This from Michael Barone from the Washington Examiner

Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty scuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word “clunker.”

But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist.

First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit violated the nation’s freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.

The CRU has been a major source of data for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for 20 years has issued alarms about supposed global warming. The e-mails conclusively establish the intellectual dishonesty of the climate scientists at the CRU and their co-conspirators.

Recently there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.

As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, “A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority.” Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger “up to 40 percent” of the Amazon rain forest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” writes Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest. “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.”

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling.

There was some basis for concern. If carbon dioxide emissions were the only factor affecting global climate, it is clear that increased emissions would tend to produce warmer temperatures over time. Those temperatures could create problems that rational societies would want to address.

But carbon dioxide emissions are not the only factor affecting global climate. Solar activity and water evaporation and countless other things do too. Climate scientists do not fully understand those things, and how they interact. It is rational for society to want to learn more.

Unfortunately, the cadre of climate scientists who have dominated public discussion and have controlled the IPCC have been demonstrated to be far, far less than trustworthy. Like the theorists who invented epicycles to explain away the failure of Ptolemaic theory to account for astronomical observations, they have distorted science in the interest of something that resembles religious dogma.

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.

The rest of us, and judging from polls that includes most of the American people, are free to follow a more rational path. In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama alluded to “the overwhelming evidence on climate change.” But he felt obliged to add, “even if you doubt the evidence” — an admission that the evidence is less than overwhelming. On a par with, it seems, the claims of trial lawyers and the assurances of used car salesmen.

Michael Barone, The Examiner’s senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday,

From Marc Sheppard c/o American Thinker

Unquestionably the world’s final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors — be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel’s “expert” counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.
Simply stated, we’ve been swindled. We’ve been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the naïvely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.

Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem — but rather, a solution.  For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the “last chance to save the planet” International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of “climate debt” reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.
Then again, neither stratagem should come as any real surprise to those who’ve paid attention. Here’s a recap for those who have, and a long-overdue wake-up call for those who haven’t. [See also The CFC Ban: Global Warming's Pilot Episode]
The Perfect Problem to the Imperfect Solution

The U.N. signaled its intent to politicize science as far back as 1972 at its Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm, Sweden. There, an unlikely mélange of legitimate environmental activists, dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, and assorted anti-establishment ’60s leftovers were delighted to hear not only the usual complaints about “industrialized” environmental problems, but also a long list of international inequities. Among the many human responsibilities condemned were overpopulation, misuse of resources and technology, unbalanced development, and the worldwide dilemma of urbanization. And from that marriage of global, environmental, and social justice concerns was born the IPCC’s parent organization — the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) — and the fortune-cookie like prose of its socialist-environmentalist manifesto, the Stockholm Declaration.
It was seven years later that UNEP was handed the ideal villain to fuel its counterfeit crusade. That was the year (1979) in which NASA’s James Hansen’s team of climate modelers convinced a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel to report [PDF] that doubling atmospheric CO2 — which had risen from 280 ppmv in the pre-industrial 1800s to over 335 ppmv — would cause nearly 3°C of global warming. And although the figure was wildly speculative, many funding-minded scientists — including some previously predicting that aerosols and orbital shifts would lead to catastrophic global cooling — suddenly embraced greenhouse gas theory and the inevitability of global warming.  It was at that moment that it became clear that the long-held scientific position that the Earth’s ecosystem has always and will always maintain CO2 equilibrium could be easily swayed toward a more exploitable belief system. And the UNEP now had the perfect problem to its solution: anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  After all, both its abatement and adaptation require huge expansion of government controls and taxation. Furthermore, it makes industry and capitalism look bad while affording endless visuals of animals and third-world humans suffering at the hands of wealthy Westerners. And most importantly, by fomenting accusations that “rich” countries have effectively violated the human rights of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people by selfishly causing climate-based global suffering, it helps promote the promise of international wealth redistribution to help less fortunate nations adapt to its consequences.
Best of all, being driven by junk-science that easily metamorphoses as required, it appeared to be endlessly self-sustaining.   But it needed to be packaged for widespread consumption. And packaged it they surely have. Here’s an early classic.
The year was 1988, and Colorado Senator Tim Wirth had arranged for Hansen to testify on the subject before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to help sell the dire need to enact national environmental legislation. As Wirth has since admitted, he intentionally scheduled Hansen’s appearance on what was forecasted to be the hottest day of the hearings. And in a brilliantly underhanded marketing ploy, he and his cohorts actually snuck into the hearing room the night before and opened the windows, rendering the air conditioning all but useless.
Imagine the devious beauty of the scene that unfolded in front of the cameras the next day — a NASA scientist preaching fire and brimstone, warning of “unprecedented global warming” and a potential “runaway greenhouse effect,” all the while wiping the dripping sweat off his brow. No wonder the resultant NY Times headline screamed, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how climate hysteria and not one, but two of its shining stars were born. For coincidentally, that was the same year the IPCC was established by the U.N. Its mandate: to assess “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.”  How perfect: an organization formed not to prove or disprove AGW, but merely to assess its risks and recommend an appropriate response.  Now it was time to really get to work.

Testing the “Global Warming as Social Injustice” Waters

In 1990, the IPCC issued its First Assessment Report, warning of a natural greenhouse effect being enhanced by human emission activities. Apparently not quite ready to show its cards, the IPCC even admitted that the still-little-understood effects of such factors as carbon sinks, ocean currents, and clouds left many uncertainties as to timing and magnitude.
Meanwhile, the politics pushed forward in earnest. At the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (aka Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, the event’s Secretary-General, Maurice Strong, told the opening session that industrialized countries had “developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma.” The veteran U.N. puppeteer blamed the “lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class,” which included “high meat consumption and large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing” for the world’s environment ills. The solution: “[A] vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.”
From that meeting sprouted the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty. Absent specific numbers, the highly-touted Kyoto precursor nonetheless promised to stabilize greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” But much less fanfare accompanied the essentially concurrent adoption of Agenda 21: a global contract that bound governments around the world to a U.N. plan to change the way people “live, eat, learn and communicate,” all in the name of “saving the earth” from mankind’s mistakes, particularly global warming.
Again we saw a U.N.-crafted convergence of climate “science” and social “justice.” While the signing of the UNFCCC would be a gradual process, 178 governments voted to adopt the Agenda 21 on the spot. This was quite a victory, especially in light of the IPCC’s complete control over just exactly how such planetary salvation was best realized.  And in 1995, its Second Assessment Report (SAR) upped that ante a bit, stating that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Oddly, SAR slightly toned down previous projections for future warming and sea level rise based on the newly-considered cooling effects of anthropogenic atmospheric aerosols — a move the U.N. brass likely regretted two years later.
In 1997, a protocol was added to UNFCCC that attempted to enact national commitments to emission reductions based on SAR recommendations. Fully 160 countries agreed to the legally binding Kyoto Protocol, under which industrialized countries would reduce their collective emissions by 5.2%. However, although a signatory, the United States made ratification all but impossible when its Senate unanimously passed a resolution that year prohibiting U.S involvement in “any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing nations as well as industrialized nations.”  It appeared time to ratchet up the rhetoric — truth be damned.

The Dawn of Outright Climate Fraud

Back in 1989, future Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 2 (WG2) lead author Stephen Schneider disclosed several tricks of the trade to Discover magazine:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.

And according to MIT’s Richard Lindzen’s 2001 Senate subcommittee testimony, that’s precisely what he witnessed as a Third Assessment Report (TAR) lead author. Among the atmospheric physicist’s revelations was the fact that contributing TAR scientists — already facing the threat of disappearing grant funds and derision as industry stooges — were also met with ad hominem attacks from IPCC “coordinators” if they refused to tone down criticism of faulty climate models or otherwise questioned AGW dogma. I suppose that’s one way to achieve the “consensus” the IPCC loudly boasts of.

As previously discussed here and here, it was in the same 2001 TAR that the IPCC suddenly and inexplicably scrapped its long-held position that global temperatures had fluctuated drastically over the previous millennium and replaced it with a chart depicting relatively flat temperatures prior to a sharp rise beginning in 1900. This, of course, removed the pesky higher-than-present-day temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1300 AD, the existence of which obstructed the unprecedented-warming sales pitch.  Truth be told, this little bit of hocus-pocus alone should have marked the end of the panel’s scientific credibility, particularly after Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick uncovered the corruption behind it. But thanks to a hugely successful campaign to demonize all critics as big-oil shills, the “Hockey Stick Graph” (aka MBH98) not only survived, but — after receiving a prominent role in Al Gore’s 2006 grossly exaggerated “scary scenarios” sci-fi movie — actually went on to become a global warming icon. Even after McIntyre finally got his hands on one scientist’s data last September and proved that Keith Briffa had cherry-picked data to create his MBH98-supporting series, the MSM paid McIntyre and others reporting the hoax little heed.
Consequently, TAR’s false declaration of the 20^th as the hottest century of the millennium was widely accepted as fact, right along with its proclamation that the 1990’s were the hottest decade and 1998 the hottest year since measurements began in 1861…as was the replacement of “discernible human influence” described six years earlier with the claim of “new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

So by the time AR4 rolled out in 2007, in which they significantly raised not only the threat level, but also the degree of anthropogenic certitude (to 90%), the IPCC’s word was all but gospel to the MSM, left-leaning policymakers, and an increasingly large portion of the population. Indeed, everywhere you turned, you’d hear that “the IPCC said this” or “the IPCC said that.” The need to address “climate change” had quickly become a foregone and inarguable conclusion in most public discourse.  At that moment, Kyoto II seemed as inevitable as the next insufferable NBC Green is Universal week, and with it, the U.N.’s place as steward of the planet, which would surely be ratified at the pending 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen.
…Until, that is, the mind-boggling magnitude of AR4’s deception became glaringly apparent.
Caught with their Green Thumbs on the Scale

Most readers are likely aware that in November of last year, a folder containing documents, source code, data, and e-mails was somehow misappropriated from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The so-called “Climategate” emails disclosed an arrogant mockery of the peer review process as well a widespread complicity in and acceptance among climate researchers to hiding and manipulating data unfriendly to the global warming agenda. The modeling source code — as I reported here — contained routines which employed a number of “fudge factors” to modify the results of data series — again, to bias results to the desired outcome. And this, coupled with the disclosure of the Jones “hide the decline” e-mail, provided more evidence that MBH98 — and ergo unprecedented 20th-century warming — is a fraud.
The following month, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian climate data. Apparently, Hadley ignored data submitted by 75% of Russian stations, effectively omitting over 40% of Russian territory from global temperature calculations — not coincidentally, areas that didn’t “show any substantial warming in the late 20th-century and the early 21st-century.”

But Climategate was only the tip of the iceberg. An AR4 warning that unchecked climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was found to be lifted from an erroneous World Wildlife Federation (WWF) report and misrepresented as peer-reviewed science. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri attempted to parry this “mistake” by accusing the accusers at the Indian environment ministry of “arrogance” and practicing “voodoo science” in issuing a report [PDF] disputing the IPCC. But one in his own ranks, Dr Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the chapter making the claim, had the astoundingly bad manners to admit that he knew all along that it “did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.” Apparently, so had Pachauri, who continued to lie about it for months so as not to sully the exalted AR4 immediately prior to Copenhagen.  And “Glaciergate” opened the floodgates to other serious misrepresentations in AR4, including a boatload of additional non-peer-reviewed projections pulled directly from WWF reports. These included discussions on the effects of melting glaciers on mudflows and avalanches, the significant damages climate change will have on selected marine fish and shellfish, and even assessing global-average per-capita “ecological footprints.” It should be noted here that IPCC rules specifically disqualify all non-peer-reviewed primary sources.
Nonetheless, Chapter 13 of the WG2 report stated that forty percent of Amazonian forests are threatened by climate change. And it also cited a WWF piece as its source — this one by two so-called “experts,” who incidentally are actually environmental activists. What’s more, the WWF study dealt with anthropogenic forest fires, not global warming, and barely made mention of Amazonian forests at all. Additionally, the WWF’s figures were themselves based on a Nature paper [PDF] studying neither global warming nor forest fires, but rather the effects of logging on rain forests. So the IPCC predicted climate change-caused 40% forest destruction based on a report two steps upstream which concluded that “[l]ogging companies in Amazonia kill or damage 10-40% of the living biomass of forests through the harvest process.”
Adding to the glacial egg on the AR4 authors’ faces was the statement that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps, and Africa were being caused by global warming. It turns out that one of the two source papers cited was actually a mountain-climbers’ magazine. Actually, this is a relatively authoritative source compared to the other: a dissertation from a Swiss college student based on his interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The 2007 green bible also contained a gross exaggeration in its citation of Muir-Wood et al., 2006’s study on global warming and natural disasters. The original stated that “a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year.” But the AR4 synthesis report stated that more “heavy precipitation” is “very likely” and that an “increase in tropical cyclone intensity” is “likely” as temperatures rise.
Perhaps the most dumbfounding AR4 citation (so far) was recently discovered by Climatequotes.com. It appears that a WG2 warning that “[t]he multiple stresses of climate change and increasing human activity on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a clear vulnerability and have necessitated the implementation of stringent clothing decontamination guidelines for tourist landings on the Antarctic Peninsula” originated from and was attributed to a guide for Antarctica tour operators on decontaminating boots and clothing. Really.  And here’s one you may not have heard yet. A paper published last December by Lockart, Kavetski, and Franks rebuts the AR4 WG1 assertion that CO2-driven higher temperatures drive higher evaporation and thereby cause droughts. The study claims they got it backwards, as higher air temperatures are in fact driven by the lack of evaporation (as occurs during drought). I smell another “-gate” in the works.
And yet, perhaps the greatest undermining of IPCC integrity comes from a recent study, which I’ve summarized here, challenging the global temperature data reported by its two most important American allies: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As these represent the readings used by most climate analysis agencies, including the IPCC, the discovery by meteorologist Joe D’Aleo and computer expert E.M. Smith that they’ve been intentionally biased to the warm side since 1990 puts literally every temperature-related climate report released since then into question.  …Along with, of course, any policy decisions based on their content.

It’s Time for some Real Climate Justice

Here in the states, left-leaning policymakers and their cohorts in the MSM have thus far all but ignored both the reality and implications of the fraud unveiled by Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, and the myriad other AGW-hyping scandals that seem to surface almost daily. Remarkably, most continue to discuss “climate pollution” and “carbon footprints” and the “tragedy” of Copenhagen’s failure, even as the global warming fever of their own contagion plunges precipitously. The president appears equally deluded, as passing a “comprehensive energy and climate bill” (as though the climate might somehow be managed by parliamentary edict) was one of the many goals he set forth in his State of the Union address last week.
But their denial will be short-lived as even the last vestiges of the green lie they so desperately cling to evaporate under the heat of the spotlight suddenly shining upon them.  For outside of the U.S., many news organizations and politicians already get it. Some are calling for Pachauri’s resignation, and others for a full investigation into his possible financial conflicts of interest. There have also been demands for a complete reassessment of all IPCC reports, including a suggestion from the Financial Times that, given the IPCC’s “central role in climate science,” an independent auditor must be commissioned to “look at all the claims in the 2007 report and remove any that were not soundly based.”
At least one American, AGW believer Walter Russell Mead of American Interest Online, agrees: “A highly publicized effort that includes serious skeptics and has bipartisan backing is the only way to get American public opinion on board the climate change train.” And China’s lead climate change negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, suggested that “contrarian views” be included in 2014’s AR5.

But when the Australian suddenly recommended “applying a healthy degree of scepticism to scientific claims that drive policy,” paleoclimatologist Bob Carter told me he just couldn’t help laughingly writing the editors to welcome them to the ranks of the majority of scientists who “practice exactly the technique that [they] belatedly recommend” — the skeptics.

Indeed, this abrupt challenge to their own “consensus” mantra that they’ve spoon-fed the public for years rings decidedly hollow. Those “serious skeptics” and the holders of those “contrarian views” are the same scientists the IPCC deliberately excluded from its proceedings with impunity. They’re the same people whom the media have ignored or ridiculed for years, along with their conventions — like Heartland’s ICCC 1, 2, and 3 — and innumerable contrarian reports. In fact, a superb rebuttal to AR4, Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) — produced by Dr. S. Fred Singer, Dr. Craig Idso, and thirty fellow scientists — has received no MSM attention whatsoever, despite its availability here since last June.  Besides, the time for credibility makeovers has long passed. As U.K. Professor Phillip Stott recently observed:

[A]s ever, capitalism has read the runes, with carbon-trading posts quietly being shed, ‘Green’ jobs sidelined, and even big insurance companies starting to hedge their own bets against the future of the Global Warming Grand Narrative. These rats are leaving the sinking ship far faster than any politician, many of whom are going to be abandoned, left, still clinging to the masts, as the Good Ship ‘Global Warming’ founders on titanic icebergs in the raging oceans of doubt and delusion.

Stott compared the IPCC’s fall to that of the Berlin Wall. And he’s spot-on — for just as the latter symbolized the doom of European communism, so does the former signal the death knell for global socialist-environmentalism.
Let’s get real — given the enormousness of the booty these grifters attempted to extort from the entire developed world, not to mention the extraordinary depth of their hubris, it isn’t rehabilitation that’s required here, but swift justice. In 2006, IPCC cheerleader Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts received a pass when he called for the Nuremberg-style war-crimes trials for the “bastards” who were members of the global warming “denial industry.” Surely, it’s now clear that the members of the global warming “fraud industry” are the true “bastards” who should be hauled before an international tribunal for crimes against humanity…any tribunal, that is, other than the U.N.’s own International Criminal Court in The Hague.
We’ll deal with their accessories-after-the-fact in the Congress, the White House — and consequently, the EPA — in due time.

And the first such judgment is already scheduled — for November.

Only our Fed could try to make these things sound like a bargain.  Aren’t you glad that we don’t get all the government that we pay for.

Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.

On the front page of the New York Times‘ online edition Sunday was an artist’s rendering of the pride and joy of the federal General Services Administration: a renovated federal building in Portland, Ore., that features plants growing up all 18 stories of one side.

“They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in,” Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A., told the Times, adding, “Don’t ask me how you get them irrigated.”

Don’t ask how much they cost, either.

I told you not to ask.

OK, I’ll tell you: The entire renovation costs $133 million. The plants are only one component, but the G.S.A. admits that the renovation is being undertaken for the purpose of making the building “green.” Done as a project of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, the renovation is Oregon’s largest federal stimulus project.

The Obama administration proudly boasts that the effort will dramatically reduce the building’s energy use, thereby saving federal taxpayers $280,000 a year in energy costs.

Now here comes the fun part.

Nowhere in the article did The New York Times bother to do the math. So I did. (It wasn’t hard, I did it on my Blackberry while setting out for a winter hike.) To recoup its investment in this renovation, the government will have to keep the building running for the next 475 years.

Look on the bright side. Everything after year 476 is gravy!

As Joe Vaughan, a Portland commercial real estate developer, told The Times, “As a taxpayer, I think it’s a horrible waste of money that no private developer would undertake.”

The G.S.A response?

“The idea is that the cost savings are in the energy efficiency,” Caren Auchman, a spokeswoman for the G.S.A., uselessly told the Times, which did not question the validity, or sanity, of that statement.

To provide a little perspective, the taxpayers are going to shell out $133 million — more than half the cost of the nearby Rose Garden Arena, where the Portland Trailblazers play — so the government can annually save the taxpayers $68,000 less than the combined yearly salaries of Oregon’s two U.S. senators.

This is what passes for a good “green” investment in Washington these days.

This is only one tiny example of the type of cost-benefit analysis being promoted in Washington in the name of saving the planet.

Last week the U.S. Department of Energy released a report on wind power. To the joy of environmentalists everywhere, the department concluded that it is “technically feasible” for windmills to provide between 20 percent and 30 percent of U.S. energy by 2024.

The only hitch is that it will cost $93 billion to expand the power grid to accommodate windmills. That’s only the grid expansion. It doesn’t include building the windmills or making other upgrades.

The benefit? At most, only a 4.5 percent reduction in carbon emissions, which even the New York Times labeled “modest.”

Another example of how math goes bad when politicians try to do calculations using green crayons: Max Schulz of the Manhattan Institute pointed out last year that estimates for the cost of Obama’s green jobs initiative range between $30,000 and $100,000 per job created. That does not include the cost of jobs lost by taxing other productive sectors of the economy to transfer money to the “green” sector. A study of a similar “green jobs” initiative in Spain found that for every green job created, 2.2 other jobs were lost, Schulz reported.

Yet despite the obviously dubious benefits from spending so much money on schemes such as these, Washington continues rushing to throw money at them. Maybe it would be a good idea to start electing fewer people who wear green wristbands and lapel pins and more who wear green eyeshades.

THANK YOU, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT GATES — appointed by Pres. George W. Bush and his father to a series of top national security posts — AND ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF, and a 42-year Navy officer.  You could have not stated the case for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” any more clearly.  It IS a matter of integrity, and the current policy IS against the national interest.  Oh — and in an era when most people understand that homosexuality is not a matter of “choice,” it is clearly against the First Amendment freedoms of the individuals involved.

Please pardon me if I don’t get the legal terms right, but the main concern of the conservative opposition is unfounded.  Inappropriate sexual activities and unwanted sexual advances are already inconsistent with the military code of conduct. Anyone — straight or gay — whose conduct in the workplace is inappropriate should face the consequences.  

Homosexuals have always served in all of the militaries of the world, at all levels, and they are there today, even in war zones and in high-security jobs, doing their jobs well without causing any morale problems (except for bigots). They serve openly in the militaries of Israel, the UK, and many other nations. Meanwhile, at a time when we are at war, thousands of military service members with outstanding records have been forced out of their careers – not because of any performance issue – but because someone “outed” them or they were “caught” or “admitted” what they were doing in their off-duty lives.  How does this help anyone? Except that it provides comfort to people who — out of ignorance or bigotry — believe that homosexuality should not exist, or even that gays and lesbians should be harassed and chased out of normal society.      

AND JOHN McCAIN, SHAME ON YOU FOR FLIP-FLOPPING ON THIS. When you were running for president, you said you would consider repealing the DADT policy if the military brass called for it; the top officials have now done so.  You also said you would order a review of the policy on your first day as president. The President and Secretary Gates have put such a review in motion.  And yet now you do the opposite of what you said you would do.  That is a very sad statement on your integrity.

Very interesting poll numbers regarding the general public’s concerns.  I hope that our new President is listening.

The more I think about this Massachusetts election outcome, the more I am concerned… but not about the Democrats.  I worry for the Republic.

 I think both parties are in much deeper trouble than their leaders realize.  And that spells trouble for the Republic.

Why?

America has become ungovernable.  Every election is about “throwing the bums out,” no matter who’s in the majority.  Seems to me we have a major populist shift in attitude in the country, with no populist leadership coming from either party, because they’re both in thrall to their corporate masters.

Candidates talk a populist game in the heat of the campaign, but they don’t govern that way (Brown rode around Massachusetts in a pickup truck to polish his populist bonafieds).

The anger is growing, but is unfocused.  That anger is evidenced by the utter breakdown of civility either in the halls of Congress or in the political discourse taking place everywhere. It’s reflected in the xenophobic hatred of immigrants and an uptick in violence against racial and other minorities.  The teabaggers, birthers, and the Town Hall screamers are evidence of the growing rage, but there is also a growing rage among traditionally left-leaning voters, who have not yet realized it, but they have some common cause with these so-called nut-cases on the right.

Rules in the Senate, and the peculiar dynamics of how we apportion Senators and how they’re elected, in particular, make it impossible for either party to effectively address the populist demands of voters.  Leadership failure and a generation of brainwashing of the populace by corporate media and corporate marketers have produced an angry public, but one that can’t really grasp the complexities of the big  issues we must face…they just want to “throw the bums out who are in there now.”  As if a near carbon copy of those “bums” will somehow ride to the rescue “this time.”  But of course, it never happens. 

Even more intractable than Senate rules, we’ve got 200 years of legal opinion giving corporations “personhood,”  thanks to a very broad judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment (which was intended to bring freed slaves into the mainstream of society).  Corporations are a LEGAL FICTION… an invention of (state) governments that permit their charter.  Corporations do not need safe food to eat, clean water to drink, or clean air to breath. They can split themselves into smaller parts or combine themselves into bigger entities. They can spawn “children” without the need for healthcare.  They can “move” to another state, or another country, overnight.  They cannot go to jail for crimes.  They are designed exclusively to protect PROPERTY and wealth.  Yet they have all the rights and protections of real, breathing human beings.  They can exercise “free speech” by spending for political campaigns (by direct contributions, or unlimited “issue advertising.”)  They can claim discrimination if any law is passed that does not also apply to real human beings.  Yet, in fact, they are “SUPER humans” that real human voters simply cannot compete with. 

It’s worth noting that over the course of US history, people have gained rights through grassroots action leading to Constitutional Amendments (rights to vote, due process, etc)… while corporations have gained their rights through the courts.  Corporate robber barons had the money to take their cases to the Supreme Court. Women, African-Americans, and others did not. 

 Party leaders on both sides think that if they just spin the facts this way or that, they can win the hearts of their core voters, either on the left or the right. 

This is NOT about left or right.  It’s more “up and down.”  That is, it’s about a population fed up that there are no real opportunities to get ahead anymore… where working hard won’t get you ahead.  It’s about a middle class under attack and a yawning gap between the richest and the poorest.  It’s about voting for change, and then our leaders cutting deals with big business as usual.. the financial sector, the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the trial lawyers, and on and on. 

 Perhaps it is time for a real rules change.  Perhaps a Constitutional change.  Thomas Jefferson believed in a little bit of revolution now and then, but our system of government has survived for 230 years while the world and its problems have changed in ways the Founding Fathers could never have imagined. 

Foreigners still  want to be like Americans… but have you ever heard anyone say, “Gee, I wish we had your Senate!.”  Parliamentary systems seem better able to deal with big problems in the modern world.

 Of course, Constitutional change is highly unlikely unless a great leader emerges to focus the anger and bring the left and the right together in common cause.  And a Constitutional Convention would be a fiasco. 

So what is to be done? 

Muddling through is certainly not working.

Perhaps a change of attitude in the judicial community regarding the personhoodof corporations?  That’s not likely either, and wouldn’t work unless other countries also moved in tandem…. multinational corporations have colonized governments worldwide, not just in the US. 

I’m flummoxed as to how we fix this.  But really concerned.

The following is excerpted from The limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich.  It is long, but well worth reading every word.

The American Empire Project 
  
 The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
By Andrew Bacevich
Published by Metropolitan Books

Excerpt
Chapter One

The Crisis of Profligacy

Today, no less than in 1776, a passion for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness remains at the center of America’s civic theology. The Jeffersonian trinity summarizes our common inheritance, defines our aspirations, and provides the touchstone for our influence abroad.

 Yet if Americans still cherish the sentiments contained in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, they have, over time, radically revised their understanding of those “inalienable rights.” Today, individual Americans use their freedom to do many worthy things. Some read, write, paint, sculpt, compose, and play music. Others build, restore, and preserve. Still others attend plays, concerts, and sporting events, visit their local multiplexes, IM each other incessantly, and join “communities” of the like- minded in an ever- growing array of virtual worlds. They also pursue innumerable hobbies, worship, tithe, and, in commendably large numbers, attend to the needs of the less fortunate. Yet none of these in themselves define what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century.

 If one were to choose a single word to characterize that identity, it would have to be more. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors. A bumper sticker, a sardonic motto, and a charge dating from the Age of Woodstock have recast the Jeffersonian trinity in modern vernacular: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins”; “Shop till you drop”; “If it feels good, do it.”

 It would be misleading to suggest that every American has surrendered to this ethic of self- gratification. Resistance to its demands persists and takes many forms. Yet dissenters, intent on curbing the American penchant for consumption and self- indulgence, are fighting a rear- guard action, valiant perhaps but unlikely to reverse the tide. The ethic of self- gratification has firmly entrenched itself as the defining feature of the American way of life. The point is neither to deplore nor to celebrate this fact, but simply to acknowledge it.

 Others have described, dissected, and typically bemoaned the cultural—and even moral—implications of this development.1 Few, however, have considered how an American preoccupation with “more” has affected U.S. relations with rest of the world. Yet the foreign policy implications of our present- day penchant for consumption and self- indulgence are almost entirely negative. Over the past six decades, efforts to satisfy spiraling consumer demand have given birth to a condition of profound de pen den cy. The United States may still remain the mightiest power the world has ever seen, but the fact is that Americans are no longer masters of their own fate.

 The ethic of self- gratification threatens the well- being of the United States. It does so not because Americans have lost touch with some mythical Puritan habits of hard work and self- abnegation, but because it saddles us with costly commitments abroad that we are increasingly ill- equipped to sustain while confronting us with dangers to which we have no ready response. As the prerequisites of the American way of life have grown, they have outstripped the means available to satisfy them. Americans of an earlier generation worried about bomber and missile gaps, both of which turned out to be fictitious. The present- day gap between requirements and the means available to satisfy those requirements is neither contrived nor imaginary. It is real and growing. This gap defines the crisis of American profligacy.

 Power and Abundance

 Placed in historical perspective, the triumph of this ethic of self- gratification hardly qualifies as a surprise. The restless search for a buck and the ruthless elimination of anyone—or anything—standing in the way of doing so have long been central to the American character. Touring the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, astute observer of the young Republic, noted the “feverish ardor” of its citizens to accumulate. Yet, even as the typical American “clutches at everything,” the Frenchman wrote, “he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.” However munificent his possessions, the American hungered for more, an obsession that filled him with “anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation.”2

 Even in de Tocqueville’s day, satisfying such yearnings as well as easing the anxieties and fears they evoked had important policy implications. To quench their ardor, Americans looked abroad, seeking to extend the reach of U.S. power. The pursuit of “fresh gratifications” expressed itself collectively in an urge to expand, territorially and commercially. This expansionist project was already well begun when de Tocqueville’s famed Democracy in America appeared, most notably through Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana territory in 1803 and through ongoing efforts to remove (or simply eliminate) Native Americans, an undertaking that continued throughout the nineteenth century.

 Preferring to remember their collective story somewhat differently, Americans look to politicians to sanitize their past. When, in his 2005 inaugural address, George W. Bush identified the promulgation of freedom as “the mission that created our nation,” neoconservative hearts certainly beat a little faster, as they undoubtedly did when he went on to declare that America’s “great liberating tradition” now required the United States to devote itself to “ending tyranny in our world.” Yet Bush was simply putting his own gloss on a time- honored conviction ascribing to the United States a uniqueness of character and purpose. From its founding, America has expressed through its behavior and its evolution a providential purpose. Paying homage to, and therefore renewing, this tradition of American exceptionalism has long been one of the presidency’s primary extra constitutional obligations.

 Many Americans find such sentiments compelling. Yet to credit the United States with possessing a “liberating tradition” is equivalent to saying that Hollywood has a “tradition of artistic excellence.” The movie business is just that—a business. Its purpose is to make money. If once in a while a studio produces a .lm of aesthetic value, that may be cause for celebration, but profit, not revealing truth and beauty, defines the purpose of the enterprise.

 Something of the same can be said of the enterprise launched on July 4, 1776. The hardheaded lawyers, merchants, farmers, and slaveholding plantation owners gathered in Philadelphia that summer did not set out to create a church. They founded a republic. Their purpose was not to save mankind. It was to ensure that people like themselves enjoyed unencumbered access to the Jeffersonian trinity.

 In the years that followed, the United States achieved remarkable success in making good on those aims. Yet never during the course of America’s transformation from a small power to a great one did the United States exert itself to liberate others—absent an overriding perception that the nation had large security or economic interests at stake.

 From time to time, although not nearly as frequently as we like to imagine, some of the world’s unfortunates managed as a consequence to escape from bondage. The Civil War did, for instance, produce emancipation. Yet to explain the conflagration of 1861–65 as a response to the plight of enslaved African Americans is to engage at best in an immense oversimplification. Near the end of World War II, GIs did liberate the surviving inmates of Nazi death camps. Yet for those who directed the American war effort of 1941–45, the fate of European Jews never figured as more than an afterthought.

 Crediting the United States with a “great liberating tradition” distorts the past and obscures the actual motive force behind American politics and U.S. foreign policy. It transforms history into a morality tale, thereby providing a rationale for dodging serious moral analysis. To insist that the liberation of others has never been more than an ancillary motive of U.S. policy is not cynicism; it is a prerequisite to self-understanding.

 If the young United States had a mission, it was not to liberate but to expand. “Of course,” declared Theodore Roosevelt in 1899, as if explaining the self- evident to the obtuse, “our whole national history has been one of expansion.” TR spoke truthfully. The founders viewed stasis as tantamount to suicide. From the outset, Americans evinced a compulsion to acquire territory and extend their commercial reach abroad.

 How was expansion achieved? On this point, the historical record leaves no room for debate: by any means necessary. Depending on the circumstances, the United States relied on diplomacy, hard bargaining, bluster, chicanery, intimidation, or naked coercion. We infiltrated land belonging to our neighbors and then brazenly proclaimed it our own. We harassed, filibustered, and, when the situation called for it, launched full- scale invasions. We engaged in ethnic cleansing. At times, we insisted that treaties be considered sacrosanct. On other occasions, we blithely jettisoned solemn agreements that had outlived their usefulness.

 As the methods employed varied, so too did the rationales offered to justify action. We touted our status as God’s new Chosen People, erecting a “city upon a hill” destined to illuminate the world. We acted at the behest of providential guidance or responded to the urgings of our “manifest destiny.” We declared our obligation to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ or to “uplift little brown brother.” With Woodrow Wilson as our tutor, we shouldered our responsibility to “show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”3 Critics who derided these claims as bunkum—the young Lincoln during the war with Mexico, Mark Twain after the imperial adventures of 1898,Senator Robert La Follette amid “the war to end all wars”— scored points but lost the argument. Periodically revised and refurbished, American exceptionalism (which implied exceptional American prerogatives) only gained greater currency.

 When it came to action rather than talk, even the policy makers viewed as most idealistic remained fixated on one overriding aim: enhancing American influence, wealth, and power. The record of U.S. foreign relations from the earliest colonial encounters with Native Americans to the end of the Cold War is neither uniquely high- minded nor uniquely hypocritical and exploitive. In this sense, the interpretations of America’s past offered by both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden fall equally wide of the mark. As a rising power, the United States adhered to the iron laws of international politics, which allow little space for altruism. If the tale of American expansion contains a moral theme at all, that theme is necessarily one of ambiguity.

 To be sure, the ascent of the United States did not occur without missteps: opéra bouffe incursions into Canada; William McKinley’s ill- advised annexation of the Philippines; complicity in China’s “century of humiliation”; disastrous post–World War I economic policies that paved the way for the Great Depression; Harry Truman’s decision in 1950 to send U.S. forces north of Korea’s Thirty- eighth Parallel; among others. Most of these blunders and bonehead moves Americans have long since shrugged off. Some, like Vietnam, we find impossible to forget even as we persistently disregard their implications.

 However embarrassing, these missteps pale in significance when compared to the masterstrokes of American presidential statecraft. In purchasing Louisiana from the French, Thomas Jefferson may have overstepped the bounds of his authority and in seizing California from Mexico, James Polk may have perpetrated a war of conquest, but their actions ensured that the United States would one day become a great power. To secure the isthmus of Panama, Theodore Roosevelt orchestrated an outrageous swindle. The canal he built there affirmed America’s hemispheric dominion. In collaborating with Joseph Stalin, FDR made common cause with an indisputably evil figure. Yet this pact with the devil destroyed the murderous Hitler while vaulting the United States to a position of unquestioned global economic supremacy. A similar collaboration—forged by Richard Nixon with the murderous Mao Zedong—helped bring down the Soviet empire, thereby elevating the United States to the self- proclaimed status of “sole superpower.”

 The achievements of these preeminent American statesmen derived not from their common devotion to a liberating tradition but from boldness unburdened by excessive scruples. Notwithstanding the high- sounding pronouncements that routinely emanate from the White House and the State Department, the defining characteristic of U.S. foreign policy at its most successful has not been idealism, but pragmatism, frequently laced with pragmatism’s first cousin, opportunism.

 What self- congratulatory textbooks once referred to as America’s “rise to power” did not unfold according to some preconceived strategy for global preeminence. There was never a secret blueprint or master plan. A keen eye for the main chance, rather than fixed principles, guided policy. If the means employed were not always pretty, the results achieved were often stunning and paid enormous dividends for the American people.

 Expansion made the United States the “land of opportunity.” From expansion came abundance. Out of abundance came substantive freedom. Documents drafted in Philadelphia promised liberty. Making good on those promises required a political economy that facilitated the creation of wealth on an enormous scale.

 Writing over a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner made the essential point. “Not the Constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a .t people,” he wrote, made American democracy possible.4 A half century later, the historian David Potter discovered a similar symbiosis between affluence and liberty. “A politics of abundance,” he claimed, had created the American way of life, “a politics which smiled both on those who valued abundance as a means to safeguard freedom and those who valued freedom as an aid in securing abundance.”5 William Apple man Williams, another historian, found an even tighter correlation. For Americans, he observed, “abundance was freedom and freedom was abundance.”6

 In short, expansion fostered prosperity, which in turn created the environment within which Americans pursued their dreams of freedom even as they argued with one another about just who deserved to share in that dream. The promise—and reality—of ever-increasing material abundance kept that argument within bounds. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, Americans came to count on an ever-larger economic pie to anesthetize the unruly and ameliorate tensions related to class, race, religion, and ethnicity. Money became the preferred lubricant for keeping social and political friction within tolerable limits. Americans, Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, “seek a solution for practically every problem of life in quantitative terms,” certain that more is better.7

 This reciprocal relationship between expansion, abundance, and freedom reached its apotheosis in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Assisted mightily by the fratricidal behavior of the traditional Europe an powers through two world wars and helped by reckless Japanese policies that culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States emerged as a global superpower, while the American people came to enjoy a standard of living that made them the envy of the world. By 1945, the “American Century” forecast by Time-Life publisher Henry Luce only four years earlier seemed miraculously at hand. The United States was the strongest, the richest, and—in the eyes of its white majority at least—the freest nation in all the world.

 Political credit for this achievement lies squarely with the Left. Abundance, sustained in no small mea sure by a postwar presumption of American “global leadership,” made possible the expansion of freedom at home. Rebutting Soviet charges of racism and hypocrisy lent the promotion of freedom domestically a strategic dimension. Yet possibility only became reality thanks to progressive political activism.

 Pick the group: blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, working stiffs, gays, the handicapped—in every case, the impetus for providing equal access to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution originated among pinks, lefties, liberals, and bleeding- heart fellow travelers. When it came to ensuring that every American should get a fair shake, the contribution of modern conservatism has been essentially nil. Had Martin Luther King counted on William F. Buckley and the National Review to take up the fight against racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, Jim Crow would still be alive and well.

 The president had originally intended to speak on July 5, focusing his address exclusively on energy. At the last minute, he decided to postpone it. Instead, he spent ten days sequestered at Camp David, using the time, he explained, “to reach out and listen to the voices of America.” At his invitation, a host of politicians, academics, business and labor leaders, clergy, and private citizens trooped through the presidential retreat to offer their views on what was wrong with America and what Carter needed to do to set things right. The result combined a seminar of sorts with an exercise in self- flagellation.

 The speech that Carter delivered when he returned to the White House bore little resemblance to the one he had planned to give ten days earlier. He began by explaining that he had decided to look beyond energy because “the true problems of our Nation are much deeper.” The energy crisis of 1979, he suggested, was merely a symptom of a far greater crisis. “So, I want to speak to you first to night about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.”

 In short order, Carter then proceeded to kill any chance he had of securing reelection. In American political discourse, fundamental threats are by definition external. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or international communism could threaten the United States. That very year, Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries had emerged to pose another such threat. That the actions of everyday Americans might pose a comparable threat amounted to rank heresy. Yet Carter now dared to suggest that the real danger to American democracy lay within.

 The nation as a whole was experiencing “a crisis of confidence,” he announced. “It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” This erosion of confidence threatened “to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

 Americans had strayed from the path of righteousness. “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close- knit communities, and our faith in God,” the president continued, too many of us now tend to worship self- indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

 In other words, the spreading American crisis of confidence was an outward manifestation of an underlying crisis of values. With his references to what “we’ve discovered” and what “we’ve learned,” Carter implied that he was merely voicing concerns that his listeners already shared: that average Americans viewed their lives as empty, unsatisfying rituals of buying, and longed for something more meaningful.

 To expect Washington to address these concerns was, he made clear, fanciful. According to the president, the federal government had become “an island,” isolated from the people. Its major institutions were paralyzed and corrupt. It was “a system of government that seems incapable of action.” Carter spoke of “a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful special interests.” Partisanship routinely trumped any concern for the common good: “You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.”

 ”We are at a turning point in our history,” Carter announced.

 There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about to night, the path that leads to fragmentation and self- interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.

 The continued pursuit of this mistaken idea of freedom was “a certain route to failure.” The alternative—a course consistent with “all the traditions of our past [and] all the lessons of our heritage”—pointed down “another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.” Down that path, the president claimed, lay “true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.”

 As portrayed by Carter, the mistaken idea of freedom was quantitative: It centered on the never- ending quest for more while exalting narrow self- interest. His conception of authentic freedom was qualitative: It meant living in accordance with permanent values. At least by implication, it meant settling for less.

 How Americans dealt with the question of energy, the president believed, was likely to determine which idea of freedom would prevail. “Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally.” By raising that standard, Carter insisted, “we can seize control again of our common destiny.” With this in mind, Carter outlined a six- point program designed to end what he called “this intolerable dependence on foreign oil.” He promised action to reduce oil imports by one- half within a decade. In the near term, he vowed to establish quotas capping the amount of oil coming into the country. He called for a national effort to develop alternative energy sources. He proposed legislation mandating reductions in the amount of oil used for power generation. He advocated establishment of a new federal agency “to cut through the red tape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects.” And finally, he summoned the American people to conserve: “to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.”

 Although Carter expressed confidence that the United States could one day regain its energy independence, he acknowledged that in the near term “there [was] simply no way to avoid sacrifice.” Indeed, implicit in Carter’s speech was the suggestion that sacrifice just might be a good thing. For the sinner, some sort of penance must necessarily precede redemption.

 The response to his address—instantly labeled the “malaise” speech although Carter never used that word— was tepid at best. Carter’s remarks had blended religiosity and populism in ways that some found off- putting. Writing in the New York Times, Francis X. Clines called it the “cross- of- malaise” speech, comparing it unfavorably to the famous “cross- of- gold” oration that had vaulted William Jennings Bryan to political prominence many decades earlier.19 Others criticized what they saw as a penchant for anguished moralizing and a tendency to find fault everywhere except in his own White House. In the New York Times Magazine, Professor Eugene Kennedy mocked “Carter Agonistes,” depicting the president as a “distressed angel, passing judgment on us all, and speaking solemnly not of blood and sweat but of oil and sin.”20

 The relationship between World Wars III and IV becomes apparent when recalling Reagan’s policy toward Afghanistan and Iraq—the former a seemingly brilliant success that within a decade gave birth to a quagmire, the latter a cynical gambit that backfired, touching off a sequence of events that would culminate in a stupendous disaster.

 As noted in the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “A decade of conflict in Afghanistan, from 1979 to 1989, gave Islamist extremists a rallying point and a training .eld.”27 The commissioners understate the case. In Afghanistan, jihadists took on a superpower, the Soviet Union, and won. They gained immeasurably in confidence and ambition, their efforts funded in large mea sure by the American taxpayer.

 The billions that Reagan spent funneling weapons, ammunition, and other support to the Afghan mujahideen were as nothing compared to the $1.2 trillion his administration expended modernizing U.S. military forces. Yet American policy in Afghanistan during the 1980s illustrates the Reagan Doctrine in its purest form. In the eyes of Reagan’s admirers, it was his masterstroke, a bold and successful effort to roll back the Soviet empire. The exploits of the Afghan “resistance” .red the president’s imagination, and he offered the jihadists unstinting and enthusiastic support. In designating March 21, 1982, “Afghanistan Day,” for example, Reagan proclaimed, “The freedom fighters of Afghanistan are defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability.”28

 In January 1993, President Bill Clinton inherited this situation. To his credit, alone among recent presidents Clinton managed at least on occasion to balance the federal budget. With his enthusiasm for globalization, however, the forty- second president exacerbated the underlying contradictions of the American economy. Oil imports increased by more than 50 percent during the Clinton era.33 The trade imbalance nearly quadrupled.34 Gross federal debt climbed by nearly $1.5 trillion.35 During the go- go dot .com years, however, few Americans attended to such matters.

 In the Persian Gulf, Clinton’s efforts to shore up U.S. hegemony took the form of a “dual containment” policy targeting both Iran and Iraq. With regard to Iran, containment meant further isolating the Islamic republic diplomatically and economically in order to prevent the rebuilding of its badly depleted military forces. With regard to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it meant much the same, including fierce UN sanctions and a program of armed harassment.

 During the first year of his administration, Clinton developed a prodigious appetite for bombing and, thanks to a humiliating “Blackhawk down” failure in and retreat from Somalia, an equally sharp aversion to committing ground troops. Nowhere did Clinton’s infatuation with air power find greater application than in Iraq, which he periodically pummeled with precision- guided bombs and cruise missiles. In effect, the cease fire that terminated Operation Desert Storm in February 1991 did not end the Persian Gulf War. After a brief pause, hostilities resumed. Over time, they intensified, with the United States conducting punitive air strikes at will.

 Although when it came to expending the lives of American soldiers, Clinton proved to be circumspect, he expended ordnance with abandon. During the course of his presidency, the navy and air force conducted tens of thousands of sorties into Iraqi airspace, dropped thousands of bombs, and launched hundreds of cruise missiles. Apart from turning various Iraqi military and government facilities into rubble, this cascade of pricy munitions had negligible impact. With American forces suffering not a single casualty, few Americans paid attention to what the ordnance cost or where it landed. After all, whatever the number of bombs dropped, more were always available in a seemingly inexhaustible supply.

 Despite these exertions, many in Washington— Republicans and Democrats, politicians and pundits—worked themselves into a frenzy over the fact that Saddam Hussein had managed to survive, when the World’s Only Superpower now wished him gone. To fevered minds, Saddam’s defiance made him an existential threat, his mere survival an unendurable insult.

 In 1998, the anti- Saddam lobby engineered passage through Congress of the Iraq Liberation Act, declaring it “the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government.” The legislation, passed unanimously in the Senate and by a 360–38 majority in the House, authorized that the princely sum of $100 million be dedicated to that objective. On October 31, President Clinton duly signed the act into law and issued a statement embracing the cause of freedom for all Iraqis. “I categorically reject arguments that this is unattainable due to Iraq’s history or its ethnic or sectarian make- up,” the president said. “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else.”

 All of this—both the gratuitous air war and the preposterously frivolous legislation—amounted to theater. Reality on the ground was another matter. A crushing sanctions regime authorized by the UN, but imposed by the United States and its allies, complicated Saddam’s life and limited the funds available from Iraqi oil, but primarily had the effect of making the wretched existence of the average Iraqi more wretched still. A 1996 UNICEF report estimated that up to half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of the sanctions. Asked to comment, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did not even question the figure. Instead, she replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

 No doubt Albright regretted her obtuse remark. Yet it captured something essential about U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf at a time when confidence in American power had reached its acme. In effect, the United States had forged a partnership with Saddam in imposing massive suffering on the Iraqi people. Yet as long as Americans at home were experiencing a decade of plenty—during the Clinton era, consumers enjoyed low gas prices and gorged themselves on cheap Asian imports—the price that others might be paying didn’t much matter.

 Bill Clinton’s Iraq policy was both strategically misguided and morally indefensible—as ill- advised as John Kennedy’s campaign of subversion and sabotage directed against Cuba in the 1960s, as reprehensible as Richard Nixon’s illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia in the late 1960s and 1970s. Yet unlike those actions, which occurred in secret, U.S. policy toward Iraq in the 1990s unfolded in full view of the American people. To say that the policy commanded enthusiastic popular support would be to grossly overstate the case. Yet few Americans strenuously objected—to the bombing, to congressional posturing, or to the brutal sanctions. Paying next to no attention, the great majority quietly acquiesced and thus became complicit.

 American Freedom, Iraqi Freedom

 To the extent that Bill Clinton’s principal critics had a problem with his Iraq policy, their chief complaint was that the United States wasn’t dropping enough bombs. Committed to their own quantitative solutions, hawkish conservatives wanted to ratchet up the level of violence. If Saddam’s survival represented an affront to American hegemony in the Gulf, then Saddam’s elimination offered the necessary corrective. Among neo-Reaganite Republicans, well before 9/11, it became an article of faith that, with Saddam’s removal, everything was certain to fall into place. Writing in the Weekly Standard in February 1998, Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative, urged a full- scale invasion. Eliminating the Baath Party regime, he promised, was sure to “open the way for a new post- Saddam Iraq whose intentions can safely be assumed to be benign.”36

 The possibility that military escalation might actually exacerbate America’s Persian Gulf dilemma received scant consideration. That the citizens of the United States might ease that dilemma by modifying their own behavior—that the antidote to our ailments might lie within rather than on the other side of the world—received no consideration at all.

 The events of September 11, 2001, only hardened this disposition. Among hawks, 9/11 reinforced the conviction that dominance in the Gulf was a categorical imperative. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld aptly summarized the prevailing view in October 2001: “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter.”37 If, today, this black- and- white perspective seems a trifle oversimplified, between 2002 and 2004, no politician of national stature had the wit or the gumption to voice a contrary view.38

 As it trained its sights on modifying the way “they” lived, the Bush administration looked to America’s armed forces as its preferred agent of change. The United States would, as Bush and his chief advisers saw it, solidify its hold on the Persian Gulf by relying in the first instance on coercion. In 1991, the president’s father had shrunk from doing what they now believed needed to be done: marching on Baghdad and “decapitating” the regime of Saddam Hussein. Throughout the remainder of that decade Clinton had temporized. Now the gloves were coming off, with Saddam’s Iraq the primary, but by no means the final, target.

 Here was an imperial vision on a truly colossal scale, a worthy successor to older claims of “manifest destiny” or of an American mission to “make the world safe for democracy.” President Bush’s “freedom agenda” updated and expanded upon this tradition.

 One might have thought that implementing such a vision would require sustained and large- scale national commitment. Yet soon after 9/11, the American people went back to business as usual—urged to do so by the president himself. “War costs money,” Franklin D. Roosevelt had reminded his countrymen after Pearl Harbor. “That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials.”41 At the outset of its war on terrorism, the Bush administration saw things differently. Even as the United States embarked on a global conflict expected to last decades, the president made a point of reducing taxes. Rather than asking Americans to trim their appetite for luxuries, he called on them to carry on as if nothing had occurred. Barely two weeks after the World Trade Center had collapsed, the president was prodding his fellow citizens to “Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida.”

 Predictably, as the scope of military operations grew, especially after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, so too did the level of military spending. During the Bush years, the Pentagon’s annual bud get more than doubled, reaching $700 billion by 2008. This time, unlike in Operation Desert Storm when Germany, Japan, and friendly Gulf states ponied up tens of billions of dollars to defray the cost of U.S. operations, the burden of paying for the war fell entirely on Washington.

 Less predictably, although perhaps not surprisingly, spending on entitlements also rose in the years after 9/11. Abetted by Congress, the Bush administration conducted a war of guns and butter, including huge increases in outlays for Medicare and Social Security. The federal bud get once more went into the red and stayed there.

 Had the administration gotten a quick win in Iraq, it might have finessed the crisis of profligacy—for a while. To put it mildly, however, the war didn’t follow its assigned script.

 Between April 28, 2003, and February 22, 2006, Iraq came apart at the seams. During this interval, the adverse foreign policy implications of American profligacy became indisputable. On the former date, skittish American soldiers in Fallujah fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing a dozen or more Iraqis. If the insurgency had a trigger, this was it. On the latter date, terrorists blew up the Mosque of the Golden Dome in Samarra, igniting an already simmering Sunni- Shiite civil war. Prior to the incident in Fallujah, the administration could still convince itself that its grand strategy remained plausible. Even a month later, swaggering White House officials were still bragging: “Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.” By the time the Samarra bombing occurred, events had not dealt kindly with such fantasies. Real men were holed up in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.

 As conditions in Iraq worsened, the disparity between pretensions and capacities became painfully evident. A generation of profligacy had produced strategic insolvency. The administration had counted on the qualitative superiority of U.S. forces compensating for their limited numbers. The enemy did not cooperate.

 Although the United States is a wealthy nation with a population of over 300 million, closing the gap between means and ends posed a daunting task. By February 2005, this was so apparent that Los Angeles Times columnist Max Boot was suggesting that the armed forces “open up recruiting stations from Budapest to Bangkok, Cape Town to Cairo, Montreal to Mexico City.” Boot’s suggestion that the Bush administration raise up a “Freedom Legion” of foreign mercenaries inadvertently illustrated the depth of the problem.47 If the Pentagon needed to comb the streets of Cape Town and Cairo to fill its ranks, the situation was indeed dire.

 The United States had a shortage of soldiers; it also lacked funds. The longer the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, the more costly they became. By 2007, to sustain its operations, the U.S. command in Baghdad was burning through $3 billion per week. That same year, the overall costs of the Iraq War topped the $500- billion mark, with some estimates already suggesting that the final bill could reach at least $2 trillion.48

 Although these figures were widely reported, they had almost no political impact in Washington, indicating the extent to which habits of profligacy had become entrenched. Congress responded to bud get imbalances not by trimming spending or increasing revenues but by quietly and repeatedly raising the debt ceiling—by $3.015 trillion between 2002 and 2006.49 Future generations could figure out how to pay the bills.

 All this red ink generated nervous speculation about a coming economic collapse comparable in magnitude to the Great Depression.50 Whatever the merit of such concerns, the interest here is not in what may yet happen to the American economy but in what has already occurred to its foreign policy.

 By 2007, the United States was running out of troops and was already out of money. According to conventional wisdom, when it came to Iraq, there were “no good options.” Yet Americans had limited the range of possible options by their stubborn insistence that the remedy to the nation’s problems in the Persian Gulf necessarily lay in the Persian Gulf rather than at home. The slightest suggestion that the United States ought to worry less about matters abroad and more about setting its own house in order elicited from the political elite, Republicans and Democrats alike, shrieks of “isolationism,” the great imaginary sin to which Americans are allegedly prone. Yet to begin to put our house in order would be to open up a whole new array of options, once again permitting the United States to “choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.”

 Long accustomed to thinking of the United States as a superpower, Americans have yet to realize that they have forfeited command of their own destiny. The reciprocal relationship between expansionism, abundance, and freedom—each reinforcing the other—no longer exists. If anything, the reverse is true: Expansionism squanders American wealth and power, while putting freedom at risk. As a consequence, the strategic tradition to which Jefferson and Polk, Lincoln and McKinley, TR and FDR all subscribed has been rendered not only obsolete but pernicious.

 Rather than confronting this reality head- on, American grand strategy since the era of Ronald Reagan, and especially throughout the era of George W. Bush, has been characterized by attempts to wish reality away. Policy makers have been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme intended to extend indefinitely the American line of credit. The fiasco of the Iraq War and the quasi- permanent U.S. occupation of Afghanistan illustrate the results and prefigure what is yet to come if the crisis of American profligacy continues unabated.

 Excepted from The Limits of Power by Andrew J. Bacevich

 Copyright @ 2008 by Andrew J. Bacevich

 Published in 2008 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Since the early 19th century, the Supreme Court has ruled numerous times on the issue of “personhood” for corporations. That is, they have given corporate entities of all types the legal and political standing of a breathing human being. Some of those rulings were just and fair. Others have had the, perhaps unintended, consequence of subverting the democratic processes of our Representative Republic.
 
We talk much about how corporate interests have hijacked our legislative process, but the fact is that corporate wealth has always been used to influence our judicial processes in ways that have allowed these “special interests” to legally overrun the legislative branch.
 
Consider: There were 150 Supreme Court cases involving the 14th Amendment prior to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. (That nefarious case established the legal standing of “separate but equal.”) The 14th Amendment ensures due process of law in legislation, equal protection under the law, etc. It was intended mainly to bring freed slaves into American society. Of these 150 cases heard by the Court, however, only 15 involved freed African-American slaves (and of those 15, they only won one case!). But 135 cases involved corporations or business entities.
Corporations, under an expansive legal view of the 14th Amendment, have used it as a shield against regulation and taxes at both the federal and state level.
 
Corporations have used the 14th Amendment to consolidate their power in the U.S. and the world. They have gained many of the inalienable rights of humans guaranteed by the Bill of Rights with their status as “persons” under the 14th Amendment. Through their right of “free speech” they have captured our legislatures and regulatory agencies. They have used the 14th Amendment to invalidate legislation that wasn’t to their liking. They have used their wealth (well beyond that available to most real persons) to invest in lawyers and flood the courts with the corporate perspective on their right to “personhood.” The result is a corporate culture defining almost all law in the U.S. The U.S. economy has been, essentially, colonized by corporations, and that has become the model for colonization of the global economy by multinational corporations.
 
In the early years of our Republic, corporations could not own stock in other corporations, and were prohibited from any part of the political process. This grew out of the colonial era, when corporations like the British East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company were able to levy taxes, create laws, and even raises armies to manage and control property & commerce…all in the name of the King who chartered them. Corporations, therefore, were not popular with the colonists. So the early state constitutions and legislatures limited their power.
 
Note that, while our Constitution is really designed to protect property (including slaves), you won’t find the word “corporation” anywhere in there.  State legislatures oversaw what corporations could and could not do. In early days, state legislatures had more power relative to the federal government. Individual stockholders were held personally liable for any harms done in the name of the corporation. In order to receive the profit-making privileges the shareholders sought, corporations had to represent a clear benefit for the public good, such as building a road, canal, or bridge. And when corporations violated any of these terms, their charters were frequently revoked by the state legislatures.
 
But something changed in the course of 200 years. Memories of colonial-era corporate oppression faded, and wealthy people began seeing corporations as a convenient way to shield fortunes and maintain ruling power. Minority rule, granted under the Constitution to male, white, landowners, was increasingly under threat during the 19th and 20th centuries (women, Blacks, the poor, all got rights to vote, for example).
 
Bit by bit, decade by decade, state legislatures increased corporate charter length while they decreased corporate liability and reduced citizen authority over corporate structure, governance, production, and labor. But since corporations are a creation of state governments, the state-by-state strategy would only get the ruling minority so far in protecting their interests. If minority rule by property was going to be successfully defended, corporations would have to gain rights, crossing the line to become “persons” under the law.
 
Enter the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. Within 20 years, the shift was dramatic. Corporations were no longer accountable to the people to perform certain duties…they were now protected from government “abuse” as persons.
 
The 14th Amendment reads “No state shall… ” If the word “person” in the 14th Amendment included “corporations,” then no state shall deny to corporations due process or equal protection of the laws. This allowed corporate lawyers to allege discrimination whenever a state law was enacted to curtail corporations. Federal regulatory agencies also had to give corporations the same rights as persons, as soon as corporations gained “personhood.” To not do so would be discriminatory. With the granting of the 5th Amendment right to due process (see Noble v. Union River Logging, 1893), corporate lawyers could challenge – and the Supreme Court could find grounds to overturn – democratically legislated laws that originated at the federal as well as state levels.
 
So, “equal protection under the law” has come to mean, “Whoever has enough money to go to the Supreme Court to fight for it.” Railroad robber barons did; women didn’t; and African Americans most certainly didn’t. In fact, the pattern over more than two centuries of US legal history is that people acquire rights by amendment to the Constitution. Corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions.
 
The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 (Buckley v. Valeo) that money spent for political purposes is equal to exercising free speech, and since “corporate persons” have First Amendment rights, they can contribute as much money as they want to overturn ballot initiatives or referenda (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti). Sure, campaign contributions have since had limits placed on them, but can you round up money from your friends and family as much in contributions as, say, The CEO of Goldman Sachs can can raise from shareholders, employees, and their families?  True, such bundling by corporations has been limited under campaign finance law… but it’s seldom proved because those involved don’t talk.

Every time “corporate persons” acquire one of these protections under the Bill of Rights, it gives them a whole new way of exploiting the legal system in order to maintain minority rule through corporate power. And since 1886, every time people have won new rights – like the Civil Rights Act – corporations are eligible for it, too.
 
A corporation is not a real thing; it’s a legal fiction, an abstraction. You can’t see or hear or touch or smell a corporation – it’s just an idea that people agree to and put into writing.

Because legal personhood has been conferred upon an abstraction that can be redefined at will under the law, corporations have become superhumans in our world. A corporation can live forever. It can change its identity in a day. It can cut off parts of itself. It can also cut off parts of itself and from those parts grow new selves. It can own others of its own kind and it can merge with others of its own kind. It doesn’t need fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink or safe food to eat. It doesn’t fear illness or death. It can have simultaneous residence in many different nations. It’s not male, female, or even transgendered. Without giving birth it can create children and even parents. If it’s found guilty of a crime, it cannot go to prison.
 
As long as these “superhuman corporate persons” have rights under the law, the vast majority of real persons have little or no effective voice in our political arena.
 
So, things like term limits for Congress; debates about pensions; Congressional health coverage; etc. are reaction, not a cure for what ails our political system. Instead, we need to get to the root of the problem: Political leaders being installed, co-opted, and maintained by a wealthy minority of “corporate super-persons.” Get rid of the personhood for corporations, and you’ll see a vast change in what happens in our legislative branch, and in who wins elections. That is the key.
 
With corporate personhood abolished, new legislation would be possible. For example, if “corporate persons” no longer had First Amendment right of free contributions to political candidates and parties, would we be having the same debate over healthcare reform or financial sector reform?  Surely not. If “corporate persons” were not protected against search without a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, then corporate managers couldn’t turn OSHA and the EPA inspectors away if they make surprise, unscheduled searches. If “corporate persons” weren’t protected against discrimination under the 14th Amendment, corporations like Wal-Mart couldn’t force themselves into communities that don’t want them.
 
Abolishing corporate personhood won’t be easy, of course, because after 200 years, it is woven into the fabric of not just our federal laws, but also the laws of the 50 states. And our model of corporate personhood has been adopted worldwide in some degree or another, so corporations stripped of personhood in the U.S. might opt to pull up stakes and head to greener pastures, in the Caribbean, for example.  But it could be done, either by the Supreme Court reversing itself, or by Constitutional Amendment.  And just as the world has copied our march toward corporate personhood, there are ways the U.S. could exert influence away from it, as well.
 
Since the existing Senate, bought and paid for by corporate “persons,” must approve Court justices, the Supreme Court route seems unlikely. Certainly the current makeup of the Court doesn’t hold out much hope.  A Constitutional amendment to strip corporations of their personhood would involve a ferocious fight, but it might be a fight we’re ready for…and certainly it’s one worth having.

Paul Crist is an economist, business owner, political activist, and essayist.  His writing and opinions reflect a progressive approach to policy issues on a range of topics.  A Washington, DC native, he currently divides his time between Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he owns a hotel and runs an HIV/AIDS non-profit, and Washington, DC, where he currently lobbies on healthcare and immigration issues.

In this excerpt from the Fareed Zakaria show on CNN – which otherwise features a surprisingly good group, with Eliot Spitzer, Naomi Klein and Stephen Dubner — former Bush speech writer David Frum somehow gets away with arguing that regulators should not overreact by setting stricter rules on financial instruments because such rules would stifle innovation.

It is pretty hard to believe that someone is still saying with a straight face that unregulated risky financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities were innovative. But Frum does, and  he reveals the speciousness of his assertion by basically  saying that technology innovations of the last decade prove that the private sector is creating innovative products all around. Frum does not tell us how developments like the smart phone and internet search technology have anything to do with banking “innovations,” and that is not the kind of precise question that is usually asked of a commentator on a cable television show.

Frum goes on to cite  interest-only loans as an example of innovation in the financial sector. Although it is very arguable that an interest-only loan represents anything more than an old-fashioned giant gamble on the part of borrower and lender alike , even if one accepts it is innovative, I do not see how financial regulation would prevent this product from being marketed. Regulation on such a loan, which would probably require measures like vetting a loan applicant’s ability to pay that loan and better disclosure of the risk of the product, would not fundamentally change the product itself. Of course, stricter regulation might cause more loan applicants to get rejected, resulting in less potential profit for the bank underwriters. But stricter regulation would prevent potential foreclosures and home loan defaults. David Frum’s assertion that regulation stifles innovation in this case does not really hold water. It leads me to wonder whether he knows what he is talking about, or if he does know, whether he cares, and how he still gets away with making this argument in the first place.

I continues to amaze me how little the airing of “dirty laundry” on the fraud that is the UN IPCC gets in the US mainstream media.  In the UK, the media does seem to have a bit more on the ball (at least sometimes).  This from the Sunday Times exposing the previous ludicrous IPCC projections about Himalaya glaciers and the absolute fantasy that they would all be melted by 2035;  exposing the complete lack of scientific review some of the pronouncements that comes out of the UN group.  Unbelievable lack of any due-diligence  – and this without the intentional fraud that characterize some of the other pronouncements.

The Sunday Times January 17, 2010

Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings

A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”

The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.

“Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.”

The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The report read: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: “Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. “I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about,” he said.

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science” (So much for his expertise!).

Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.

The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding.

He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been “speculative”, and published the update in the New Scientist.

Cogley said: “The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

Pearce said the IPCC’s reliance on the WWF was “immensely lazy” and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for comment.

The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific consensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climategate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key date. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.

Copyright 2010, TST

In 2006, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its illegal approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa. The federal courts sided with CFS and banned GE alfalfa until the USDA fully analyzed the impacts of the plant on the environment, farmers, and the public in a rigorous analysis known as an environmental impact statement (or EIS). USDA released its draft EIS on December 14, 2009. A 60-day comment period is now open until February 16, 2010. This is the first time the USDA has done this type of analysis for any GE crop. Therefore, the final decision will have broad implications for all GE crops.

Read more and tell the USDA you DO care about GE contamination of organics!

  I am proud to be an American Citizen and am very proud of our military and those who have in past, present and those who will serve in the future. My family is made up of many who have served our country in the military capacity.  I myself am not in the military so my perspective is purely coming from a observational place. There is something that troubles me about the military system.

A report was released in 2009 and Katie Couric reported, ” One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military, compared to one in six women in the civilian world. The Pentagon released a disturbing report Tuesday on sexual abuse in the military, saying that more than 2,900 sexual assaults were reported last year, up nearly 9 percent from the year before. Nearly two-thirds of the cases involved rape or aggravated assault.”

 ”These are major crimes, not misdemeanors,” said Vivian Gembara, a retired member of the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. While the statistics are apalling, what I find supremely disturbing is that according to the statistics the majority of those who actually recieve punishment  just see a reduction in rank and pay. As I said the statictics are apalling, however in this report, it was also said that many of the cases go virtually unreported, thus indicating that the statistics may actually be higher. The fact is most of these cases do not even make it to Jag for many reasons. As a female in the military, there is a stigma attached to being a victim and thus many victims are afraid of ruining their careers and they deem that will happen if they come forward. Secondly, I believe that many do not want to go through the whole Jag process due to the fear of losing peer and superior officer confidence, damaging any chance for  military career advancement and like in civilian cases, the victim does not want to rehash the incident for public display and be attacked by the prosecution. Many victims decide to not go to trial and thus those who commit these crimes get away with  minimal consequences as mentioned above.

 Everything under the sun should be done to prevent these crimes from happening. One reason I feel that these crimes are so high is that most perpertrators do not fear that any repercusions will be felt. If there is no negative recourse feared, essentially the belief is that consequences are aparition, resulting in an absence of negative stimuli as a deterrent. 

 How can we correct this problem of many feeling like they will go unscathed by commiting these types of crimes? Well it can’t happen if the incidents are unreported and that victims are afraid to come forth and see the perpertrators through a trial. Do not get me wrong, I am not indicating that it is the victims fault in any way shape or form. I am indicating that the military system needs to do better at pursuing these cases and supporting the victims in a way wherein they can be assured that they will not ruin their career if they come forth. Essentially the military needs to turn their sights and focus on a campaign that demonizes those who commit these crimes. Launching a campaign that gets the personalization point across that these victims could be your mother, your sister, your daughter. More importantly the campiagn should hone in on the fact that these crimes weakens our military, negative effects a units cohesiveness and this kind of group weakness can result in major mistakes that causes injuries and loss of life. Units need to truly live by the core values they swear to uphold. The need to embrace the victims and kick out those who prey on their own. Commiting crimes against your own indicates that they are the weak link and they can’t be trusted in any capacity. Demonizing these perpertrators will slowly turn the opinion and the voice of the military personnel about these matters, therefore making it easier for the victims to come foward, pursue and see a trial through its end. This campaign must however begin with the victims. The campaign for turning around the viewpoint of these crimes in the military will be pointless if victims do not stand up, if they do not stand together bravely. Throught history, military or not, change always begins with a few who are vocal and demand attention and change. Then others soon follow suit and change is seen.

 The statistics that were realeased and the lack of adequate punishment for these incidents are apalling. More needs to be done to support the victims in these crimes so that they are able to come forth. Most importantly, for those of us who personally know victims of these heinous crimes, military related or not, listen to them, support them, embrace them and stand by them. Encourage them to seek out help in dealing with this trauma, whether it be through one on one counseling or through a support group.  The best way to ensure these abuses stop is to empower others, which in turn will make the voice so strong against these crimes that no perpertrator will think they have free reign, resulting in hopefully decreasing the occurance of these crimes and those who still choose to offend will recieve steep punishment.

In closing, these crimes are horrific and should not be tolerated. Those military personnel should be subject to the same standards; like any other criminal who commit such crimes they should recieved adequate punishment. I suggest at a minimum it begin with dishonorable discharge and in my personal opinion those individuals should be reported on sites like Familywatchdog. Afterall, those who commit these assaults on their fellow personnel, are going to become civilian one day and they end up living next door to you!

If my comments interest you please read this news article: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/17/eveningnews/main4872713.shtml

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City is calling for a salt crackdown.  As I listened to a radio interview this morning on this topic I about fell off my stationary bike. New York is in financial dire straits and Mr. Bloomberg is focusing his efforts on salt? Come on, really?

Firstly, I want to reserve the right to make the choice on what I do and do not put in my mouth. Secondly, if I buy a bag of saltless chips and I feel like it needs salt, guess what I have it in the cupboard. So, if he wants to crackdown on salt, his thought process is flawed. People will not buy food that is deficient in seasoning, secondly if they do they will just put salt on it.  Thirdly, the salt crackdown will just lead to inventions of chemicals that can mimic the taste and flavoring of salt. So instead of salt on our chips we will ingest something that is meant to clean up bio hazardous waste because it mimics the flavorings of salt. Ok I admit, maybe that is a bit dramatic. Think about it though. Which is safer salt or a chemical subsitute?

What ever happen to freedom of choice? It is bad enough that they are trying to force this Health Care farce down our throats on an idealistic level without making us prove our compliance. If this final Health Care Bill is passed and actively implemented, we would be strong armed& another avenue of IRS regulation would begin. This Bill would require everyone to show proof of health insurance every tax season or face a fine.

Isn’t the IRS burdened and broken as it is? Who is going to be the Health Care proof of insurance Czar? Meanwhile, if someone can’t afford insurance or doesn’t want to purchase insurance, then you fine them? So freedom of choice stripped along with fines for the financially strapped? I thought the whole idea of this Health Care reform was to help not hinder the financially challenged. Besides, what if the fine is not paid, will they garnish wages or put you in prison?

The Health Care Bill is riddled with issues, this IRS connection is just one item that should concern us all.

It is maybe a cliche at this point that China is ascending to a world power. In the latest article on that subject, Paul Krugman bemoans the country’s trade policies. Many end-of-decade articles pointed out that while the U.S. and other developed nations had basically zero growth on their nations’ stock indexes, and what I think is an even more dismal decline in salary, the markets in the “BRIC” nations–Brazil, Russia, India and China–grew explosively. There is no way this kind of growth will sustain itself–it never does, historically–but for the time being, I think it is important to take a certain perspective toward the growth of the Chinese economy in particular, as a lay consumer.

Although our economy is arguably abysmal right now and China’s is growing, I think Americans still enjoy standards of living the likes of which the Chinese or most other nations do not know. We have larger houses, more cars and did have more disposable income. Unlike millions of other people, we were, for many years, able to buy things on credit without proving that we could pay it back anytime soon. The current growth of China and decline of America is in some ways a leveling, where the Chinese move closer to what we have in this country just as we lose it.

This is not to say that I think what is happening is deserved. It is more that we should appreciate that for many years we had very favorable lending policies, could buy electronics and retail items for cheap (in large part, because of China) and could drive cars and live in homes that have great environmental and monetary costs (because of these lending policies), which most other people in this world could not do. We were not encouraged to live within our means, either. I think this way of life was egged on by an unfortunate mentality.

That is the Wal-Mart mentality–I’m as guilty of it as the next guy–of believing you should be able to get quality for cheap in areas like domestic services, infrastructure, schools. When they invariably do not see quality, many Americans immediately resort to blaming the local government or state governments or schools and insisting that they be deprived yet more money, and a vicious cycle of spending cuts continues.

Governments are not totally innocent–dishonest politicians have brought on massive tax cuts and freezes (see California, Colorado) and then people wonder why we have more congestion, worse public transportation, struggling schools and greater college and graduate school loans to shoulder. The answer is because we do not pay for quality. Quality–from health care to education to infrastructure–costs money and must be maintained. It is of course a question of priorities as to whether we want quality in these areas and whether we can pay for it all, but I hope in 2010 the American spoiled-ness that thinks we should get everything for less (see Wal-Mart) dissolves as our new economic reality becomes more clear.

My wishlist for 2010 is a total re-prioritization in this economy that would probably look un-American, or at least, un-American circa 1980-2009. This would mean…

Increase revenue from upper-income people, those who are still doing well by this economy, by…

• Raising taxes on the very wealthy. More tax brackets, so that millionaires and billionaires pay a greater percentage of their income to the IRS than people who make around 300K per year.
• As a corollary: greater enforcement of tax evaders (Fortunately, this has already begun).
• For the love of god, tax ibankers’ bonuses, as they are doing in Europe.

Spend to create jobs, improve infrastructure and maintain public services.

• Use this money to create jobs in areas that improve infrastructure and invest in American economies of the future.
• Also use money to help out states, which are having a terrible time balancing their budget and keeping basic social service programs.

Our leaders need to challenge us to overcome the selfish economic mantras of the ’80s-’00s. That will not be easy.

This is a Macleans Article by Mark Steyn on Thursday, December 24, 2009 11:10am that I thought was very interesting.  I unfortunately do not have the link.

According to the CIA’s analysis, “detrimental global climatic change” threatens “the stability of most nations.” And, alas, for a global phenomenon, Canada will be hardest hit. The entire Dominion from the Arctic to the 49th parallel will be under 150 feet of ice.

Oh, wait. That was the last “scientific consensus” on “climate change,” early seventies version, as reflected in a CIA report from August 1974, which the enterprising author Maurizio Morabito stumbled upon in the British Library the other day. If only the impending ice age had struck as scheduled and Scandinavia was now under a solid block of ice. Instead, the streets of Copenhagen are filled with “activists” protesting global warming, some of whom torch automobiles in the traditional manner of concerned idealists. As long as it’s not my car, I can just about live with these chaps, preferring on balance thuggish street politics to the spaced-out cultish stupor in which many of their confreres wander glassy-eyed from event to event. On the Internet, there is a telling clip of Christopher Monckton interacting with a young Norwegian from Greenpeace who has come along to protest the former’s “denialism.” Monckton is a viscount—i.e., a lord, like his fellow denialist, the former British chancellor Lord Lawson. Now that’s what I call peer review! (House of Lords joke.) Lord Monckton has the faintly parodic mien of many aristocrats, whereas the Greenpeace gal was a Nordic blond. If there were empty stools adjoining both parties at the Climate Conference bar, you’d head for hers before some carbon-credit travelling salesman swiped it. Big mistake. Monckton was the soul of affability, gently suggesting places where she could check out the data. She, by contrast, seemed barely sentient, clinging to rote emotionalism and impervious to reason, data, facts, inquiry.

As I always say, if you’re 30 there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school after a lifetime of eco-brainwashing, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. None. After the leaked data from East Anglia revealed that Dr. Phil Jones (privately) conceded this point, Tim Flannery, one of the A-list warm-mongers in Copenhagen, owned up to it on Aussie TV, too. Yet, when I reprised the line in this space a couple of weeks back, thinking it was now safe for polite society, I was besieged by the usual “YOU LIE!!!!!!!” emails angrily denouncing me for failing to explain that the cooling trend of the oughts is in fact merely a blip in the long-term warming trend of the nineties.

Well, maybe. Then again, perhaps the warming trend of the nineties is merely a blip in the long-term ice age trend of the early seventies. I doubt many of my caps-lock emailers are aware of the formerly imminent ice age. It was in Newsweek and the New York Times, and it produced the occasional bestseller. But, unlike today’s carbon panic, it wasn’t everywhere; it wasn’t, in every sense, the air that we breathe. Unlike Al Gore’s wretched movie, it wasn’t taught in schools. TV networks did not broadcast during children’s time apocalyptic public service announcements that in any other circumstance would constitute child abuse. Unlike today, where incoming mayors announce that as their first act in office they’re banning bottled water from council meetings, ostentatious displays of piety were not ubiquitous. It was not a universal pretext for recoiling from progress: back in the seventies, upscale municipalities that now obsess about emissions standards of hot-air dryers were busy banning garden clotheslines on aesthetic grounds. There were no fortunes to be made from government grants for bogus “renewable energy” projects. Unlike Al Gore, carbon billionaire, nobody got rich peddling ice offsets.

The man with the sandwich board announcing the end of the world on Jan. 7 is usually unfazed when he wakes up on the morning of Jan. 8. He realigns the runes, repaints the sign, and reschedules Armageddon for May 23. The rest of us, on the other hand, scoff.

But not with this crowd. First it was the new ice age. Then it became global warming. Now it’s “climate change.” If it’s hot, that’s climate change. If it’s cold, that’s climate change. If it’s 12° C and partly sunny with a 30 per cent chance of mild precipitation in the afternoon, you should probably pack emergency supplies and head for higher ground because global milding is rampaging out of control, and lack of climate change is, as every scientist knows, the defining proof of climate change.

Indeed, our response to climate change can itself cause climate change that manifests itself in lack of climate change. A couple of days back, the Guardian ran the following story:
“The hole in the earth’s ozone layer has shielded Antarctica from the worst effects of global warming until now.”

Remember the ozone layer? It was all the rage back in the old days. It was caused by spray-on deodorants, apparently. So we packed ’em in, and switched over to roll-on deodorants. And, because we forswore the sinful spraying of armpits, the hole began to heal. Which is tough on the Antarctic ice cap. Because the only reason it isn’t melting is because the ozone hole isn’t fully closed up. Once it is, more hot air will remain trapped and melt the ice. It may be time to start spraying your armpit hair again.

Why did “climate change” remain the boutique scare-story of a few specialists last time round, and gain global traction this time round? In the Spectator, Maurizio Morabito puts it this way:
“Is the problem with the general public, who cannot talk about climate except in doom-laden terms, and for whom the sky is the last animist god?”

That last part explains a lot. Forty years ago conventional religious belief was certainly in decline in what we once knew as Christendom, but the hole was not yet ozone-layer sized. Once the sea of faith had receded far from shore, the post-Christian West looked at what remained and found “Gaia.” Not long ago, in Burlington, Vt., I got into a somewhat heated discussion about global warming with a lady who accused me of ignoring “science.” She then drove away in a car with the bumper sticker “THE EARTH IS YOUR MOTHER.” In Quebec City for the Summit of the Americas in 2001, I sought a breather from the heady scent of Sûreté du Québec tear gas and idled away half an hour among a display of brassieres promoting “sustainable development.” One (a 54D, as I recall) read “THE EARTH IS MA MÈRE.” In flagrant breach of Quebec’s Bill 101, the francophone right cup was not twice the size of the anglophone left cup. If the earth is our mother, who are we to dictate to the goddess? As Lord Monckton pointed out to that Norwegian CO2-head, we’ve had climate change for four billion years. But now apparently there is an ideal state that Ma Mère has to be maintained in. A belief in a garden of Eden which man through sin has despoiled sounds familiar. But this time we get to pick. Not the Medieval Warm Period that causes the “scientific consensus” such problems, and not presumably the bucolic state the planet was in when Canada was 150 feet under, but some pristine condition somewhere in between.

When man was made in the image of God, he was fallen but redeemable. Gaia’s psychologically unhealthy progeny are merely irredeemable. Anti-humanism is everywhere, not least in the barely concealed admiration for China’s (demographically disastrous) “One Child” policy advanced by everyone from the National Post’s Diane Francis to Sir David Attenborough, the world’s leading telly naturalist but also a BBC exec who once long ago commissioned the great series The Ascent of Man. If Sir David’s any guide, the great thing about man’s ascent is it gives him a higher cliff to nosedive off.

Very few sciences could survive being embraced as a religion (and please note that environmentalism IS NOT a science.  It is an “ism” NOT an “ology” [look it up in the dictionary]).  Imagine the kind of engineering or math you’d get if it also had to function as a “faith tradition.” What’s also changed since the seventies is the nature of the UN and the transnational bureaucracies. Once it became obvious that “climate change” represents an almost boundless shakedown of functioning jurisdictions by dysfunctional basket cases, the die was cast. “Aid” is a discredited word these days and comes with too many strings attached. But eco-credits sluiced through an oil-for-food program on steroids offers splendid new opportunities for bulking up an ambitious dictator’s Swiss bank accounts.

And, because of this malign combination—corrupted science, ersatz religion, Third World opportunism—global warming took off in a way the old ice age never did. It would perhaps be too much to expect a generation of brainwashed schoolkids to shake off their brain-dead conformism. And so, between the anti-human left and an alliance of rapacious dictatorships, it now falls to a handful of economically expansive emerging nations—India, China, Brazil, a couple of others—to save the developed world from itself.

I don’t put a lot of faith in NBCs TODAY SHOW in being a “hard-hitting” news program, but Matt Lauer hits Napolitano with the obvious facts that the “system” failed no matter how much she tries to divert the blame.  When this overly soft news program sees the obvious failings, you know that the end is likely near.   Here’s to her and the others that should have known better to allow this known loose-cannon on any plane getting fired for incompetence.

By Mark Finkelstein
December 28, 2009 – 08:20 ET

It took a tough question from Matt Lauer, but after having laughably claimed that “the system worked,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has now conceded the obvious: that the security system that permitted Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board NWA 253 with explosives “failed miserably.”

On Today and in other interviews this morning, Napolitano attempted to use her own ignorance as a shield. Each time she was hit with a hard question, her response was to the effect “yeah, we’re wondering about that ourselves.” She also continued to point the finger back at George Bush, repeatedly mentioning that the security procedures in place were formulated under the Bush administration. Whatever happened to “change you can believe in”?

But back to Today, where Lauer laudably asked Napolitano the necessary question: how could she possibly have claimed, as she did yesterday, that the “system worked”?

MATT LAUER: You made a comment over the weekend and I want to call attention to that because a lot of people are disagreeing with it this morning. You talked about this incident aboard this Northwest flight and you said “when it came right down to it, the system worked.” A lot of people don’t think the system worked at all, that the only thing that prevented outright disaster was luck. Can you respond to that?

JANET NAPOLITANO: Sure, I think the comment is being taken out of context. What I’m saying is that once the incident occurred, moving forward, we were immediately able to notify the 128 flights in the air of protective measures to take, immediately able to notify law enforcement on the ground, airports both domestically, internationally, all carriers, all of that happening within 60 to 90 minutes, so –

LAUER: So you’re only talking about what happened after this man tried to ignite this explosive device on the plane.

NAPOLITANO: Indeed.

LAUER: You would then concede that the system prior to that, the system that’s supposed to prevent something like this from happening, failed miserably?

NAPOLITANO: It did. And that’s why we are asking a lot of the same questions I heard you asking before this interview. How did this individual get on the plane? Why wasn’t the explosive material detected? What do we need to do to change perhaps the rules that have been in place since 2006 for moving somebody from the generic database to more elevated status. All of that under review right now.

LAUER: So many man-hours, so much money, Madam Secretary, has gone into securing fliers in this country and around the world, and so let’s talk about it: how does a guy who’s on this general terror list, who then buys a one-way, trans-Atlantic ticket with cash, checks no luggage, a man whose own father has written a letter to authorities both in his own country and U.S. embassy authorities, saying he’s worried that his son has become more radicalized and might attempt some kind of a suicide mission. How is this guy not the perfect candidate for a strip search or a full-body scan?

NAPOLITANO: I’ve asked the same questions.

We’ve got another question: what is Janet Napolitano, head of a department that she now admits “failed miserably,” still doing in office?

Note: As part of her “it’s Bush’s fault” defense, on Morning Joe Napolitano mentioned that young Umar had been issued his US visa “in June, 2008,” i.e., during the Bush administration. OK, but that would have been before his father was frantically trying to alert the Obama admin that his son had apparently turned into a terrorist.

—Mark Finkelstein is a NewsBusters contributing editor and host of Right Angle. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net.