Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Before Climategate, Steve McIntyre forced NASA to correct its data

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Let’s reminisce about the previous Steve McIntyre triumph, when he force NASA’s eco-moonbat James Hansen to admit that there were errors in NASA’s data.

This Townhall.com article by Amanda Carpenter has an interview with McIntyre.

Here’s the story summary:

Despite the fact that NASA tried to block him from accessing U.S. temperature data, persistent efforts by a climate change blogger forced the government to amend U.S. temperature data.

Because of the blogger’s efforts, NASA now recognizes 1934 as the hottest year in U.S. history, not 1998.

[…]Now, the ten hottest years on record in the U.S., beginning with the hottest year, are: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939. Before the revision, that list read: 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921, 1931, 1999, 1953, 2001, 1990 and 1938. The re-ranking completely knocked 2001 off the top 10 list.This U.S. temperature revision could cause problems for former Vice President Al Gore. Assisted by Hansen, Gore asserted in his global warming film “An Inconvenient Truth” that nine of the ten hottest years in U.S. history occurred since 1995.

[…]According to McIntyre, when he began downloading data from NASA’s website to compare the adjusted and the raw data from the polling stations, “this led to a bit of a fight with NASA in May. As I started downloading the data in sequence they cut off my access to the data.”

“They blocked my IP address,” McIntyre said.

[…]“After I was blocked and I explained myself they still didn’t want to let me have access to the data,” McIntyre lamented.

He continued: “They just said go look at the original data. And I said no, I want to see the data you used. I know what the original data looks like. I want to see the data that you used. But one of the nice things about having a blog that gets a million and half hits a month is that I then was able to publicize this block in real-time and they very quickly withdrew their position and allowed me to have access.”

When he got the data, McIntyre then compared the raw and adjusted data sets for all 1200 U.S. weather stations. “Probably 75 percent of the stations had jumps of at least a quarter degree in the year 2000,” he said.

One of the people who comments here occasionally e-mailed me this week to chastise me in response to the leaked CRU e-mails by saying that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred recently. So the true believers are undaunted by the discovery that this whole mess is fraudulent – they just keep right on having blind faith in the teeth of scientific evidence. They hate science and want to remain in the Dark Ages. This commenter also believes in an eternal universe, an unobservable multiverse, etc.

Commentary

Cato Institute says the cost of Obamacare is over six trillion dollars

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Story here from the Cato Institute. (H/T Health Care BS via ECM)

Excerpt:

Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years.  Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.

[…]When we correct for both gimmicks, counting both on- and off-budget costs over the first 10 years of implementation, the total cost of ObamaCare reaches — I’m so sorry about this — $6.25 trillion.  That’s not a precise estimate.  It’s just far closer to the truth than President Obama and congressional Democrats want the debate to be.

Read the rest here.

Commentary

MUST-READ: Robin of Berkeley explains why the left hates Sarah Palin

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Robin’s article is here at American Thinker. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Like for most feminists, it was a no-brainer for me to become a Democrat. Liberal men, not conservatives, were the ones devoted to women’s issues. They marched at my side in support of abortion rights. They were enthusiastic about women succeeding in the workplace.

[…]Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women, but it’s far worse: many are perpetuators.

The Left’s behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.

[…]The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat.

And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways: by symbolically raping her.

Just like a perpetuator, they dehumanize her by objectifying her body. They undress her with their eyes.

They turn her into a piece of ass.

Liberals do this by calling her a c__t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like “slutty flight attendant” and “Trailer Park Barbie,” and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek.

And from Atlantic Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan “Sarah Palin’s vagina is the font of all evil in the galaxy.”

Nothing is off-limits, not actress Sandra Bernhard’s wish that Palin be gang-raped or the sexualization of Palin’s daughters.

As every woman knows, leering looks, lurid words, and veiled threats are intended to evoke terror. Sexual violence is a form of terrorism.

Read the whole thing.

Do conservatives oppose women?

Conservatives think that men and women should make good choices and do good things. That is why on this blog hardly a moment goes by without me praising women like Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Jennifer Roback Morse and Trayce Hansen for making good choices and doing good things.

For example, here’s Michele Bachmann speaking out about National Adoption Day.

Adoption is a good thing. Conservatives support the choice to love and nurture vulnerable children. We don’t support the choice to kill an unborn person. Conservatives support good choices, and oppose bad choices.