An aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has been put on leave during an investigation into how Republicans gained access to Democratic memos concerning opposition to President Bush’s judicial nominees.
Manuel Miranda, who works for the Tennessee Republican on judicial nominations, is on leave pending the outcome of the inquiry by the Senate sergeant-at-arms, Frist spokesman Nick Smith said yesterday. In the matter under investigation, Democratic memos stored on a computer server shared by Judiciary Committee members ended up in Republican hands.
Miranda denies the allegation, but Republicans, led by Sen. Orrin Hatch, are indeed pursuing this.
Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.
A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change “of remarkable amplitude” in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.
…
The development – described as “the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments”, by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research – threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe’s weather mild.
If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador – which is on the same latitude – bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison.
So will this wake up us folks who are against the radical measures being put forth by environmentalists to reverse the warming trend? Before I answer that, let me show you what’s hiding behind that ellipses (…) above:
Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden “flips” of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades.
And later on in the article:
When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population.
12,700 years ago, there were no cars or CFCs, yet this same phenomenon occurred. According to studies I’ve cited before, there’s a natural cycle going on here that goes way, way back, and to suggest that there’s anything man can do to reverse it is the height of arrogance (or power-grabbing, or both).
EXETER, N.H. – Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean.
And why did Franken feel it necessary to do this?
Franken said he’s not backing Dean but merely wanted to protect the right of people to speak freely.
Stifling free speech in the name of promoting free speech. And this guy wants a national radio show? If he’s on opposite Limbaugh, is Rush allowed to jam Franken’s signal?
Republican lawmakers who generally back President Bush are not backing him on immigration. In fact, they want their leaders to know they have “serious concerns” about President Bush’s proposed immigration policy.
In a letter addressed to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and several other members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus said they won’t go along with the president’s plan because it “does not address the problem appropriately.”
I’ve personally heard the “lockstep” charge myself, and news like this just goes to prove that all wrong.
This reader’s points boiled down to the idea that we simply have no possible way of knowing if or how global warming is going to affect us, so we should act. He compared reaction to Iraq to reaction to warming; “You can’t logically conclude that war with Iraq was justified and conclude that acting to stop global warming is not. Both have the same degree of certainty – which is none.” He’s said that we didn’t know for certain that Hussein had WMDs; “You don’t know for sure that Saddam was going to somehow attack us with WMDs, or give them to terrorists, despite the events of 9/11. These were unproven risks, that no one can accurately ascertain.” And yet we did go into Iraq not knowing for certain what would happen. Therefore, we should do the same for global warming.
If, by his suggestion, there is absolutely no scientific certainty that global warming is either man-made or reversible by man, yet he still wants to pass drastic legislation to “deal” with it, there’s a million other theories that have no certainty either that I’m sure are waiting in the wings to get legislation passed for their pet concern. The chance of their being aliens preparing to obliterate us has the same degree of certainty – which is none.
The comparison to the war in Iraq is particularly wrong. The fact is that having used them on his own people, it is certainly not an unproven risk that Saddam would use them on foreigners intent on removing him from power. Therefore, at least logically, the concerns about the war in Iraq had a bit more than a 0% degree of certainty, to say nothing of the many Republicans and Democrats (liberals tend to forget about that) that proclaimed with differing degrees of certainty that Hussein had them.
Frankly, he had quite a number of good points to make, especially regarding the multiple personalities the Bush administration has had on this topic. He’s certainly done his homework, and more so than I have, to be honest. But while he made references to the affects of global warming, I don’t think the case is there to say that man is doing it and that man can reverse it. Warming may in fact be occurring. Even the studies that I cite show that it is, but those studies show that it’s part of a natural process (actually, a complex combination of a number of natural processes) that man has not altered much, if at all, and hence cannot effectively, if at all, reverse.
I appreciate his acknowledging that scientists said 30 years ago that the earth was cooling, but he’s quick to pass on by that and say that they think differently now, and that doesn’t do much for my confidence in their predictive powers. If we’d started acting on global cooling in the 70s, what upheaval might we have caused economically only to hear them say, “Oops. Turn around; we meant to go that way”?
What would it take to change my mind? For starters, a much higher degree of certainty than “none”. We’ve been there and I’m glad we didn’t take the bait.
[CNN reporter Walter] Rodgers, from inside a studio: “Hello, Wolf. There was a collective sigh of relief in Europe after the President’s State of the Union address. Partially because this time there was no talk of new American military action anywhere, unlike two years ago when he scared Europeans with his talk about the axis of evil and unlike last year when Mr. Bush was about to unleash war on Iraq.
“Still, Europeans find the President’s talk about God and good and evil very scary, so there wasn’t much President Bush could say to ingratiate himself to Europeans, that is how badly he has alienated America’s traditional allies and analysts here say that alienation is not going to change until Mr. Bush leaves the White House.
Honestly, if that’s all it takes, then these “allies” have less feet of clay and more feet of vapor. Is it possible that this whole world, besides American conservatives, are comfortable discussing reality? Even if you don’t believe in God, certainly calling evil “evil” shouldn’t get folks shaking in their boots. That is, if you haven’t been re-educated to think that that is no such thing as good and evil. And I would imagine the two–belief in God and acknowledging good & evil–are rather tied together more closely than many would want to admit.
Of course, the problem with a non-God-centered definition of “evil” is that evil becomes what each individual thinks it is, and thus you get 6 billion versions of the definition, some radically different than others. That doesn’t make for much in the way of sanity when a body like the UN tries to gather “international support” for things, which is why they’re so ineffective against (or downright friendly with) obvious evils in the world, and so quick to denounce actions taken without their consent.
Fear of evil, or even speaking of evil, only makes you all the more susceptible to it. If you won’t call it what it is, you may find yourself more readily adopting it than shunning it.
Yup, as Neal Boortz’s analogy goes, we’ve raided the home of a counterfeiter and found a high-tech printing press, special paper and inks, and engraving plates for $100 bills, but darn it no actually counterfeit money. Guess he’s innocent after all.
Accuweather is predicting the temperature will reach a high of a bone-rattling 14 degrees this morning – accompanied by snow and high winds – while Gore blasts the Bush administration’s policy on global warming.
However, the folks from MoveOn.org, the extremely far-left organization that appears to be taking over the Democrat party, gave a telling quote:
“We don’t control the environment,” said Lisa Sabori, a public-relations official for MoveOn.org, the group sponsoring the event.
She was referring to the weather on the day of the event, but I daresay it’s just as true about the weather in general. With all the mixed messages both science and the earth itself is giving us, we shouldn’t be making policy based on it.
“Maybe [the speech] won’t apply in New York right now, but Vice President Gore will be highlighting the effects of global warming in different parts of the world,” Sabori added.
So “global warming” may not be global, and it looks like it may not be warming.
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