Currently viewing the tag: “Makes”
Breaking “News!!!” They said it couldn’t be done, yet the lack of experience reflected in the way President Obama performed his duties the first 2+ years of his administration may finally being replaced by some experience, you guessed it -he has taken off the training wheels and finally made a speech without the TOTUS, the teleprompter of the United States.
will not have an unobstructed run for the Democratic Party nomination in 2012. A formidable candidate, an ex-Senator who has run for the Oval Office before, is about to announce a new run. Along with that story, covered in today’s Newsbusted; the real reason OMG and LOL have were added to the Oxford dictionary, and what political group is the POTUS thinking of joining in order to boost his falling job ratings. All this and much, much more can be found in today’s Newsbusted, the twice weekly feature from Newsbusters.org . Its the funniest two and a half minutes on the internet since the end of March 2011.
This episode of Newsbusted is a must watch, in fact it is so important that if you do not view the video below, the UN will give Colonel Quadaffi sanctuary in your home.
So click play below and remember, swallow whatever you are drinking unless you want your computer to be damaged from the resulting spit take and enjoy the latest episode of Newsbusted, and the real news (sort of).
Oh, and if you cannot see video below click here
Please email me at [email protected] to be put onto my mailing list.
Feel free to reproduce any article but please link back to http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com![]()
Feel free to reproduce any article but please link back to http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com
CBC.ca |
Matt Kemp makes strides in Dodgers' win over San Francisco
Los Angeles Times Kemp shows patience in walking three times in the Dodgers' 2-1 opening-day victory. Two of his walks result in the Dodgers' runs against the Giants. Dodgers center fielder Matt Kemp slides into second with a stolen base as Giants shortstop Miguel … Giants' success could hinge on their shaky defense With nation watching, Clayton Kershaw delivers sterling performance Larry Stone Giants' Tim Lincecum stays cool, even in defeat |
It took a combination of Donald Trump’s air war and a New Jersey-based grass roots guerilla war to open television news up to the possibility that Barack Obama is not the writer
American Thinker Blog
Ever since Chief Justice Roberts joined the Supreme Court, the Chamber of Commerce has treated his Court as their personal genie, and Roberts has been more than happy to grant even many of their most outlandish wishes. Indeed, big business’ wins before the Supreme Court have spiked massively under Roberts’ leadership:
If the Roberts Court continues its pattern of favoritism to corporate interests, voters, workers and consumers could easily be left in the cold during three cases being argued this week:
- Buying Elections
In the wake of the Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, the Chamber pledged to spend a massive $ 75 million to elect corporate-aligned conservatives, and the Chamber’s right-wing allies kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars more. This kind of corporate influence over elections not only places a huge thumb on the scale in favor of pro-corporate candidates, it also corrupts existing lawmakers by forcing them to either play ball with corporate fundraisers or find some other source of funds in order to remain in the game.
Public financing provides a partial shield against this effect, but public financing schemes only work if they allow candidates who opt into them to remain competitive. If a state offers only a few thousand dollars in public funds to a candidate whose opponent is backed by tens of millions of corporate dollars, than the non-corporate candidate will have no choice but to raise money on their own. To defend against this problem, Arizona developed a two-tiered public financing system. Candidates receive additional funds if their opponent or corporate interest groups overwhelm them with attack ads, and thus candidates who are determined not to be tainted by the corrupting influence of major donors are not left defenseless.
Yet, in a case called McComish v. Bennett, the Court’s five conservatives appear poised to strike this two-tiered system down. If they do so, it could be the death knell for public financing, since no candidate is safe from massive infusions of corporate money after Citizens United.
- Making Courts Inaccessible
Many of the Court’s most corporate-friendly decisions create complicated and arcane procedural barriers to Americans seeking justice. The Court’s infamously Ledbetter decision didn’t literally take away women’s right to equal work for equal pay, it just created a procedural rule that made it nearly impossible for women to learn that they were victims of discrimination until after the statute of limitations to file a claim had run out. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court will decide whether to shut off another opportunity for women in the workplace to seek relief — class actions.
Class action lawsuits are brought by groups of plaintiffs who share a common injury with each other. These suits are essential to allow ordinary Americans, who often lack the resources to hire lawyers capable of taking on a major corporation on their own, to pool their resources in order to hire counsel that are capable of facing off against someone like Wal-Mart. There is substantial evidence that women who work for Wal-Mart stores have endured systematic pay and promotion discrimination and thus should be able to bring a class action. If the Supreme Court denies them this right, many of them will be left powerless before Wal-Mart’s legal team.
- Lawsuit Immunity
Finally, many corporate sectors have been given almost total lawsuit immunity by the Supreme Court. The justices gave sweeping legal immunity to medical device manufacturers and health insurers, and even gave the thumbs up to a biased system of corporate-owned courts that overwhelmingly rule against consumers and employees. In a case called PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, the justices will now decide whether to give lawsuit immunity to the makers of generic drugs.
Ever since Chief Justice Roberts joined the Supreme Court, the Chamber of Commerce has treated his Court as their personal genie, and Roberts has been more than happy to grant even many of their most outlandish wishes. Indeed, big business’ wins before the Supreme Court have spiked massively under Roberts’ leadership:
If the Roberts Court continues its pattern of favoritism to corporate interests, voters, workers and consumers could easily be left in the cold during three cases being argued this week:
- Buying Elections
In the wake of the Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, the Chamber pledged to spend a massive $ 75 million to elect corporate-aligned conservatives, and the Chamber’s right-wing allies kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars more. This kind of corporate influence over elections not only places a huge thumb on the scale in favor of pro-corporate candidates, it also corrupts existing lawmakers by forcing them to either play ball with corporate fundraisers or find some other source of funds in order to remain in the game.
Public financing provides a partial shield against this effect, but public financing schemes only work if they allow candidates who opt into them to remain competitive. If a state offers only a few thousand dollars in public funds to a candidate whose opponent is backed by tens of millions of corporate dollars, than the non-corporate candidate will have no choice but to raise money on their own. To defend against this problem, Arizona developed a two-tiered public financing system. Candidates receive additional funds if their opponent or corporate interest groups overwhelm them with attack ads, and thus candidates who are determined not to be tainted by the corrupting influence of major donors are not left defenseless.
Yet, in a case called McComish v. Bennett, the Court’s five conservatives appear poised to strike this two-tiered system down. If they do so, it could be the death knell for public financing, since no candidate is safe from massive infusions of corporate money after Citizens United.
- Making Courts Inaccessible
Many of the Court’s most corporate-friendly decisions create complicated and arcane procedural barriers to Americans seeking justice. The Court’s infamously Ledbetter decision didn’t literally take away women’s right to equal work for equal pay, it just created a procedural rule that made it nearly impossible for women to learn that they were victims of discrimination until after the statute of limitations to file a claim had run out. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court will decide whether to shut off another opportunity for women in the workplace to seek relief — class actions.
Class action lawsuits are brought by groups of plaintiffs who share a common injury with each other. These suits are essential to allow ordinary Americans, who often lack the resources to hire lawyers capable of taking on a major corporation on their own, to pool their resources in order to hire counsel that are capable of facing off against someone like Wal-Mart. There is substantial evidence that women who work for Wal-Mart stores have endured systematic pay and promotion discrimination and thus should be able to bring a class action. If the Supreme Court denies them this right, many of them will be left powerless before Wal-Mart’s legal team.
- Lawsuit Immunity
Finally, many corporate sectors have been given almost total lawsuit immunity by the Supreme Court. The justices gave sweeping legal immunity to medical device manufacturers and health insurers, and even gave the thumbs up to a biased system of corporate-owned courts that overwhelmingly rule against consumers and employees. In a case called PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, the justices will now decide whether to give lawsuit immunity to the makers of generic drugs.
Ever since Chief Justice Roberts joined the Supreme Court, the Chamber of Commerce has treated his Court as their personal genie, and Roberts has been more than happy to grant even many of their most outlandish wishes. Indeed, big business’ wins before the Supreme Court have spiked massively under Roberts’ leadership:
If the Roberts Court continues its pattern of favoritism to corporate interests, voters, workers and consumers could easily be left in the cold during three cases being argued this week:
- Buying Elections
In the wake of the Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, the Chamber pledged to spend a massive $ 75 million to elect corporate-aligned conservatives, and the Chamber’s right-wing allies kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars more. This kind of corporate influence over elections not only places a huge thumb on the scale in favor of pro-corporate candidates, it also corrupts existing lawmakers by forcing them to either play ball with corporate fundraisers or find some other source of funds in order to remain in the game.
Public financing provides a partial shield against this effect, but public financing schemes only work if they allow candidates who opt into them to remain competitive. If a state offers only a few thousand dollars in public funds to a candidate whose opponent is backed by tens of millions of corporate dollars, than the non-corporate candidate will have no choice but to raise money on their own. To defend against this problem, Arizona developed a two-tiered public financing system. Candidates receive additional funds if their opponent or corporate interest groups overwhelm them with attack ads, and thus candidates who are determined not to be tainted by the corrupting influence of major donors are not left defenseless.
Yet, in a case called McComish v. Bennett, the Court’s five conservatives appear poised to strike this two-tiered system down. If they do so, it could be the death knell for public financing, since no candidate is safe from massive infusions of corporate money after Citizens United.
- Making Courts Inaccessible
Many of the Court’s most corporate-friendly decisions create complicated and arcane procedural barriers to Americans seeking justice. The Court’s infamously Ledbetter decision didn’t literally take away women’s right to equal work for equal pay, it just created a procedural rule that made it nearly impossible for women to learn that they were victims of discrimination until after the statute of limitations to file a claim had run out. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court will decide whether to shut off another opportunity for women in the workplace to seek relief — class actions.
Class action lawsuits are brought by groups of plaintiffs who share a common injury with each other. These suits are essential to allow ordinary Americans, who often lack the resources to hire lawyers capable of taking on a major corporation on their own, to pool their resources in order to hire counsel that are capable of facing off against someone like Wal-Mart. There is substantial evidence that women who work for Wal-Mart stores have endured systematic pay and promotion discrimination and thus should be able to bring a class action. If the Supreme Court denies them this right, many of them will be left powerless before Wal-Mart’s legal team.
- Lawsuit Immunity
Finally, many corporate sectors have been given almost total lawsuit immunity by the Supreme Court. The justices gave sweeping legal immunity to medical device manufacturers and health insurers, and even gave the thumbs up to a biased system of corporate-owned courts that overwhelmingly rule against consumers and employees. In a case called PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, the justices will now decide whether to give lawsuit immunity to the makers of generic drugs.
Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is out with a new video that highlights the significance of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides low-income students with a scholarship to attend a private school. Today the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the SOAR Act, which restores funding that President Obama and Democrats eliminated.
Boehner’s video highlights the congressional testimony of Lesly Alvarez, an eight-grade student who is benefiting from a scholarship at Sacred Heart School. Lesly shared her story about the program before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee earlier this month.
“The Opportunity Scholarship Program has been a miracle for me and hundreds of other students just like me,” Lesly testified. She pleaded with the program’s critics to give other students like her a chance to escape the crime-ridden and under-performing public schools in the District of Columbia.
The measure is expected to easily win approval in the Republican-controlled House, but the Senate will present a bigger obstacle, despite having Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) as the bill’s lead champion. Boehner acknowledged that fact in the video. However, he said there’s no better issue to achieve bipartisan education reform.
“Despite its proven success, the program faces an uncertain future,” Boehner said. “You see, the education establishment in America is opposed to greater competition in our school systems. They regard it as a threat when in reality it’s an opportunity to raise the bar.”
New York Times reporter Jennifer Medina’s Sunday story from Sacramento focused on the state’s cute political couple, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his young budget director Ana Matosantos: “Political Odd Couple, United by Crisis In California Budget.”
They are a constant if unlikely pair these days: the oldest man elected governor of California and the woman who is its youngest budget director, shuttling from office to office as they meet with lawmakers, confer quietly in the Capitol hallways and fend off reporters and lobbyists.
Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, lived through another fiscal crisis when he was governor 30 years ago. The budget director, Ana Matosantos, 35, was barely able to do addition back then, but she has the experience that comes with having served under the last governor and through three years of California fiscal crises.
Medina painted Matosantos as a budgetary whiz (who, conveniently, is also opposed to Republican spending cuts):
And now the two of them are at the center of what has become the critical battle in Mr. Brown’s first few months on the job, as he tries to push through a budget that would almost certainly define much of his remaining years here. And for all of Mr. Brown’s knowledge and self-assurance, it is this unlikely budget director — a Republican appointee — to whom the governor keeps turning to help him navigate this treacherous terrain….Without hesitating, she explained how the state made up for services that local governments could not afford.
Months later, Bill Emmerson, a Republican state senator, asked for similar information in a private meeting. Ms. Matosantos ticked off the information without looking at any notes, convincing Mr. Emmerson that an inflexible spending cap would not work. A few weeks later, Mr. Emmerson could not remember the details himself. But he was certain that Ms. Matosantos had given them the right guidance.So why would the Times bother to butter up a relatively obscure political figure in the bowels of the California state bureaucracy? Maybe because her pull may help push up state taxes and reduce spending cuts:
While the Legislature has moved forward in approving more than $ 11 billion in cuts, parallel negotiations to put a tax extension up for a statewide vote have sputtered and stalled. Now Ms. Matosantos is going through marathon meetings with Mr. Brown, as well as painstaking, occasionally painful sessions with Senate Republicans, whose votes are needed to get the tax initiative on a June ballot. Without those taxes, Mr. Brown has said, the cuts to the state’s budget will need to be even more draconian.
Medina even made politically correct points out of Matosantos’s gay relationship.
Ms. Matosantos seems unconcerned about her status as a first in so many categories — in addition to being the youngest, she is the first Latina and the first openly gay person to hold the job — and likes to keep her matter-of-fact tone on any topic. “At the end of the day, what matters is the numbers: this all has to add up and make sense.”
(Back in June 2007, Medina fretted that after arrests of illegals immigrants in New Haven, Conn, “any sense of sanctuary that the city and advocates for immigrants had developed over the years was turned upside down, replaced with fear.")
On Fox last night, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made a slight error on the cost of the Libyan intervention: a mere 700 percent too much. John McCain certainly knows how to pick quality people.
Last week, the New York Times ran an explosive front-page story revealing how General Electric (GE), despite making over $ 14 billion in profits in 2010, paid absolutely nothing in federal corporate income taxes. It even received a tax benefit of $ 3.2 billion.
ThinkProgress provided substantial coverage of the story, offering further analysis and insight into the firm’s behavior:
– Despite Paying No Income Taxes, GE CEO Lauded His Company’s Patriotism In 2009 West Point Speech [3/25/11]
– Sen. Johnson’s Reaction To General Electric Paying No Taxes: Cut The Corporate Tax Rate [3/25/11]
– After Paying Zero Income Taxes, GE Plans To Ask Its Union Workers To Make Wage And Benefits Concessions [3/28/11]
Reviewing the television coverage of GE’s tax avoidance, ThinkProgress found that the story was covered 23 times by Fox News between March 25 and March 28. Certainly, with an anti-Obama axe to grind, it is not surprising that the network chose to excoriate a company that is considered close to the Obama administration and whose CEO is the head of an outside White House jobs panel.
Yet, as FAIR’s Peter Hart points out, this blockbuster story received scant coverage on another major cable news outlet: MSNBC. A review of MSNBC coverage finds that, over the same three-day period, the General Electric story received relatively little mention. It was only mentioned three times on MSNBC — one of these mentions was by host Rachel Maddow during a conversation with the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson and another mention was made by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a guest on the network.
To his credit, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell extensively covered GE’s tax dodging. O’Donnell ran a whole segment about the company on his show last Friday night, saying that in a fair world the network’s parent company would pay the most taxes, because it’s the country’s biggest corporation. Watch it:
O’Donnell went on to actually dissect GE’s tax filing on air, providing a useful service to viewers who may be amazed that the tax code allows a mega corporation like GE to avoid paying federal corporate income taxes.
The wider failure of MSNBC to report about GE’s tax avoidance provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of over-reliance on corporate conglomerates to provide news to the American people. And it also highlights the importance of not-for-profit media and public media — like the public broadcasting conservatives are trying to defund.
Washington (CNN) – President Barack Obama made his case Monday night for intervention in Libya, addressing the nation amid tough calls for him to clarify the United States’ role in the U.N.-authorized military mission.
Both Democrats and Republicans have criticized the president’s policy in the war-torn North African nation. Among other things, they have questioned the purpose of the mission, as well as its cost, endgame, and consequences for the broader Arab world.
Berkeley Professor Richard Muller, author of widely debunked books, has worked hard to undermine credibility in well-established science and doesn’t have a great grasp of basic climate science (see here) or energy (see “here).
Now, as we’ll see, he has become such a victim of Gore Derangement Syndrome that he fabricated a story about the Nobel prize-winning vice president and a leading scientist. He also gratuitously smears Tom Friedman.
Laughably, Muller launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study to supposedly restore credibility in the global surface temperature dataset, but he has done everything possible to destroy BEST’s credibility, along with his own. He has taken money from Charles Koch, the leading funder of climate science denial, created a massive conflict of interest with his family business, allowed hard-core climate science deniers access to BEST’s work product, and apparently even allowed them to work with the team.
In some sense this is too bad because, as Muller revealed in a public talk last week, BEST’s results to date show “We are seeing substantial global warming” and “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”
Muller, clearly, isn’t a denier like Koch. But he does share one thing in common with Koch — Gore Derangement Syndrome — and it has driven him to a libelous fabrication, two libels, actually. Brad Johnson has the story of just how far Muller will go to smear Gore:
Unlike Koch, Muller recognizes that fossil fuel pollution is threatening civilization, Muller argues that existing climate policy is corrupt and misguided, and that many leading climate scientists are guilty of academic fraud — just as Koch argues. “With the uncertainty and the politicization of the science so far,” Charles Koch told the Weekly Standard, “to go spend trillions of dollars a year changing the whole world economy to satisfy something this uncertain, because you have some religious zealots like Al Gore going around preaching this—it doesn’t make sense.”
As with Koch, a particular target of Muller’s righteous scorn is Vice President Al Gore, whom he calls an “extremist” and “alarmist.” In a recent lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, Muller told an anecdote to support his personal attacks on Gore. Muller claimed that Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was lambasted by esteemed climate scientist Dr. Ralph Cicerone, the head of the National Academy of Sciences:
Al Gore, when he talks about the polar bears being killed by the receding glaciers, no basis for that. In fact, let me jump ahead and tell a little story. Ralph Cicerone, head of the National Academy, said there are lots of things wrong in his movie, and Al Gore asked him to come and explain this to him, and he did come. And he said, “Well, what’s wrong with my movie?”
“Well, lots of things, like the polar bears. We track polar bears. Not a single polar bear has died because of retreating ice.”
And Al Gore turned to his movie producer and said, “So, why did we put that in?” The movie producer said, “Well, it really gets people emotionally involved.”
See, this is what politicians do. They put in things that they consider a real danger that represents what they consider to be reality. Doesn’t matter if it’s technically true or not. So, there’s so much misinformation on this field. Global warming is real. I am deeply concerned about it. I am leading a major study on global warming. But most of what made the newspaper headlines is either wrong, or backward, or simply exaggerated.
Muller’s story is not “technically true.” In fact, it’s false. The meeting between Gore and Cicerone that Muller describes is apocryphal. A fiction. A lie.
After ThinkProgress queried Cicerone’s office, Bill Skane, the Executive Director of News & Public Information for the National Academy of Sciences explained in an email that the supposed conversation never took place:
There was no meeting or conversation between Dr. Cicerone and Vice President Gore or his film producer regarding An Inconvenient Truth and thus no comment about polar bears. We’ve contacted Dr. Muller today about his speech and are hoping to hear back from him.
“Thanks for taking the time to check this material before using it in something you might write,” Skane concluded. “Dr. Muller’s remarks regarding Dr. Cicerone were in error.”
Gore’s spokesperson Kalee Kreider confirmed to ThinkProgress that the Cicerone-Gore confrontation was a fantasy.
Not only did the conversation not take place, Muller’s depiction of An Inconvenient Truth was false as well. Here’s the transcript of what Gore actually said about polar bears in his documentary, which was released in 2006:
Right now, the Arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror, all the sun’s rays bounce off, more than 90%. It keeps the Earth cooler, but as it melts, and the open ocean receives that sun’s energy instead, more than 90% is absorbed, so there is a faster buildup of heat here, at the North Pole, in the Arctic Ocean, and the Arctic generally than anywhere else on the planet. That’s not good for creatures like polar bears, who depend on the ice. They’re now, actually, looking for other ecological niches. It is sad what’s going on in the Arctic ecosystem.
Unsurprisingly, Cicerone said essentially the same thing a year before Gore’s documentary came out, in testimony before the U.S. Senate:
The Arctic has warmed at a faster rate than the Northern Hemisphere over the past century. A Vision for the International Polar Year 2007-2008 (2004) reports that this warming is associated with a number of impacts including: melting of sea ice, which has important impacts on biological systems such as polar bears, ice-dependent seals and local people for whom these animals are a source of food; increased rain and snow, leading to changes in river discharge and tundra vegetation; and degradation of the permafrost.
Both Gore and Cicerone’s statements succinctly summarized the known science on the radical changes of the Arctic ecosystem and the threat to polar bears. In the Hudson Bay, for example, where sea ice breaks up three weeks earlier than it did in 1980, the average weight of female polar bears had dropped by about 21 percent, and the population declined by 22 percent, by 2004.
Since An Inconvenient Truth, the situation has grown increasingly dire for the Arctic. The rate of Arctic sea ice decline has increased precipitously, from a decline of 8.6 percent per decade to 11.5 percent per decade. In 2005, five of 19 polar bear subpopulations were known to be in decline (5 stable, 2 increasing, 7 unknown); by 2009, eight of the 19 subpopulations were known to be in decline (3 stable, one increasing, 7 unknown).
Muller is testifying before the House science committee on climate science and policy this Thursday.
Let me add that I spoke to Gore’s office and indeed they confirm they everything Muller said in that clip was a fantasy. Indeed, they pointed out that everything else Muller says in his entire talk about Gore is false.
First, though, it bears repeating (pun intended?), that as the NYT’s Revkin blogged in 2009, “There is rising concern among polar bear biologists that the big recent summertime retreats of sea ice in the Arctic are already harming some populations of these seal-hunting predators. That was one conclusion of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, a network of bear experts who met last week in Copenhagen to review the latest data….”
If you watch Muller’s entire talk last Saturday, (which I don’t recommend without multiple head vises), it’s clear that Muller is a volcano of long-debunked denier talking points and misinformation. I promised to re-debunk him later, and that is a project that will take a number of posts. But here is what Kalee Kreider wrote me:
-With regards to the Kyoto Protocol, Dr. Muller mis-stated VP Gore’s position on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol was based upon international precedent that was established by the Montreal Protocol (a treaty designed to reduce and ultimately eliminate the chemicals that cause ozone depletion). The Montreal Protocol was designed to allow the industrialized countries to take the first steps while phasing in (generally within a ten year time period) participation by developing countries. Former VP Gore supported the Kyoto Protocol based, as it was, on the Montreal Protocol because it had been so successful in cutting ozone-depleting chemicals and protecting human health and the environment.
-With regards to the movie:
At the time that An Inconvenient Truth was published, several independent sources sought to verify the scientific integrity of the film. I have included them below for your reference:
Associated Press story
http://www.usatoday.com/ tech/ science/ 2006-06-27-gore-science-truth_x.htmReal Climate review
http://www.realclimate.org/ index.php/ archives/ 2007/ 10/ convenient-untruths/To address some of the specific issues:
-Polar bears. Professor Muller mis-states what VP Gore has said about polar bears [discussed above]
There were a variety of sources for this section including the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.
“The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover,” concludes the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States.
-Glacial retreat/Kilimanjaro. Former Vice President Gore cited the work of Professor Lonnie Thompson (National Medal of Science winner) and other on Kilimanjaro—in the movie and in other talks. Their work was published in the journal Science in 2002. The glacial retreat science is very well established by the NAS, IPCC, and other studies. As Dr. Thompson said recently, “The real message here is that these ice fields will disappear. Whether it is in 10 years or 30 years is not the issue. The fact they will disappear within a few decades, as will many glaciers throughout the tropics, is the real concern,” he said.
-Hurricane science—In An Inconvenient Truth VP Gore said:
“So the temperature increases are taking place all over the world including in the oceans. This is the natural range of variability for temperature in the oceans, you know people say, “oh it’s just natural, it goes up and down, so don’t worry about it.” This is the range that would be expected over the last 60 years. But scientists who specialize in global warming have computer models that long ago predicted this range of temperature increase. Now I’m gonna show you recently released, the actual ocean temperatures. And of course, when the oceans get warmer, that causes stronger storms.”
Former VP Gore did not address the link between climate change, hurricanes and frequency in the film.
-Professor Muller mis-states VP Gore with regards to SLR [sea level rise]. VP Gore has cited SLR estimates if the Greenland ice sheet were to collapse (without giving a time frame) or the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. He makes clear in the movie what the animations are based upon.
“Tony Blair’s scientific advisor has said that because of what’s happening in Greenland right now, the maps of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida.”
He then went on to show other sea level rise animations in the film.
-An Inconvenient Truth did not include a discussion of wildfires. It did include a short discussion of beetle infestations in the West. It was difficult from the video to determine the charts he was using. In general, the IPCC and other major research institutions have cited a link between climate change and wildfires for many years. This research is going on in the US (Westerling et al.) and many other parts of the world CSIRO, etc.
See “Climate change expected to sharply increase Western wildfire burn area — as much as 175% by the 2050s.” Even the National Academy of Science accepts that (click here).
Finally, Dr. Muller cites a conversation between VP Gore and the producers of An Inconvenient Truth about the content of the film that did not take place. Dr. Muller was not one of the film’s science advisers.
Anyone who knows the vice president knows that he spends a great deal of time talking to leading climate scientists and reviewing the literature. He is exceedingly careful in how he uses language in the film, despite the best efforts of others to smear him (see Unstaining Al Gore’s good name 2: He is not “guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements” and is owed a correction and apology by the New York Times and UPDATED: Gore Derangement Syndrome).
If you zoom to the end of Muller’s talk, at one hour, 20 minutes, you’ll find this doubly libelous quote:
Al Gore and Tom Friedman … don’t pay attention to the science, as the example with the polar bears illustrates.
The fabrications about Gore have been debunked, and I don’t even know what the basis of his lie about Friedman is. They both pay a great deal of attention to the science.l
The bottom line is that “the example with the polar bear” illustrates that Richard Muller doesn’t pay attention to the science and that he is a liar.
The latest installment of New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s Sunday Magazine column, “Among the Guerrillas — What role do the mainstream media play in an environment beset by Assanges and O’Keefes?” likened conservative guerrilla film-maker James O’Keefe, who brought down ACORN and the executive suite at National Public Radio with his hoaxes, to Julian Assange, the anti-American anarchist who spilled secret diplomatic cables with the intent of harming U.S. interests.
Intriguingly, Keller went further than he usually does to meet his critics, confessing that his paper could be rightfully accused of a liberal outlook in a cultural sense, though he managed to make this particular brand of urban cultural liberalism sound appealing: “[Former Public Editor Daniel] Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan….Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered.”
Keller’s journalistic sympathy lies with Assange, one formerly evinced by the Times’s participation in the last and most potent batch of diplomatic leaks from Assange’s WikiLeaks project. (The Times was not nearly as approving of O’Keefe’s hoaxes, which were aimed at liberals.)
Has anyone actually seen James O’Keefe and Julian Assange together? Are we quite sure that the right-wing prankster who brought down the leadership of National Public Radio and the anarchic leaker aren’t split personalities of the same guy — sent by fate to mess with the heads of mainstream journalists?
Sure, one shoots from the left, the other from the right. One deals in genuine (albeit purloined) secrets; the other in “Candid Camera” stunts, most recently posing as a potential donor and entrapping a foolish NPR executive into disclosing his scorn for Republicans and the Tea Party. Assange aims to enlist the media; O’Keefe aims to discredit us. But each, in his own guerrilla way, has sown his share of public doubt about whether the press can be trusted as an impartial bearer of news.
Keller does admit to some liberal lean on the part of his paper, although he chalks it up to the cultural factor of being a Manhattan-based newspaper:
Back in 2004, Daniel Okrent, the first ombudsman at The Times, wrote a column under the headline, “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” The sly first sentence of his essay was: “Of course it is.” Nobody seems to remember what came after. Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan. We publish news of gay unions on the wedding pages. We have a science section that does not feel obliged to give equal time to creationists when it writes about evolution. Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered. Respect is a prerequisite for understanding. But he did not mean that we subscribe to any political doctrine or are foot soldiers in any cause. (Anyone who thinks we go easy on liberals should ask Eliot Spitzer or David Paterson or Charles Rangel or….)
The latest installment of New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s Sunday Magazine column, “Among the Guerrillas — What role do the mainstream media play in an environment beset by Assanges and O’Keefes?” likened conservative guerrilla film-maker James O’Keefe, who brought down ACORN and the executive suite at National Public Radio with his hoaxes, to Julian Assange, the anti-American anarchist who spilled secret diplomatic cables with the intent of harming U.S. interests.
Intriguingly, Keller went further than he usually does to meet his critics, confessing that his paper could be rightfully accused of a liberal outlook in a cultural sense, though he managed to make this particular brand of urban cultural liberalism sound appealing: “[Former Public Editor Daniel] Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan….Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered.”
Keller’s journalistic sympathy lies with Assange, one formerly evinced by the Times’s participation in the last and most potent batch of diplomatic leaks from Assange’s WikiLeaks project. (The Times was not nearly as approving of O’Keefe’s hoaxes, which were aimed at liberals.)
Has anyone actually seen James O’Keefe and Julian Assange together? Are we quite sure that the right-wing prankster who brought down the leadership of National Public Radio and the anarchic leaker aren’t split personalities of the same guy — sent by fate to mess with the heads of mainstream journalists?
Sure, one shoots from the left, the other from the right. One deals in genuine (albeit purloined) secrets; the other in “Candid Camera” stunts, most recently posing as a potential donor and entrapping a foolish NPR executive into disclosing his scorn for Republicans and the Tea Party. Assange aims to enlist the media; O’Keefe aims to discredit us. But each, in his own guerrilla way, has sown his share of public doubt about whether the press can be trusted as an impartial bearer of news.
Keller does admit to some liberal lean on the part of his paper, although he chalks it up to the cultural factor of being a Manhattan-based newspaper:
Back in 2004, Daniel Okrent, the first ombudsman at The Times, wrote a column under the headline, “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” The sly first sentence of his essay was: “Of course it is.” Nobody seems to remember what came after. Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan. We publish news of gay unions on the wedding pages. We have a science section that does not feel obliged to give equal time to creationists when it writes about evolution. Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered. Respect is a prerequisite for understanding. But he did not mean that we subscribe to any political doctrine or are foot soldiers in any cause. (Anyone who thinks we go easy on liberals should ask Eliot Spitzer or David Paterson or Charles Rangel or….)
The latest installment of New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s Sunday Magazine column, “Among the Guerrillas — What role do the mainstream media play in an environment beset by Assanges and O’Keefes?” likened conservative guerrilla film-maker James O’Keefe, who brought down ACORN and the executive suite at National Public Radio with his hoaxes, to Julian Assange, the anti-American anarchist who spilled secret diplomatic cables with the intent of harming U.S. interests.
Intriguingly, Keller went further than he usually does to meet his critics, confessing that his paper could be rightfully accused of a liberal outlook in a cultural sense, though he managed to make this particular brand of urban cultural liberalism sound appealing: “[Former Public Editor Daniel] Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan….Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered.”
Keller’s journalistic sympathy lies with Assange, one formerly evinced by the Times’s participation in the last and most potent batch of diplomatic leaks from Assange’s WikiLeaks project. (The Times was not nearly as approving of O’Keefe’s hoaxes, which were aimed at liberals.)
Has anyone actually seen James O’Keefe and Julian Assange together? Are we quite sure that the right-wing prankster who brought down the leadership of National Public Radio and the anarchic leaker aren’t split personalities of the same guy — sent by fate to mess with the heads of mainstream journalists?
Sure, one shoots from the left, the other from the right. One deals in genuine (albeit purloined) secrets; the other in “Candid Camera” stunts, most recently posing as a potential donor and entrapping a foolish NPR executive into disclosing his scorn for Republicans and the Tea Party. Assange aims to enlist the media; O’Keefe aims to discredit us. But each, in his own guerrilla way, has sown his share of public doubt about whether the press can be trusted as an impartial bearer of news.
Keller does admit to some liberal lean on the part of his paper, although he chalks it up to the cultural factor of being a Manhattan-based newspaper:
Back in 2004, Daniel Okrent, the first ombudsman at The Times, wrote a column under the headline, “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” The sly first sentence of his essay was: “Of course it is.” Nobody seems to remember what came after. Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan. We publish news of gay unions on the wedding pages. We have a science section that does not feel obliged to give equal time to creationists when it writes about evolution. Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered. Respect is a prerequisite for understanding. But he did not mean that we subscribe to any political doctrine or are foot soldiers in any cause. (Anyone who thinks we go easy on liberals should ask Eliot Spitzer or David Paterson or Charles Rangel or….)
