The NYT Tosses Sen. Menendez Under The Bus

There is a lot of smoke rising from the area around Sen. Bob Menendez of NJ, the man designated by Sen. Harry Reid to be the next Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Is there fire underlying it? A recent op-ed from the NYT suggests that there might be an inferno.

Allegations are that Menedez engaged in sex with underage Dominican prostitutes and that he accepted expensive gifts, all of which are related to his relationship with Florida eye surgeon Salomon Melgen, a man whose interests Menendez inappropriately championed with our government. We of course do not know definitively at this point whether any or all of the allegations are true, but in a rather amazing turn of events, the NYT editorial board has tossed Menendez under the bus in an op-ed calling for him to be denied the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And indeed, the op-ed looks like it could have been written by someone at the NRO:

. . . At issue are the curious dealings between Mr. Menendez and his close friend and benefactor Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida eye surgeon and major Democratic donor. The senator’s efforts to help Dr. Melgen, part-owner of a firm that had a long-dormant contract with the Dominican Republic to provide port security, revive that lucrative contract — deemed an exorbitant giveaway by business leaders and government officials there — were detailed in an article in The Times last week by Raymond Hernandez and Frances Robles. The contract’s dubious legitimacy and Dr. Melgen’s lack of experience in border security issues did not deter Mr. Menendez from pressing State and Commerce Department officials to insist that the contract be honored, including at a hearing in July of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee over which he presided.

Compounding the unseemliness, Senator Menendez’s help came as Dr. Melgen was in the process of making donations totaling $700,000 to Majority PAC, a Democratic “super PAC” set up by former aides to Mr. Reid. Majority PAC ended up shoveling $582,500 to Mr. Menendez’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Mr. Menendez’s interventions on Dr. Melgen’s behalf were not limited to port security. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Mr. Menendez personally raised concerns with top federal health officials in 2009 and again in 2012 about the fairness of their finding that Dr. Melgen had overbilled the government $8.9 million for care provided at his eye clinic. The Post also reported that Dr. Melgen invoked the senator’s name repeatedly to exert pressure on federal fraud investigators. Last week, F.B.I. agents raided Dr. Melgen’s offices in West Palm Beach and removed 30 boxes of documents and other material, but the focus of the inquiry is unclear. . . .

One suspects that there must be a lot of truth to the allegations for the NYT editorial board to toss a latino progressive Senator from a bluer than blue state under the bus. Normally, the left merely yawns and ignores it when one of their own engages in misconduct. I am left with the impression that the NYT is acting proactively here because they are convinced of the truth of the allegations and that the fallout from the scandal would be exponentially worse if it all comes out only after Menendez is appointed to a position of high power in the Senate democratic hierarchy.

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Guns, Equality, A Land Where "Thieves Rule The Night," & An Insane NYT "News Analysis" (Updated)

There is an old saying, God created man, Samuel Colt made them equal.

We saw the exercise in equality play out in the news just the other night when an intruder broke in on a woman and her two young children. They tried to hide from him in an attic crawl space. He sought them out. The woman had a .38 caliber revolver that she emptied into him, then escaped unharmed with her children. In another story in the news, a young woman in India and her boyfriend were on a bus, unarmed, when they were attacked by several men. The men beat the boyfriend, then gang raped and disemboweled the woman.

[Update: This from Instapundit - GOOD: Delhi Gang-Rape: Indian Women Stocking Up On Guns For Protection. God created man and woman. Col. Colt made them equal.]

Those are anecdotes. So what happens on a meta-scale when a nation is disarmed, and people are unequal to the criminal element? For that, we can compare the U.S. and the U.K.

In the U.K., gun ownership is virtually banned. Even the police force in the U.K. is, for the most part, unarmed. Raw figures show that the UK has a lower homicide rate than the U.S., 1.2 per 100,000 of population in the U.K. versus 4.8 in the U.S. But when it comes to violent crime overall, the UK is a much greater hotbed than the U.S., with 2,034 violent criminal incidents in the U.K. per 100,000 of population versus 486 in the U.S. An anecdote from a British police officer gives a chilling feel for the ramifications of a disarmed society - where the criminals are very often more powerful at the point of the crime than either the citizens or the police. This from the Police Inspector Blog:

An ATM raid is where a gang steals a digger, a flatbed truck and some old 4X4 vehicles. They then drive in convoy, at night, to an isolated bank or other ATM site, use the digger to smash the ATM out of the wall, load it on to the flatbed and ‘make off’ to a dump site.

At the dump site, which will be a field or a clearing in a wood somewhere, the kind of place they also use to burn the metal out of stolen cable, the ‘engineer’ will be waiting in another 4X4, ready to cut the ATM open and release the cash. The cash is then divided and the gang abandon all but the getaway vehicles and run for home.

This is a high value business. Some ATM’s have up to £1/4 million inside if they are ‘hit’ at the right time. Every county police officer knows where I am coming from with this. Here is the bad bit for us.

If an insomniac wandering about in the early hours sees such a raid and calls it in, we have to respond. When we eventually arrive, single crewed or if we are lucky, double crewed, if the offenders are still there or if we come across the convoy ‘making off’ we can expect to be met with extreme violence by at least eight hardened criminals. They are better armed than us and will ram our family saloon cars off the road in an instant.

If police officers are caught in the open they will be met with baseball bats, iron bars and firearms. They will also be heavily outnumbered. Even if we manage to get one of the counties very few police dogs to respond, the dogs can be stabbed or shot and the handlers beaten half to death. This has happened in Ruralshire. With our tiny numbers of police available for such a huge county, our pathetically underpowered vehicles and our uniquely unarmed status, the thieves rule this county at night now, not us.

It would seem that disarming the populace has the effect of making them game animals for the predators. And the same holds true for the police. It has the point of making the law abiding citizens unequal when it counts most, when their lives and liberty are on the line.

Equality is perhaps the greatest good - so the progs assure us. They demand equality for women, for minorities, some even for flora and fauna. You have to wonder why these calls for equality end completely when it comes to the ability of the average law abiding person to protect their lives and liberty?

Update: As we prepare for the upcoming Obama push to limit the availability of guns to law abiding Americans, the NYT continues their daily rhetorical support for such measure with a "news analysis" piece, More Guns = More Killing. Even for the wildly partisan NYT, this one should win an award for its over the top and under sourced claims.

The NYT notes that the NRA solution to Sandy Hook style massacres is to expand legal gun ownership among the law abiding and to put armed individuals in our schools. The Times then tries to make the point that more guns just means more killing by using the examples of Latin American countries, all with unstable governments, poor economies, many with massive problems of narco-terrorism, and several with left wing insurgencies, such as FARC. They are not quite relevant comparisons to the U.S..

The NYT also relies heavily on quotes from David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He makes the remarkable claim that “[t]here is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”

The NYT let's that statement stand, apparently unable to find anyone around their water cooler who might contest it. To assist the NYT on this, let's point out that one who would contest it would be professor and author John Lott, who has studied the correlation between gun ownership and violent crime and written extensively on the topic. This from an interview with Prof. Lott:

There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate—as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.

Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves.

Question: What is the basis for these numbers?

Lott: The analysis is based on data for all 3,054 counties in the United States during 18 years from 1977 to 1994.

Question: Your argument about criminals and deterrence doesn’t tell the whole story. Don’t statistics show that most people are killed by someone they know?

Lott: You are referring to the often-cited statistic that 58 percent of murder victims are killed by either relatives or acquaintances. However, what most people don’t understand is that this “acquaintance murder” number also includes gang members killing other gang members, drug buyers killing drug pushers, cabdrivers killed by customers they picked up for the first time, prostitutes and their clients, and so on. “Acquaintance” covers a wide range of relationships. The vast majority of murders are not committed by previously law-abiding citizens. Ninety percent of adult murderers have had criminal records as adults.

Question: But how about children? In March of this year [1998] four children and a teacher were killed by two school boys in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Won’t tragedies like this increase if more people are allowed to carry guns? Shouldn’t this be taken into consideration before making gun ownership laws more lenient?

Lott: The horrific shooting in Arkansas occurred in one of the few places where having guns was already illegal. These laws risk creating situations in which the good guys cannot defend themselves from the bad ones. I have studied multiple victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1995. These were incidents in which at least two or more people were killed and or injured in a public place; in order to focus on the type of shooting seen in Arkansas, shootings that were the byproduct of another crime, such as robbery, were excluded. The effect of “shall-issue” laws on these crimes has been dramatic. When states passed these laws, the number of multiple-victim shootings declined by 84 percent. Deaths from these shootings plummeted on average by 90 percent, and injuries by 82 percent. . . .

Question: Violence is often directed at women. Won’t more guns put more women at risk?

Lott: Murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry concealed handguns, but a gun represents a much larger change in a woman’s ability to defend herself than it does for a man. An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to 4 times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men.

The NYT brings up Australia as proof that gun bans are effective.

After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Before then, Australia had averaged one mass shooting a year. Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent, and there have been no mass killings, said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.

They don't quite tell the whole story. The homicide rate in Australia, low in 1996 at 1.9, increased in the three years after their gun ban before dropping to 1.3 in 2007. Regardless, overall, violent crime in Australia has exploded since gun control was imposed, with the sum of violent crime, including sexual assaults, robberies and assaults, increasing about 20% in just 12 years.

In comparison, the violent crime rate in the U.S. has fallen precipitously in the same time frame:

Indeed, it would seem Australia is going through much the same experience as Britain, with a fairly low homicide rate, but a disarmed populace increasingly suffering at the hands of violent criminals who hold the upper hand at the point of their crimes. When "thieves rule this country at night," that is not a society in which I would like to live. Nor would most of the NYT's employees, I would imagine, were the violence ever to be directed into their fantasy world.

Back to the article. The NYT writes:

“To put people with guns who are not accountable or trained in places where there are lots of innocent people is just dangerous,” Ms. Peters said, noting that lethal force is used to deter minor crimes like shoplifting. . . .

There are a number of responses to this. The NYT provides zero facts to justify Ms. Peters bald assertion. According to Dr. Lott, statistically, the degree at which civilians with gun permits criminally misuse their weapons is very low, and indeed, no higher or lower than that level of misuse among trained police officers. Moreover, according to at least one retired LAPD detective, it is quite likely that gun permit holders are actually more experienced with their weapons than the average police officer. This bald claim by Ms. Peters is just pure arrogance combined with a mistrust of the unwashed masses.

Lastly, there is this gem from the NYT.

“If you’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ world, where criminals have free rein and there’s no government to stop them, then I’d want to be armed,” said Dr. Hemenway of Harvard. “But we’re not in that circumstance. We’re a developed, stable country.”

The canard in Dr. Hemenway's analysis is glaring. Criminals will always have "free reign" for a period of time when a crime is being committed - at least if the intended victims are unarmed or otherwise unable to mount an effective defense. Police respond after the fact, when the criminal's carnage has either been done or been stopped. For example:

1. Sandy Hook Elementary School was a "gun free zone" where the teachers and staff were prevented by law from carrying concealed weapons. Once the shooter gained access to the school, police were notified. It took police twenty minutes to arrive, during which time the shooter killed 26 children and teachers.

2. In Texas, two men attempted a home invasion. Inside the home were a teen age boy and his young sister. The boy retrieved his father's AR15 and proceeded to shoot the criminals, protecting his life and the life of his sister. Police arrived in time to take the suspects to the hospital.

3. In Georgia, a home invasion ended when a woman, defending herself and her two small children, shot her assailant five times. Police arrived in time to take the suspect to the hospital.

4. In Texas, during the Luby Cafeteria Massacre that claimed the lives of 23 people, a diner at the cafeteria who had left her weapon in her car in order to comply with Texas gun control laws at the time, testified that she could easily have stopped the massacre had she had her weapon in her purse. Police response time was about 15 minutes.

5. In Connecticut, during a home invasion by two men, the husband, Dr. Petit, was beaten and put into the basement. There were no guns available to Petit or his family. Over the next seven plus hours, Dr. Petit's wife was strangled and their two daughters, one 11, the other 17, were tied to their beds and raped. Near the end of the ordeal, Dr. Petit was able to free himself and went to his neighbor's house to call the police. The police arrived, set up a perimeter, then stood in place for nearly half an hour, waiting for more back up. During that half hour, the criminals poured gasoline over the two daughters - both still alive - then set them on fire.

The lessons of the above anecdotes are blatantly clear. If you have a weapon, you can defend yourself, your family and others. If you are disarmed by law or choice, then you are wholly at the mercy of criminals. And as the above scenarios makes clear, while we may not live in a "Mad Max" country, there is nothing to keep "Mad Max" from visiting you or your loved ones. Dr. Hemenway has apparently been lucky in his life to date, but that has not been because he has any concept for the reality of crime, violence or self defense.

Related Posts:

- Boy Uses AR15 To Stop A Home Invasion

- Larry Correia's Brilliant Essay On Guns, Gun Control & Concealed Carry

- Thoughts On Gun Control From The Late Paul Harvey

- The Futility Of An Assault Weapons Ban As An Answer To Sandy Hook

- When Seconds Counted At Sandy Hook, Police Were Twenty Minutes Away

- St. Louis Police Chief Calls for Arming School Personnel

- John Fund essay on Mass Murders, Gun Control & Our Treatment of Mental Illness

- Luby Cafeteria Massacre, Testimony of Suzanna Hupp, Texas School District Authorizes Concealed Carry For Its Schools

- Reynolds On Gun Free Zones, The Left's Mistrust Of Armed Private Citizens, & Our Problematic Mental Health Laws

Linked at Larwyn's Linx, Nice Deb and the Watcher's Council. Thanks.

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NYT Editorial On The Cornball Oreo Token House Negro Tim Scott

Is it time for some good old fashioned violence yet? Is it time to start getting attention by meeting false charges of racism with fists and feet? That is my conundrum. I doubt many conservatives will agree with me, but I think that it is.

I am livid at this point of being falsely accused of racism as a conservative, and in equal measure, I am infuriated at the left's treatment of any minority who dare not tow the progressive line. And there is no more scurrilous example of that than a recent NYT editorial by Univ. of Penn. political science Prof. (tenured, no doubt) Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Reed uses his poison pen to comment on the decision of South Carolina's first female governor - and the nation's first Indian American governor - Nikki Haley's decision to appoint black Republican Rep. Tim Scott to take over the Senate seat of tea party hero Jim DeMint. Sen. DeMint lobbied for the appointment of Scott because both share the same conservative ideology. Scott, a self made man and a darling of the tea party, was elected to Congress in a majority white district in SC over two white opponents, one of whom was the son of former SC Senator, Strom Thurmond.

According to Reed, while the appointment of Scott "seemed like another milestone for African-Americans," the reality is that "modern black Republicans" are "more tokens than signs of progress." As Reed later makes explicit, all minority conservatives, like Gov. Nikki Haley herself, were elected simply because "Republicans don’t want to have to think of themselves, or be thought of by others, as racist." Thus, when a Republican pulls the lever for a minority it is merely a psychological defense mechanism to hide their own rampant racism from themselves. And indeed, Prof Reed later asserts that the Tea Party itself is a cauldron of "thinly veiled racism."

All of which leads to the question, just how in the world does Prof. Reed define "racism?" He has an incredibly simple litmus test, one that has nothing to do with intolerance based in whole or part on the melanin content of one's skin - you know, actual racism. Instead, Prof. Reed defines racism as failing to support progressive policies nominally labeled as helping blacks. This is unconscionable.

The real travesty, of course, is that the left has been able to so mislead blacks with their false claims of racism. In any rational world, every single black American would have pulled the lever against Obama, a President who has overseen the single greatest economic decimation of blacks since WWII. They would not vote for a party that puts teachers union interests far ahead of the education of their children. They would not vote for a party whose commitment to the welfare state has done nothing positive for blacks, and indeed, has been one of the prime drivers in tearing apart the black family unit. They would not vote for a party that promises them a few handouts, but does not promise them jobs and advancement. The plight of far too many blacks in America today is an inexcusable and unnecessary tragedy.

A last special mention needs to be made of Prof. Reed's incredibly intellectually dishonest effort to suggest that South Carolina is itself a hotbed of racism. Reed notes that the state is (present tense) "home to white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, Preston S. Brooks, Ben Tillman and Strom Thurmond." That is beyond the pale. Calhoun, Brooks and Preston were Democrats who lived and died over a century ago. The late Strom Thurmond was a Senator who started his career as a segregationist Democrat before altering his view of race in Ameica post-1970. This would be akin to me noting that the left is the ideological home of Marx, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, in addition to noting that the last member of both the KKK and the U.S. Senate was Democrat WV Senator Robert Byrd. Arguably, none of those individuals define the left in the U.S. today, just as none of the individuals Reed sites mean that racism is rampant in SC today. Prof. Reed is simply despicable.

It really is time to stop accepting these false and scurrilous charges of racism. It is past time to meet such charges with a measured, rational response. It should be obvious that, after 50 years of the left using this tactic to effectively distort our politics, such responses are useless. It is time to treat such charges the same way I would expect blacks to react at being called "niggers." It should be met with seething anger and, where appropriate, violence. C'mon, who wouldn't want to see Prof. Reed on his knees cupping his recently kicked balls, or even better, Chris Matthews trying to clean his bloody nose and dust himself off as he got up off the floor.

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The Left's Constitutional Wish List

Do the left wing in our country see our Constitution as an archaic obstacle to their goals? The recent evidence certainly points to it. The question then becomes, if the left could wage a magic wand, with what would they replace our Constitution?

It was about two years ago that the left's "go to guy" for policy issues, Ezra Klein, complained about the Constitution, that "the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago."  The left has been working through the Courts to work fundamental changes to the Constitution for 50 years, creating new rights out of whole cloth in many instances while, in other areas of  enumerated rights, limiting them. As to the latter, religion and property rights have been the arenas of the most judicial activism.

Thus it was no surprise when a sitting left wing Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, should opine that Egypt should not look to the U.S. Constitution as a model, but rather to South Africa's Constitution, as it "embrace[s] basic human rights . . . [and] an independent judiciary." Nor is it surprising to see the New York Times weigh in with an editorial, suggesting that our Constitution has many faults. "The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards," and the Constitution is "difficult to amend." I add as a comment here that it is not difficult to amend our Constitution if you are a federal judge who wants to see their own personal policy choices made into Constitutional law. At any rate, the NYT author then launches into the crux of the left wing criticism of our Constitution:

Americans recognize rights not widely protected, including ones to a speedy and public trial, and are outliers in prohibiting government establishment of religion. But the Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care.

It has its idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as the Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms."

As to a right to travel and a presumption of innocence, the NYT criticism is ridiculous.  Those have been fundamental rights recognized by our Courts since the time of our founding.  Likewise, the left  uniformly hates the thought of an armed populace.  But the real nub of the NYT criticism is that our Constitution does not make us all wards of the state by entitling us all to "food, education and welfare."    

 The South African Constitution so beloved of Justice Ginsburg goes further than merely "food, education and welfare."  It includes:

-  a right to housing;
-  makes affirmative action Constitutional;
-  has a provision requiring regulation of hate speech;
-  provides a right of all workers to unionize and strike;
-  provides a right to a clean environment;
-  allows property to be expropriated not merely for a public purpose, but also "in the public interest;
-  provides an extensive children's bill of rights; and finally,
-  it contains a clause that allows the government to limit the above rights as it deems necessary.

In short it is a leftie's wet dream.  It provides cradle to grave welfare, extensive unionization, it limits property rights, allows for government thought control under the auspices of hate speech, and finally, contains a catch all provision that allows the government to limit all of the above rights.  It is a Constitution that requires big government, massive taxation to provide  the welfare state, and that allows religious freedom on one hand but limits it on the other through hate speech laws and by requiring the state to assume functions that are traditionally charitable.  And on top of that, the catch all provision would allow the government expansive power to drive a gaping hole through every one of the rights.

If you want to see where the left would lead our nation, Ginsburg and the NYT are not exactly hiding the ball.  They would take us from a nation of limited government to a socialist nation with an expansive government.  Unfortunately, through judicial activisim, they are well on the way to achieving their goal.  It is a process that, as Newt Gingrich and Andrew McCarthy point out, must end.

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NYT's Curious Definition Of "Hope"

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in November, 315,000 people "dropped out of the labor force," while only 130,000 new jobs were added.  In other words, the jobs situation took yet another significant turn for the worse.  Yet in the unique math practiced by today's BLS - not accounting for those who have dropped out of the labor force in the U-3 unemployment number - that means the our nation's job situation actually improved, on paper only of course.  The reality is that we still have "13 million unemployed workers, whose periods of unemployment averaged an all-time high of 40.9 weeks" and that number continues to grow, far outpacing job creation.  Nonetheless, the BLS calculates that the unemployment rate dropped from 9% to 8.6% in November, thus leading the New York Times to trumpet:

Signs of Hope in Jobs Report; Unemployment Drops to 8.6%

Many more signs of hope like that and our nation will be completely wrecked. 


Update:  The broader unemployment number, U-6, which includes the underemployed, is at a staggering 15.6%.


Rush Limbaugh has a colorful rant dealing with both the fraud in the unemployment number and the reaction of the drive-by media to the 8.6% number.  Meanwhile, TIME magazine's Stephen Gandell suggests that this drop below 9% could be a "game changer," a sure sign of a strengthening economy.  That level of intellectual dishonesty is stomach churning.


That said, not all left of center pundits are intellectually dishonest.  My hats off to The New Republic for publishing this Brookings Institution analysis of the current job situation:

Three points are worthy of note.

First: Despite the growth of the working-age population over the past four years, the labor force (roughly, the sum of those employed plus job-seekers) has not expanded. For various reasons, more and more Americans have been dropping out of the labor force. If Americans of working age were participating in the labor force at the same rate as they were at the onset of the recession, the labor force would be nearly 5 million people larger, and unemployment would be significantly worse in both absolute and percentage terms.

Second: Despite the modest economic recovery since the recession ended in mid-2009, total employment remains more than 5.5 million below the level of 2007 and about 1.6 million below where it was when President Obama took office.

Third: To regain full employment (5 percent, which happens to be the same as the level when the recession began) with the pre-recessionary labor force participation rate, we would need 150.7 million jobs—10.1 million more than we have today. That’s a reasonable measure of the hole we’re still in, two and a half years since the official end of the recession.

The American people are unlikely to cheer up about the economy until we get appreciably closer to the top of the hole.

This graph, from Doug Ross, shows the depth of unemployment during this recession in comparison to all of the other recessions since WWII:

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Newt, The NYT, & The Presidential Scarlet Letter

Newt Gingrich is poised to announce his bid for the Presidency, likely today. And as to be fully expected, this event is celebrated in the pages of the NYT with a lengthy column, though it is a column that seems drawn in inspiration from the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's magnum opus, The Scarlet Letter. Titling their first real hit job of the 2012 Presidential season "Gingrich Set to Run, With Wife in Central Role," the NYT revels in . . . . well, you guess. Is it, (A), a news worthy analysis of what makes Newt a viable candidate to challenge Obama? Or is it (B), a lengthy walk down the memory lane of Newt's marital infidelities? For the answer, let's go to the opening paragraphs of the NYT announcement of Newt's presidential aspirations:

Callista Bisek’s friends from rural Wisconsin were stunned when, well over a decade ago, she confided that she was secretly dating an older, married man: Newt Gingrich.

Still in her 20s when they met, Ms. Bisek had been raised in a town of 1,500, the only child of a meat packer and a secretary. A churchgoing Roman Catholic, she had attended a Lutheran college where she practiced piano five hours a day. “Is this the wisest course for you to be taking?” Karen Olson, her best friend, recalled asking. . . .

I think this piece may be even too low brow for the Enquirer. They at least have some journalistic standards. How long before this left wing rag finally goes into bankruptcy?

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Academia, Left-Wing Bias & The Newest Victim Class

John Tierney, writing in the Science section of the NYT, has made a discovery of immense proportions. The newest left-wing victim class among card carrying social scientists is . . . . conservatives. Heh. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to play my victim card to cut short the next leftie diatribe. "Hey, Jesse Jackson, shut up you hate spewing conservativphobe!!!"

This from Mr. Tierney at the NYT:

Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. . . .

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Tierney points out that the left vastly outnumber conservaives throughout much of academia - "six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences." In the social sciences though, those numbers become exponentially more lopsided. So how did this come about and what is the net effect:

In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. . . .

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. . . . . After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” . . .

So what is the perscription of Dr. Haidt to solving this conundrum: Step one, all social psychologists should start reading the National Review and Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.” Fair enough, I concur. Step two, "a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020." Lolll. Spare me. At this point, I doubt that "affirmative action" is an effective way to cure anything. The real cures are, one, to punish those in the community that try to silence alternative thought, as happened with Larry Summers or Patrick Moynihan, by playing the victim card. Two is to require researchers to look below the numbers to see if there is actual '-ism' at work in any numerical disparities. The rest will take care of itself, particularly as the "race card" loses all of its legitimacy in America - and that is what I believe is happening.

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Krugman Tries to Save Face

Ed Driscoll, at PJM, wonders if Paul Krugman has not, after the past week, become a millstone around the neck of the NYT and the left. Given his column of today, it would seem that Krugman himself might be getting that message.

For the last six days, the left in general, and Paul Krugman in particular, has experienced a massive push back against the "blood libel" Krugman initiated when he claimed, iu the immediate aftermath of the mass murder in Arizona and in the total absence of any supporting facts, that the right created the climate of hate that drove the mass murder. Today, in his column, this ethically challenged hyper-partisans beats a retreat, still vaguely implying the same about the right, but couching it in a manner that is far less caustic. He appends his implications as an ad hominem to the conclusion of his column, wherein he divides America into two warring camps - those who support the welfare state and those who do not - with the latter being utterly heartless beings willing to see the poor starve. He concludes:

Right now, each side in that debate [about the direction of our country] passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.

This is a face saving - and perhaps job saving - effort if there ever was one. Krugman is trying to morph his libelous accusations into a general condemnation of the current political atmosphere. It won't work. We will have to wait and see, but I think Krugman has done tremendous damage to the progressive brand, at least among any of those in the middle who have been paying any attention.

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Palin & A Surreal MSM Narrative

For the past several days, the right have been savaged in the media with what is accurately described as a blood libel - a false assertion that one is responsible for murder. And in particular, no one on the right has been so savaged as Sarah Palin. So if anyone has a right to respond and push back against this morally bankrupt attempt by the left to delegitimize and silence conservative speech in America, it is and was Sarah Palin.

And she did so yesterday morning. After making a statement of condolences for the dead and injured, Palin stated that speech by the right was not responsible for mass murder in Arizona and that, "within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel."

This has lit a fire under the already energized MSM hacks:

ABC opined that "instead of trying to get beyond this controversy, Palin has put herself back in the middle of it" and that "Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way to become part of the story." Could those statements be anymore surreal. Palin didn't insert herself into the middle of the story, nor did she by her acts "become part of the story." All of that was forced on her by a rabid, morally bankrupt left-wing media. ABC is turning this on its head with a none too veiled criticism of her for having the temerity of defending herself.

CBS's treatment was by far and away the most outrageous, with Don Farber, EDITOR IN CHIEF of CBS News, writing a libelous screed that ends with him accusing Palin of playing the "victim card." Faber is apparently signalling his desire to take over at MSNBC if a slot opens up.

Farber starts by stipulating that which we now know, that Loughner was insane and was not motivated by Sarah Palin or anyone else on the right to commit murder. Then Farber brushes it off as meaningless - in other words, asking the reader not to confuse the issue by worrying about the facts:

Regardless of what motivated Loughner to pull the trigger, the tragedy in Tucson has put the tone of political discourse, and those who tend to inflame more than inform, in the spotlight."

After this non-sequitur, Faber focuses fully on the utterly discredited meme that Palin's use of crosshairs on a campaign map has, in and of itself, taken political discourse in America to a heretofore unseen level of militancy, concluding:

But Palin doesn't seem to think that there are any negative consequences associated with her campaign words and images."

Precisely what those consequences are, Faber never says, but he does his level best to imply that one of those consequences was Loughner's mass murder. Seizing on her defense, that the left is involved in a blood libel against her and the right, Faber states:

Blood libel is the false accusation, perhaps originating in the 12th century, that Jews murder children to use their blood for religious rituals and holidays. Palin appears to be appropriating the term to indicate that she is a victim, as a result of some groups and individuals claiming that her political rhetoric contributed to the actions of the deranged, lone gunman.

But the real victims are Rep. Giffords and the others who were wounded or killed, not Palin, . . .

Could Faber be more scurrilous, insinuating both that Palin has not been tarred with the tsunami of accusations against her and that she is trying to callously make of herself a victim on par with those shot and wounded. This is Pravda territory. That this hyper-partisan, intellectually dishonest joker is the senior editor for CBS News should indeed give everyone pause.

NBC, for its part, had Anderea Mitchell declare Palin "ignorant" for using the term "blood libel," as have many others. Why it is "ignorant" Mitchell does not explain. But indeed, the first person to call the acts of the left concerning this mass murder a "blood libel" was no one less than Robert Avrech, the deeply religious Jewish award winning screen writer, on his blog, Seraphic Secret. Moreover, famed Jewish lawyer and Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz, when asked for an opinion, stated that he found Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" wholly appropriate in this context.

And in a sign, for those who believed the President's oh so careful phrasing in his speech last night was telling those on the left to stop the blood libel, the NYT apparently interpreted his speech differently, writing today:

The president’s words were an important contrast to the ugliness that continues to swirl in some parts of the country. The accusation by Sarah Palin that “journalists and pundits” had committed a “blood libel” when they raised questions about overheated rhetoric was especially disturbing, given the grave meaning of that phrase in the history of the Jewish people.

Note what the NYT is doing here, turning reality on its head. Seraphic Secret spoke to this well worn technique of the left the other day, preemptively accusing one's opponent of committing the sins of which the accuser is guilty. These people are deeply unethical. And Politico's take on this is no better than the NYT.

And in a final exclamation point to this surreal media feeding frenzy, there was this from ABC News this morning:

This morning on “Good Morning America,” ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield sat down with Zach Osler, a high school friend of Jared Loughner, the suspect in the Tucson massacre.

Osler says his friend wasn’t shooting at people, “he was shooting at the world.” Regarding the high-pitched talk radio and cable news political rhetoric, Osler says his friend didn’t even watch the news.

He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right.

Facts are fickle things for the left.

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Krauthammer: "The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?"

Charles Krauthammer, in a former life, Chief Resident in Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, makes a rare Wednesday appearance in the Washington Post to address the insanity at work in Arizona, and the transparent political gambit using the dead and injured coming out of New York and Washington. Given his perspective both as a former psychiatrist and now, as perhaps the most astute political observer of our time, I quote him in full on this issue.

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class "I sit by the door with my purse handy" so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.

Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner's fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

I do not think Krugman or any of the others on the left are delusional. They - Krugman, the NYT, Moulitas, Rep. Clyburn and others on the left - seized on this mass murder while the blood of the innocents was still wet on the ground in a transparent effort to delegitimize their opposition. It is so transparent and so outrageous, so outside the bounds of legitimate political discourse - or as WSJ's John Fund puts it, crossing a moral line - that if there is any cosmic justice in the world, this will rebound against them.

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Hey, NYT & Paul Krugman, About All That Violent Hate Speech . . .

Just One Minute may just have the single best example of the hypocrisy of the left's campaign to tar the right with responsibility for Jared Loughner's mass murder in Arizona:

[This from] the voted-out Rep. Kanjorski (D, PA) last fall:

"Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him [Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for Florida governor] and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks."

And as Tom goes to point out, this same person who called for the murder of a Republican candidate for governor now appears today as a guest columnist in the NYT pontificating about the need for civility in our political discourse because of "how easily political differences can degenerate into violence."

The cherry on top of this cake of hypocrisy comes when you remember that Paul Krugman, the man who, along with his employer, the NYT, are leading the charge to blame the right for the the acts of Jared Loughner, said in a NYT op-ed the other day:

[T]here isn’t any place [in our democracy] for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized.

No, NYT, no, Paul Krugman, it's not hard to imagine at all. One merely need take the briefest look at the facts over the past ten years.

On a related note, this from Instapundit:

Mark Halperin, last seen musing that what Obama needed was a “horrendous act of violence” that would save his Presidency, is now advising people on the right that they should turn the other cheek when falsely accused of murder after the hoped-for “horrendous act of violence” occurred. To avoid “escalation,” don’t y’know.

Bull. Now Halperin is throwing bible quotes at us to try and stamp down the backlash against the left for this scurrilous attack. Perhaps he and his commrades should have read the rest of the bible before engaging in this outrageous attack. Proverbs 19:5 - "A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape."

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Traitors & Villains

There are many inherent conflicts in our nation between the right of freedom of speech and the right of our nation to keep classified material out of the public eye. It is a question of what newspapers - or in the case of Jullian Assange, websites - have a right to publish and what we as a nation have a right to demand be kept from disclosure.

Some calls are easy. If the material concerns indisputable wrong doing, such as the Mai-Lai massacre in Vietnam, then its exposure is warranted. The publication of the Pentagon Papers against which Nixon fought so vociferously gave a window into how our political class got us into the Vietnam - but it revealed no real secrets. While its publication caused an uproar, virtually all of the information divulged was simply historical. But then there was Phillip Agee, once a CIA Officer and possible Cuban/KGB double agent, who published the names of undercover CIA officers in 1978. That resulted in the passage of a law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

But with Wikileaks, we are into an entirely new class of leaks. Someone in the military with a top-secret clearance, during time of war, leaked over 100,000 classified communications directly relating to the war. They passed the information to Jullian Assange who has since then published the vast majority of the documents in coordination with the New York Times (of course) Der Spiegel and The Guardian. What possible justification could there be for this massive security breach?

By all accounts, the information contained in the documents contains no new revelations. We have known for a long time that the war was not going well, that Pakistan has been a schizophrenic partner, and that Iran has been involved in the war in support of the Taliban. Assange claims that there is proof of war crimes contained in the documents though fails to point out any particular instance. This seems the penultimate exercise in throwing mud against the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

Some consequences of this massive release of our military communications in the Afghan theatre are blatantly obvious. Over the long term, the information will significantly harm our military. It provides all of our potential enemies - the Taliban and al Qaeda included - what ex CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden has called a "priceless" treasure trove of information on our methods, sources and tactics. But the most immediate damage it will do is expose hundreds of Afghans identified in the documents as people who have cooperated with American forces. These individuals now face the danger of severe reprisals, including torture and murder of them and their families. The secondary effect will be to make it much harder for our military to solicit cooperation from Afghans. This has the potential to significantly degrade our war effort and to get a lot of people killed.

All of these effects were completely foreseeable as soon as it was learned that Assange held over 100,000 classified communications from the Afghan theatre. Yet it now appears that the White House did not even object to their publication. According to Richard Fernandez,

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, explaining that the White House didn’t try to stop the publication said he met with reporters from the New York Times and sent a message through its reporters to Assange asking that he redact information in the documents that could harm US military personnel. As for the Afghans? Well what about them? Wikileaks made its pathetic effort to sanitize the data didn’t they? And if it was good for the Times and Gibbs, why shouldn’t Assange have concluded it was good enough period?

Simply put, this was an act of treason by the person who passed this information to Assange and it is an act of espionage by Assange to publish this information. Both the leaker and Assange should be shot. Unfortunately, given the First Amendment protections, it is likely Assange, at least, will never face reprisals from the U.S. government. It is a travesty.

That said, I wonder if there is any reason why the Afghans named in the documents released by Assange - and who now face torture and murder because of Assange - could not bring civil law suits in America against Assange and everyone involved in the ownership of the Wiki brand. If they cannot be shot, they should at least be reduced to a lifetime of penury.

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Really Misleading Journalism

The NYT's Brian Stetler has crafted perhaps the most misleading piece of agenda journalism I have seen in years - which is saying quite a lot. This left wing nut job should get an award for use of innuendo and half truths while throwing out the race card at Fox News. His piece, "When Race Is the Issue, Misleading Coverage Sets Off an Uproar." The picture appearing below this headline:



What an utter ass. Megayn Kelly at Fox, whose sin for the left is her refusal to ignore and allow to fade away the accusations that the Dept. of Justice is using race to decide which laws it will enforce, is actually only a small part Stelter's charge that Fox is a racist network. How her coverage has been misleading, Stelter never really tells us. That said, Stetler's main effort is to tie Fox News into the Shirley Sherrod affair, utterly refusing to acknowledge that Fox News Network never once mentioned Sherrod prior to her being slimed by the NAACP and fired by the Dept. of Agriculture. At any rate, I could spend hours fisking this one - but I just don't have the time to climb down into the gutter at the moment. You read it and you decide.

As an aside, Powerline has noted that the NYT has finally run a limited correction to its frequent sliming of the Tea Party organizations for the objectively false claim that some of its members yelled racial epitaths at members of the Congressional Black Caucus in March during the hearings on Obamacare. Someone needs to tell that to Stelter.

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The NYT Finally Addresses The Obama Administration - GM Fraud

I posted here on the fraud being jointly perpetrated by GM and the White House as regards GM early repayment of its government loan. Touted by both GM and the White House as proof of GM's profitability and responsibility, they failed to note that the repayment was accomplished using TARP funds. The Bush administration would have been roasted to a smoking husk over this in the MSM had his administration engaged in such a blatant fraud. Nonetheless, as with most things involving the left, it has been virtually ignored by the left. Today, weeks after the story broke, the NYT has posted an article addressing the fraud:

. . . Truth seekers the nation over . . . are indebted to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who in recent days uncovered what he called a government-enabled “TARP money shuffle.” It relates to General Motors, which on April 21 paid the balance of its $6.7 billion loan under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

G.M. trumpeted its escape from the program as evidence that it had turned the corner in its operations. “G.M. is able to repay the taxpayers in full, with interest, ahead of schedule, because more customers are buying vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu and Buick LaCrosse,” boasted Edward E. Whitacre Jr., its chief executive.

G.M. also crowed about its loan repayment in a national television ad and the United States Treasury also marked the moment with a press release: “We are encouraged that G.M. has repaid its debt well ahead of schedule and confident that the company is on a strong path to viability,” said Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary.

Taxpayers are naturally eager for news about bailout repayments. But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.

Neil M. Barofsky, the inspector general overseeing the troubled asset program, revealed this detail when he spoke before the Senate Finance Committee on April 20.

“So it’s good news in that they’re reducing their debt,” Mr. Barofsky said of G.M. But he went on to note that G.M. was using other taxpayer money to make the loan repayment, according to the transcript of his testimony.

Armed with this information, Mr. Grassley fired off a letter to Mr. Geithner on April 22, asking for details of the transaction. “I am concerned ... that this announcement is not what it seems,” he wrote. “In fact, it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle.”

Mr. Grassley heard back from the Treasury last Tuesday. Herbert M. Allison Jr., assistant secretary for financial stability, confirmed that the money G.M. used to repay its bailout loan had come from a taxpayer-financed escrow account held for the automaker at the Treasury.

Emphasizing that the cash in the account was “the property of G.M.,” Mr. Allison said that the department had approved the company’s use of the money to retire the original debt because it was “consistent with Treasury’s goal of recovering funds for the taxpayer and exiting TARP investments as soon as practicable.”

It’s certainly understandable that G.M. would want to spin its repayment as proof of improving operations. But Mr. Grassley said he was troubled that the Treasury went along with the public relations campaign and didn’t spell out how the loan was retired.

“The public would know nothing about the TARP escrow money being the source of the supposed repayment from simply watching G.M.’s TV commercials or reading Treasury’s press release,” Mr. Grassley said in a speech on the Senate floor last Wednesday, saying that “many billions” of federal dollars remained invested in G.M.

“Much of it will never be repaid,” Mr. Grassley added. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that taxpayers will lose around $30 billion on G.M.”

(Taxpayers still own $2.1 billion in preferred stock of G.M. and almost 61 percent of its common equity.) . . .

Of course, there is much joy in Mudville when a recipient of government aid repays its obligations. And it is also natural that the administration is keenly interested in reassuring taxpayers that losses on their bailout billions will be smaller than expected. Still, employing spin and selective disclosure is no way to raise taxpayers’ trust in our nation’s leadership. . . .

I pointed out in my initial post that this fraud and collusion likely fell afoul of securities regulations. And today, Hot Air and Powerline conclude similarly. This is more than a bad act - it is a potentialy criminal scandal. It is certainly a scandal deserving of far more than a buried article in the business section of the NYT, though that is at least a small start.

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Meteorologists Attack Global Warming, NYT Recommends Reeducation Camps

Meteorologist Joe Bistrardi, a vocal and articulate critic of antrhopogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW), has done a recent video (see here - unfortunately cannot embed it) wherein he points to a fundamental disconnect between Goddard's map showing massive warming in the polar regions this past winter while other measurments show a significant rise in polar sea ice. As Bastardi points out, those two events are mutually exclusive and, thus, the people at Goddard are making adjustments to the polar temperature data that logically cannot be true.

That leads in to a NYT article today, Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming. The NYT admits that there may not be quite a consensus on anthropogenic global warming [AGW], particularly among meteorologists, a very significant number of whom openly describe AGW as a "scam." That said, the NYT does nothing to hide its own bias, and in the end, quotes from several anthropogenic global warming [AGW] proponents who assure us that it is all a simple case of misunderstanding, nothing that a few months in reeducation camps for dissident meteorologists won't solve.

This from the NYT:

The debate over global warming has created . . . tensions between two groups that might be expected to agree on the issue: climate scientists and meteorologists, especially those who serve as television weather forecasters.

Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns.

That last paragraph is incredibly misleading. One, as to a generalized warming trend over the past two centuries, not a single meteorologist would contest that. We have been slowly warming up since the last Little Ice Age. The seminal issue is whether the warming is part of a natural cycle and, if not, then to what extent it is being driven by man. Two, meteorologists looking at the unadjusted temperatures over the last decade can clearly see that temperatures have gotten a bit cooler. They are in good company. Some of the top members of the AGW community happen to have admitted to the same thing. Three, this grossly overstates the "consensus" in AGW among climate scientists. To continue from the NYT:

. . . Joe Bastardi, for example, a senior forecaster and meteorologist with AccuWeather, maintains that it is more likely that the planet is cooling, and he distrusts the data put forward by climate scientists as evidence for rising global temperatures.

“There is a great deal of consternation among a lot of us over the readjustment of data that is going on and some of the portrayals that we are seeing,” Mr. Bastardi said in a video segment posted recently on AccuWeather’s Web site.

Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology.

A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.”

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

The NYT fails to note an important fact. Unlike academics competing for grants or the vast enviro-industrial complex - i.e., all of those from Al Gore to GE to Goldman Sachs and others who stand to reap a windfall from government mandates concerning AGW - meteorologists are unique in having no vested interest in either proving or disproving AGW theory.

. . . climate scientists use very different scientific methods from the meteorologists. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who straddled the two worlds when she worked at the Weather Channel, noted that meteorologists used models that were intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but had little accuracy more than seven days out. Dr. Cullen said meteorologists are often dubious about the work of climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future.

But the cynicism, said Dr. Cullen, who now works for Climate Central, a nonprofit group that works to bring the science of climate change to the public, is in her opinion unwarranted.

“They are not trying to predict the weather for 2050, just generally say that it will be hotter,” Dr. Cullen said of climatologists. “And just like I can predict August will be warmer than January, I can predict that.”

To the NYT credit, they do point out later in the article that Cullen is the radical who advocated that the Meteorological Society withhold accreditation from any meteorologist who did not first swear fealty to AGW theory. But the NYT quoted Cullen without challenging any of her ridiculous assertions. The Times authors fail to note that all of the "complex models" that the AGW theorists relied upon to show catastrophe in 50 to 100 years predict that temperatures will rise in concert with and because of increases in carbon dioxide. Not a single one of these "complex models" predicted the last decade of cooling, even as humans pumped ever more CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, the computer models are fatally flawed and of no predictive value. And for the NYT to let Cullen get away with saying she can predict that it will be hotter in 2050 than today with the same assurance that she can predict warmer weather in August than January is just jaw dropping. That is utterly ridiulous.

Resentment may also play a role in the divide. Climatologists are almost always affiliated with universities or research institutions where a doctoral degree is required. Most meteorologists, however, can get jobs as weather forecasters with a college degree.

Ahhh, here we go. The problem is one of [a] degree, so to speak. Climatoligists should be believed because they, as a group, are smarter than meteorologists, who as a group are also driven by jealousy and envy.

The problem with that theory is you do not have to have a PhD in climatology to be able to evaluate the work produced by the AGW proponents. There are many intelligent people from other walks of life who can look at the work of climate scientists and say, whoa, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. There are more that can understand that there is a problem when the IPCC substitutes peer review in place of the scientific method as the gold standard for reliability. And all people should be able to understand that there is a problem when the IPCC does not even live up to that standard - relying on non-peer reviewed sources for claims of oncomoing and inevitable doom from global warming.

As to meteorologist angst with global warming, a classic example is the link at the top of this post, with Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi pointing out the disconnect between adjusted temperature data showing torid temperatures in the poles while other data shows the growth in polar sea ice. Sceptical meteorologists like Bastardi and Anthony Watts key on unjustifiable adjustments being made to raw data and an even more fundamental concern about how the raw data is collected.

For Steve McIntyre, a retired mining engineer, his problems with AGW theory have come from looking at the methodology and statistics used by Climatologists - when he could get the data. Much of the stonewalling of climate scientists over the past decade has been their refusal to provide their raw data and methodology to Mr. McIntyre. For example, it was only recently that McIntyre finally got a hold of Kevin Briffa's dataset for Yamal - after a decade of stone-walling - and pointed out that Briffa manipulated his findings by using tree rings from a single outlier.

For historians, their problems are with the AGW alarmists who claim that the earth today is the hottest in history. We know that it was hotter at other times, including most recently during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Parts of Greenland today frozen over were being farmed during the MWP, and the British had a thriving wine industry as far north as Hadrian's Wall. In other words, claims that we are in an unprecedented cycle of warming simply because we are in a general warming trend do not flow from the historical record. That coupled with ridiculous efforts of Michael Mann and the IPCC to wipe the MWP and the Little Ice Age from the historical record have left many of us with the firm conviction that climate scientists are advocates, not scientists, and indeed, the worst sort of scam artists.

And then of course there are numerous other scientists who are agnostic as to AGW, but who, in the wake of Climategate, look at how the scientific method has been bastardized by AGW proponents to produce a "consensus." These scientists recoil in disgust of their own.

The NYT blithely ignores all of that, expounding ever more on their hypothesis that the only reason for the split between climate scientists and meteorologists is because the latter simply don't understand. Thus, the NYT tells us, meteorologists themselves need to be reeducated. This is arrogance unbound. It is of an ilk displayed by Obama and the left when telling us that the only reason we don't support Obamacare is because we don't understand it. It is rather breath-taking - but not surprising.

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In A Pinch

How often have we read in the NYT about greed on Wall St. and how evil bankers were for making millions while their businesses contracted. Well, add Pinch Salzburger to that list. His NYT has been on a death spiral ever since he took over the center-left newspaper and turned into a hard left rag suitable for parakeet cage lining. This from Future of Capitalism:

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s overall compensation as chairman of the New York Times Company "more than doubled to $6 million in 2009," reports Dow Jones Newswires. That during a year during which many Times reporters and editors, who make about $100,000 a year, were subjected to a 5% pay cut, and reporters at the Globe, who make less than those at the Times, took a 5.9% pay cut. . . .

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