Open Email to Trevor Carroll on the Climate Change Hoax

Trevor ---

Hope you are having a good summer. While you are laying around the house drinking your dad's beer, I've got a job for you --- you need to read:

The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so (Hardcover) by Lawrence Solomon (Author)_­

I have heard Solomon talk and he knows of what he speaks.

When you're done with that book, you need to read:

Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor (Hardcover)
by Roy Spencer (Author)

I know Roy Spencer; I have been on several committees with him and we both were involved with analyzing satellite image data. I was extracting information on nation's snowpack; Spencer used the same satellite imagery to assess sea-surface temperatures and global temperatures over time.

These two books should go a long way to correct much of the misinformation, willful deceit, and government/academic propaganda that is camouflaged as education and public policy these days.

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Tom Carroll

None Dare Call It Treason!

Court's Ruling Gives Support To Our Enemy

By HORACE COOPER

June 16, 2008

The Supreme Court's decision to strike down the so-called military tribunals law not only runs contrary to precedent and the U.S. Constitution. It is yet another dangerous example of the judiciary usurping the constitutional authority of the political branches of government and stands sharply at odds with the national security reality that Americans face.

We are in a global war with terrorists who seek to destroy our country and our way of life. This threat is real and actualized: They've attacked us at sea and on land, away and abroad.

While we didn't initially recognize what they were doing, the body count revealed the truth: nearly 3,500 dead in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, this ruling, by denying the seriousness of the threat, will hinder our efforts to keep this number from rising.

While the errors in the case are numerous, several obvious ones must be addressed.

First, this decision marks the first-ever application of a constitutional right of habeas corpus in the entirety of American history for alien combatants held abroad in the course of an ongoing war.

The opinion completely ignores the reality that the "writ of habeas corpus" was always understood constitutionally and in common law as a matter exclusively for dealing with domestic detention — that is, detention inside the U.S. Other than the results of a major power grab by a judicial majority, there is no reason for discarding nearly 200 years of precedence in this regard.

Second, the court engages in a radical manifestation of judicial supremacy when it claims that the Detainee Act of 2005 was some kind of a means for Congress and the president to "govern without legal constraint" outside the U.S.

To ensure that it gets the final say, the court leaps past a basic and time-tested constitutional question of whether the litigants in question even have standing to raise a complaint in U.S. federal courts. As a result, there is no logical reason why the court couldn't use this same argument as a justification for interfering and overseeing detentions in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere the U.S. is at war.

Third, this activist decision strikes down perhaps the most generous set of procedural safeguards ever afforded military detainees. Congress and the president worked carefully to craft a set of rules — having access to specialists and after careful review and debate.

The court sets aside these findings and doesn't even list a set of replacements, observing instead that lower courts will develop them subject to their review. This time-consuming process of discovering and navel-gazing is precisely what the framers did not intend, especially with regard to national security matters.

Finally, the liberal majority takes great pleasure in noting that there is no recorded case in American history of denying jurisdiction outside the U.S. This logic is exactly backwards.

It has been so overwhelmingly accepted that the "writ of habeas corpus" applies only inside the U.S., should we be surprised that no one but the attorneys for desperate and dangerous terrorists and their liberal activists on the Supreme Court would make such an argument?

This decision also puts the servicemen and women who actually captured these rogue warriors on the battlefield on an equal playing field in our courts of law. Not unlike America's failed "catch and release" immigration policy, the court's actions envision a world where our men and women in uniform risk their lives capturing and detaining some of the most deadly terrorists on the globe only to find them eligible for release after a hearing before some liberal activist judge.

This is unconscionable, and it will mean more Americans are at risk of dying. This is not what our framers intended.

While reported as a loss for the Bush administration, the court's ruling represents a major setback for our country's national security. Emboldened terrorists will be less likely to surrender and end their plans for another attack. They will in some sense feel justified.

This ruling not only shackles America's efforts to prevail in this worldwide clash of civilizations. It also gives energy and succor to an evil and restless enemy at a time when they should be given no sanctuary or encouragement.

Boumediene v. Bush makes it all too clear that courts simply are not the appropriate agents for directing the sophisticated and complicated policy prescriptions of statecraft and national security.

They are ill-equipped to assess the risks and benefits and they are immune from the accountability instrumental in ensuring that policymakers act in a manner consistent with the interests and needs of the American people in matters of national security.

Cooper is a national security and constitutional expert and a senior fellow at the American Civil Rights Union.

Polar Bears Will Be Just Fine, Thank You Very Much!

Alaska's Polar Bears: Going With The Floe?

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

June 16, 2008

Energy: The green light given by the Fish and Wildlife Service for oil drilling off Alaska is being portrayed as an OK to hurt polar bears. But there are so many polar bears, it's the drillers who should worry.

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IBD Series: Breaking The Back Of High Oil

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Environmentalists rejoiced last month when Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne declared the polar bear endangered. The designation gave them a poster pet for the dangers of global warming and a club to bludgeon oil companies.

Last week, however, there was a break in the ice, so to speak. New Fish and Wildlife regulations gave legal protection to seven oil companies that plan to search for oil in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast if "small numbers" of polar bears and Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed over the next five years.

The Associated Press went ballistic, proclaiming that less than a month after the polar bear was listed as endangered, "the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas."

What the administration is doing is honoring contracts signed in February, before the polar bear was listed — wrongly, we believe — as endangered. Fact is, polar bears aren't endangered, either by oil companies or climate change.

When he made the listing, Kempthorne noted that exploration in the Chukchi Sea was exempt. "Polar bears are already protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act," he explained, "which has more stringent protections for polar bears than the Endangered Species Act does."

Listing the polar bear as endangered was a political decision made under political pressure.

The Mineral Management Service estimates we could recover 15 billion barrels of oil plus 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the Chukchi Sea's 29.7 million acres. Oil companies enjoyed a similar exclusion in the Chukchi from 1991 to 1996 and in the Beaufort Sea since 1993 with no effect on the bears.

In fact, there's no proof of a single bear being harmed by oil operations in Alaska since 1993. Since 1960, when the Alaska oil hunt began, only two oil-related bear fatalities have been documented.

The world polar bear population is at a modern high and growing. Mitch Taylor, polar bear biologist with the Government of Nunavut, a territory in Canada, puts the current population at 24,000, up 40% since 1974. Some 2,000 of these bears live in and around the Chukchi Sea, where the oil companies purchased leases worth $2.6 billion in February.

Taylor says that, contrary to greenie hype, climate change, particularly in the Arctic, is not pushing them to the brink of extinction. They have and will continue to adapt to their environment.

The ice-loving bears have survived warmer periods than we are experiencing now. The most recent such period occurred 6,000 and 9,000 years ago, and it was even warmer between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, long before the first SUV hit the road.

In a report to Fish and Wildlife, Taylor stated: "No evidence exists that suggests that both bears and the conservation systems that regulate them will not adapt and respond to the new conditions." Taylor stressed polar bears' adaptability, saying they evolved from grizzlies 250,000 years ago and as a distinct species about 125,000 years ago when natural climate change occurred.

From caribou that have thrived for 30 years as 15 billion barrels have been pumped from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to marine life thriving among drilling platforms that act like artificial reefs off the Louisiana, evidence says oil exploration and the environment can coexist. Katrina ravaged Gulf of Mexico oil facilities and not a single drop of oil was leaked or spilled.

Oil companies are criticized for not using their "obscene" profits to find more oil but then attacked when they want to. Lift the polar bear's endangered status. Drill in the Chukchi. Drill now.

The Next Nuclear War Starts Here!

A U.N. Khan Job

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
June 16, 2008

WMDs: Blueprints for a nuclear weapon compatible with the ballistic missiles of Iran, North Korea and other rogue states were found on computers of the notorious Khan smuggling ring. Will a complacent world wake up?

Read More: Iran | Global War On Terror

It's clear that it's getting easier to build and use a nuclear bomb. If civilized countries want to stop their biggest cities from becoming radioactive craters, they'd better implement a no-tolerance policy against nuclear proliferation.

It's unacceptable to find — four years after their seizure — that computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities housed sophisticated electronic designs for a Pakistani atomic bomb, in a form easy to reproduce.

David Albright, former chief arms inspector for the United Nations who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security, will issue a report this week revealing that the designs were found on computers in the possession of Swiss smugglers linked to nuclear engineer Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is considered the father of Pakistan's bomb.

The computers were seized in 2006. Yet the geniuses at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reportedly had more trouble deciphering the more than 1,000 megabytes of information on the computers and finding the bomb plans than the Manhattan Project had building the first atom bomb in the 1940s.

Which raises a question: Why send hundreds of millions of dollars to Vienna, Austria, each year for IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei's budget? So he can win a Nobel Peace Prize while helping the Islamofascist Iranian regime stall for time while it builds a nuke?

The U.N. agency, which turned 50 last year, exists by law to make sure that nuclear energy "is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose." On winning his 2005 Peace Prize, ElBaradei said it was an "urgently required" step for the IAEA to "keep nuclear and radiological material out of the hands of extremist groups."

Khan's contacts with Tehran's revolutionary regime go back to the 1980s. The IAEA knew at least five years ago that Iran's centrifuge designs were Pakistani.

The IAEA should have been aggressively tracking down every tentacle of the Khan network for years.

Had it done so — who knows? — it might even have found Saddam Hussein was one of Khan's clients, something that may yet be in the cards and that would not enhance ElBaradei's reputation.

Switzerland's government announced that it destroyed 30,000 pages relating to the Khan nuclear plans so they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. But only a naif would conclude that Khan's plans aren't now in the hands of dozens of unsavory characters around the world, from Pyongyang to Damascus, and perhaps even in the caves of Waziristan.

A real international nuclear watchdog would be carrying out a relentless global manhunt for anyone who might have such instructions on how to kill a million innocent souls.

What we have instead in the IAEA is an incompetent, ideologically leftist bureaucracy that continually is making worse an already dangerous state of affairs.

What Do These Three Men Have In Common?

Posters Of Communist icon Che Guevara and Barack Obama hang on a wall as Common Pleas Judge James Burge speaks in his office in Loraine, Ohio, in this April 22 photo. Last week, Burge ruled that Ohio's lethal injection process is unconstitutional because it could cause pain and the state mandates that an inmate's death be painless.

Your Taxes Will Be Going Up -- WAY UP!

Price Of Not Extending Bush Cuts: Return To Historically High Taxes

By J.T. YOUNG

Despite liberal condemnation of the Bush tax cuts, virtually no one embraces a complete return to their pre-cut level — including the Democratic majority in Congress and both pending presidential nominees. There is good reason.

Implicit in this rejection is the admission that they were too high to return to. While the media won't say it now, and certainly wouldn't then, those supposedly halcyon days of fiscal policy rested on historically high tax levels.

Taxes got there by increasing retroactively in 1993, adding a 36% income-tax bracket and effectively another of 39.6% through a surcharge on incomes above a certain level. That hike also raised the corporate rate to 35%, increased estate taxes and the gas tax, taxed certain Social Security benefits and upped AMT rates to 26% and 28%.

In short, most everyone making more than $20,000 paid more in taxes.

Eight years later, those hikes were reversed. The 2001 tax cut created a low 10% rate bracket and lowered all the rest — the top 39.6% rate to 35%, 36% to 33%, 31% to 28%, and the 28% bracket to 25%.

It also increased the child credit, eased the marriage penalty, incentivized pension contribution and decreased estate taxes.

In short, most everyone paying income taxes paid less in taxes. The difference is reflected in individuals' effective tax rates — the rate of taxes actually paid.

The Congressional Budget Office studied effective rates from 1979 to 2005. It showed the 1993-2000 average for all quintiles at 22.6% — higher than any other single year outside 1993-2000. The 2001 tax cut decreased these effective rates across the board, as the accompanying chart shows.

A comparison of the distribution of the federal income tax burden is similarly illuminating.

Using 2008 Internal Revenue Service statistics, the 2001 cuts shifted the income tax burden up the economic ladder.

In 2000, the top 1% paid 37.4% of all income taxes vs. 39.4% in 2005. The top 2% went from 56.5% to 60%, the top 10% from 67.3% to 70.3%, the top 25% from 84% to 86%, and the top 50% from 96% to 97%.

In addition to its impact on taxpayers, the 1993-2000 years also had a historically high federal tax burden on the economy. Over the last 60 years, the federal tax burden has averaged 17.9% of GDP; the 1993-2000 period averaged 19.2%.

While that 1.3% difference may seem slight, it is greater than the 1% level deemed necessary earlier this year to stimulate the slowing economy.

In contrast, the 2001-07 period averaged 17.9% of GDP — equaling the 60-year average despite the 2000 economic slowdown that tipped into a recession following 9/11.

The 1993-2000 burden magnitude is demonstrated by the fact that its 19.2% average was surpassed by only three single years — 1981 (19.6%), 1969 (19.7%) and 1945 (20.4%) — outside the period.

The period's highest year, 2000's 20.9%, is unsurpassed and only equaled by 1944's wartime level.

All told, the period was the highest of any eight years recorded in the Historical Tables of the President's Budget.

Comparing the federal income tax burden to the economy is even more dramatic. The average of the last 60 years is 8% of GDP. The 1993-2000 period average was 8.8%; 2001-07's 8.1%.

Again, the 1993-2000 period was the highest of any eight-year period, and its 2000 peak of 10.3% of GDP was higher than any on record.

We need not simply look backward to understand what will happen going forward. The CBO projects that, even with the removal of the Alternative Minimum Tax's impact, federal taxes will immediately return to 19.8% of GDP in 2012 — easily exceeding the 1993-2000 average — just two years after the 2001 tax cuts expire.

The effect on income taxes is even greater, tying the all-time record of 10.3% of GDP by 2016 and breaking it at 10.4% a year later.

The current fixation on the 2001 tax cuts masks the real, bigger tax story. By myriad measures — marginal rates, effective rates, distribution of the tax burden or as percentage of the economy — taxes were not just high before the 2001 tax cuts; they were also historically high.

It's no wonder that such tax levels are being rejected — at least in part — across the political spectrum this election year. But they will return in 2011.

They will not increase gradually, but immediately return to high levels. They will come regardless of the state of the economy. And they will come regardless of what politicians promise this year . . . unless they act by Congress passing and the president signing legislation.

Talk is cheap, particularly in an election year. But rest assured, the taxes of 2011 will not be.

Young served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004 and as a congressional staff member from 1987 to 2000.