Tag Archives: Fraud

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Global warmist Phil Jones admits there’s been no global warming since 1995

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Story here from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T VotingFemale via Neil Simpson)

Excerpt:

Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits.

Countless gallons of aviation fuel have been consumed carrying experts, lobbyists and politicians to apocalyptic conferences on global warming.

Every government on Earth has changed its policy, hundreds of academic institutions, entire school curricula and the priorities of broadcasters and newspapers all over the world have been altered – all to serve the new doctrine that man is overheating the planet and must undertake heroic and costly changes to save the world from drowning as the icecaps melt.

You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent.

But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

[…]…he also sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory, admitting that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accepting that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.

He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.

Read the rest here. An updated story is here.

One other thing: a new US Senate report on polar bear populations. (H/T Big Journalism via ECM)

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s.  A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs.”

It’s just a hoax, people.

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Obama’s TSA nominee withdraws after lying to Congress about abuse of power

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Story from Yahoo News.  (H/T Ed Morissey of Hot Air)

Excerpt:

The Obama administration’s choice to lead the Transportation Security Administration withdrew his name Wednesday.

In a statement, Erroll Southers said he was pulling out because his nomination had become a lightning rod for those with a political agenda. President Barack Obama tapped Southers, a former FBI agent, to lead the TSA in September but his confirmation has been blocked by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who says he was worried Southers would allow TSA employees to engage in collective bargaining with the government.

Questions have also been raised about a reprimand that Southers received for running background checks on his then-estranged wife’s boyfriend two decades ago. Southers wrote a letter to lawmakers earlier this month acknowledging that he had given inconsistent answers to Congress on that issue.

Ed Morrissey writes:

There were at least three reasons why Southers’ nomination was going nowhere in the Senate.  When Congress created TSA and the Department of Homeland Security, it exempted both from labor laws that allowed unions to organize the workers, in order to avoid having labor problems disrupt national-security efforts.  Southers was seen as an appointee who would push for unionization by Senator Jim DeMint, among others, who held the nomination in order to get clearer answers from the Obama administration on their intentions.  That hold got lifted shortly after the Christmas Day bombing when the Obama administration complained that the Senate had prevented Obama from providing leadership to TSA, but Obama had taken eight months to nominate Southers in the first place.

It was at that time that Southers finally admitted that he had misled Congress during his confirmation process on his involvement in breaching privacy laws to investigate his wife’s boyfriend.  That involved two issues of trust: accountability to Congress and the security of private information being held by the government.  Not only did Southers himself twice breach the data, he also disseminated it — which is a felony, although long past the statute of limitations, presumably.  The Senate should not look kindly on appointees who begin their jobs by lying to Congress, and multiple holds replaced the DeMint hold as a result.  That has nothing to do with “political agendas,” but with Southers’ suitability for the job.

Another one bites the dust. Here’s a few of the previous failures.

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Republicans want bonuses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac CEOs canceled

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Rep. Michele Bachmann

Story here from CNS News.

Excerpt:

Seventy Republican members of Congress want Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to cancel up to $6 million in bonuses and deferred compensation — approved before  Christmas 2009 — for the chief executive officers of the failed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“(T)here’s a letter that’s going to Sec. Geithner from a number of us calling for a rescission of those bonuses,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told CNSNews.com Wednesday.

On Christmas Eve, at the same time the Obama administration announced that it was removing any cap on the amount of taxpayer aid to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants announced that they had received approval from their financial regulator to pay $42 million in compensation packages to 12 top executives for 2009.

The compensation packages included up to $6 million each to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac chief executives. For the CEOs, annual compensation consists of a base salary of $900,000, $3.1 million in deferred compensation and incentive pay of as much as $2 million. Public disclosure that the retention bonuses were being copnsidered first surfaced in the Spring.

And naturally my favorite member of Congress was involved:

“(We are pushing) for an ending — an unwinding, if you will — of the U.S. owning Fannie and Freddie. We want out of this sinking business as quickly as we possibly can, and we want to pull the plug on an unlimited taxpayer bailout of Freddie and Fannie,” Bachmann said.

[…]“When Sec. Geithner said that there’d be unlimited taxpayer funding continuing to go into this sinking ship, and then bonuses they’re given?,” she said. “On what basis?  What did they do?  What was the criteria that they could possibly be given a bonus?  The fact that they got unlimited taxpayer money?”

Bachman was referring to Treasury’s announcement that it would send unlimited tax money to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, thereby eliminating the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid that Treasury can give without having to come back to Congress for authorization.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are closely tied to Democrats.

Consider this Fox News story.

Excerpt:

Freddie and Fannie used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.

A group called the Center for Responsive Politics keeps track of which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions. The top three U.S. senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and No. 2 is Sen. Barack Obama.

Now remember, he’s only been in the Senate four years, but he still managed to grab the No. 2 spot ahead of John Kerry — decades in the Senate — and Chris Dodd, who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Fannie and Freddie have been creations of the congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, designed to make mortgages available to more people and, as it turns out, some people who couldn’t afford them.

Fannie and Freddie have also been places for big Washington Democrats to go to work in the semi-private sector and pocket millions. The Clinton administration’s White House Budget Director Franklin Raines ran Fannie and collected $50 million. Jamie Gorelick — Clinton Justice Department official — worked for Fannie and took home $26 million. Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama’s VP search committee, has hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae CEO job.

More here about how the Democrats caused the recession.