Labels: MR
Why the climatologists get it wrong.
Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."
OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?
In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."
You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.
In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.
Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.
Sorry, I noticed.
It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.
Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes.
His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone.
The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue.
That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing.
While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Their growth rings show what's happened no matter which philosophy is in power. Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.
Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.
Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans.
Today, as I peck out these words, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops."
To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. But the longer term changes are no more compelling, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age?
I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status.
Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. That's another inconvenient fact.
Labels: afghanistan, Barack Obama, Iran, Mahdi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Labels: cru, fraud, global warming, Lie, phil jones
In a move by the Obama administration that is gallingly cynical and would be considered treasonous in a less progressive era, a message sent by Code Pink and an article published by the left wing online publication AlertNet indicates the White House is working with the left wing terrorist support group Code Pink to agitate the public and undermine President Barack Obama’s newly announced Afghanistan war policy.
Labels: afghanistan, Barack Obama, code pink, Treason
The magical faraway tree: a larch in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, sampled by Dr Keith Briffa, has been called 'the most influential tree in the world'Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.
To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.
It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period).
The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels.
Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.
At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them.
This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.
This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted.
Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".
But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.
A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)
In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.
Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.
I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.
The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing.
If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all.
Labels: climategate, fraud, global warming, influential tree, phil jones, siberia
Sean Hannity's scalp-hunting desperation descends into fabricating NAMBLA connections to Jennings
Last night he not only was still clinging desperately to the false notion that Jennings should have reported a teenager's sexual affair to authorities, but he came up with a new line of attack -- borrowed directly from the fine fools at Powerline -- claiming that Jennings, in "a 1977 speech," had praised "one of the founders of NAMBLA," a gay-rights pioneer named Harry Hay. Hannity calls him a "big supporter of NAMBLA."
As usual, the fine researchers at Media Matters have the whole story:
Power Line's Hinderaker cited Jennings' speech, NAMBLA. In an October 1 post, Power Line's John Hinderaker noted Jennings' 1997 speech and wrote: "Obama nominee Kevin Jennings actually said that the founder of NAMBLA -- the North American Man-Boy Love Association -- Harry Hay, is '[o]ne of the people that's always inspired me,' " ... Hinderaker's claim that Hay founded NAMBLA is false. As the Associated Press noted in 2002, Hay "in 1950 founded the secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society." Hay wrote in the Gay Community News (retrieved from Nexis) in 1994, "I am not a member of NAMBLA, nor would it ever have been my inclination to be one."
NAMBLA AND HAY:Hay conceived of the idea of a homosexual activist group in 1948. After signing a petition for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, Hay spoke with other gay men at a party about forming a gay support organization for him called "Bachelors for Wallace".[26] Encouraged by the response he received, Hay wrote out the organizing principles that night, a document he referred to as "The Call".[27] However, the men who had been interested at the party were less than enthused the following morning.[26] Over the next two years, Hay refined his idea, finally conceiving of an "international...fraternal order" to serve as "a service and welfare organization devoted to the protection and improvement of Society's Androgynous Minority".[28] He planned to call this organization "Bachelors Anonymous" and envisioned it serving a similar function and purpose as Alcoholics Anonymous.[29] Hay met Rudi Gernreich in July 1950. The two became lovers,[note 3] and Hay showed Gernreich The Call. Gernreich, declaring the document "the most dangerous thing [he had] ever read",[17] became an enthusiastic financial supporter of the venture, although he did not lend his name to it[30] (going instead by the initial "R"[31]). Finally on November 11, 1950, Hay, along with Gernreich and friends Dale Jennings and lovers Bob Hull and Chuck Rowland, held the first meeting of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, under the name "Society of Fools".[32] The group changed its name to "Mattachine Society" in April 1951, a name chosen by Hay based on Medieval French secret societies of masked men who, through their anonymity, were empowered to criticize ruling monarchs with impunity.[33]
Hay (upper left) with members of the Mattachine Society in a rare group photograph. With Hay are (l-r) Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Rudi Gernreich, Stan Witt, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland (in glasses), Paul Bernard. Photo by Jim Gruber.As Hay became more involved in his Mattachine work, he correspondingly became more concerned that his homosexuality would negatively affect the Communist Party, which did not allow gays to be members. Hay himself approached Party leaders and recommended his own expulsion. The Party refused to expel Hay as a homosexual, instead expelling him as a "security risk" at the same time declaring him to be a "Lifelong Friend of the People".[34]
In the early 1980s, Hay joined other early gay rights activists protesting the exclusion of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from participation in LGBT social movements, most noticeably pride parades–arguably the most visible signs of LGBT culture–on the grounds that such exclusions constituted a betrayal by the gay community.[33] In 1983, at a New York University forum, sponsored by an on-campus gay organization, he remarked "[I]f the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world."[49] In 1986 Hay was confronted by police when he attempted to march in the Los Angeles pride parade, from which NAMBLA had been banned, with a sign reading "NAMBLA walks with me."[14][note 5] Hay refused to participate in the official 1994 parade in New York City commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots because of its exclusionary policies. Instead he joined an alternate parade called "The Spirit of Stonewall".[33]
“One of the people that’s always inspired me is Harry Hay, who started the first ongoing gay rights groups in America. In 1948, he tried to get people to join the Mattachine Society [the first American homosexual “rights” group]. It took him two years to find one other person who would join. Well, [in] 1993, Harry Hay marched with a million people in Washington, who thought he had a good idea 40 years before. Everybody thought Harry Hay was crazy in 1948, and they knew something about him which he apparently did not—they were right, he was crazy. You are all crazy. We are all crazy. All of us who are thinking this way are crazy, because you know what? Sane people keep the world the same [sh*tty] old way it is now. It’s the people who think, ‘No, I can envision a day when straight people say, ‘So what if you’re promoting homosexuality?’ Or straight kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you and your boyfriend come over before you go to the prom and try on your tuxes on at my house?’ That if we believe that can happen, we can make it happen. The only thing that will stop us is our lack of faith that we can make it happen. That is our mission from this day forward. To not lose our faith, to not lose our belief that the world can, indeed, be a different place. And think how much can change in one lifetime if in Harry Hay’s one very short life, he saw change from not even one person willing to join him to a million people willing to travel to Washington to join him. You can see the same changed happen in your lifetime if you believe you can.”
Labels: MR
From Gateway (click on the title above to read the whole thing):
Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Recently he was appointed by the Obama administration to run the Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools in the US Department of Education. In 2007 Kevin Jennings was paid $273,573.96 as the executive director of GLSEN.
In 2000 GLSEN held a conference that was not so much about tolerance as it was about teaching children about sex. In this clip GLSEN activists promote “fisting” to 14 year olds.
This conference was fully supported by the Massachusetts Department of Education, the Safe Schools Program, the Governor’s Commission on Gay & Lesbian Youth, and some of the presenters even received federal money.
In this clip from the 2000 conference GLSEN activists promote “fisting” to 14 year-olds.
Here is the transcript.The clip is from a lecture by Scott Whiteman from Mass Resistance. Scott attended the GLSEN conference on March 25, 2000 undercover. He recorded this clip at the GLSEN Conference.
Mass Resistance recorded this discussion at a 2000 GLSEN conference workshop for children:If it’s all about tolerance, why is the following question necessary?
David LaFontaine, chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth and the man who is mostly responsible for the Gay Straight Alliances in Massachusetts, tells us, “We believe very strongly that all students should not be sexually active in high school.”Woman: Question is: What’s fisting?
Man: A little known fact is that you don’t make a fist like this. When they do it, it’s like this. This is a lot easier than this. [laughter]
Woman: You work your way up to it… [unclear] one finger, two fingers, three fingers … Some people can take a hand, or they can’t take a hand.
It’s about tolerance? If Gay Straight Alliances are not about sex, why are the people who run Gay Straight Alliances telling students about fisting? What you did not see is the man leading the discussion positioning his hand and showing 14 year olds how to insert their entire hand into the rectum of their sex partner.
Kevin Jennings who ran GLSEN is now Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar.
Male Teacher: … Spit versus swallowing – I don’t know about the calorie count of cum. All right. Is it rude? Let’s ask this question: Is it rude not to swallow?
Students: No! Oh, no! [Many "no's" from the children.]
Male Teacher: No. So it’s in good bedroom etiquette … [unclear] to spit out?
Kevin Jennings who ran GLSEN is now Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar.
More… Catholic Online- Remove Kevin Jennings! An Open letter to Mr. Obama.
Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings is not exactly a child advocate.
Jennings has a record of promoting child porn books to school children and praising NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) leaders.
The sign Harry Hay carried at the 1986 L.A. Gay Pride Parade on left (Zomblog) and Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings on the right.Yesterday, Gateway Pundit blog came under at least two cyber attacks that shut down the First Things website.
This came after the report on Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar’s child porn books.Scott Baker from Breitbart-TV.com and Co-Host of ‘The B-Cast‘ submitted a shocking report to this blog on Obama’s deviant Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings.
Scott Baker reported: I was recently approached by a team of independent researchers that I have known for some time and have come to trust. They prepared this report involving ‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded, GLSEN, and asked that I find a way to help draw attention to what they uncovered. Knowing that Gateway Pundit has followed Kevin Jennings since his appointment, as we have on The B-Cast (here, here, and here), and on Breitbart.tv (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), I felt this would be an appropriate place for this report.
The explosive report posted here and here outed Obama’s ‘Safe Schools Czar’s sickening promotion of child porn books to school children.
But, that’s not all. Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar is also on record praising the founder of NAMBLA (The North American Man/Boy Association) as one of his heroes.
Regular Folks United reported:Jennings publicly stated that he was inspired by one of the biggest promoters of pedophilia in the country—Harry Hay. Hay actively promoted sex between men and boys and supported the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Transcripts of a GLSEN conference in NYC on October 25, 1997 indicate that Jennings said, “one of the people that always inspired me is Harry Hay.” Jennings also edited a book called Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay and Lesbian History for High School and College Students which included a biographical sketch on Harry Hay. One of GLSEN’s Education Department resources also lists a work on Harry Hay.
Is this a person you’d trust with your child?
Is this the type of person Barack Obama trusts with his daughters?More… The next post planned for release this afternoon will be EXPLOSIVE.
Previously:
** Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings Hid Pedophilia
** Audio: Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Admits Hiding Pedophilia From Officials
** Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Expresses Regret for Not Reporting Statutory Rape
** Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Praised NAMBLA Founder, Too
** White House Blames FOX News For Their Safe Schools Czar’s Slimy Past
**Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Slams Schools For Promoting Heterosexuality
** Report: Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Wrote the Foreword to a Pedophilia Book
** Bill Ayers Endorsed Same Book as Obama’s Safe Schools Czar
** Jennings Wrote That Killing Someone Who Called You Names Was “Not Aberrant Behavior”
** Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Knew Harry Hay Was a Child Perp
** Pornographic Anti-Christian Harvard Art Show Funded By Obama’s Safe Schools Czar
Labels: Barack Obama, czar, kevin jennins, pedophilia
Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.
An "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions -- even if Congress doesn't pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.
Many business groups are opposed to EPA efforts to curb a gas as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide.
An EPA endangerment finding "could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery," he said, noting that the group supports federal legislation.
Not even Wesley Mouch could have invented better than this.
Someone hold my seat on the San Sebastian Line
Labels: MR
From my reliable tweets, 3:56 am: Uprisings in Shiraz: around 1000 students has started anti mullah slogans, the crowd are growing minute by minute
"students have started chanting slogans inside TH UNI, but slogans r not radical yet"
"have them under surveillance since last nigh"
""3 Student Activists Arrested in Lahijan" " Latest Reports on Prisoners : Students Face Heavy Arrest and Heavy Prison Terms"
"No Cell Phone Coverage in Enghelab Sqr, Around Tehran Uni and Polytechni"
Iran Police Surround University to Block Protests FOX
TEHRAN, Iran — Thousands of riot police and Revolutionary Guard members armed with tear gas, batons and firearms were deployed Monday outside Tehran University to prevent student demonstrations backed by the opposition.
The large security operation suggested that authorities planned to make good on their promise to deal harshly with protesters marking the day in 1953 when three students were killed in an anti-U.S. protest. The occasion has in recent years been used by students to stage pro-reform demonstrations.
There was no word immediately available on whether demonstrations have begun inside the campus, but the witnesses said police were conducting ID checks on anyone entering the campus to prevent opposition activists from joining the students.
Journalists working for foreign media organizations are banned from covering Monday's planned protests. They were told late Saturday by the Culture Ministry that their press cards would be suspended for three days starting Monday.
On Sunday night, government opponents braved pouring rain to climb to Tehran rooftops and shout "Allahu Akbar" and "Death to the Dictator."
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.
It's just a symbolic gesture. Mosques can function perfectly well without minarets. In fact, Saudi Wahhabi mosques don't have minarets, because they're considered bid'a, innovation. But the widespread support for a minaret ban represents the frustration of the common people with the elites' indifference toward and/or complicity with Islamization and the advance of Sharia.
"75% support for the ban on minarets in London Daily News poll," from the London Daily News, December 4
The Obama administration, grappling with a spate of recent Islamic terrorism cases on U.S. soil, has concluded that the country confronts a rising threat from homegrown extremism.I'm looking for the punk-ass head fake in here somewhere.
Anti-terrorism officials and experts see signs of accelerated radicalization among American Muslims, driven by a wave of English-language online propaganda and reflected in aspiring fighters' trips to hot spots such as Pakistan and Somalia.
Europe had been the front line, the target of successive attacks and major plots, while the U.S. remained relatively calm. But the number, variety and scale of recent U.S. cases suggest 2009 has been the most dangerous year domestically since 2001, anti-terrorism experts said:
* There were major arrests of Americans accused of plotting with Al Qaeda and its allies, including an Afghan American charged in a New York bomb plot described as the most serious threat in this country since the Sept. 11 attacks.
* Authorities tracked other extremism suspects joining foreign networks, including Somali Americans going to the battlegrounds of their ancestral homeland and an Albanian American from Brooklyn who was arrested in Kosovo.
* The FBI rounded up homegrown terrorism suspects in Dallas, Detroit and Raleigh, N.C., saying that it had broken up plots targeting a synagogue, government buildings and military facilities.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued her strongest public comments yet on the homegrown threat.
"We've seen an increased number of arrests here in the U.S. of individuals suspected of plotting terrorist attacks, or supporting terror groups abroad such as Al Qaeda," Napolitano said in a speech in New York. "Home-based terrorism is here. And, like violent extremism abroad, it will be part of the threat picture that we must now confront."
What did I write yesterday?Opening ceremonies began with a short film featuring children of the future facing an apocalypse of tempests and desert landscapes if world leaders failed to act today.
"There will be hundreds of millions of refugees," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's panel of climate scientists, said in the film.
"Please help save the world," said a little girl, plaintively.
Last week, I spent more than my share of hours trying to track down the truth about an incident on an AirTran flight out of Atlanta on Nov. 17.
Flight 297 to Houston, with about 70 passengers onboard, departed gate C-16 at 4:43 p.m. Until something happened that caused the pilot to turn around and come back.
Two and a half weeks later, the incident is in high dispute, thanks to some passengers who have spoken out on the Internet about what they say is a cover-up by AirTran and other transportation officials. This has been heating up since Tuesday, when one passenger's e-mail about the events he saw on the plane went viral, and the saga isn't over yet.
Initial media reports from Nov. 18 indicate the cause of the plane's turnaround was a single passenger who refused to turn off an electronic device. Some accounts said cell phone, some said video camera, but the bottom line is the flight crew felt something was amiss enough to turn around after they'd left the gate - no small occurrence.
In the now infamous e-mail (AirTran refers to it on their Web site www.inside airtran.com as "Flight 297 - Anatomy of an Urban Legend") a Texas man writes about an orchestrated attempt by a group of 13 men, which he characterizes as Muslim, to intimidate flight attendants and passengers.
His colorful description of the troublemakers boarding the plane, spreading out to their seats and then being uncooperative and verbally abusive toward flight attendants and other passengers hit my mailbox Tuesday, having been forwarded by the writer's friend, a former Marine and NASA employee, who also included his name, address and phone number.
Even as people scrambled to substantiate the e-mail, Muslim and leftist Web sites began characterizing the writer and anyone who thought it might have merit as "right wing racists." They immediately initiated a campaign to discredit and ridicule the writer, who actually had the audacity to speak boldly about the escalating fear and anger on the flight, though he admitted to me yesterday he'd taken artistic license with a couple points, never imagining it would travel beyond his circle of friends. He's not a journalist, and has no wish to become the next Joe the Plumber, he said.
His account, not intended for publication, focused on Arabic-speaking men using a number of tactics to upset the aircraft, such as taking photos of passengers, getting up and down from their seats at inappropriate times and intimidating others. The e-mail has, unfortunately, overshadowed the real story.
From AirTran, we know that the captain of Flight 297 felt it necessary to turn his plane around after leaving the gate. Once there the troublemakers were removed and questioned in what turned into a two-hour delay. And then, amazingly, all but two were allowed to reboard for the trip to Houston.
What ensued, according to the disputed e-mail as well as a new and highly credible eyewitness, was a small rebellion on board, with crew and at least a dozen passengers refusing to continue the flight.
Meanwhile, another Texas eyewitness, Dr. Keith Robinson, had been scheduled on the flight, but had missed his connection. He told his version of "the obvious commotion" at the gate, and added by phone he had offered his services as an ordained chaplain during the two-hour delay, but was rebuffed by AirTran officials.
"Gate agents expressed solemn concern" after the plane returned, he said, so he knew something was amiss. When the crew and a dozen passengers finally deplaned, some were openly sobbing and "anger and fear were etched on their faces."
Robinson, a good-natured man of God who formerly worked in restorative prosthodontics at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, eventually got on the plane.
"Chaplains are supposed to go where other people don't want to be," he explained. His account, also posted on the Internet, was written during the flight. He told me the Arabic-speaking men were quiet when he was on the flight, but that the tension was palpable. He believes the decision to allow the group back on the plane was based on fear of lawsuits.
"But is it inappropriate for Americans to stand together," he asked me, "draw a line in the sand and say this type of incident will not happen? Don't we have a duty to stand against this kind of intimidation?"
On Friday, AirTran spokesman Christopher White, formerly with the TSA, was snide and rude when I called to inquire about the incident.
He refused to answer questions and referred me to the above-mentioned website, which is not an official statement from AirTran but a public rebuking of a customer's circulating e-mail.
Note to Chris: putting a customer's writing on your site making him a target for death threats and ridicule seems rather irresponsible for a major airline. I hope someone reviews your qualifications as spokesperson.
Then, Saturday, AirTran went further, posting the assertion that the disputed e-mail writer from Texas, according to "legally binding" flight manifests, wasn't on the plane (just in case any of us believe the "urban legend" he supposedly made up out of thin air to get attention he isn't seeking,,, or something).
The e-mail writer told me today AirTran is lying and he has his boarding pass, but I'm beyond this by now, because I discovered another highly credible eyewitness to the incident was none other than Cobb businessman and security expert Brent C. Brown, CEO of Chesley-Brown International.
Brown, who is also chairman of the Marietta History Museum, confirmed late Saturday that he was on Flight 297 and that there was chaos on the plane. He believes the entire incident was mishandled by AirTran officials, though has kind words for the pilot, who he said, "was dead right" in his decision-making, and is to be commended for turning the plane around.
Seated in the third row in business class, he said it was obvious the suspicious men were interacting with each other and refusing to sit down, grounds for the pilot's decision.
Once back at the gate, however, Brown says there were no law enforcement officials visible (this contradicts the Texan's e-mail) and airline officials weren't talking to the passengers, who were openly upset and refusing to fly.
"The tension on board was incredible," Brown said. The men who came back on board after questioning were belligerent and smirking, and the people who got off, he confirmed, were traumatized.
So the story evolves. And in this age of jihadi Army officers and internet hoaxes, us regular folk continue to seek the truth.
Airlines have removed problem passengers for far less egregious behaviors such as:
being too fat for EasyJet
or breastfeeding on Delta
crying child from Southwest Airlines
And airlines have successfully fought for this right in courts -
airline wins case re:racial discrimination
And yes, even AirTran has tossed passengers in the past for something as 'inconvenient' as a toddler's tantrum
or even
questionable muslim behavior
The fact remains, the original flight crew refused to fly. Several other passengers also refused to fly.
There is more to this story.
I wonder how many lawyers are already working on this case - for AirTran, Petrunas, Robinson, and any other passenger or crew member from flight 297.
All airlines MUST hold to ZERO TOLERANCE for behaviors counter to flight crew authority or they WILL lose a lot of business and deserve it.
This crew is mute because their jobs may be on the line. Shame on any airline that won't back their crew.
The individuals who are responsible for permitting the provocateurs back on flight 297 are the ones whose jobs should be on the line. The provocateurs were the passengers who should have been 'inconvenienced' by being placed on another flight after being cleared by security.
Want to murder a cheating wife? Need religious justification for doing so? Then Islam is your "religion"....
Click on the title above and go to Weasel Zippers to read the whole story.
Labels: 9/11 Families, 911 Never Forget Us, December 5 Rally, Eric Holder, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
All of us, every single man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth were born with the same unalienable rights; to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, if the governments of the world can't get that through their thick skulls, then, regime change will be necessary.
OBSESSION
UNDERCOVER MOSQUE
GERT WILDER'S
Original Artwork By Bosch Fawstin
The Blasphemous Book of Queen Kafirtiti
CULTURISM
by John Kenneth Press
The Martyr's Prize: A Tale of American Exceptionalism and Ruthlessness in the Age of Religiously Inspired Terrorism 
