in research grants for the CRU hasn't deterred Obama from his energy- and economy-destroying agenda any more than double-digit unemployment figures have dissuaded him from his failed Keynesian policies. Nor is Obama bothered by the incestuous relationship among the CRU, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Copenhagen summit.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sniffed that corruption at the highest levels of climate-change intelligentsia – corruption, mind you, that bears directly on the underlying science – doesn't alter the president's firm opinion that "climate change is happening."

"I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," said Gibbs. "I think there's no real scientific basis for the dispute of this."

Oh? Is this administration so myopic as to be dangerously ignorant? So arrogant that it deems dissenting opinions unworthy of acknowledgment? Or just old-fashioned liars?

The intellectually honest can't deny there is widespread debate over the existence of manmade catastrophic global warming. More than 31,000 scientists, 9,000 of whom have Ph.D.s, signed a petition urging our government to reject the Kyoto Protocol, and 100 more endorsed an ad by the Cato Institute disputing the president's "facts" on global warming. Also, countless books have been written refuting the exaggerated, distorted claims of the warming lobby.

ACORN's tax problems

So ACORN is also trying to get out of paying taxes:

ACORN might even declare bankruptcy before Christmas. As of Nov. 11, ACORN and its affiliates owed at least $2,328,596 in long overdue back taxes to all levels of government. Many of the tax liens, which are only issued by creditor tax agencies after a tax debt has become seriously delinquent, do not appear in the Nexis database, so the actual total may be much higher. ACORN has been negotiating with tax collectors to have interest on its tax debts waived and to have some of the debts partially forgiven.

Or ACORN might get a bailout from the federal government.

Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department released a legal opinion last week that allows the Obama administration to ignore the will of Congress, which has voted overwhelmingly to suspend federal funding of ACORN until at least Dec. 18. Holder has also ignored the 88-page report on ACORN's systemic corruption and flagrant racketeering activities that was issued this summer by Republican investigators on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Apparently, public outrage at the continuing antics of the corrupt radical advocacy group that used to employ President Obama and White House political director Patrick Gaspard counts for nothing.

Which side do you trust?

David Limbaugh:

In light of Climategate, serious people studying the global warming issue and the staggering consequences of political decisions based on it should consider the relative credibility of the opposing sides of this debate. Which of the two sides insists, despite vigorous dissent, that there is no debate; uses intimidation and ridicule to suppress and discredit this dissent; refuses to hold itself accountable for repeated false alarms (e.g., Paul Ehrlich, Ted Danson, Al Gore, etc.); has often been caught manufacturing data to fit its predetermined conclusions; has an economic and political agenda driving its science; has been tainted by millions of dollars in corrupting research grants; and is recommending policies that are objectively imprudent and to the manifest detriment of the United States?

Which side do you trust?

Progressives' convenient fantasy

Erik Rush goes after the Progressive movement:

Those of us whom some would crown with tinfoil hats are not any more intellectually gifted than our fellows; we simply possess a broader perspective. For example: Progressives claim to corner the market on (among a multitude of other things) understanding and insight vis-à-vis divergent cultures. In truth, it is the deeper comprehension thereof on the part of their political opponents – that would be us – which provides much more sagacity in this area.

America was attacked by radical Islamists on Sept. 11, 2001, yet to progressives, what I would deem prudent comportment in the face of that action is silly and alarmist, or even racist. This despite the fact that radical Islam continues to arm itself and profess its intention to wipe out America and her allies.

My model for prudent comportment reflects a deeper understanding of the Islamic worldview than that of progressives. I have witnessed their actions. I have heard their rhetoric. I have researched their beliefs and their history. Hence, there is every reason for me to believe that Islam poses a threat to America and will continue to do so for quite some time.

While the masses stare glassily past the efforts of eager oligarchs and Marxists to distend government to cyclopean proportions, my tinfoil-hat-wearing friends and I manifest a better, and even humbler, understanding of history and human nature. We know that humanity has not evolved into the august creation progressives would have us believe we are, in which our vast wisdom and divine intellect will consistently guide us to morally superior action. We know that civilization can be fragile and that human beings can revert to their primal nature in a New York minute. Just ask anyone who survived that hurricane former President George W. Bush coaxed ashore with his black ops technology to kill black people back in 2005.

Given the cushy perceptual bubble in which so many Americans live, they see no problem with turning over vast swaths of our economy to a demonstrably inept, self-serving bureaucracy, because they believe that its principals truly have our best interests at heart. They see no reason that the means by which Americans might defend themselves against a tyrannical regime ought not be regulated out of existence, because the idea that our government might someday initiate wholesale oppression of Americans is simply preposterous.

The shallow perspective of dedicated progressives and their deluded acolytes is due in part to intellectual indolence, and in part to the left having capitalized upon that indolence. Their aims will, of course, be far easier to achieve if more of us buy into the idea that America is too big to fail, our government can be trusted, and our enemies really don't hate us as much as those far-right nut jobs say they do. It is a convenient fantasy.

And who is more dedicated to, and most adept at, weaving fantasy than those in the entertainment industry? While historically, societies paid little deference to those who entertained them, and even less to their opinions, America has allowed a deeply harmful cult of celebrity worship to develop. In our admiration, we have emulated their narcissism and become conditioned to equate form with substance. Consequently, our collective worldview has been shepherded into the gutter by a collection of uninformed, shallow, pampered morons.

This is what passes for enlightenment in the 21st century.

The greatest scientific fraud of the 21st century

Joe Schimmel points out those who foster convenient lies:

The sordid revelations discovered in recently leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit further confirm what many of us have long suspected regarding the global-warming hoax: that elitists are cherry-picking data, rigging peer reviews, ignoring pertinent facts and using "tricks." All of this in an effort toward perpetuating a myth of manmade global warming to sell the world on a Chicken Little "The Sky is Falling" scenario.

Whether it is a CRU scientist acknowledging, "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," or Phil Jones, head of Hadley CRU, advocating they "hide the decline" of global temperatures, the CRU weather balloon, filled with so much hot air, is out of the bag! This revelation of CRU's dark underbelly, however, is only the tip of the iceberg in what will very likely go down as the greatest scientific fraud of the 21st century.

After British filmmaker Phelim McAleer asked Al Gore at the Conference for Environmental Journalists what he was going to do to revise his film, "An Inconvenient Truth," after a British High Court in London found nine significant errors, his microphone was abruptly shut off. (The Huffington Post, Oct. 10, 2009)

Even the notoriously liberal Newsweek pointed out that after one scientist Gore interviewed informed him that significant amounts of CO2 emissions (the great peccadillo at the heart of the manmade global-warming theory) could be soaked up through proper soil management, they said it posed a "dilemma for Gore" and a "political clash." Why? Because Gore needs the threat of global warming to advance his radical leftist global agenda!

After Gore found out that Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, was informing the public that CO2 need not be a problem, stating, "If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit," Gore's assistant told LaSalle to dial down his estimate.

All of this begs the question, why "dial down" good news and "hide the decline" of global temperatures? How is it that we are enduring the ninth-coldest year on record, Greenland's ice mass is "increasing," and the world's polar bear population is "growing," while certain politicians and scientists continue to engage in shameless deceit? The reason so many leftist politicians "hide the decline" is so they can manipulate the fears of the masses and cause them to seek refuge in the arms of Big Brother. Sadly, many scientists cannot resist the temptation to support such scenarios because it insures that they will receive huge financial grants and enjoy elite status in the liberal academic community.

Furthermore, it is no secret that Al Gore and others are exploiting environmental issues to further a global agenda. Al Gore wrote in his book "Earth in the Balance," "We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth." Gore shamelessly calls for us to surrender to a "a central organizing principle. …"

Ultimately for elitists, truth is not the issue – control is.

Progressive agenda scientists suppress disent

Jack Cashill tells us about another conspiracy

Dr. Richard Sternberg knows all about the kind of abuse global-warming skeptics have endured at the hands of the Climatic Research Unit in the brewing "Climategate" scandal.

Five years ago, Sternberg challenged the most vulnerable of the science establishment's paradigms, namely Darwinism and its derivatives, and learned firsthand the lengths that establishment will go to suppress dissent.

For any number of uneventful years, the evolutionary biologist Sternberg was a member in good standing of that very establishment.

Employed by the National Institutes of Health in association with the Smithsonian Institution, he served as the managing editor of the Smithsonian-affiliated journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

In 2004, Sternberg chose to publish a tightly argued paper by the Discovery Institute's Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, titled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories."

In brief, Meyer contended that neo-Darwinism has failed to provide a convincing explanation for the relatively sudden and massive infusion of new genetic information into the fossil record popularly known as the Cambrian Explosion.

Shortly before receiving Meyer's paper, Sternberg had attended an in-service training module on the ethics of peer review.

What Sternberg took away from the training is that the "peers" selected to review a given paper be neither prejudiced against the topic nor partial to it for reasons of self-interest.

Sternberg identified three such scientists to review Meyer's paper. They offered some useful revisions, and the paper was published in August 2004.

In publishing Meyer's paper, Sternberg had merely hoped to provoke a good discussion. He was "absolutely not expecting" the hell that rained down upon him with the paper's publication.

The road to hell was paved with e-mail. But even by Climategate standards, the e-mail campaign to punish Sternberg was a cruel and catty one.

One zoologist colleague, for instance, asked their common department head, Dr. Jonathan Coddington, why the heretical Sternberg should be allowed to keep an office, especially one with "a name on it."

Prejudiced to the point of paranoia, the zoologist demanded that his own office "be re-keyed."

Coddington handled the affair with all the courage and conviction of a Pontius Pilate. "At present I am not tossing him out," he told his colleagues of Sternberg. "Do you want anything done?"

Coddington's own plan was to meet with Sternberg and "hint that if he had any class he would either entirely desist or resign his appointment."

When Sternberg failed to take the hint, Coddington and colleagues settled on a bold plan of petty revenge, death by a thousand academic cuts.

For Sternberg to keep his research associate position, he would have to detail every move he made short of bathroom breaks.

When Sternberg asked if the other research associates were being subjected to the same treatment, Coddington replied, "This is not about the other RAs. This is only about you."

No shame in believing in conspiracy theories

Joseph Farah also believes in being honest:

I am sometimes accused of believing in and promoting "conspiracy theories."

To this charge, I must plead guilty.

For a long time, I have warned of a massive conspiracy to persuade the American public, in fact the population of the entire world, that life as we know it is threatened by a phantom crisis. This conspiracy is so massive and bold it seeks literally to usher in a new age of global governance, even though there is no evidence to support the claims behind the imminent threat to the planet.

Nevertheless, most of the news media, most government institutions, most politicians of both parties, nearly all schools and universities – even most corporations – promote this conspiracy.

And, later this month, a United Nations global convention in Copenhagen aims to build upon the work of this conspiracy in the hopes of promoting unaccountable global governance – turning people in formerly free countries like the United States into little more than serfs far removed from their masters.

I speak, of course, of the widespread conspiracy and increasingly obvious fraud known as man-made, catastrophic climate change.

For years, we have been told that "scientists" have a reached a broad consensus that man's activity on the planet, particularly through the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is causing "global warming."

It has never been true that such consensus exists – despite broad efforts at seduction, intimidation and coercion of scientists through the use of government grants, foundation support, academic appointments, peer pressure and, ultimately, blacklisting of those who don't go along with the charade.

But recently, strong evidence of that intimidation and blacklisting of scientists has surfaced.

It came in the form of e-mails from prominent scientists from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia clearly trying to "shout down" those with opposing views. The e-mails show a willingness to manipulate data to make it fit the theory. What's worse, a preliminary investigation of the e-mails shows those responsible have destroyed much of the original data so it can no longer be independently verified in light of the scandal.

Yes, I do believe in conspiracies.

And global-warming hysteria is a textbook example of how they work in the real world.

In order not to believe in conspiracies you would have to be naïve. You would have to believe there aren't bad people in the world working in their own self-interest. You would have to believe that politicians and university professors and scientists are all incorruptible and above reproach.

Do you believe that?

Do you believe government always works in the best interest of people?

Or, do you believe that power can corrupt and absolute power can corrupt absolutely?

Another government made housing bubble

John Stossel is on top of the continuing governemtn intervention into the housing market:

The Federal Housing Administration announced this week that it wants tougher rules on mortgage lenders. It's about time.

Maybe FHA got spooked by the recent New York Times story titled "Easy Loans to Wealthier Areas," which said: "In its efforts to prop up a shattered housing market, the government is greatly extending its traditional support of real estate, including guaranteeing the mortgages of middle-class and even upper-class buyers against default."

The Times explained that San Francisco, one of the priciest real-estate markets in the country, had no government-insured mortgages two years ago, but now "the government is guaranteeing an average of six mortgages a week here. ... The Federal Housing Administration is underwriting loans at quadruple the rate of three years ago even as its reserves to cover defaults are dwindling."

And some of those loans are surely questionable.

The Times explains that 27-year-old Mike Rowland and his friends were able to buy a two-unit apartment building for almost a million dollars. "They had only a little cash to bring to the table but, with the federal government insuring the transaction, a large down payment was not necessary."

"It was kind of crazy we could get this big a loan," Rowland said.

Yes, it was crazy. Such policies do not end well. Young Rowland gets that. Even the Times does: "With government finances already under great strain, the policy expansions are creating new risks for American taxpayers."

But our leaders plunge ahead, with your money. Has the administration forgotten that today's financial mess was precipitated in part by government's moves to encourage mortgage lending to unqualified or at best unproven borrowers? In the 1990s, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, concerned that blacks and Hispanics were "underserved," issued guidelines to banks stating: "Policies regarding applicants with no credit history or problem credit history should be reviewed. Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor. ..."

Soon, the lower standards spilled into the prime-mortgage market. The risk to lenders seemed small because government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac happily bought the dubious loans. An entire financial edifice was built on these securitized mortgages and derivatives based on them.

Then the good times ended. Interest rates rose. Home prices flattened and then declined. Then those AAA mortgage-backed securities became "toxic."

After all that, it's crazy that government still subsidizes housing rather than letting the market work. The economy will recover from recession only when it is allowed to discover the real value of assets like houses. But the government refuses to allow this to happen. FHA has been blowing air into another bubble, while other agencies do everything they can to boost prices.

This includes leaning on and bribing banks to ease mortgage terms for people in default. The Obama administration announced that it would increase that pressure because "the banks are not doing a good enough job," said Michael S. Barr, assistant treasury secretary for financial institutions. Some Democrats want to go further. They demand that the government compel mediation over defaulted mortgages or empower judges to change the terms.

This sounds humane, but it is typical political shortsightedness. When government helps delinquent borrowers to get easier loan terms, it simultaneously makes it harder for marginal borrowers to get loans in the first place. That's because lenders must now factor in the likelihood of a judge changing the terms.

The know-it-alls in Washington "help" Americans by hurting them.