The Greens Think You're Stupid

By Alan Caruba

Every day EcoWatch.org sends me an email that features links to several articles on issues they regard as urgent and important. If I had no knowledge of science or much else, I would be spending my days in a state of panic and that would be just fine with the EcoWatch folks.

In late February, one of the articles to which one could link was “Top Earth Scientists Warn of Global Ecological Emergency” that was the epitome of everything that is wrong with the environmental movement in general and the machinery of the United Nations whose goal is to be the single global government with which to rule the Earth. Towards this end, the UN has an Environmental Program whose most recent gift to humanity has been three decades of lies about “global warming.”

Now the UN has its eyes set on “transforming” the world’s economic system in general and the destruction of capitalism in particular. That is what the upcoming Rio+2- Earth Summit in June is all about. Why anyone would believe anything these people have to say defies explanation.

“Ecological Internet (EI) reiterates is declaration of a planetary ecological emergency, first issued two years ago. Since then abrupt climate change has revealed itself in all its fury. Habitat loss and extinction have intensified, food and water have become increasingly scarce, and human inequity and injustice have grown.”

This kind of Chicken Little blather is the very lifeblood of environmentalism.

If individuals and nations cannot be driven to pay dearly for “carbon credits” in order to emit carbon dioxide, than some new scheme must be devised and driven by the same scare tactics and campaigns that worked for global warming until it became apparent that it was a complete fraud and those who advanced it little more than criminals with PhDs.

Parenthetically, it is precisely the Big Lie of carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” that is at the heart of the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule-making that would destroy the nation’s manufacturing and energy production sectors.

Americans and others around the world are largely unaware of the massive propaganda machine, aided and abetted by the news media and even Hollywood, that works relentlessly to shape public perceptions and opinion.

In just four day’s time, EcoWatch emails provided twenty-four links to stories, some of which had the following headlines:

“Who’s Funding Climate Change Denial?”

“Overfishing leaves Swaths of Mediterranean Barren”

“Water Scarcity Impacts at Least 2.7 Billion People Each Year”

“As Fracking Boom Hits Ohio, Deceptive Industry Practices Squeeze Landowners”

“10 Ways Monsanto and Big Ag Are Trying to Kill You—And the Planet”

“School Lunchrooms Put Planet and Kids at Risk”

“7 Dangerous Lies About Plastic”

There are common environmentalist themes in just these few examples. All corporations are evil, but those seeking to provide sources of energy are more evil than, say, those providing farmers the means to grow more crops to feed more people. Anything that might improve the economy or enhance the lives of Americans is vigorously opposed.

The use of deliberate deception is a constant factor in environmental claims.

The assault on America’s children continues unabated, especially in their classrooms where they are routinely taught that humans are to blame for destroying entire eco-systems, the climate, and everything else.

The latest abuse of young minds is “The Lorax”, an animated film that one critic said “all but shouts its disdain for capitalism” as the Lorax proclaims “I speak for the trees.” Another critique concluded that the film “is relentless in propagandizing how the use of natural resources to create consumer products is inevitably catastrophic.”

In sum, environmentalists, the vast matrix of eco-organizations, and the United Nations, all think you’re stupid. They are counting on it, but they are taking no chances as they overwhelm the news media, motion pictures, the Internet, and every other form of communication with their message that we must abandon common sense for their brand of Green slavery.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Media Hypes BPA Ban, Endangers Everyone's Health

By Alan Caruba

A direct threat to the health of millions worldwide is being hyped by the media, continuing the anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-illness agenda of environmental organizations to ban BPA, a chemical that protects against food-borne disease and increases the safe use of all plastic containers.

From January through June 2011, I wrote and posted a six-part series called “The BPA File” that anyone can read on the blog I created for the series. Thoroughly research and documented, it was written because of my concern that this particular effort to ban the chemical would, like the ban on DDT, cause millions to die.

On February 16, Matthew Glans, the Midwest Director of The Heartland Institute’s Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, posted a commentary on its “Somewhat Reasonable” blog, “Media Biggest Proponent for BPA Ban.” My research files are filled with hundreds of examples of this and one need only Google “BPA” to find thousands of references to the chemical with the single theme of banning it.

As Glans points out and my series confirms, “Chemical BPA is a chemical used in plastics for many consumer products. Amongst other uses, BPA (is) most commonly used in hardened plastics and as part of the safety liner for food and beverage cans.”  (Emphasis added)

BPA is an acronym for Bisphenol-A and it has been in use for more than six decades, tested hundreds of times, and never found to post a threat to health, but rather as an essential packaging element to protect it.

Glans quotes an article by Business and Media Institute’s Julia Seymour who wrote that the “Fear of chemicals and ‘toxins’ is rampant among the so-called ‘environmental’ left. Unfortunately, that phobia infects national media coverage as well. For more than a decade, the Left has been on the attack against BPA, a product that is commonly found in plastics and other products.”

Ms. Seymour noted that “The Food and Drug Administration has a deadline of March 31 to respond to a petition by the National Resources Defense Council—an environmental group—that seeks to ban BPA. NRDC argues that the FDA should ban BPA on the basis that it causes harm to humans.”

If you read my BPA series, you will learn that BPA has been tested here and in other nations and has been found to pose no health threat whatever.

“Meanwhile,” said Ms. Seymour, “the media have exaggerated the threat of BPA for years. On the Feb. 25, 2010, CBS ‘Early Show’ broadcast, Katie Lee crossed the line from hype into outright falsehood when she said of BPA: ‘And that’s been shown to cause liver disease, heart failure, all sorts of things.”

“The Business & Media Institute analyzed ABC, CBS, and NBC reports as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal that discussed BPA from Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2011.”

Incredibly, Canada, Japan, Denmark and France have banned the use of BPA for several products, including baby bottles. To date, “the FDA has been unwilling to declare BPA unsafe.” There’s a reason for that. Its history and the many tests of BPA have found it to be entirely safe.

Let’s understand a fundamental determination of what is toxic or not. As Paracelsus (1492-1541) said long ago, “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison.”

If you take too much aspirin, too many sleeping pills, too many pain-killers, too many of any medication, it will likely kill you. This is why directions for their use are printed on every bottle. Substances like arsenic can be found in potatoes, but the amount of arsenic is so low that its ingestion poses no threat whatever. Moreover, our bodies possess organs that clean such substances from our bodies and evacuate them every single day.

The real toxins are the lies the media prints and broadcasts without researching the claims of environmental organizations that thrive on the income such scare campaigns generate and whose fundamental agenda is the reduction of the world’s population “to save the Earth.”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Stupid Voters

By Alan Caruba

It’s a comment I hear all the time these days. “The voters are stupid.”

I am not sure that those saying it mean literally that the voters have a low level of intellect or academic achievement, but rather that they mean voters seem prone to making their choices based more on emotion than on a serious examination of the candidate’s qualifications and character.

The best example of this was the 2008 campaign in which a candidate was presented in much the same way companies seek to “brand” their product or service, repeating the same message (Obama’s was hope and change) until it becomes part of the consumers’ decision-making process. It’s why we buy a particular brand of cereal or car. We have come to associate values with it that go beyond the taste or the look.

Barack Obama had served barely two years in the U.S. Senate before he made an unprecedented leap from there to the White House. He was, for all intents and purposes, an unknown quantity with a legislative record—if anyone bothered to check—that was a straight Democratic Party line vote.

In his earlier incarnation as an Illinois legislator, he had voted “present” so many times it was clear he was avoiding taking any position he regarded as politically dangerous; a vote that would come back to haunt him and very few did. The media cooperated in this, avoiding calling attention to anything that might be deemed controversial.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton, whether you liked her or not, was a candidate with a full cart of baggage from her years as the former governor’s and president’s wife, and her years as a U.S. Senator who served, not from Arkansas where she first came to notice, but from New York where liberals thrive. The process of campaigning wore her out and, being the first women to seriously contend to be president, she had even more of a challenge to overcome. Her raw ambition tended to make people afraid of her.

What elected Obama had nothing to do with the slim qualifications he put forth. Few candidates had less to offer. He had never met a payroll. All information regarding his academic records was sealed from view. The press made no effort to ask what passport he had traveled on to Pakistan at one time and did not raise any question about his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he had never lived or worked. Famously, he released a “birth certificate” that anyone in Hawaii could attain for the asking, not the “long form” which is deemed credible.

The voters have paid a fearful price for electing Obama; increased unemployment, a huge national debt, a hollowed-out military, billions wasted on “Green” energy, unprotected borders, a Congress in near total gridlock, and a world beyond our shores that perceives an America made weaker by Obama’s three years in office.

I have worked as a public relations counselor for most of my life with earlier years spent as a journalist. I know something about how a product, a service, or an individual is “packaged” to present a positive “image.” What we have all learned since 2008 was that Obama was superbly “packaged” and that the image of an articulate, highly intelligent, well informed candidate was without substance. His inability to speak publicly without a TelePrompter swiftly became a joke.

So, to say that those who voted for him were “stupid” is to misread the new era of politics, one that has more to do with “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” than with the serious selection of the leader of the nation and the free world.

As they say in advertising, voters bought the sizzle, not the steak.

We are seeing this process continue as the Republican candidates vie for votes. The Gingrich “surge” in South Carolina came after he had two successful debates. It is true that Gingrich is a good debater, but the real question is whether he would be a good president. Questions about his character remain.

Gingrich has been comfortable sharing a couch with Nancy Pelosi to advocate the bogus global warming “theory” or taking money from Freddie Mac.. Now he is trying to appear to be a “real” conservative as opposed to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and the quixotic Ron Paul.

While his judgment on issues has been called into question, Romney’s character never has. There has never been a hint of scandal in his life. In terms of policy, he was the Governor of one of the most liberal states and he did support Romneycare there. Politics is rarely pretty and even New Jersey’s fire-breathing Governor, Chris Christie, has taken some extraordinarily liberal positions and made some questionable appointments.

There might have been a time when Gingrich was, indeed, a bona fide conservative, but his long years in Washington, D.C., have taught him that “to get along you have to go along” In the end, even his colleagues in the House, for reasons of policy and personality, could no longer support him as Speaker.

From the days of Bush41 until the 2010 elections the Republican Party looked so much like the Democratic Party, voters had an increasingly hard time telling them apart. The Tea Party movement changed that. They and the “independents” are going to decide the 2012 elections that are currently making history with endless debates.

The debates are proving to be a succession of sound bites and vitriol between the candidates. They increasingly demonstrate how the mainstream media, the debate sponsors, are visibly seeking to influence the outcome of the election and they demonstrate that many voters are easily swayed by matters that have little to do with actual policies and issues.

There has been less and less substance with each debate.

I fear that too many Republican voters are having too many mood swings, relying on a moment or two from the most recent debate than on a serious examination—I repeat myself—of the candidate’s qualifications and character. Romney is carefully scripted and a tad robotic, but Gingrich could become the GOP nominee simply because he is entertaining.

Without doubt, President Obama and the Democrats are enjoying the Republican free-for-all and, without doubt, they have concluded that the voters are stupid.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How to Listen to Obama's State of the Union Speech

By Alan Caruba

The Tuesday morning post of the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” is worth sharing in part. You can read the whole post here.

“Tonight, Americans who tune in to the State of the Union will watch the work of a rhetorical master with a flair for illusion,” says Mike Brownfield. “President Barack Obama will take the to the floor of the Capitol in hopes of laying the groundwork for a political debate on his terms—one where he stands on emotional appeals, populism, and class warfare, not the shaky ground of his crumbling record.”

“And looking right back at him will be the U.S. Senate, which has for the past 1,000 days failed to pass a budget—a total shirking of their fundamental duty to be diligent stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

That about sums up the situation in which voters on both side of the political spectrum, from liberal to conservative, find themselves and for both it is a portrait of failure of spectacular dimensions. Government, as we envision it, is not functioning.

Instead, Americans will have to listen to a great deal of nonsense about “fairness” and Obama’s view that government, as Brownfield warns, “should be the guarantor of equal outcomes and that ‘fairness’ of achievement should be decided by legions of bureaucrats in Washington.”

The Founding Fathers knew that life is not fair and that government can only provide the circumstances under which Americans are provided not happiness, but “the pursuit of happiness” based on a host of factors that include the good luck of being born to good parents, receiving a decent education, and being willing to work hard for a portion of success in life. Even without these factors, many Americans succeed while most just settle.

Joe Wilson, a Republican Representative of South Carolina’s Second District, gained fame at a previous State of the Union speech when in 2009 he shouted out “You lie!” at the president. He has said that “Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.”

That kind of straight talk is rare in politics. Commentators and political pundits are more free to express themselves than politicians and Charles Krauthammer has said that “Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

I doubt that Americans want to be equally poor, but that is the end result of Obama’s socialist policies.

Most certainly, a large element of the mainstream press has bought into Obama’s policies and the result is a growing distrust and disdain for it. Fox News’ Brit Hume has said that “Fairness is not an attitude. It’s a professional skill that must be developed and exercised.” It is reflected in Fox’s famed “fair and balanced” motto, though any journalist will tell you it is a very high standard to achieve.

We would do well to keep in mind Lincoln’s advice:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

At the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech will be the direct opposite of the values expressed by Lincoln.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Media Amnesia

By Alan Caruba

We are now in a countdown to November 6, 2012, Election Day, and the mainstream press will shift more intensely into coverage of the campaigns; first for the Republican nomination of the candidate to oppose Barack Obama, and then through the interminable ups and downs of the campaign for the presidency.

We got a taste of it with Politico.com, an arm of The Washington Post that permits its liberal bias to be reported with a more barehanded approach. It was Politico.com that broke the Herman Cain story of sexual harassment allegations in the 1990s and issued some seventy “stories” about it in the space of three or four days. The women who filed the complaints and who financially benefited from the National Restaurant Association’s settlements have wisely recused themselves from going public.

About the only thing we have actually learned is that Herman Cain, who had a ten-day heads-up on the story, handled it poorly. As someone who has earned his bread in public relations, watching him stumble around with several different versions of what he remembered and what he knew was painful. That said, the story is likely to go away because such allegations by unnamed women are (a) commonplace in the business world and (b) most decent people don’t like that kind of “gotcha” journalism.

As U.S. troops are finally withdrawn from Iraq, news coverage of that nation is going to disappear from the front pages unless the bombings occurring with increasingly regularity there continue. Don’t expect the media to connect the dots to ask or even identify who’s setting off those bombs or why.

Both the existential and actual threats to Israel are also likely to get short shrift despite the fact that mere days after Israel released more than a thousand Palestinian terrorists to gain the return of a single soldier, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Sderot in southern Israel were under missile attacks from Gaza. No longer being attributed to Hamas, a group calling itself Islamic Jihad is getting the credit for the forty rockets and mortars fired over a two-day period in late October.

As Dore Gold, an Israeli statesman noted, “The real explanations for the decision of Islamic Jihad to attack at this time, however, are not to be found in the Gaza Strip, but rather in Tehran.” Islamic Jihad, Gold pointed out, “is a very different organization than Hamas.” Yet another effort by the Israelis, the 2005 forced evacuation of the Gaza Strip’s Jewish population to placate the Palestinians, has not accomplished anything more than a launch site for endless rocketing.

The media will continue to monitor the events in Europe as its Eurozone monetary system continues to collapse, likely taking the European Union with it. It is one of those ideas by the continent’s elitists and intelligentsia that ignored hundreds of years of history behind the sovereign states there or the economic disparities between them. It is doubtful such coverage will provide anything more than the daily he-said, she-said accounts as the individual nations go their own way. The site of many U.S. exports and investments, it will further harm our tenuous economy as well.

The campaign here at home will be page one news, but may serve to mask the incipient scandals of the Obama administration such as Solyandra and other failing green energy companies that received huge loan guarantees. Nor will the administration’s efforts to keep the southern border open to the flow of illegal aliens get much attention as it continues to sue states like Alabama and Arizona for trying to deal with the consequences.

The Great Depression 2.0

The one story the media cannot suppress is unemployment. Last week the media trumpeted the announcement that the “official” rate of 9.1% decreased to 9%. These government-generated statistics are a farce. It is likely closer to 22% because those who have given up looking for work and other factors are conveniently ignored. Unemployment is as bad as it was during the Great Depression, but don’t expect the media to report that.

In the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, it is likely that the Obama administration will exploit the distraction offered by the election campaign to continue its destruction of the nation’s energy sector; the one sector responsible for actually adding new jobs since 2003. The Environmental Protection Agency is desperate to impose new regulations to further its agenda of killing jobs and exercising total control over every aspect of our lives. Don’t expect much coverage.

There are some early indications that the media have grown disenchanted with Obama. They put him in office with their crazed propagandistic coverage in 2008, but he has proven to be a very big disappointment. This portends that their coverage of his reelection campaign will be treated like kryptonite, the substance that weakened Superman.

It is not putting it too strongly to say that, with notable exceptions, the mainstream media has failed and even deceived Americans for too long now, from the bogus global warming hoax to the installation of Barack Obama in the Oval Office. They think they know what is best for us, but they often have only the slimmest grasp of what is actually occurring at home and around the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Weather Newsgasm

By Alan Caruba

What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it.

The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do.

By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster.

By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over North Carolina, Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and commentator on WattsUpWithThat.com, was reporting, “What we have here at this point appears to be a tropical storm. By the time it reaches New York, it may very well just be a tropical depression on par with a Nor’easter in intensity.” But not a hurricane.

At one point late Saturday, I clicked the remote on every local channel and on every cable news channel. Every single one was reporting on the hurricane. According to my blogger pal, Texas Fred, that’s a “newsgasm”.

By Sunday morning, the drenching rain, but no high winds, was already moving north out of New York City and northern New Jersey where I live.

The incessant “news” coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts. So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) became an acronym for incompetence. Presumably lessons have been learned and the agency will perform more effectively if needed.

Americans have been taught that the federal government will always come to their rescue and it rarely does with any efficiency and usually with a great waste of money and resources. Local first responders are usually the best and most reliable.

In a society that is utterly and completely dependent on electricity to function, it is always a sobering experience for many to discover how useless every single appliance in their home or apartment becomes without it.

I am sure I am boring people to death by repeatedly pointing to the way government at the federal and state level, along with many environmental organizations are deliberately making it difficult, if not impossible, to build coal-burning or nuclear utilities. As for transportation, the same forces are allied against any oil exploration and extraction. There hasn’t been a single new oil refinery built since the 1970s. That’s insane.

Now they are gearing up to deter natural gas extraction using “fracking” even though this technology has been in safe use for fifty years. The discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas should be greeted as welcome news by everyone. Only the luddites want us to return to mythical “simpler” times that never existed. It is still easier and a whole lot faster to take the train from New York to Washington, D.C. than to ride a horse.

If a foreign invader had imposed the same limits on our ability to access and use our own vast national reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, we would be in the streets with metaphorical pitchforks.

Returning to the theme of hurricanes, does anyone remember how Al Gore and other global warming liars were predicting that global warming would cause more hurricanes? Well, the East Coast has been through a period of some five years without one making landfall. Since there never was any dramatic global warming, there never was a connection between the two.

It’s worth remembering the previous decades since the late 1980s that were filled with reports from the full panoply of the print and broadcast media. They assured us that global warming was going to transform all life on earth unless we stopped producing carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., “greenhouse gas” emissions. It was a scam to sell bogus “carbon credits.”

This is the same bull we keep hearing about “renewable” energy, wind and solar power, along with ethanol and biofuels. The latter wastes food—corn—and the former wastes open space along with taxpayer’s and consumer’s hard earned money.

We are constantly assailed with extremely dubious, if not outright lies that involve something “scientific”, but science has been corrupted with too much environmental claptrap, political correctness, and devious chicanery. There are good sources of information, but the government and the media are not among them.

Trust your common sense. It is usually a good guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Liberal Media is Deserting Obama

By Alan Caruba

The conservative media has been criticizing President Obama since before he was President and that hardly comes as a surprise, but there is a discernible trend occurring among the liberal media. They are beginning to abandon Obama and, if that continues, it will erode his base and the electoral turnout he needs to be reelected.

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, is one of my barometers and she has been backing away from Obama for weeks. In an August 6 column, “Downgrade Blues”, she opined that “Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.” It’s more like Obama has become Darth Vader, destroying the economy since the day he arrived in the Oval Office.

“When he had power,” said Dowd, “he didn’t use it.” No, Obama’s problem is that he did use it and most dramatically in his effort to impose Obamacare on an America that did not want it. Only a straight party vote in Congress passed it despite a massive 2009 march on Washington to protest it. That sparked the Tea Party movement and that transferred power in the House in the 2010 midterm elections.

The syndicated columnist, Eleanor Clift, a strident devotee and defender of Obama, wrote on August 9th that “Disappointed liberals are among Obama’s harshest critics. They feel he’s given away too much to conservatives and they don’t understand where his gifts of intellect and oratory are now that the country is looking to him for a bold plan forward that can take the economy out of the doldrums.”

Like so many liberals, reluctant to assign any blame to Obama, Clift ignores the trillions in additional debt that Obama added to an already tenuous situation when he became President. She ignores the failed stimulus program or his administration’s all out attack on the energy sector of the economy. It’s a long list of bad judgments.

As to his alleged intellect and oratory, Obama’s dependence on teleprompters became a running joke early in his first months in office. During his address on Monday, his “oratory” fell flat with both the media and the public. A string of clichés and worn-out ideas, plus a plea for bipartisanship he has never displayed resulted in a further plunge in the stock market.

A Spurned Prom Date

David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, on July 25 sharply criticized Obama after the debt ceiling negotiations, saying “the president lost his cool. Obama never should have gone in front of the cameras just minutes after the talks faltered Friday evening. His appearance was suffused with that ‘I’m the only mature person in Washington’ condescension that drives everybody crazy. Obama lectured the leaders of the House and Senate in the sort of patronizing tone that a junior high principal might use with immature delinquents. He talked about unreturned phone calls and being left at the alter, personalizing the issue like a spurned prom date.”

Assessing the Monday address following the Friday Standard & Poor’s credit rating downgrade, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, wrote, “Yet Obama plods along, raising gobs of cash for his reelection bid—he was scheduled to speak at two DNC fundraisers Monday night—and varying little the words he reads from the teleprompter. He seemed detached even from those words Monday as he pivoted his head from side to side, proclaiming that ‘our problems is not confidence in our credit’ and turning his bipartisan fiscal commission into a ‘biparticle.’”

In October 2010 the Washington Times published a commentary of mine that asked if Obama was a moron. Turns out, he is.

In the August 9 edition of the conservative Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens’ column was titled “Is Obama Smart?” Concisely summing up the two views of the President, Stephens wrote “Liberals say he’s too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.”

“I don’t buy it,” wrote Stephens. “I just think the president isn’t very bright.” He concluded “Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.”

For me, there is more than a degree of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in other’s misfortunes, but the really bad news is that Obama’s misfortunes are America’s misfortunes and the mainstream media is beginning at last to take notice.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Sarah Palin's Media Mockery Tour

By Alan Caruba

Watching the mobs of media folk chasing Sarah Palin’s bus resembles paparazzi chasing Lindsay Lohan more than anything related to serious politics in America. But, hey, if we were truly serious about politics, would we have elected Obama and Biden, or any of the other Leftwing loonies in Congress?

Fox News anchorette, Greta Van Susteran, hitched a ride with Sarah on a huge bus whose exterior is illustrated to demonstrate it is NOT a campaign bus, but just your typical family recreation vehicle as the Palin clan arrived in Washington, D.C., just in time for the Rolling Thunder motorcycle tribute to the nation’s fallen heroes.

Reportedly, Palin has not provided the mainstream media with an itinerary of her trip although we are told that she will head to Gettysburg at some point; probably right after having dined with—are you ready for this—Donald Trump.

While in Washington, she took her family to the National Archives to view the “foundation” documents on display. Something, frankly, every parent should do. My Father took me to the nation’s capital when I was a boy and we toured all the sites from the Lincoln Memorial to the Smithsonian. It’s not something one is likely to forget.

Palin, however, is beginning to sound like some windup doll where you pull the string and it spouts the same message over and over again. There’s no doubt that many on the Right welcome it, but at the same time it tends to sound trite after the fiftieth iteration.

I am among those who think that Palin will not take a run at the presidency. I think this bus tour has layers of reasons that include demonstrating her political viability, her potential kingmaker status, her “brand” to sell future books, and to prove she can draw a crowd anywhere in ways that the current crop of candidates cannot.

It is no accident she will be in New Hampshire the same day Mitt Romney officially announces his candidacy and you can imagine how thrilled he is about that! It also demonstrates the early lack of enthusiasm for most of the Republican field of candidates. That is not unusual. Things don’t begin to heat up until the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

Palin, though, despite all she has been through since John McCain picked her from the anonymity of being Alaska’s Governor, still cannot handle even softball questions. She can deliver a speech to audiences eager to hear all that good stuff about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and conservative values, but there is little indication, as Brit Hume, a Fox News analyst, recently observed, that she has “schooled” herself in the greater global issues of our times.

In the meantime, she has got the usual media mob trailing her bus around, intoxicated by the carbon monoxide fumes, and desperate to get a sound bite. It is Palin’s revenge for the way they normally savage her.

It is her Media Mockery Tour.

For my part, the notion of a President Palin borders on farce. It’s a lot like the Broadway myth, “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!” The 2008 campaign made Palin an instant star.

Everything she has done and said since then has maintained that status, but it is a theatrical term, not a political one. The media, Left and Right, is fascinated with her and she has coined that fascination with bestselling books, a television travel series, and well-paid speaking engagements; nothing wrong with that.

But President? Get real.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Esquire Magazine Telling Lies

By Alan Caruba

There is often a thin line between so-called "satire" and telling lies. That's what happened when Mark Warren blogged in Esquire's "Politics" online segment the following:

"Breaking: Jerome Corsi's Birther Book Pulled from Shelves!"

Not funny, not true.

It is a deliberate act of disinformation intended to hurt the sales of Corsi's new book, "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President."

I became aware of it when a link was posted on the May 18 Drudge Report in a fashion that suggested it was an actual news story.

Warren appended an "Update, 12:25 p.m." saying "We committed satire this morning..." Warren may disagree with the facts in Dr. Corsi's book, but he has no right to suggest "it's core premise and reason to exist" was "gutted by the news cycle" when Obama released an alleged long form birth certificate that has been judged a forgery.

Dr. Corsi, a regular contributor on World Net Daily and author of several bestselling non-fiction books, is a public figure and subject to such attacks, but to cloth this one as "satire" ignores its obvious intent when it claimed that World Net Daily's "Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Farah, has announced plans to recall and pulp the entire 200,000 first run printing of the book."

Just when one is recovering from a baseless. liberal, mainstream media attack on some conservative and/or Republican political figure, or someone expressing opposition to Barack Hussein Obama, along comes some new, vicious effort like this one.

I don't expect it to stop. Indeed, I expect it to increase as the Obama reelection campaign picks up speed. It is already telling various reporters and media they are not welcome or will not have access because of news coverage deemed unfavorable. Well, too bad.

As is often said, "The truth hurts", and Dr. Corsi's new book may well end the worst presidency of the modern era since Jimmy Carter's. It could even do so prior to the 2012 elections.

(c) Alan Caruba, 2011

Pageantry, History, and Change

By Alan Caruba

Last week ended in pageantry that altered history in ways the whole world could take notice, vicariously participate, and absorb into the collective conscience. On Friday the heir to the British throne married and a former commoner became the future queen of England. The world rejoiced.

On Sunday, Pope John Paul was beatified, a step toward sainthood, in an expedited Vatican process that was a response to the crowds who gathered at his funeral on April 8, 2005 and cried out “Santos Subito!” Sainthood now.

The evening before was the annual black-tie White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner, a gathering whose humble beginnings reflected the job of covering the presidency. The Association was formed in 1914 in response to news that President Wilson wanted to hold regular press conferences, but wasn’t sure who should attend. The reporters wanted to make sure they made that decision. They held their first dinner in 1920 and, in 1924, Calvin Coolidge was the first President to attend.

Today the dinner is a glitzy affair and can be watched on C-SPAN. As Dana Milbank of The Washington Post noted in an April 29 commentary, the dinner has spawned twenty parties around the event, sponsored by corporations and media organizations who invite film and television celebrities who are also guests at the dinner. It’s a chance for star-struck reporters to rub shoulders with them.

“The correspondent’s association dinner was a minor annoyance for years,” wrote Milbank, “when it was a ‘nerd prom’ for journalists and a few minor celebrities. But as with so much else in this town, the event has spun out of control. Now awash in lobbyists and corporate money, it is another display of Washington’s excesses.”

What ties the dinner together with the beatification ceremony the following day was inadvertently touched upon by Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, historian, best selling author, and a national treasure.

Writing about Pope John Paul’s historic visit to his native Poland in June 1979, Noonan noted that the Mass he conducted was attended by easily a million or more Poles, but when “Everyone at the Mass went home and put on state-controlled television to see the coverage of the great event, they knew millions had been there, they knew what was said, they knew everyone there was part of a spiritual uprising. But the state-run TV had nothing. State-run TV had a few people in the mud and a picture of the pope.”

“Everyone looked at the propaganda of the state, at its lack of truthfulness and its disrespect for reality, and they thought: It’s all lies. Everything the government says is a lie. The government itself is a lie.”

Poland along with Eastern Europe was still in the iron grip of the Soviet Union as it had been since the end of World War Two. In Poland, however, resistance had begun in the form of the Solidarity Movement. Lech Walessa, its leader, told Noonon “We knew…communism could not be reformed. But we knew the minute he touched the foundations of communism, it would collapse.”

The collapse that came began with the failure of the Polish state-controlled press to tell the truth.

While the United States does not have a state-controlled press, the rise of many news and news analysis sites on the Internet has made it clear to a growing body of Americans that the mainstream news media (MSM) has failed or refused to report the truth.

The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 is now largely attributed to the slavish adoration and biased reporting that lifted him from virtual obscurity and put him in the Oval Office.

The release of an obviously fraudulent “birth certificate” this past week evoked virtually no outrage in the MSM. Instead they demanded that the issue of Obama’s eligibility to hold the highest office in the land had been settled. It had taken nearly two years since an initial, comparable certificate had been put out by his campaign to get a repeat of that fraud.

The trust that was formerly given the MSM has been steadily eroded for years and with good reason.

Milbank wrote that he did not fault any one host for throwing a party “or any journalist for attending. Many of them are friends. There’s nothing inherently wrong with savoring Johnnie Walker Blue with the politicians we cover. But the cumulative effect is icky.”

That’s a pretty good description of the nation’s mood about President Obama and those charged with reporting on him. It’s “icky.”

This is a President who is calling for higher taxes in the midst of a severe recession, increasing inflation, $4 a gallon gasoline at the pump, a distressed housing market, and high unemployment.

This is a President who will not let our vast national reserves of oil and coal be developed for America’s use. This is a President advocating high speed trains, wind and solar power, electric cars. He shuns our allies and thinks he can pick the winners and losers in the “Arab spring” as despots are being overthrown and challenged.

Not only has our federal government been debased by a Marxist regime, but those charged with reporting on it have allowed themselves to be seduced by it.

“Santos Subito!” is a call for a renewed spiritual faith and the spiritual values that Americans of all faiths want and need in order to replace the quasi-communist regime in Washington, D.C.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

How Expert Are the Experts?

By Alan Caruba

We live in a society that apparently has experts on everything stacked ten deep. You cannot turn on the television without being introduced to experts of every description about everything.

That being the case, why is the nation on the brink of insolvency despite the fact that I can order a product, receive email confirmation, and a tracking notice of its shipment without once having to talk to a living person?

That, I submit, is pure genius, whereas creating programs for the wasteful redistribution of wealth, mine and yours, is my definition of really, really stupid.

Why stupid? Because communism and/or socialism, sooner or later always fails. Because banishing the ownership of private property—this is MY stuff, not yours—runs counter to everything we humans strive to achieve and because people don’t want to interact with the government in some fashion every damned day, unless it’s the postman.

As Thomas Paine put it, “that government is best which governs least”, calling it “a necessary evil.”

I got to wondering how many PhDs there are in the United States and, it only took a bit of Googling to conclude there is a huge glut of PhDs, not just here, but worldwide. Considering that it takes from 7.5 to 10 years to nail the diploma to the wall that is a lot of time acquiring something that often does not kick open the door to prosperity, although it does look good on their resumes.

Let us grant that we want our physicians, Doctors of Medicine, to have spent a good stretch of time learning how not to kill us in the process of curing us. Other fields critical to our well being include engineers who design bridges, buildings, and such. We want smart people to ensure that the vast preponderance of dumb people don’t kill us prematurely.

Anyone who has spent any time around PhDs or, in my case, answering their emails, soon concludes that many of them are just nitwits. The greatest drawback of being a PhD is, apparently, concluding that you are smarter than everyone else and then wanting to make that point on an hourly basis, particularly with strangers.

So, forgive me if I have grown old and skeptical listening to or reading PhDs and the views of “experts”, people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

Permit me to cite just a few examples.

“So here is the Great Society. It’s the time—and it’s going to be soon—when nobody in this country is poor.” – Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.” Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, firing Elvis Presley after one performance on September 25, 1954.

“Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we’re not going to buy your product.” – Joe Keenan, president of Atari, responding to Steve Job’s offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak had developed, 1976.

“There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear) energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Dr. Albert Einstein, 1932. (PS. He changed his mind).

Let me close this observation on expertise or the lack of it, by noting that all politicians lie. The best and most noble of them lie on occasion and the rest of them lie all the time. Our current President has managed to lie ceaselessly, with or without the aid of a TelePrompter. Other than the hardcore 25% of Liberals, most Americans have concluded that he is not to be trusted.

Likewise, far too many scientists have taken to lying a great deal as well and this has been particularly obvious as regards all those telling us that global warming is real, carbon dioxide is a lethal pollutant, and just about anything involving the use of a chemical is suicide.

In Proverbs it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Let me amend that by suggesting that wisdom includes regarding all those experts on the television, radio and print media with a degree of skepticism. This is another way of saying take the time to do your own research. A republic such as ours requires people to seek the best answers to present problems.

The views of Liberals defy history, science, economics, and logic. They are wrong. Their experts are wrong. That is why we are struggling to put right, to eliminate, all their governmental “answers” to our present crisis.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What Jared Loughner is NOT

Impatient Americans

By Alan Caruba

Americans are an impatient people. There’s a reason why every manner of labor-saving device was invented here and why we are in love with every kind of device that lets us instantly communicate with one another.

In an earlier era, it might have taken longer for a majority of Americans to realize just how awful President Obama’s legislative and other policy initiatives were for the nation, but a plethora of punditry on countless Internet websites and blogs alerted them even while the mainstream media was trying to deceive them as they had with their support for candidate Obama.

As an aside, media prognosticators are predicting that daily newspapers are essentially all dinosaurs and many, if not most, will be gone in a decade or so. The general rule is that new technology, the Internet, drives out old technology, dead-tree newspapers.

The other factor is that most daily newspapers with their liberal outlook have simply been abandoned by subscribers who have tired of seeking real news amidst the propaganda. Prediction: none of the news weeklies will be around in five years or less.
When even the National Enquirer and Star Magazine are filling for bankruptcy protection, you know the times they are changing. Survivors, however, may be the nation’s many weekly newspapers because, like politics, all news is local.

Impatience with a Congress that was so clearly out of touch with most constituents has resulted in a historic turnover of power to the Republican Party and it is a far more humble party than its heyday during George W. Bush’s two terms, the latter of which saw Americans return Democrats to power.

Americans had already grown weary of the war in Iraq that had begun in 2003 and had little enthusiasm for the nation’s military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001. Throughout history, great empires have fallen because they got over-extended in such conflicts.

Making matters worse for any administration is the growing perception that the Middle East is psychotic; a place where reason takes a backseat to a seventh century religion that dominates its politics and social life. Watching Muslims blow up mosques filled with other Muslims is sufficient to convince many Americans that no amount of military power or billions in foreign aid will change anything.

Only one nation in the Middle East poses any kind of military threat and that is Iran. The minute it actually acquires nuclear weapons will be the hour in which Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and various Gulf States sit down at the table with Israel to discuss and plan ridding itself of this threat. The Iranian leadership—not its people—are certifiably crazy.

Americans will be looking to a Republican controlled House to rid the nation of Obamacare and begin to address over-spending, joblessness, and other issues, but the next two years will be spent in triage, trying to stop the bleeding until the patient can make it to the operating room and that will require the election of a new president and a Republican Senate.

So Americans are going to have to strive to be patient while the many Republican governors redistrict their states to aid a victory in 2012. They will have to content themselves with legislative maneuvers to defund Obamacare or remove many of its more noxious mandates. Also on the To-Do list will be to put the Environmental Protection Agency in manacles before it utterly destroys the economy with crazed greenhouse gas emissions regulations.

There is little that can be done to turn around the decades-old disastrous energy policies that have stalled the construction of the many new coal-fired and nuclear plants needed to provide the electricity that is the very breath of life to the nation. The Obama administration will also continue to thwart any oil exploration and drilling, and how much of a priority this will be in the new Congress is unknown.

Meanwhile the White House has announced that, upon his return from India, President Obama will sit down with the Republican leadership of the House along with their Democrat counterparts including the noxious Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It is likely to be little more than a photo-op because this president is deaf to partisanship or the reversal of his plans to destroy the nation.

This means that that a less frightening two years is ahead with the hope of real change in 2012. The economy is barely improving and is likely to remain stagnant, even with the extension of the Bush tax cuts. A Mount Everest of federal regulations will have to be eliminated to get the economy moving again.

And then there are the unknown and unpredictable “events” that will occur. 9/11 was one such event in 2001.

On September 18, 2008, there was a little reported electronic run on U.S. banks that withdrew $550 billion before the Federal Reserve stepped in to stop it. It blew away the charade of the nation’s housing market that involved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Privatizing both should be a GOP priority. Americans have yet to have been told who withdrew those billions.

Other events over which there is no control such as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes could play a role. We’ve seen how the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico undermined confidence in the Obama administration.

Two years isn’t really that long a time, but a lot can happen and it will call for patience and perseverance.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Public Relations and the World

By Alan Caruba

PR Week publishes monthly editions in addition to its other news services and the July issue is devoted to “The most powerful people in PR.” All industries have their major players, so there is nothing surprising that public relations would also have its heavy hitters, but there are some interesting insights to be gleaned from the list of the twenty-five chosen.

I have plied the magic arts and crafts of public relations since the 1970s when I gave up the notion of ever making a decent living as a journalist. Journalism offers tons of ego satisfaction, but the pay was bad back then and, by comparison with other professions, not much better today.

The major players are, not surprisingly, the ones in charge of projecting and protecting a corporate “image”, otherwise known as perception. Number one on the list is Katie Cotton, the VP of worldwide corporate communications for Apple. She is teamed with Steve Jobs its cofounder and CEO because, together, they are the dynamic due of PR for a company that is testimony to American innovation and enterprise. It’s a very good choice.

Corporate PR folk on the list include Leslie Dach, VP for Wal-Mart; Jon Iwata, VP for IBM; Ed Skyler, Executive VP for Citigroup; Sally Susman, Senior VP for Pfizer; Chris Hassell fpr Procter & Gamble; Gary Sheffer, VP for GE; Bill Margaritis, VP for FedEx; Rachel Whetstone, VP for Google, Julie Hamp, Senior VP for PepsiCo; and Teri Everett, SVP of News Corporation.

One thing should particularly be obvious and which continues throughout the list is the role of women at very high levels, even if men continue to dominate these positions. Of particular interest is the inclusion of Stephanie Cutter among the “most powerful” as an Assistant to the President for Special Projects. That is president as in President of the United States of America. While Robert Gibbs is in the spotlight as Obama’s spokesperson, Cutter played an essential role in his campaign and now in his administration.

Of the top twenty-five named, nine were women. That’s progress.

Among the other “power principals”, there are the expected CEOs of major agencies such as Richard Edelman of Edelman; Harris Diamond, CEO of Shandwick Worldwide; Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, Paul Taaffe, CEO of Hill & Knowlton; and Margery Kraus, CEO of APCO Worldwide. It is worth noting that these public relations firms operate on a global basis.

In a recent public television documentary on George P. Schultz who served in many top posts, including Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan, he noted that while people think cabinet members have a lot of power, their primary power is the ability to persuade people to support their policies. I cite this because the U.S. government employs a small army of “communications” people whose job is to marshal support. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. probably has more PR agencies per square mile than any other city in the nation.

Persuasion is the cash crop of public relations and perhaps the most interesting new trend is the creation of a whole new breed of PR folk whose expertise is in “social media” which is to say PR focused on using websites like Facebook, My Space, and Twitter to spread the message. There's a lot of outreach to influential bloggers as well. The emergence of the Internet has been one of the major changes affecting the profession.

Time was if a PR guy or gal “placed” a story with the wire services or a major newspaper such as The New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times, or a news magazine like Newsweek or Time that was sufficient to affect events. The loss of numerous daily newspapers and the shriveling of others have altered that dynamic. The news magazines are in their death throes.

A major contributor to this is the loss of credibility these news dynamos have brought upon themselves by pushing hoaxes such as global warming or in giving unexamined support to political agendas depending on who was in office. Investigative reporting is virtually a thing of the past as news organizations trim their staffs to the bare minimum.

The recent virtual black-out on news about the New Black Panthers and the failure of the Department of Justice to pursue voter tampering charges is yet another reason fewer and fewer television viewers turn to the network news shows for, well, news.

The rise of conservative talk radio speaks to the fact that a majority of Americans self-identify as politically conservative. The popularity of leading news and opinion websites that serve this audience is testimony to the power of public opinion.

Meanwhile the PR power players, in corporations, trade associations, special interest organizations, and in agencies, are hard at work seeking to influence public opinion.

Ultimately, however, it comes down to the quality of products and services, the actions taken by government, and the state of the economy that determines what the public thinks and does.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

How the MSM Covers Terrorism

And now for more news about Tiger Woods!

For the record, I am delighted that Tiger Woods is back playing at the Masters. His private life is his private life and we should leave him alone. Go, Tiger!

Mainstream Media Ignores Climategate

By Alan Caruba

Ah, Spring! The days grow longer and warmer. Trees begin to sprout leaves again. Early flowers like crocuses begin to appear. Birds return to serenade each other and build nests. It is a time of renewal, an annual reminder of the Earth’s capacity to shake off the hibernation of winter and regenerate itself.

What I have also noticed since the revelations in November 2009 that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data had been deliberately falsified to justify claims of “global warming” is the return in the media of the usual idiotic claims that “global warming” is causing this and that.

The Economist, an otherwise respected news magazine, had a recent issue in which it essentially said it didn’t care how much evidence there was that no global warming was or is occurring.

The media doesn't care that Gallup’s annual poll of environmental issues shows global warming is at the bottom of Americans’ concerns. Of the eight environmental issues listed, global warming finished last.

The Earth entered a definitive cooling cycle around 1998 when weather satellites all recorded decreases in average global temperatures. The temperatures reported by the IPCC had been deliberately falsified by the placement of weather stations in or near “heat islands” such as cities or had been ignored when their data contradicted the fraud.

In February, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the lone voice of sanity in Congress regarding “global warming”, asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation.” Sen. Inhofe asked that Al Gore be called back before the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee to defend his claims that “the Earth has a fever” and that drastic measures must be taken to avoid “global warming.”

Having passed the healthcare “reform” bill, the Obama administration will turn toward the passage of Cap-and-Trade legislation that is entirely based on the IPCC’s phony “science.” It is a scheme to sell and trade “carbon credits” intended to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has already threatened to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) and other minor atmospheric gases, none of which have anything to do with the non-existent “global warming.”

This would strangle the nation’s economy because the use of most energy sources except nuclear and hydroelectric generates CO2. Cap-and-Trade has been characterized as the greatest tax on energy use in the history of the nation.

Briefly, the EPA’s threat is based on IPCC “science” regarding greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC is an international organization that is not subject to U.S. data quality and transparency standards. Moreover, U.S. agencies, NOAA and NASA, have participated in the provision of dubious “global warming” data, politicizing a scientific process to the point of rendering it useless and invalid.

The EPA is clinging to the lie that humans are causing climate change and continues to engage in practices that propagate the fraud and thwart economic growth. There is no threat to public health from CO2, a gas that is vital to all life on Earth because it is to plants what oxygen is to humans.

You are not likely to read about any of this in the MSM. In the same way they are studiously avoiding the full story of the collapse of the “global warming” fraud, they will continue to propagandize Cap-and-Trade and other measures.

Spring officially arrived on Saturday, March 20.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Time Magazine Has a Problem with the Truth about Global Warming

By Alan Caruba

Bryan Walsh has a great career in public relations awaiting him. Unfortunately he is currently passing himself off as a journalist for Time Magazine.

PR, a profession I have enjoyed for several decades, is widely seen to “spin” facts to a client’s advantage and this is frequently the case. PR is advocacy. Journalism is supposed to be something else, i.e., the unbiased, objective reporting of the facts. Someone needs to explain this to Bryan.

In an article titled “Explaining a Global Climate Panel’s Key Missteps”, Bryan barely pretends to be a journalist as he engages in whitewashing some widely known facts about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations' scam for the propagation of the huge global warming hoax.

Bryan correctly notes that the IPCC was “one of the most respected organizations in the world” and, in October 2007, had shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, a famed global warming blowhard and fabulist best known for predicting the end of the world next Tuesday.

Bryan noted that the Norwegian Nobel committee had “lauded the IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 as creating an ever broader consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.” Note that these are stated as facts, but in truth there never was a “consensus” in the worldwide community of climatologists and meteorologists, and other scientists.

Indeed, there have been three international conferences to debunk global warming, all sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit, free market think tank that brought together some of the world’s leading scientists who participated in seminars and gave addresses that were illustrated by graphs and other data that debunked global warming. A fourth conference is scheduled in May and, who knows, some members of the U.S. media might actually attend and report the truth this time?

The assertion that there is a connection between human activities and the non-existent global warming doesn’t even meet the lowest standard of journalistic accuracy. There is no connection. None has ever been proven despite the claims. In general terms, the Earth’s climate is determined by the sun, the oceans, and other factors of such magnitude as to suggest that an ant hill poses a threat to a skyscraper.

Bryan finally got around to mentioning that “over the past week or two, the IPCC has seen its reputation for impartiality and accuracy take serious hits.” Hello! Those hits have been around for years, but the leak of emails in November 2009 between the key players in the global warming fraud unleashed a tsunami of revelations about the way the IPCC relied on deliberately distorted “facts” and strove to suppress the publication of the truth in leading science publications. It wasn’t over the past week or two unless Bryan has been in a deep comma for three months.

Calls for the resignation of IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, were noted. He has been under fire because he knew in advance of the Copenhagen conference that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were bogus. Plaintively, Bryan asked, “What’s wrong with the IPCC?” and then answered saying, “To some degree, it’s a victim of its own size.”

Wrong again. The IPCC may have claimed that it had some 2,500 scientists participating, but the real “work” of the IPCC was undertaken by a close knit group of global warming fraudsters, several of whom are under investigation. They include Prof. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that provided key data regarding the planet’s temperatures---which always seemed to be rising exponentially.

Others included Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a paleoclimatologist famed for his “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that managed to overlook the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. Joining the merry pranksters was Prof. Keith Briffa, another CRU researcher, who dished up a tree ring theory that confirmed global warming.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, linked increased hurricane activity to global warming, but was probably hard pressed to explain those years when it did not increase. There are others like Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute that got the whole ball rolling in 1986 when he told Congress that global warming would destroy the Earth if we didn’t put an end to all energy use that generated greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of noting the misdeeds of these and others closely affiliated with the IPCC, Bryan quoted a scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a “lead author on the 2007 IPCC report.” And we know how eager Richard Somerville must have been to suggest it might have been a thousand pages of nonsense. Bryan also quoted Peter Frumhoff of the left-learning Union of Concerned Scientists who repeated the tired IPCC message that “there is no debate about the core urgency” of global warming.

No debate? The debate has been raging for decades. Bryan, however, just plowed on, offering one excuse after another to cover the IPCC’s serious breach of ethics and accuracy, concluding that its “self-assessment” after each report and “the pressure…to be flawless” is the problem,but not the lies it has been putting forth since 1988.

“But that’s exactly the sort of information policymakers will need to prepare for climate change going forward,” said Bryan.

No, policymakers need is real science, proven science. And the IPCC “science” about global warming, now rebranded as "climate change", is an insult to all real scientists and, beyond them, to a worldwide public that was consistently led to believe a massive hoax.

Time, Newsweek, and countless others in the mainstream media have been co-conspirators in the global warming fraud. It is time to end this shameful blot on journalism and begin to report facts, not apocalyptic fantasy.

Observing the Obvious

By Alan Caruba

For the past two years, it has been obvious to a lot of conservatives and independents that we have a President whose elevator doesn’t go to the top floor. This is a seriously flawed person.

Anyone in law enforcement will tell you that there are few people, including serial killers, who “look” like criminals and a danger to society. This is not to say that profiling isn’t a helpful tool, but that there is no Hollywood generic “bad guy” image in real life. About the only people that deliberately try to assume that image are professional wrestlers who play the villains in the ring.

Homicide detectives will tell you that, time and again, the murderers they capture, interrogate, and who end up confessing often break down in tears and some even ask if they can see their momma before being taken off to jail. Only occasionally do they encounter a seriously bad person who insanely kills to satisfy some demonic itch.

Now, I am NOT saying the President of the United States is criminally insane, but I am saying that he is so seriously immersed in a communist ideology that everything he says and does is intended to get him just that much closer to destroying the nation.

He has been assisted in this goal by Nancy “crazy eyes” Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal who has demanded and received a 757 jet airliner with which to travel back and forth from her home every week. He has been assisted by Sen. Harry Reid who lacks even the most minimal support in his home state of Nevada and appears to be devoid of any moral compass.

It is clear to most reasonable people that Obama and the Democrat Congress has been driving up the debt of the nation to unconscionable levels and, while the thought of an America forced to default on his financial obligations seems unthinkable, it is not. The Democrats are proposing a $1.9 trillion increase in the debt limit, having raised the debt ceiling to $12.4 trillion the day before Christmas 2009.

In his bestselling book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality”, Jerome R. Corsi, PhD thoroughly documented what could be known about Barack Obama, noting the influence of Frank Marshall Davis as his “Communist mentor.” Davis was a widely known communist in the 1950s as a newspaper journalist and poet. He had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when called before a congressional committee. “A year earlier, in 1955, the Commission on Subversive Activities organized by the government of the territory of Hawaii identified Davis as a member of the Communist Party USA.”

Davis was a friend of Obama’s grandparents. Davis had assured Obama that his white grandmother was right to be scared of black people. “She understands that black people have a reason to hate,” Davis told him and Obama recalled that it “he was right to reject his grandparents” because all white people were inherently racists. Obama wrote that he knew “for the first time that I was totally alone.”

His father, a Kenyan, had divorced his mother and abandoned him. His Indonesian step-father would later divorce his mother and she, in turn, would abandon him to the care of his white grandparents who, despite sacrificing to send him to a private school nonetheless regarded Davis, a black, Communist radical, as a close family friend.

Obama would write that he chose his friends at Occidental, a college he attended, from among “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and the structured feminists and punk-rock performers.”

I am not a psychologist, but I am a student of history and virtually every dictator has written openly of the obsessions that drove them to seek power. “Mein Kampf” by Hitler comes to mind and Mao’s “Little Red Book” comes to mind.

Liberals have always embraced these people and one sees it today in the way many prominent actors and others have made their way to Castro’s Cuba or Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, to bask in the light of these horrid people. Former President Jimmy Carter has embraced terrorists such as Hamas and has displayed an obvious anti-Semitism. Many US communists were appalled to discover that Stalin was a mass murderer in the wake of Nikita Krushchev’s revelations about the man.

We need to pay attention, not just to the politics of our nation’s leaders, but to their pathologies as well. After being forced to resign, those closest to former President Richard Nixon revealed that he was subject to a paranoia that may have served him well in dealing with America’s enemies, but which ultimately led to the Watergate scandal.

Now it is the turn for Democrats who were so enamored of Obama to begin to observe the obvious. It is the turn of the mainstream media to raise the warnings that have been so obvious to those who have written and spoken of Obama’s serious flaws of personality and policy.

The nation faces three more years of Obama’s term in office and they will represent the most serious threat the nation has ever faced in its long history.

Obama: What a Difference a Year Makes

By Alan Caruba

Historians are likely to look back at 2009, the first year of Barack Obama’s term in office and assess the damage it has done to Americans and to the image of America as the primary line of defense against the world’s thugs.

I long ago stopped reading news magazines like Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report because they became increasingly useless as a mean to know what was actually occurring. Throughout the 2008 campaign they and others devoted cover-after-cover to the face of Obama, becoming in the process a very bad joke. It was a total abnegation of objectivity.

I am soon to drop my subscription to The Economist, a still widely respected news magazine because it has ceased to meet even the most fundamental standards of accuracy regarding an alleged “global warming” even though the planet has been cooling for a decade.

I am one of those people, though, that saves his magazines as a lens to look back over the year and a review of the reporting of The Economist in 2009 regarding Obama provides a useful measurement of his first year as seen by the magazine. Below are quotes that track his progress or lack of it.

January 17-23 edition: “Mr. Obama seems to be different. By offering the most prized cabinet job to his rival, Hillary Clinton, and by keeping Robert Gates, the defense secretary, who has done a good job, Mr. Obama has shown a determination not to surround himself with cronies.”

March 28-April 3 edition: “Hillary Clinton’s most effective quip, in her long struggle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination last year, was the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job-training. It went to the heart of the nagging worry about the silver-tongued young senator from Illinois; that he lacked even the slightest executive experience, and that in his brief career he had never really stood up to powerful interests, whether in his home city of Chicago or in the wider world. Might Mrs. Clinton have been right about her foe?”

June 27-July 3 edition: “If he were starting from scratch, there would be a strong case (even to a newspaper as economically liberal as this one) for a system based mostly around publicly funded health care. But America is not starting from scratch and none of the plans in Congress shows an appetite for such a European solution. America wants to keep a mostly private system—but one that brings in the uninsured and cuts costs. That will be painful, and require more audacity than Mr. Obama has shown so far.”

August 1-7 edition: “If the opinion polls are to be believed, Barack Obama is now, six months into his presidency, no more popular than George Bush or Richard Nixon were at the same stage in theirs. His ratings are sagging particularly badly with electorally vital independent voters: two-thirds of them think he wants to spend too much of their money.”

October 17-23 edition: “Most of all, Mr. Obama needs to fight this war (in Afghanistan) with conviction. His wobbles over the last month have done more to comfort his enemies and worry his allies than any recent losses on the ground. Only if he persuades his troops, his countrymen and the Taliban that America is there for the long haul does he have a chance of turning this war around.”

November 28-December 4 edition: “Which will he be, clever or weak? Does this president have a strategy, backed if necessary by force, to reorder the world? Or is he merely a presidential version of Alden Pyle, Graham Greene’s idealistic, clever Quiet American who wants to change the world, but underestimates how bad the world is—and ends up causing harm?”

December Special Edition: The World in 2010: “By 2010, moreover, Mr. Obama will no longer be able to fall back on the excuse that all of this was beyond his control…The coalition Mr. Obama marshaled in 2008 around the alluring but ambiguous banner of ‘change’ will splinter…Mr. Obama will find no consolation on the world stage…In his second year, it will become increasingly clear to people at home that America risks losing its status as the world’s sole superpower and undisputed top nation as its relative economic power wanes.”

I learned as a journalist that news is history written in a hurry and usually without all the information easily at hand. The Economist’s editors have reacted to Obama in the same way as a growing majority of Americans and others around the world.

Americans and the rest of the world have had a year in which to watch Barack Obama and it has been one of constant disappointment and growing fears. That trend is unlikely to change.