"Fakegate" Blows Up in Warmist Faces

By Alan Caruba

On February 16, I published “Anatomy of a Global Warming Hoax” concerning the theft of the private records of The Heartland Institute’s board meeting  and the creation of an alleged forged document intended to harm its reputation as a long time advocate of the real, not fake, science that has been the basis of the global warming—now called “climate change”—hoax.

The Feb 21 issue of The Wall Street Journal published an editorial, “The Not-So-Vast Conspiracy” noting that “As for ‘the largest international science conference of skeptics’ Heartland will, according to the documents, spend all of $380,000 this year on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. That’s against the $6.5 million that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) costs Western taxpayers annually, and the $2.6 billion the White House wants to spend next year on research into ‘global changes that have resulted primarily from global over-dependence on fossil fuels.’” (Emphasis added)

The global warming hoax has cost taxpayers billions since it was initiated and earned the purveyors of “carbon credits” millions as industry and others paid for the privilege of emitting “greenhouse gas”—primarily carbon dioxide—as part of doing business. Currently the European Union is trying to shake down the airline industry by charging them a surtax on their emissions as they fly tourists and businessmen to that benighted continent. Most of the exchanges that sold the credits have since closed.

The infamous “Cap-and-Trade” legislation that thankfully died in Congress was part of this scam.

We now know that the document theft was either perpetrated or abetted by Dr. Peter E. Gleick, a water and climate analyst, and founder of the Pacific Institute. A contributor to Huffington Post and prolific castigator of global warming “skeptics” and “deniers”, Dr. Gleick has admitted his part in the effort to depict The Heartland Institute, its board and its donors as part of the worldwide conspiracy to debunk the hoax.

Since 2008 Heartland  has sponsored six conferences that brought together scientists and others who presented ample evidence of the absurdity that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” was causing the Earth to heat up. Unfortunately for the real IPCC conspirators, the Earth entered a natural cooling cycle in 1998 and, in 2009, thousands of email exchanges between the IPCC scientists were posted to the Internet revealing their growing panic over the failure of Mother Nature to cooperate with their lies, most if not all of which were based on bogus computer models.

Even The New York Times that had trumpeted the false allegations based on the purloined documents, published a Feb. 20 article, “Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers” reporting that “Dr. Gleick distributed the documents to several well-known bloggers and activists who support the work of mainstream climate scientists and who have documented the Heartland Institute as a center of climate change denial.”

The Times is incapable to not slandering organizations and individuals who have fought long and hard to rip the mask of respectability from the perpetrators of the hoax. The “mainstream scientists” to whom it refers are, of course, the IPCC scientists behind the hoax. “Climate change denial” is nothing less than the propagation of the truth about the hoax.

For me, the most interesting aspect of all this has been the way The Heartland Institute has responded to Dr. Glieck’s chicanery. From the moment that documents, real, altered and fake, were posted on sites like DeSmogBlog.com and others, Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, went after the then-unknown identity of the person who secured the documents threatening legal action.

When Dr. Glieck publicly admitted his part in a Huffington Post statement, Bast released a statement saying, “Gleick’s crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland’s staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.”

The key word in Bast’s statement is “crime.” As John Sullivan, a British-based attorney and an active “denier”, author and blogger, noted, Bast said “A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage”, adding that Dr. Gleick faces being financially ruined by a civil prosecution and “is also liable to a criminal investigation as such falsification of documents is a well-known brand of white collar crime.”

Some time ago I wrote a commentary saying that some of the global warming conspirators needed to go to jail for their crimes. As events unfold, that yet may occur insofar as they were the recipients of public funding and United Nations support as the IPCC published their false “science” amidst alarmist global warming claims.

Perhaps their greatest crime was the debasement of meteorological and climate science. Beyond that, their attacks on the reputation of the brave scientists who stepped forward to refute them is the very definition of slander and libel. The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the National Geographic, and other “mainstream” news publications will unfortunately be given a pass for advancing their lies even to this day.

The Heartland director’s meeting was devoted to a program to deal with the torrent of false teaching in our nation’s schools intended to warp the perceptions and knowledge of students regarding global warming. That, too, is part of the crime committed against a national and worldwide population that was deliberately misled.

The warmists are in retreat and for that everyone owes a great debt of gratitude to The Heartland Institute and all the others who joined in the effort to refute the greatest hoax of the modern era.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Anatomy of a Global Warming Smear

By Alan Caruba

Full disclosure: Years ago I received a small stipend from The Heartland Institute to help cover the costs of writing articles regarding the global warming hoax, well before it was exposed in 2009 when emails between its perpetrators—the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—revealed the total lack of real science involved. I have continued to expose the hoax without any support from Heartland or any other entity.

A total of six conferences on climate change have been sponsored by The Heartland Institute. I attended the first conference in New York City in 2008 and my initial observation was that virtually no one from the press was there and the meager coverage it received disparaged it.

This week, a major smear campaign against the Institute erupted as the result of an act of deception and thievery that may well result in criminal charges against its as yet unknown perpetrator.

The President of the Institute, Joe Bast, immediately informed its supporters, directors, donors and friends that someone pretending to be a board member had sent Heartland an email claiming to be a director and asking that documents regarding a January board meeting be re-sent.

A clever ruse, but the result was that elements of the confidential documents were then posted on a number of so-called climate blogs and from there to various members of the media who, with the exception of The Guardian, took no steps whatever to verify the authenticity of the documents, some of which Heartland says were either a concoction of lies or altered to convey inaccurate information.

The leading disseminator of the global warming hoax, The New York Times, published its version on Wednesday, February 15th, titled “Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science.”

Suffice to say, the “climate science” served up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been a pack of lies from the day it first convened. Its “science” was based on computer models rigged by co-conspirators that include Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia.

The original leak of their emails in November 2009 instantly revealed the extent of their efforts to spread the hoax and to suppress any expression of doubt regarding it. A second release in 2011 confirmed what anyone paying any attention already knew.

The “warmists”, a name applied to global warming hoaxers, launched into a paroxysm of denial that has not stopped to this day. Their respective universities have since engaged in every possible way to hide the documentation they claimed supported their claims. Suffice to say, the global warming hoax was the golden goose for everyone who received literally billions in public and private funding.

We have reached the point where the warmists have been claiming that global warming causes global cooling! Along the way the bogus warming has been blamed for thousands of utterly absurd events and trends. What really worried the perpetrators was the fact that the planet had entered a cooling cycle in 1998.

At the heart of the hoax was the claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) was causing the Earth to heat and that CO2 emissions must be reduced to save the Earth. Next to oxygen, CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as it sustains all vegetation which in turn sustains every creature that depends on it as a source of food. It represents a mere 0.033% of the Earth’s atmosphere and is referred to by warmists as a “greenhouse gas.” It is, as any meteorologist or climatologist will tell you, the atmosphere that protects the Earth from becoming a dissociated planet like Mars.

The New York Times article is a case study in bad journalism and bias on a scale for which this failing newspaper is renowned. The Times reported that “Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming part of the nation’s culture wars.”

Wrong, so wrong. Polls have demonstrated that global warming is last on a list of concerns by the public. It barely registers because the public has concluded that it is either a hoax or just not happening. Teaching global warming in the nation’s schools constitutes a crime against the truth and the students.

The Times article makes much of the amounts some donors to Heartland have contributed, but in each cited case, with one exception, the donations had nothing to do with its rebuttal of global warming science.

“It is in fact not a scientific controversy”, said the Times article. “The majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by human beings are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk.”

The exact magnitude is zero. Thousands of scientists have signed petitions denouncing global warming as a hoax. The Times lies.

A post at The Daily Bayonet on February 14th said it well, “What the Heartland documents show is how badly warmists have been beaten by those with a fraction of the resources they’ve enjoyed. Al Gore spent $300 million advertising the global warming hoax. Greenpeace, the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, NASA, NOAA, the UN and nation states have collectively poured billions into climate research, alternative energies, and propaganda, supported along the way by most of the broadcast and print media.

The Times will continue to publish lies about global warming, as will others like Time and Newsweek magazines. The attacks on Heartland and the many scientists and others like myself who debunk this fraud will continue, but their efforts are just the dying gasp of the greatest hoax of the modern era.

There’s a reason the theme of Heartland’s sixth conference in 2011 was “Restoring the Scientific Method.” Real science does not depend on declaring “a consensus” before the hypothesis has been thoroughly tested, a process that often involves years of effort. Meanwhile, the planet continues to cool.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Liberals Exit Stage Left

By Alan Caruba

Granted that reading anything in the liberal media can be daunting for the sheer volume of infantile content it represents, but it can be instructive, particularly as regards the emergence of trends in Leftist opinions.

I am sure that liberals were delighted to read all the criticism conservatives directed at George W. Bush, but they seemed unaware that Bush43 was more frequently than not on their team. As the debate over modifying Medicare rages on, they forget that he expanded the program by adding prescription benefits to it. W never saw a spending bill he would not sign.

Now, however, liberals have their man in the Oval Office and have had two and a half years to assess his performance. They are increasingly unhappy.

Sunday’s Rasmussen daily presidential tracking poll found that 24% of the nation’s voters “strongly approve” of Obama’s performance, but short of changing his party affiliation that is a near-constant level of approval. It just means that nearly one-in-four voters are too dumb to be allowed to use sharp instruments. I call it the Food Stamp Vote.

By contrast, “Nearly half of U.S. voters give President Obama poor marks for his handling of the economy,” noted Rasmussen and it is the economy that will dominate the 2012 elections even if he totally emptied the Strategic Oil Reserves.

I have long regarded Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, as a barometer of what liberals are saying to each other. She’s the Ann Coulter of liberalism and almost as entertaining.

Her Sunday column was titled “Why Is He Bi? (Sigh)” and notes that Obama is “binary” and “likes to be on both sides at once.” After that she was off and running, citing how “In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay” while “On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.”

“On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending.” Her column is well worth reading because, essentially, she skewers Obama in a fashion that only a former true believer could.

“With each equivocation, the man in the Oval Office shields his identity and cloaks who the real Barack Obama is,” chiding that “On some of the most important issues facing this nation, it is time for the president to come out of the closet.”

Conservatives know who the “real” Obama is. He’s a Marxist. He’s possibly a Muslim. He is incompetent, arrogant, and was ineligible to run for the presidency or hold the office.

If it was just Maureen Dowd voicing her doubts, it would not be a trend, but over at the Huffington Post, Arianna was having her own doubts about recent Obama decisions, noting that “This week brought two high-profile examples of what has become the president’s trademark approach to leadership—‘the fierce urgency of something later’—as he kicked the proverbial can down the road on Afghanistan and gay marriage.”

An apparent memory lapse regarding Libya caused Arianna to write “We know that it’s easier to start a war than to finish one…” It was Bush who first ventured into Afghanistan to drive out al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11 and then got distracted by Iraq. Even so, he was elected twice. Obama has taken to openly expressing doubt he will be a two-term president.

Meanwhile, over at the reliably liberal Washington Post, the lead story was “Obama’s focus on visiting clean-tech companies raises questions.” Well, yes, it does and it was nice of the Post to notice. By now we all know that Obama is besotted by solar panels, electric cars, and high-speed trains where none are needed.

All those “green jobs” he promised have failed to materialize, but neither have all the other jobs he promised two trillion dollars ago.

Could we be witnessing a slow inching off the stage by the Left? Having lost three governorships and power in the House to Republicans, liberals/Democrats may be having second thoughts about the Obamessiah. This is surely a trend worth watching.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Blizzard of Lies in The New York Times

By Alan Caruba

“Bundle Up. It’s Global Warming” – December 26, 2010, New York Times opinion article by Judah Cohen.

It’s Orwellian when cold is declared warmth. It’s deceitful and insulting when it occurs in the midst of a huge blizzard shutting down much of the northeast.

I would not even trust the date on the front page of The New York Times because the newspaper long ago lost touch with reality, with sanity, and, one can only assume, readers fleeing to other sources for the news.

When the oft-called “newspaper of record” chooses a day on which Mother Nature is demonstrating what tons of snow and chill air can do to a huge swath of the nation’s northeast with effects reaching Tallahassee, they are either trying to see just how stupid their readers are or doubling down on the global warming hoax they have disseminated since Jim Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute declared we’re all doomed back in 1988.

If you want a lesson in Orwell’s “doublethink”, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts or ideas at the same time, you need only read the first line of Cohen’s article: “The earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside.” In other words, who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?

Judah Cohen is identified as “the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.” No further details are offered such as the name of the firm or Cohen’s academic credentials. Is he a meteorologist? If so, he is one of the worst I have ever encountered.

It happens that I know quite a few meteorologists and climate scientists. One of them is Joseph D’Aleo, an American Meteorological Society Fellow, and editor of a science-based Internet site, Ice Cap. Suffice to say, D’Aleo has been one of a hardy band of skeptics that have countered the global warming hoax with hard science, frequently dissecting the bogus “science” put forth by government agencies including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and other such sources.

In an article titled “Why We Need a New Global Data Set”, D’Aleo wrote the following:

“As I showed in the first analysis, the long term global temperature trends in their data bases have been shown by numerous peer review papers to be exaggerated by 30% to 50% and in some cases much more by issues such as uncorrected urbanization (urban heat island), land use changes, bad siting, bad instrumentation, and ocean measurement techniques that changed over time.”

“NOAA made matters worse by removing the satellite ocean temperature measurement which provide more complete coverage and was not subject to the local issues except near the coastlines and islands.”

‘The result has been the absurd and bogus claims by NOAA and the alarmists that we are in the warmest decade in 100 or even a 1000 years or more and our oceans are warmest ever.”

While Cohen is parroting the World Meteorological Organization’s latest claim that “2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record” in England, the Daily Mail was reporting on December 5 that “Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.”

This parallels the weather occurring now in the U.S. where new low temperature records are being set while cities like Columbia, S.C., had its first significant Christmas snow since weather records were first kept in 1887!

Suffice to say that Cohen’s article repeats the usual blather about melting Artic sea ice while waiting until the very end to admit that “the Eastern United States, North Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinary snowy and cold winters since the turn of the century.”

A word to all who did not study meteorology; the World Meteorological Organization, a creature of the United Nations is also the mother ship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The IPCC, responsible for the Kyoto Protocols that called for limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, was totally discredited in 2009 when the exchange of thousands of emails revealed its chief perpetrators of the global warming hoax were manipulating the climate data it reported.

To trust the WMO or IPCC at this point in time is futile and dangerous. To trust the garbage coming out of NOAA, GISS and other government entities purporting to predict the climate is also to trust the Environmental Protection Agency that will announce in January 2011 its plans to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, claiming they are “causing” a global warming that is not happening.

Americans are being deliberately misled by rogue government agencies with no scientific justification for their continued existence.

As for The New York Times, it is unfit to line the bottom of a canary’s birdcage.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Editor's Note: Over at IceCap.us. editor Joseph D'Aleo added the following to the post of the above commentary. I appreciate his clarification:

"Judah is a meteorologist and a very bright one. He unfortunately works for a company that depends on government funding for modelling and research. They mistakenly trust the temperature data. Judah also has for years confused cause and effect, claiming the snow in Siberia was the cause of the cold weather when it really is the result of the pattern that causes the cold weather. Since snow starts there early, it is a an early indicator of what might be ahead. He should look at sun and ocean cycles for an even early indicator. He also mistakenly claims that ocean warmth drives the climate models when really models don’t handle ocean cycles well at all, can’t reproduce El Nino and La Nina nor the multidecadal cycles. Modelers have tuned the models to have greenhouse forcing drive the climate - both oceans and land."

All the News The Times Wants You to Know

By Alan Caruba

In a long career as a journalist, full time and freelance, I have sometimes said that I knew something was seriously wrong with The New York Times when I began to see my byline show up on stories that appeared briefly.

It’s been decades since I have held The Times in my hands though I have read an article or column on occasion via the Internet because I have long since concluded it cannot be trusted for anything it prints with the possible exception of obituaries.

During the early years when Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union, a Times reporter named Walter Duranty, based in Moscow from 1922 to 1936, would deliberately fail to report outrages such as the starving of the Ukrainians to force their capitulation to Moscow. Duranty would win a Pultizer Prize in 1932 which, to this day, the Times has not repudiated. Duranty, like The Times, harbored a lot of sympathy for Marxism.

My own opinion of The Times was shaped during the Vietnam War when it became apparent that the newspaper was rooting for the Vietcong. This culminated in the revelations of the famed Pentagon Papers, purloined by an anti-war activist. They revealed the many misconceptions that drove the conflict. Neither President Lyndon Johnson nor his advisors come away from that period with honor, but American soldiers fought with honor for what they believed was their nation’s struggle against communism.

I remember thinking that the Times would probably have published the plans for D-Day, the WWII invasion of Europe, if they had gotten their hands on them.

I was not surprised that The Times and some foreign newspapers published the latest WikiLeak’s “dump” of purloined U.S. State Department internal cables; some of which were marked Top Secret while others had lower ratings of secrecy.

Prior to posting and publication of the cables, The Wall Street Journal had been offered the trove and refused it. A previous WikiLeak’s release of data regarding U.S. combat efforts in Afghanistan raised the stakes against troop safety.

The Obama administration gives little indication that it has made any effort to use whatever means at its disposal to find and neutralize the man behind WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. He is an Australian (former?) computer hacker with little to indicate he would emerge as the leading activist attempting to embarrass and alter U.S. policy. He has now become a major threat to the nation’s ability to function in peace or war.

If there are no present laws regarding Assange’s acts, some need to be quickly crafted and passed. A nation needs to protect its secrets and punish those that reveal them.

The alleged source of the Afghanistan data is U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, a sexually confused young man drawn to the Lesbian Bisexual Gay and Transgender movement and yet granted a security status sufficient to have given him access to secret information. He is under arrest and awaiting trial.

Clearly, there are way too many people cleared to read secret and top secret information. This is not a new situation. In the early 1960s even I was cleared to handle secret information by the U.S. Army though I was not much older than Manning. Wars, after all, are fought by young men.

The New York Times published a defense of its actions regarding the previously secret diplomatic documents, aggregating for itself the right to “illuminate aspects of American foreign policy” even if it meant that it would be a very long time before any foreign representative would speak candidly to a U.S. diplomat again.

Is foreign policy replete with duplicitous behavior? Yes. The world is a very dangerous place in the best of times and we are now living in times when Iran, led by a small band of lunatics taking their orders from Allah, is closing in on making nuclear weapons.

The cables revealed that the missiles to threaten the whole of the Middle East and parts of Europe transited from North Korea through China with its blessing. North Korea has been a case study in communist repression and aggression since the 1950s. The U.S. briefly fought a war there and settled for a stalemate. Gen. Douglas MacArthur once famously said there is no substitute for victory and he was right.

One could make a long list of nations that are essentially just waiting around for either the U.S. or Israel to solve the Iranian problem for them.

“For The Times to ignore this material would be to deny its own readers the careful reporting and thoughtful analysis they expect when this kind of information becomes public.” How modest of The Times and how thoroughly hypocritical.

Contrast this with the way The Times danced around the November 20, 2009 revelations when thousands of emails between the main perpetrators of the global warming hoax were posted online for all to see. Since the 1980s The Times has been one of the leading advocates of “global warming” despite the fact it had no basis in climate science or any science.

Its chief environmental hack reporter, Andrew C. Revkin, was very unhappy about what he called “the unauthorized distribution of the climate files.” The fact that those exchanging their plots and schemes were the recipients of British and U.S. governmental funding clearly meant they had an obligation to be transparent. Instead, one of the e-mailers, a Brit, admitted to destroying files to avoid his nation’s Freedom of Information laws, not dissimilar from our own.

Revkin’s description of what came to be called the “Climategate” emails was filled with words like “purloined documents” that were “uploaded surreptitiously” or “acquired illegally”, was intended to cast the revelations in the context of something quite evil. The Times continues to mislead readers about “climate change” in its quest for a one-world government, presumably run from the bowels of the United Nations.

The contrast between its assumption of noble journalistic laurels regarding the WikiLeak criminality and its view that the exposure of the Climategate emails was a corrupt act reveals an essential hypocrisy that belies The Times motto of “All the news that’s fit to print.”

It should be “All the news we want you to know” even if it is severely tainted by bias, inaccuracy, and an anti-American agenda.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

John Quincy Adams versus Maureen Dowd

By Alan Caruba

(Sunday, August 22) As this is being written, two rallies are being held in the pouring rain in New York, just outside the proposed site of the Ground Zero mosque. One represents people opposed to it and one with people who see no problem whatever in an Islamic house of worship a few steps from where Muslims, in the name of Islam, destroyed the Twin Towers and killed some 3,000 people.

That pretty much tells you how a particular mindset can either resist evil or fall victim to it. Some might say that “evil” is too strong a word with which to describe Islam, but let me take you back to 1830 and quote John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States.

Referring to Muhammad, he wrote: “Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent god; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle.

Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion.

He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust; to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.

Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant...While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon the earth, and good will towards men.”

Liberals can never see evil no matter how it manifests itself or how many times it does so. They are drawn to it and the men who personify it.

Here is Maureen Dowd writing in The New York Times on Sunday:

“The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems—making them easy prey for fearmongers.”

According to Dowd, Americans are foolish, even stupid, to remain angry about 9/11.

As far as Dowd is concerned, “Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America—-a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.”

How far from reality has Dowd wandered? The nation is irrational? Obama is high-minded? Being angry regarding the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor is wrong? And surely the fearmongers she has in mind include Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.

In psychology, the term “projection” is used to describe imputing one’s own emotions to others. “The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment.”

The echo chamber to which she refers has been and is the liberal news media that sold us on Barack Obama, equating him with Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Engaging in what media pundit, Bernie Goldberg, called a “slobbering love affair.” Dowd is looking in the mirror.

This isn’t punditry or even rational analysis of the current political scene. This is ill-concealed contempt for the vast majority of Americans who either were already conservative or who have been moving into the ranks of conservatives as they witnessed the abomination of Obamacare, the massive bailouts of unions and banks while ordinary Americans saw their jobs disappear and homes foreclosed.

They are the Americans who voted Republicans into the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, and replaced Teddy Kennedy, the ultimate liberal, with a Republican Senator. They are the Americans who compose the Tea Party movement.

Within the liberal enclave of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, there is bewilderment that Americans would object to a mosque near Ground Zero.

The nation is not having a nervous breakdown. It is Maureen Dowd and all the fellow travelers who cannot believe that Americans will not roll over for Obama’s socialist agenda, who are angry at a profligate Congress that has amassed more debt in a year and a half than the days when the U.S. spent its treasure to win World War Two.

In 1830 John Quincy Adams understood exactly the threat Islam posed to the modern world. In 2010, Maureen Dowd and the readers of The New York Times remain utterly clueless.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Stop Al Gore Before He Lies Again..and Again...and Again!

By Alan Caruba

The New York Times once again is Al Gore’s “enabler”, publishing a February 28 opinion editorial, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change”, despite the mounting evidence that global warming was and is a complete fabrication.

In November 2009, the Telegraph, a British newspaper, carried a story, “Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire”, so let us disabuse ourselves of the notion that Gore just wants to save the world.

Heavily invested in the “carbon credits” scam and technologies whose success depend on people believing fairy tales about “clean energy” alternatives such as wind and solar energy, Gore has enriched himself by trumpeting the biggest hoax of the modern era.

It is no surprise that The New York Times published his latest collection of lies. The reportorial record of the Times has been decades of lies about global warming. Whatever patina of respectability it once had has been eroded by its participation in the fraud. Why should it stop now?

There is increasing discussion of whether testimony before Congress by Gore and other global warming advocates constitute criminal behavior that begins with lying under oath.

On February 24th The Washington Times reported on a hearing of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget. “Republican James Inhofe told EPA head, Lisa Jackson, that man-made climate change was a ‘hoax’ concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who ‘cooked the science.’”

“More than that, Inhofe in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast criminal enterprise designed to bilk governments, taxpayers and investors while enriching those making the false claims.”

The global warming hoax has been sustained for decades by reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) an agency of the United Nations Environmental Program. It is responsible for the Kyoto Protocol that required signature nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases said to be trapping heat. In July 1997 a unanimous Senate resolution rejected the Protocol.

Key players, the scientists who controlled and provided the data to support global warming, Phil Jones, head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, are just two currently under investigation for alledgely deliberately providing and publishing falsified climate data.

Based on thousands of emails leaked last year, it is clear they and others engaged in an effort to suppress any dissenting data from being published in peer-reviewed science journals.

Does that deter Al Gore? The very first paragraph of his opinion editorial claimed that the planet faces “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale preventative measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

He wrote this knowing that data from weather satellites have shown little warming trend of the atmosphere since 1979!

He wrote that “January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.” Rubbish. He based that on the claim of a single Australian scientist that came from the same garbage can of equally absurd claims put forth for decades.

In a similar fashion, IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers were melting and the countless other claims attributed to global warming were based on inaccurate, often deliberately distorted computer models and from dubious sources.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, a leader in the effort to reveal the vast global warming fraud, on February 27 wrote that “this apparent (global warming) consensus misled not only the media and the public, but also the wider scientific community, which had remained largely unaware of the ongoing debate and of the work of many reputable climate experts who disagreed with the IPCC.”

Dr. Singer summed up the entire global warming hoax as based on “temperature data (that) had been manipulated.”

When you use bad data you get bad results. When you use it to enrich yourself, you are engaged in an activity worthy of a criminal investigation.

It was unworthy of The New York Times to lend itself to the continuing lies of Al Gore, but neither it is surprising since the credibility of this once respected newspaper has been trashed by its appalling biases and a succession of reporters who have been found to be plagiarists and fantasists.

About the only thing left in which a reader can put any confidence is the date under the Times banner each day.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

When You're Cold, You're Hot says the NY Times

New York Times Urges Air Conditioner Purchases.
"If You're Cold, That Means You're Hot."
By Ron Marr

In an effort to reduce their advertising revenue even further, the New York Times today hit new heights of insanity when it insisted that global warming caused the blizzard that recently smothered the east coast. In its February 10th editorial, the Old Gray Lady demonstrated her ever-encroaching senility by proclaiming that “Cold means hot . . . damn you!”

In a long and rambling piece that was terrifyingly reminiscent of when your doddering old great uncle regales a Thanksgiving gathering with the white-knuckle tale of how he once saw a kitty, The Times issued the following statement:
Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt. Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.

Okie dokie there Granny; I think it’s time for your pills and a long nap. This stance follows in the footsteps of other insane Times editorial, such as, “Eating Lard Will Make You Skinny,” “Oxygen Does Not Aid Breathing,” and “Obama Will Be The Bestest President In The History of Historical History.”

Editor's Note: This was shameless stolen from my friend, Ron Marr's blog at www.troutwrapper.com.

The New York Times: Desperate, Blatant Lies

By Alan Caruba

Once, very long ago, I used to be “a stringer” for The New York Times. My articles would appear in the New Jersey section and an occasional short book review would make it into the legendary newspaper.

My Father read the The Times more faithfully than an ayatollah reads the Koran or a Hasidim reads the Torah. Little did he know that, during the early years of Stalin’s regime, a Times reporter named Walter Duranty deliberately failed to report the deaths of millions of people in the Ukraine because Soviet communism demanded they obey or die.

Starting in the 1980s, The Times has led the greatest fraud of the modern era, the global warming hoax. It went through a succession of reporters who turned out articles that all asserted various claims attributed to a dramatic increase in the Earth’s temperature that was not happening. At one point, it published a story that the North Pole was melting.

The leading advocate of the global warming fraud has been Al Gore, a former Vice President who has enriched himself selling bogus “carbon credits” and investing in “renewable energy” businesses. His so-called documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”, was filled with so many inaccuracies that a British court ruled it could not be shown in its schools without informing students of them in advance.

We know now, thanks to the “Climategate” revelations, that a handful of scientists, working at the behest of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deliberately distorted or invented climate data to further the fraudulent claims.

They were associated with the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, the Pennsylvania State Earth System Science Center, as well as U.S. government agencies such as NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Most are currently being investigated for alleged abuses of the positions they held and questionable actions in which they engaged.

The release of emails detailing their conspiratorial efforts to advance their false data and suppress any that represented a contrary point of view destroyed what little credibility there was for the recent UN Conference on Climate Change held in Copenhagen. It collapsed like a circus tent.

So why, on Sunday, January 24, did The New York Times publish an editorial titled “The Case for a Climate Bill” in an effort to support the insupportable, the Senate’s Cap-and-Trade legislation?

The bill is superficially intended to put limits on greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide, that are alleged to be “causing” global warming. It is, in reality, a massive tax on the use of energy, harmful in countless ways to the nation’s economy and a burden on all producers and consumers.

Cap-and-Trade has no basis in science because carbon dioxide plays no role whatever in climate change and because the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998; a cycle that legitimate climate scientists predict will last another decade or two.

It takes an enormous amount of gall to support this legislation claiming “The long-term trend in greenhouse gas emissions is up (the decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record.)” No, a decade in the 1930s was the warmest. The last decade saw a constant decrease in temperature, leading to the record-breaking blizzards, expanding glaciers, and other indications that the Earth is cooling.

“Finally there’s the question of credibility: Mr. Obama said in Copenhagen that the United States would meet at least the House’s 17 percent target” of reduced CO2 emissions said The Times.

President Obama has virtually no credibility left and had to flee the Copenhagen conference in order to avoid being snowed in there and unable to land in Washington, D.C. which was also expecting a snowstorm!

This blind and desperate refusal to face the facts, let alone to report them, will ultimately destroy the famed “newspaper of record” and, if that happens, I will not mourn its passing.

Journalism isn't Dead, but Newspapers are

By Alan Caruba

As frequent readers of my commentaries know, I began my working life as a journalist. This, of course, ruined me for honest work!

As a result, I migrated into public relations, a craft or trade that likes to think of itself as a profession, but other than medicine, why would one want to be thought of in the same way as lawyers?

Nowadays, every endeavor with its own trade association calls itself a profession. All one needs is a Code of Ethics that its members can ignore and, voila, you’re a professional.

Journalists think of themselves as professionals and they too have a Code of Ethics as put forth by the Society of Professional Journalists. Let it be noted that I have been and still am a SPJ member for more than twenty-five years and, for much of that time, I also subscribed to Editor & Publisher, a publication that has been around for 125 years.

E&P died on Thursday. It was shut down by its parent company, Nielsen, along with The Hollywood Reporter.

If anything signals a near-death experience for print journalism; that is to say, the process by which the combined talent and efforts of reporters, columnists, photographers, and editors produced a daily portrait of a city, a state, the nation and the world, the loss of Editor & Publisher pretty much says “the times they are a-changing.”

I am willing to bet that weeklies will survive because people want news specific to the town in which they live.

Journalism as the collection and reporting of news is not dead. One can go to any number of Internet sites that provide or aggregate news and opinions for proof of that. In fact, it may be increasing.

You will search long and hard for conservative opinion in the mainstream press. Other than Charles Krauthammer and George Will, it is scant when measured against their liberal counterparts, but they and many other conservative commentators thrive on the Internet.

Broadcast journalism, even in tough times, is surviving, but at the local level it is driven by the motto, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This is why the 6 o’clock news is mostly shootings, fires, and comparable (and dependable) mayhem.

Most of the rest resembles at its best the Fox News Channel, followed far behind by others so partisan it is ugly. I predict that the decline of print journalism will bode well for Bloomberg News, and anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, such as The Wall Street Journal and Fox! The government funded Public Broadcast Networks will survive because they are not dependent on advertising.

At this point, if the Associated Press closed its doors, I would not miss its endless churning of distorted news that looks like it was written in a carnival fun house.

So far this year, 105 newspapers have shut their doors. The number of jobs associated with print journalism is estimated between 10,000 and 40,000, with the top number being most likely. And don’t forget all those folks who ran the presses and the drivers who delivered the papers.

In the first quarter of this year, ad sales declined by 30%. Most classified advertising long ago had migrated to Craig’s List, Monster.com, and dozens of comparable Internet outlets.

Consider some of the newspapers that are no more; Tucson Citizen, Rocky Mountain News, Baltimore Examiner, Kentucky Post, Cincinnati Post, Albuquerque Tribune, and even the San Juan Star, to name but a few.

Get ready to bury a whole bunch more including the Philadelphia Daily News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Detroit News, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the New York Daily News; also on death watch, Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report.

I fully understand the economics behind the closings that have occurred and that will continue. I think, however, that other factors have been a work for a very long time.

It is their arrogance.

It is their capitulation to leftist political ideology.

It is their abandonment of accuracy and balance.

The pages of too many newspapers and news magazines scream BIAS.

This was evident with Editor & Publisher that, at least a decade ago or longer, became little more than a leftist rag. Its editors and commentators were ideologues so far out of touch with the events of the real world that the magazine’s demise mirrors the general decline of print journalism.

For myself, I am waiting for The New York Times to tank and take with it some of the worst practitioners of journalism to ever gather in a single city room. Columnists, Paul Krugman and Thomas L. Friedman, are award-winning, clueless ignoramuses. The Times in recent years has specialized in revealing government secrets vital to the greatest enemy of freedom, the fascists that want to impose Islam on the world.

I don’t care how many Pulitzer Prizes the Times has garnered. The nation is filled with newspapers whose display cases are filled with awards, but which are dead or dying because they forgot to print the TRUTH.

Our Nobel Prize Moron

By Alan Caruba

I know you’re thinking the title refers to Al Gore, but no, it belongs to Paul Krugman, an economist best known as a New York Times columnist, and winner in 2008 of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. He is widely regarded as an expert in international economics and has very impressive curriculum vitae. By all the standards of our times, the man is a genius.

Anyone who has worked for an institution of higher learning as I once did soon loses his awe of PhDs. Their expertise is usually very narrow. The intellectual hot house which they share also includes immense pressure to demonstrate through research and publication that they are productive. There is a herd mentality and some vicious politics that goes on as well.

Krugman may know about economics, otherwise known as the “dismal science” because I suspect the capacity to be very wrong is equal to or greater than the chance of getting things right. Most certainly, his May 15 column, based on a trip to China demonstrated he knows nothing about meteorology, climatology, the science of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Nobel Prize winner demonstrated what a moron he is when he strayed into the usual discredited blather associated with “global warming.” He spouts the nonsense about greenhouse gas emissions like some Red Guard reading from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

“The scientific consensus on prospect for global warming,” wrote Klugman, “has become much more pessimistic over the last few years.” Firstly, the Greens have been predicting global warming since the 1980s, always concluding it was due to arrive ten, fifteen, twenty or fifty years from now. This is usually a good indicator of how flawed and false such predictions actually are.

Second, there is no such thing as a scientific “consensus” about global warming, unless you include the growing consensus that it is a huge scam designed to further a hidden agenda to destroy the economies of industrialized nations.

In March I attended the 2nd annual Climate Change Conference sponsored by The Heartland Institute. It was wall-to-wall seminars by climatologists and others demonstrating why carbon dioxide in particular plays no role whatever in determining the Earth’s climate trends and never did.

But for Klugman, like Al Gore, facts are of no value when writing about global warming. “Indeed, the latest projects from reputable climate scientists border on the apocalyptic. Why? Because the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions are rising is matching or exceeding the worst-case scenarios.”

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Since carbon dioxide, a gas as vital as oxygen to all life on earth, plays no role in climate change, this assertion is just a regurgitation of Al Gore’s boldfaced lies. As to worst-case scenarios, that is the stock-in-trade of the Greens who conjured up the global warming hoax. It is based entirely on flawed and deceptive computer models.

The Earth has been cooling for the past ten years and, given the low activity of the Sun, the primary determinant of the Earth’s climate and temperature, solar scientists and others are predicting we could be on the cusp of a new little ice age or worse---a full-scale ice age that will render civilization’s short rise moot as nations find themselves buried under miles of ice for the next 100,000 years until the next interglacial period. It is, quite simply, colder everywhere.

Krugman’s main criticism of China, where he had visited prior to writing his column, was that “In January, China announced that it plans to continue its reliance on coal as its main energy source and that to feed its economic growth it will increase coal production 30 percent by 2015.” Good for China! I wish that the United States would permit, nay encourage, coal-fired plants to provide the electricity we will need by 2015 and beyond.

The opposite, however, is happening in the United States which has elected a President who’s on record saying he’d prefer to “bankrupt” any company that dared to build a coal-fired plant. Meanwhile, coal is the source of just over 50 percent of all the electricity we currently use!

If the U.S. continues to refuse to permit more coal-fired plants and continues to delay the building of more nuclear plants, we will not have the energy the economy needs to grow and Americans will begin to experience blackouts and brownouts like the banana republic we shall surely become.

Krugman was annoyed that the Chinese, more than a billion of them, seem to believe they have as much right to a lifestyle similar to ours, most of which was built on the availability of cheap energy and remains dependent on its affordability. If Congress passes the insane “cap and trade” emissions legislation, it will crash the nation’s economy. And they know it!

“The burden should fall,” wrote Krugman, “on those foreign consumers instead, that shoppers who buy Chinese products should pay a ‘carbon tariff’ that reflects the emissions associated with these goods’ production.” So, instead of benefiting from affordable Chinese exports, Americans should pay more for something—global warming—that is not happening and punish China and themselves in the process.

It just gets worse from that point on as Krugman writes that, “Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports.”

Great! That’s just what we need with China, a trade war!

If this is the best a Nobel Prize winning economist has to offer then the process of destroying our economy is already under way. Lesser mortals will instantly identify his remedies as idiotic.

Mr. Wonderful

By Alan Caruba

Years ago there was a Broadway show, “Mr. Wonderful”, built around Sammy Davis, Jr. On the matinee that I saw it, Davis decided he was too tired or bored to continue and called the second act to a close by turning to the audience to tell them how the show ended and sing a short encore.

No one complained. After all, he was Sammy Davis, Jr., already a famed member of the Las Vegas “rat pack” that included his pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

For many in the mainstream media Barack Hussein Obama is Mr. Wonderful.

Obama’s growing problem, however, is that a lot of people are already beginning to complain about his act. He is already the object of derision for never going anywhere without a Teleprompter.

He probably thinks he can get away with it, but Mr. Smooth, Mr. Imperturbable, Mr. Wonderful, is growing old and doing so quickly.

When “Sixty Minutes” reporter, Steve Kroft, opened his half-hour interview with Obama, he did so noting that, other than his political campaign, Obama had no previous executive experience. Kroft looked increasingly skeptical and even uncomfortable with the President.

At one point Kroft chided him for treating the financial crisis and other issues with a smile that came too easily in the course of discussing them. Obama referred to it as “gallows humor” but few people are smiling at the prospect of rising unemployment, housing foreclosures, and business failures.

Obama’s studied effort to portray himself as in control of events and issues is less and less convincing.

It was instructive when, on the same Sunday, the uber-liberals of The New York Times, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, were both busy expressing doubts about Obama and his advisors. Even the editorial reflected dissatisfaction.

In a piece titled, “Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ arrived?” Rich bluntly wrote that, “To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck.”

Transparency and oversight, however, was supposed to be the job of Congress and various regulatory agencies that utterly failed to act on repeated warnings about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the activities of hedge funds such as the one run by Bernard Madoff, and the general practices of the banking and investment community.

In “Toxic R Us”, Dowd who apparently is still enamored of Michelle Obama took note of the symbolic vegetable garden being planted behind the White House. “The tableau of Michelle Obama hoisting a pitchfork on Friday with her sinewy arms and warning that the commander in chief would be commandeered into yard work left me wondering if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.”

Whether the right Obama, Barack, is also the right man to be in the Oval Office during this time of crisis is being voiced by New York Times columnists and a whole lot of other people barely two months since his inauguration.

For his part, Obama told Kroft that many of the decisions that arrive at the Oval Office are between the bad and the worse choices.

So far, however, Obama has endorsed and repeated nearly all the errors made in response to the Great Depression; raising taxes instead of cutting them, rolling out costly “stimulus” programs instead of instituting changes that will make it easier for small business owners to survive, offering financial assistance to people who should not have received mortgages in the first place, and attacking banks and bankers instead of reassuring them that their government is going to help by removing their “toxic paper” in order to let them get back to lending.

Simply giving the banks billions appears to have been foolish in the extreme, but so were the meaningless “stimulus” checks dispensed during the last year of the Bush administration. What Americans have been witnessing are responses to the crisis that we might expect from children as opposed to people who presumably know how the financial system is supposed to work.

From Jay Leno to Sixty Minutes, increasingly Obama’s problem is seen as being over-exposed in the truest sense of the word. His weaknesses are being exposed despite his bravado. People are noticing. It worries them.

If you think the media chatteratti and just ordinary folks are worried, consider what it must be like for the heads of state of allies around the world? Consider, too, that our enemies are beginning to think that the President of the United States is, at heart, weak.

Think back now to the feeling of confidence we had following 9/11 when President Bush showed up at Ground Zero and promised swift retribution to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Think about the many United Nations resolutions Saddam Hussein had ignored and the satisfaction you felt when he was toppled from office, fished out of a hole in the ground, and finally hung.

George W. Bush was a victim of Hurricane Katrina like all those folks along the gulf coast, but probably no one was more surprised than he to discover how incompetent the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans were, along with his own director of FEMA.

Katrina has become the perfect example of how poorly a huge, centralized government functions in a perfect storm.

Bush just soldiered on through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and other problems. You knew he would do his best and his best would get us through.

You can’t say that about Barack Obama.

Disappearing Daily Newspapers

By Alan Caruba

As someone who began his career in journalism, working for weeklies, moving on to a daily, and later seeing my by-line on occasion in The New York Times, I have a nostalgic fondness for newsprint. I actually start my day reading my local daily, albeit mostly checking the obituary pages—it’s an age thing—and having a freshly brewed cup of coffee.

Then, in order to really know what is going on in the nation and the world, I surf the Net for an hour, visiting various news and opinion websites (some of which post my writings). It is virtually impossible to get a sense of reality from newspapers that continue to tell you that the Earth is in a midst of a perilous global warming that will require shutting down all the coal-fired plants in the nation.

Since new technology drives out old technology, accounting for why two percent of the population now feeds all the rest of us, it should come as no surprise that great city newspapers are dying for loss of classified and other advertising. The other reason is that most newswire and daily news reporting simply cannot be trusted any more.

Historically, American newspapers were often notorious for having their own agenda, but they were just as often the only game in town if you wanted the news. Some cities supported four, five or more newspapers depending on your own bias. The notion of the “objective” reporter was always suspect, but my generation of reporters did not feel that their job description included agreeing with their publisher on all issues.

The most egregious example is the alleged “environmental” reporting in The New York Times which has never reflected the actual science of global warming and other Green obsessions. For some twenty years or more, it has had a succession of reporters, all of whom were astonishingly indifferent to science or even the truth.

The latest is Andrew Revkin who was unable to ignore the fact that 700 or so of the world’s leading climatologists, meteorologists, physicists, economists, and others were meeting in New York this passed week to debunk global warming. His report on the event was an insult to those participating and attending.

This is how Revkin described The Heartland Institute’s second annual International Conference on Climate Change: “More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.”

If you were hoping for any accurate reporting in that sentence or the rest of his article, you are still waiting for it. I was there. One of the items I brought home was a thick book filled with the names of 31,478 American scientists who signed a global warming petition, agreeing that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, will cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” There is no “broad scientific and political consensus.”

As Jim Peden, an atmospheric physicist, noted in an email to fellow skeptics, “I think we’re all being a bit too hard on Revkin. He is, after all, only doing his job…to support and defend the liberal editorial policies of his employers. In case you haven’t noticed, the New York Times, once arguably one of the premier news sources on the planet, is slowly dying. It hasn’t had a genuinely honest journalist on its staff in more than two decades, and anyone who attempts to put the genie back in the bottle at this late stage of the game would likely find himself out of a job.”

Meanwhile, the United Press International devoted four thin paragraphs to the conference citing “signs of internal disputes and weakening support.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. Little wonder Rush Limbaugh refers to them as “the drive-by media.”

This is, I believe, an increasing component of the reason U.S. dailies such as Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and a host of cities are going to be down to having one or no daily newspaper. The news they have been delivering is not reliably true or even an effort to reflect a balanced presentation of conflicting versions of events and issues.

It must be said that publishing a newspaper is a tremendously labor-intensive undertaking requiring a phalanx of reporters and editors backed up by an advertising department, a circulation department, the men who actually print it, and those who then deliver it. There is almost no way to trim such people from the payroll without doing grave injury to the process and the product.

That is particularly evident when it comes to local reporting, the heart and soul of a newspaper. Somebody must attend the many meetings of the city council, the transportation and education boards, ad infinitum. Some newspapers will survive by becoming solely their website.

It is entirely likely that, in the future, someone will attend and will then post their reports on Internet sites specific to the topic of interest. You will bookmark a variety of such local sites to keep up to date. In the meantime, there are already countless sites that are devoted to what’s going on in hometowns everywhere.

Let me tell you a story. Once, very long ago, I was auditioning for a job with the daily newspaper serving a vast swath of my home State. The editor asked me to write a series on the local chapters of the Humane Society and American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. What I unearthed was a great deal of hypocrisy and degrees of corrupt behavior. When I turned in the assignment, the editor said to me, “I don’t think you understand. I wanted something along the lines of Jane and her pet duck, not a wholesale exposure of these people. Pet owners would be enraged.”

Well, yes, that was the point. Suffice it to say that I decided to take up public relations where, at least, I could earn a lot more than a lowly reporter. I also lost a large degree of respect for what passed for journalism then and, over the years, now.

So, yes, local dailies, some with illustrious histories, are shutting down. They will be missed, but they will be replaced by some very lively, engaged, and hopefully accurate Internet reporting that has long since been missing from what passes for daily newspapers these days.

Who Are You Calling Stupid?

By Alan Caruba

The September 14, Sunday edition of The New York Times is a study in what might be called journalistic cognitive dissonance.

On the front page the lead story was “Storm Damage is Extensive and Millions Lose Power.” On the editorial page, Pulitzer Prize winning bloviator, Thomas Friedman, was explaining why we have to stop using oil as an energy source for transportation and replace coal and nuclear with wind turbines and solar panels to produce electricity.

The title of Friedman’s column was, “Making America Stupid”, and it is a pretty good description of the entire environmental movement whose main objective often seems to be the thwarting of any new energy, i.e., power, sources in America.

“Almost the entire metropolitan area (of Houston, Texas) lost power, and authorities said more than three million people were trying to manage in the dark. Utility officials say it could be weeks before power is restored throughout the region.”

Bad news for Texans, but worse news for the rest of us. “The magnitude of the power loss and the flooding raised the possibility that several major oil refineries would take more than a week to reopen.”

It helps, if you are a New York Times editor, to be unable to make the connection between your page one story and the babbling of Thomas Friedman who is inside the same issue calling for “innovating a whole new industry of clean power” for America after the grudging admission that “Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years.” You think????

Friedman’s column lambastes the bad old Republicans for wanting to “focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology—fossil fuels—rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology—renewable energy.”

That fabulous renewable energy, wind and solar power, would surely have been embraced by now if it could deliver the power that, for example, is not available in Houston and a huge swath of Texas. Could it be because a lot of power lines have been blown down?

In Texas, there are lots of wind turbines, but they like all the rest in the nation provide barely one percent of our electricity needs. And they exist only because they are heavily subsidized with federal and state funding. To put it another way, they are so inefficient and impractical, that without the government mandating them, they would not exist! The same goes for solar power.

This is what happens when government intrudes itself into areas left to intelligent people. During the Carter administration, the Department of Energy was established in 1977 for the purpose—we were told—of reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Thirty-one years later the budget for DOE is $24.2 billion a year. It has 16,000 employees and some 100,000 contract employees. Are we energy independent yet? This is the same Jimmy Carter who had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. They’re gone now.

Friedman pauses in his criticism of Sen. McCain and the Republican solutions to our energy needs (“Drill, baby, drill!”) to make fun of their proposal for more nuclear plants. Rumor has it that France gets most of its electricity from them. India is building some for its growing energy needs, but Freidman wants to carpet America with solar panels and ruin the landscape will thousands of wind turbines. No thank you!

There’s a reason why we don’t have more coal-fired and nuclear plants generating the electricity we need.

There’s a reason our electric power grid is not being upgraded to meet our future needs.

There’s a reason oil companies won’t spend billions to build new refineries.

There’s a reason food costs more when corn is converted into fuel instead of food.

The reason is thirty-one years of government regulations and general interference with the power and energy industries that must answer to their investors while coping with “environmental” laws that slow or render impossible the provision of our energy needs.

Enthralled as all liberals are with Sen. Obama, Friedman assures us that, when elected, he will improve education and health care, deal with the deficit, and forge “a real energy policy based on building a whole new energy infrastructure.”

No, he won’t. The government just makes a botch of it when it intrudes into the marketplace to control education and health care.

The government has given us the deficit, not reduced it.

And real energy policy is based on access to our nation’s vast deposits of affordable coal and the ability of the oil and gas industry to extract the vast reserves of oil and natural gas that exist.

Friedman thinks it’s stupid to drill for oil and natural gas, and mine our coal. He thinks it’s smart to throw money at windmills and solar panels. He thinks you’re stupid enough to agree with him.

Pultizer Puke

By Alan Caruba

Isn’t it about time we all just admit that the Pulitzer Prizes are a sham? Let’s see who the winners are this year. There’s The Washington Post that took six of the 14 journalism categories. Six! It’s the most ever for the newspaper and second only in history to The New York Times which won seven Pulitzers in 2002, mostly for its 9/11 coverage.

They’re gnashing their teeth at The Times this year because it only picked up two Pulitzers and tied with the Chicago Tribune for the “Explanatory Reporting” category, whatever the hell that is?

Perhaps it’s time to start giving awards for firing or laying off the least amount of editors and reporters? The real story about journalism this year is the way traditional print journalism is taking a nosedive as people turn to the Internet to get news and opinion from sources they trust. Or tune into the 24/7 news channels like Fox and MSNBC.

The real story in the world of journalism is the rise of Cybercast News Service (CNS.com), Canada Free Press.com, World Net Daily, New Media Journal or any of the many other Internet providers of news and views that resonate with people who are concerned about things like reducing the size of government, Second Amendment, sovereignty, immigration, education, and other issues of concern to conservatives.

How can a handful of politically correct, carefully selected letters to the editor compare or compete with the many lively forums in which anyone can participate? Little wonder that most newspapers have added forums and blogs to their websites in a desperate effort to entice readers.

The problem with the Pulitzers is that they are so blatantly elitist. And the winners are! Always The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution-Journal, The Wall Street Journal. Yawn.

Dailies in smaller cities west or south of the Hudson River have to pray that something newsworthy occurs such as the award to the Idaho Statesman for its coverage of the juicy Larry Craig scandal or a rarity like a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter for stories on—God help us—tax laws and pension misuse. Hats off to the Sarasota (FL) Herald Tribune and Denver Post reporters as well.

Stop the presses. Bob Dylan received a special “citation” for his contribution to music. If you like listening to a guy that sounds like a cat being slowly sawed in half, run out and pick up a CD. Dylan is so 60s that it’s a surprise to learn he still draws breath.

I am happy to know that good journalism exists, but the Pulitzers, like the Oscars, are so politicized they no longer signify much. The world of the working journalist these days is a tenuous one at best. They are over-worked and under-paid, but I was too when I was a reporter in the 1970s. It was fun then when I didn’t have to think about paying a mortgage or any grown-up stuff.

If you want to know what today’s journalists are thinking, just visit http://angryjournalist.com. It is riotous stuff, a seething cauldron of vanity, hubris, bias, and most of the sins of the heart we know and despite so well.

Meanwhile, the winning reporters and editors will renegotiate their salaries and perks. Others will call their agents and tell them to start hustling a book deal. After an alarmingly short period of preening and strutting the job cuts will continue.

Newspapers aren’t exactly dead yet, mostly due to the soft sections on health, home, and entertainment. Most people I know read the obits every day.