06/9/15

Retired NASA Scientists Take on Pope

With the papal encyclical on climate change scheduled for a June 18 release, the liberal media can be expected to portray the Vatican document as a major step forward for the United Nations agenda of controlling and taxing the use of natural resources by governments and people. But a group of retired NASA scientists is taking on the pope directly, armed with the expertise that has come through decades of planning U.S. space missions and dealing with the most complex and difficult issues of climate science.

Their verdict: the pope is risking his moral status and his credibility.

In fact, this group is directly warning Pope Francis that if he embraces the climate agenda of the United Nations, he will be violating both scientific principles and the religious values he embodies that are supposed to be reflected in direct aid for the poor people of the earth.

But the pope is apparently counting on his status as “the most popular person on the Earth,” in the words of Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant organization, to make the “moral” case that we live on “an abundant yet finite planet,” and that global limits to industrial growth have to be imposed on a worldwide basis.

The battle, now taking shape, will likely help determine whether U.S. sovereignty will be sacrificed in order to make possible a system of “global governance” or world government.

In a controversial decision that could backfire, Republican House Speaker John Boehner (OH) has invited Pope Francis to deliver an address to Congress in September, an opportunity he could use to push the similar climate change agendas of both the Vatican and the Obama administration.

That a research team composed primarily of retired NASA scientists and engineers has entered the debate is relatively new and particularly noteworthy. These individuals have a lot of experience in the climate change area, as a result of sending astronauts into the atmosphere and outer space and returning them to earth.

The members of the group, the Right Climate Stuff Research Team, are veterans of the NASA Apollo program that landed astronauts on the moon and returned them safely during the decade of the 1960s, according to the introduction to their letter to the pope. They maintain a website setting forth their view that there is no convincing evidence that the planet is in a “climate crisis.”

These retired scientists suggest that the pope is making a big mistake by using unreliable or untested computer models that predict a “climate disaster.” They assert, “Our strict NASA policies, based on common sense concepts of the Scientific Method, trained us to ignore projections of un-validated models for critical design or operational decisions involving human safety, and instead, base such decisions on available physical data.”

Their spokesman is Harold H. Doiron, who serves as chairman of the Right Climate Stuff Research Team. He tells the pontiff in a letter that “There is no compelling scientific or humanitarian reason for immediate enactment of world-wide CO2 emission controls, as the UN is urging you to recommend…”

What’s more, Doiron and his colleagues argue, the poor in the developing world “need unfettered access to relatively inexpensive fossil fuel energy sources to improve their quality of life,” and if higher atmospheric CO2 levels do in fact occur, they will not hinder the development of poor nations but rather result in “increased food production” that will benefit them.

Rejecting the idea of CO2 as a pollutant that should be regulated, they said, “we know that CO2 is a very special colorless, odorless and non-polluting gas designed by our Creator to be an essential chemical compound for sustaining all plant, animal and human life.”

Doiron made a presentation in Rome on April 28 as part of a Heartland Institute event designed to warn the Vatican against rushing to embrace the U.N. climate change agenda. He included a PowerPoint presentation titled “An Independent, Objective Assessment of the Human-Caused Global Warming Issue,” which refers to the U.N. agenda as “climate alarmism” based on faulty models, not actual data.

He is scheduled to speak this week in Washington, D.C. at the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change.

At his presentation in Rome, Doiron said he was a member of a Catholic parish in Texas where fellow parishioners were “praying that Pope Francis will have discernment as he looks into this global warming controversy.” On Fox News Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a practicing Catholic, said “there are more pressing problems on Earth” for the pontiff to be addressing than climate change.

Ignoring the concerns of conservative Catholics that the church should focus on moral issues, The New York Times ran a story, “Pope Francis Steps Up Campaign on Climate Change, to Conservatives’ Alarm,” reporting that the papal encyclical “will be accompanied by a 12-week campaign, now being prepared with the participation of some Catholic bishops, to raise the issue of climate change and environmental stewardship in sermons, homilies, news media interviews and letters to newspaper editors…”

The source of this statement was Dan Misleh, who has been invited inside the Vatican to help coordinate the campaign. He previously directed the educational and outreach efforts of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development.

His group has now become part of the Global Catholic Climate Movement, whose website shows poor people walking through flood waters, hurricanes, and smokestacks, as visitors to the site are urged to “change our course,” and to pray and then act.

03/17/15

Hillary Clinton’s Tangled Web of Lies

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While some liberal commentators may continue to dismiss the coverage of Emailgate as “nonsense,” and a “fake scandal,” the fact remains that Hillary Clinton’s ongoing lies regarding her exclusive use of private email while serving as Secretary of State constitute just more of a long trail of deceptions reaching back to her youth. In 2008 Accuracy in Media published a column by the now-deceased Jerome Zeifman, the Democratic Party’s general counsel for the Watergate investigation. I had several conversations with him in his final years.

Zeifman was openly critical of Mrs. Clinton. Having worked with her during the formative years of her career, he had tremendous insight into her early character, which continues today. “Eventually, because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust,” he commented for AIM in 2008.

Some have said that Zeifman “fired” Mrs. Clinton; but she was let go as one of a number of staff no longer needed. But as Zeifman said back in 1998, “If I had the power to fire her, I would have fired her.”

Mrs. Clinton’s unethical practices during the Watergate investigation included “erroneous legal opinions,” “efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel,” and a general “unwillingness to investigate Nixon,” according to Zeifman.

The Democratic strategy of the time was to “keep Nixon in office ‘twisting in the wind’ for as long as possible” so that Republicans could not reclaim legitimacy, and so that a Democrat could gain the presidency, he wrote. Such cold political calculations ignored the damage that President Nixon was doing to the country in favor of acquiring political power.

“According to her boss, Democrat Jerry Zeifman, Hillary met with Teddy Kennedy’s chief political strategist—a violation of House rules,” Ben Shapiro recently wrote for Front Page Magazine. “She then manipulated the system to avoid investigating Nixon, hoping he’d stick around long enough to sink Republican election chances in 1976, letting her boy Teddy into the White House.”

Yet Mrs. Clinton is involved with The Clinton Foundation, and likes to present herself as an idealist. For example, her most recent press conference to address concerns about Emailgate was held in the United Nations building right after she finished a speech on women’s rights.

Back in 2008 Ron Rosenbaum of Slate Magazine called this ongoing dichotomy “Hillary I vs. Hillary II.” The first Hillary is an “idealistic believer in helping and healing children,” he writes. The second is a Machiavellian, which Rosenbaum cast as an “idealistic Machiavellianism, the use of complex tactical manipulation to achieve noble idealistic goals.”

Which is why up to $16 million in taxpayer funds will have been sent to the Clintons by Election Day of 2016, with some of it allocated to the “salaries and benefits of staff at his family’s foundation,” according to Politico on March 12. “But scrutiny of the act—and of the vast financial empire built by the Clintons—is poised to intensify as questions mount about the family’s commingling of personal, political, government and foundation business,” it reports.

Like so many in the media, in 2008 Rosenbaum refused to accept the rotten core—that Mrs. Clinton might have actually been cynical and politically calculating at such an early age. “I must admit, I found myself taken aback at Zeifman’s charges because I didn’t think Hillary had lost her innocence that early—or even now had become as cynical as some now say she is,” he wrote.

Zeifman clearly outlined how cynical Mrs. Clinton was at 27—and this informs her actions in the present scandal.

The second Hillary, the other side, is “not the dewy-eyed idealist, but the shrewd Machiavellian many see her as now,” wrote Rosenbaum in 2008. Yet, he concluded that he “find[s] Hillary Clinton more of a mystery, perhaps a more complex character in a novelistic sense, than Richard Nixon… I’d almost want to see her become president just to solve the mystery.”

The most recent of many Clinton scandals, Emailgate, itself demonstrates ongoing political corruption at the expense of national security, transparency, and accountability by both Mrs. Clinton and the White House.

Ben Shapiro finds no mystery in Mrs. Clinton and her husband’s repeated missteps: Mrs. Clinton just plain lies, and has kept on lying throughout her political career. “Hillary is still the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI,” he notes. Cheryl Mills, “helped prevent the Clintons from turning over 1.8 million emails to Judicial Watch, Congress, and federal investigators,” yet this close Clinton ally “ended up being in charge of document production for Hillary’s State Department in the Benghazi investigation.” Shapiro is referring to Project X, in which those 1.8 million emails were kept hidden from Congress and the media. The story was broken by the investigative journalist Paul Rodriguez in late 1998, and Accuracy in Media reported on this cover-up at the time.

And now we have Emailgate, part 2, where Mrs. Clinton supposedly transparently turned over all her work-related emails to the State Department,

After using a private email account,
Years later,
After they were vetted by her advisors,
After deleting approximately half of the 60,000 emails, and
After allegedly using key word searches to determine whether the emails were work-related instead of reading each one of them,
Oh, never mind, it turns out they did read all 32,000 “personal emails” before they were deleted.

During her March 10 press conference, Mrs. Clinton deceived once again when she said, “The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.” But the State Department threw her under the bus on that one, when Jen Psaki, State Department spokesman, said three days later that “the department only started automatically archiving emails for other senior officials in February,” long after Mrs. Clinton was gone from the State Department.

Another problem she faces is the OF-109 form, which every State Department employee is required to sign upon departure from their job, certifying that they have turned over all work-related documents and communications, including email. So did she sign it, and hold on to the work material for nearly two more years, or did she get a pass on signing it? Either way, this would apparently be a violation of a law, or at least a State Department policy. So far, Hillary is refusing to answer that one, as is the State Department.

There are gaps within her email spanning months, according to Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC).

USA Today’s Catalina Camia put it most simply: “We can only go by what Clinton says.”

It’s the media’s mandate to verify—not take Mrs. Clinton, nor any of our political leaders, at their word.

02/20/15

No “Major Scandal” in Obama Administration?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

David Axelrod’s book tour is off to a rollicking start, with perceived attacks on Hillary Clinton’s upcoming presidential run, and an absurd comment about the ethics and integrity of the administration he served so loyally, and continues to do so.

Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, recently asserted something so patently untrue that it demands a response. “And I’m proud of the fact that, basically, you’ve had an administration that’s been in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,” he pronounced at a University of Chicago event.

The Washington Post leapt in to defend Axelrod’s claim by pointing to how President Obama’s approval ratings did not shift in the wake of the potential scandals he has faced since taking office. “It could be that scandals don’t have a lot to do with how Americans rate the president,” writes Hunter Schwarz for the Post.

It could also be that the liberal media, along with academia, determine what is classified as a “scandal”—and then refuse to report on scandals which don’t meet their own predetermined criteria. In this case, any lies, corruption, abuses of power, financial payoffs, or associations with unsavory characters or organizations that involve President Obama or anyone in his administration are never to be treated as a scandal.

The ongoing incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and the media often tilts in favor of the administration, leaving many scandals uninvestigated, minimized, or outright ignored. For example, both CBS News president David Rhodes and former ABC News president Ben Sherwood have siblings working for the administration. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, a former Obama staffer under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, joined Bloomberg News, while MSNBC hired Axelrod.

President Obama even joked in 2013 that “… David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod.”

With so many members of the elite media in bed with the administration, Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan’s 2011 observation that “the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing” becomes essentially meaningless. Nyhan said that a scandal becomes a scandal “once the S-word is used in a reporter’s own voice in a story that runs on the front page of the [Washington] Post.”

If Axelrod is using the same criteria, then, of course, President Obama probably can be considered scandal-free. But a real scandal involves actual administration wrongdoing or lies, regardless of the “perceptions” dished out by the media.

Axelrod’s comments ignore the presence of a number of real scandals which the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, continue to report on as phony—including but not limited to:

Benghazi:

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 were greeted with a concerted public relations campaign by the Obama administration blaming the attacks on a protest inspired by a YouTube video, as revealed in the smoking gun Ben Rhodes email. (Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to President Obama, is CBS’ President David Rhodes’ brother.) The media, including David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times, continue to dispute key facts of the case such as al Qaeda’s involvement, have championed erroneous Congressional reports, ignore evidence of a cover-up, and have generally covered for the administration by promoting the idea that this is one of many “phony scandals.” The interim report of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi details the various failings and scandals related to Benghazi.

IRS scandal:

The IRS targeted conservative groups applying for non-profit status from 2010 to 2012. In what some see as an attempt to influence elections, the IRS began requesting inappropriate information disproportionately from conservative groups and then delaying their approval, generally chilling free speech throughout the country. Lois Lerner, at the heart of the scandal, has refused to testify before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment. The media continue to argue that President Obama is not connected to this scandal, but it can be tied directly to the White House. The President has tried to assert that there isn’t a “smidgeon” of corruption at the IRS.

Fast and Furious

The Obama Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged gunwalking across the Mexican border of thousands of weapons, resulting, ultimately in the murder of border agent Brian Terry. An ATF whistleblower, John Dodson, spoke out in 2011 about the problems with the ATF’s decision to let guns go to Mexico. As I wrote about in 2011, Fast and Furious was a scandal that no longer could be denied, but the media continued to do so. Sharyl Attkisson recounts in Stonewalled, “But as outrageous and remarkable as the allegations are, most of the media don’t pick up on the story. They’re steering clear.” As I wrote, the scandal “involves some 1,500 guns, about 1,000 of which ended up in Mexico, and a Border agent…who was murdered with weapons found near the scene of the crime in Arizona. The weapons were among 57 linked to Fast and Furious which have been tied to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., including the Terry murder.” Like Benghazi, Fast and Furious resulted in real deaths—but the media continue to ignore or downplay this scandal.

Veterans Administration

Following revelations in 2014 that there was widespread Veterans Administration falsification of health care wait times, and that certain locations had created secret waiting lists for veterans, the media finally declared this a scandal. But it’s not Obama’s scandal, it’s a Veterans Affairs scandal. Hunter Schwarz writes for the Post that “It was a very significant scandal, to be sure, but perhaps not one that people laid directly at Obama’s doorstep.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler recently referred to this one as a scandal, noting that only eight people have lost their jobs so far as a result of this veterans care debacle, not 60 as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said last week on Meet the Press. But as I have argued, there were really two scandals at the Veterans Administration at the time: health care wait times and the disability benefits backlog.

Solyndra

Solar panel business Solyndra received more than half a billion dollars as part of the administration’s green energy program, before going bankrupt. Its executives took substantial bonuses before the layoffs began. And, a Solyndra investor was also a major bundler for Obama, demonstrating a conflict of interest when the administration refused to turn over more documents as part of a Congressional investigation. And yes, the Post reported on its front page that the Obama administration had asked the company to “delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress.” But NPR ran an article last year victoriously announcing that “Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent”—as if that had anything to do with the crony capitalism of the Solyndra scandal.

Obamacare

Obamacare is an ongoing debacle of premium increases and high deductibles coupled with crippling regulations. It leads to less, not more, health care access. While the focus has been on errors made within the “Obamacare rollout,” the media continue to champion exaggerated statistics regarding the alleged 10 million who have received health insurance under President Obama’s signature legislation. In reality, this program marks a rapid increase in Medicaid, and many enrollees are part of a “substitution effect” by which people who previously had insurance have switched to Obamacare. The subsidies, which the media casts as essential to the law, are under dispute in the courts, and increase the burden on the American taxpayer. Even Politifact called President Obama’s false assertion that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” Meanwhile, the complicit media finds every chance it can to champion this legislation’s “successes.”

This list just scratches the surface. Executive overreach has become standard fare, whether on immigration or environmental regulations. The Obama administration’s penchant for controlling leaks, a lack of transparency, and a war on journalists has been noted by the likes of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie Jr. who said “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration leaks,” and New York Times reporter David Sanger who said, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” James Risen of the Times added that the Obama administration has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

The administration’s Middle East policies have been a disaster, if not scandalous. Just look at the growing threat from the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical jihadist Muslim groups. More than 200,000 have been killed in Syria, Libya has become a jihadist playground, described by former CIA officer Bob Baer as “Mad Max,” and Yemen, as recently as September held up as example of where Obama’s foreign policy is working, has seen a coup by Iranian backed jihadists. And looming over all of this is the unfolding, outright appeasement of an Iran with nuclear aspirations.

What unifies all of these scandals and lies is how our news media have looked past all the administration’s corruption, treating, these occurrences as discrete, minor grievances, gaffes—or even conservative or Republican political maneuvering. This means that the constant lies by the administration, and President Obama himself, can be made with impunity. The media simply will not hold President Obama, or any of his associates who might tarnish his reputation, accountable.