It’s almost like liberal academia wants to silence dissent on the Goracle’s junk science. (Climate Ethics/PSU) — Over the next few weeks, ClimateEthics will take a deeper look at what has been referred to as the “climate change disinformation campaign” through an ethical lens. Although ClimateEthics has examined these issues briefly before, see: An Ethical

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Penn State Professor: Global Warming Skeptics “Deeply Ethically Abhorrent, Malicious And Morally Reprehensible”…

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Gingrich Just Dead Wrong on Judicial Proposal

On December 19, 2011, in Barack Obama, Congress, by Markisacopyrightthief

I really, really wanted to avoid any more posts on Gingrich this week, but the way he is demagoguing the judicial issue is just awful. I have looked and looked and can’t find a single respected legal/judicial expert — left, center, or most importantly, solidly conservative — who thinks Gingrich is on the right track in proposing A) subpoenaing judges to appear before Congress; B) having Congress consider impeaching judges for bad decisions (I editorialized against this idea when Tom DeLay proposed it years ago, so this has NOTHING to do with my feelings about Gingrich’s candidacy); C) having Congress eliminate judgeships to get rid of problematic (i.e. liberal) judges; D) having the president unilaterally decide he can ignore Supreme Court rulings. These are just horribly anti-constitutional ideas. Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center says so. Roger Pilon of CATO says so. Former GOP attorneys general say so. Ann Coulter (despite her bombast, a pretty good lawyer) says so. I could cite lots of other names in the conservative legal firmament (I chose those three just to give a sense of the breadth of the opposition to Gingrich’s idea, from traditionalist conservative to libertarian to eclectic); the point is that Gingrich is WAY off base here. I say this as somebody deeply involved in the wars over the judiciary, for years, always on the solidly conservative side (for instance, I am 99.999 percent sure I was the first in print or cyberprint, something like six or seven months before the spots opened up, to write that Sam Alito would be the perfect choice for a S. Court judgeship). I agree with Gingrich that the imperial judiciary must be reined in. I am a firm advocate of passing laws to restrict the jurisdiction of various courts. That is an explicitly constitionally allowed option that just hasn’t been used. But Gingrich’s suggestions would completely upend the spirit of the Constitution and its balance of powers — not just recalibrate that balance, to bring judges back into line, but instead actually scramble everything in a way that would promote anarchy. If it were a serious proposal, it wouldn’t be conservative, but outrageously and dangerously radical. I don’t think it’s a serious proposal, though. I just think it’s Gingrich pandering and demagoguing, trying to stop his slide in the polls.

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Gingrich Just Dead Wrong on Judicial Proposal

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For those who missed it: Last Friday Nancy Pelosi told Talking Points Memo that she had all sorts of investigative dirt available on current GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich.  Specifically, “ I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff .” So… Newt Gingrich responded today by thanking Pelosi for the early Christmas present and noting “… if she’s suggesting she’s going to use material that she developed while she was on the ethics committee, that is a fundamental violation of the rules of the House and I would hope that members would immediately file charges against her the second she does it .” Annnnnd now we’re being told (via Weasel Zippers ) – it would be cruel* of me to use the word ‘frantically’ – that what the former Speaker of the House really meant by her comments to TPM was that there was plenty of public record information about Newt Gingrich available.  Not that there was any private dirt.  Nope.  Not at all. Representative Pelosi then went on to reveal that the Red Sox had won the 2004 World Series and that Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been indicted on felony charges. I think that we can safely score this one as a win for Team Newt.  Seriously,  why did Nancy Pelosi not resign after 2010, again? Moe Lane ( crosspost ) *’Cruel;’ not ‘inaccurate.’

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Nancy Pelosi retreating from insinuations of new dirt on Newt Gingrich.

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In Defense of a Democrat

On December 5, 2011, in Barack Obama, Congress, by AlvarezDana

In its never-ending quest to stop the peril this country faces from natural gas , the New York Times takes on Rep. Dan Boren , the sole Democrat in Oklahoma’s congressional delegation. He co-chairs the House Natural Gas Caucus and serves as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee. As a representative of the #3 gas-producing state, it’s not surprising that his voting record is decidedly pro-industry, and specifically, pro-fracking. (Boren, one of the more conservative Democrats in the House, has announced that he will not be seeking reelection in 2012.) Of course, the Times tries to portray the Congressman’s voting record as corrupt, since he has income from a (silent) interest in a family enterprise (on the order of $100K/year). Added to that, his father, former U.S. Sen. David Boren (D-OK) receives compensation for his service on the board of a successful oil company. (David Boren, as the Times chooses not to report, is president of the University of Oklahoma since 1994, and a member of several corporate boards .) The congressman’s income has jumped in the last six years, thanks to two family businesses he partly owns that have signed more than 300 mineral leases, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of those deals are with Chesapeake Energy , a top donor to his campaigns. … House ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from taking steps to aid industries in which they have a financial stake. But some ethics experts say such actions are still inadvisable. [Emphasis added.] “Some experts say…” It wouldn’t be a Times article without that chestnut. “Even if it is legal, if every member of Congress pushed for industries that they have financial ties to, there would be an outcry from the public,” said Robert M. Stern, a California lawyer who has helped draft state ethics and campaign finance laws. You gotta be kidding me, chief. House ethics (oxymoron alert!) rules do not prohibit members from trading in public companies whose fortunes may be affected by Congressional action. And then there’s the case of Maxine Waters, who intervened, not in the interest of her state or an industry, but for a particular bank in which her husband owns a significant stake. The implication that Boren’s voting record is the result of corruption and not the consequence of his experience and his constituents’ interests is pretty astounding. Fracking has been going on in Oklahoma since the late 1940s. Oklahoma-based corporations (notably Chesapeake, Devon Energy, and Continental Resources) are national leaders and innovators in the new “resource” technologies. (The energy industry has always tried to cover its bets by backing friendly members of both parties, but energy state Dems are becoming an endangered species .) Most of the land in Oklahoma is in private hands (or in some cases, tribal lands). It’s not unusual that a large land-owning family would be leasing its land, and not unusual that the pace of leasing has picked up since 2004, which was the beginning of a gas-drilling boom. Oil and gas has been a large segment of Oklahoma’s economy since before statehood. The state depends not only on the 71,000 industry jobs; 1 in 7 jobs of all kinds depend directly or indirectly on energy. State revenues benefit from a 7% severance tax — a percentage of value of all minerals produced within its borders — in addition to income taxes. Then there are the landowner royalties, the mineral owner’s participation in success, a tremendous source of income to the landowners of the state. What is the power of the natural gas bogeyman in the mind of the Times and in the minds of its (dwindling) legions of readers? What is the mystical power of oil and gas money versus, say, corn money? Should we question the ethics of a Kansas, Iowa or Indiana legislator with family interests in farming be questioned because of a vote on agricultural policy, or ethanol subsidies? I’m sure there are plenty of examples. Is a congressman from Florida or Hawaii suspect because of donations from the tourism industry? Nevada and gambling? New Jersey and concrete? Are the only politicians to be trusted anti-industry hacks like Henry Waxman (CA) or Ed Markey (MA)? Or the delegates from Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas and Guam, who the Democrats have packed onto the House Natural Resources Committee, and who enjoy full voting rights on committee matters? Or better yet, are we going to trust Hollywood know-nothings like Mark Ruffalo on energy issues? It’s probably good timing for Boren to leave Congress in 2012. His district encompasses much of what was once a Dem stronghold in eastern OK, but with redistricting and population shifts it now comprises growing Tulsa suburbs which trend conservative. In 2010, he beat his Republican challenger 56-43 despite an overwhelming money advantage. Cross-posted at stevemaley.com . Follow @VladimirRS

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In Defense of a Democrat

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Alinsky to Obama to Occupiers

On October 21, 2011, in Barack Obama, Congress, by AlvarezDana

Civil unrest is President Barack Obama’s crutch, his comfort zone, and his trump card. That’s why he has encouraged the “Occupy Wall Street” protest and its progeny across the country, despite significant political dangers to him for doing so . Closer looks at Obama’s career roots and at the protesters’ behaviors help explain both why the protests are worrisome developments and why the president actually likes them. First, it helps to understand just how radical most of these protesters are — and just how obscene. Clearly, they are mostly socialist or communist in orientation . And reports are rampant about the lewdness, vileness, and illegality that has marked the Wall Street “occupation” zone, including plenteous drugs, public nudity and sex, and defecation on police cars. A lot of this isn’t free speech; it’s open law-breaking. So why does Obama applaud it, when he repeatedly castigated Tea Party demonstrators who lawfully secured permits, usually behaved with remarkable decorum, and cleaned up after themselves? The answer is easy: This is Obama’s milieu. This is how he was trained. As Ryan Lizza explained in a definitive piece in the New Republic — a liberal magazine, not a right-wing/anti-Obama hit factory — Obama’s intellectual roots and career choices made him a student of, and later actually an instructor in, the particular mass-movement methods taught by the late, radical, Saul Alinsky. The sort of unrest seen in the anti-Wall Street movement comes directly out of Alinsky’s secular bible called Rules for Radicals. “The first step in community organization is community disorganization,” wrote Alinsky. “The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization…. The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community…. When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you an ‘agitator’ they are completely correct, for that is, on one word, your function — to agitate to the point of conflict.” Alinsky hardly was squeamish about using filth to get his way. “If your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.” Later, he gave a fictitious but oh-so-literal example of one way to do it: He suggested that protesters gorge on beans before occupying a public building so that their — uh, their natural emissions — would literally create a stench. “In a fight almost anything goes,” he wrote. “It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.” Alinsky openly and exuberantly belittled the notion of ethics. All that mattered, he said, was whether your side is losing or winning. Only afterwards do you try to find an excuse for your illicit behavior: “The tenth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that you do what you can with what you have and [then] clothe it with moral garments.” To be clear, nobody suggests Obama is personally orchestrating the various “Occupy” demonstrations. Then again, he doesn’t need to. The Occupiers are receiving financial help or organizational muscle from many of his associates or major supporters, including several union bosses of the sort who just weeks ago pledged to “take these [SOBs] out” of commission. Despite Obama’s eloquent words earlier this year demanding milder rhetoric and more carefully calibrated political actions, he has not uttered a peep in admonishment of the increasingly virulent language, not to mention lawless actions such as attempting to physically “take over” public buildings. Critics have noted that the protesters often can’t even define what they are protesting, or that their “issues” are such a diverse hodgepodge as to be unintelligible. Again, this is straight from Alinsky’s playbook. The organizer, he wrote, “should search for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals. He should be able, with skill and calculation, to use irrationality in his attempts to progress to a rational world. For a variety of reasons the organizer must develop multiple issues…. Multiple issues mean constant action and life.” What Obama particularly likes about this disruptive movement is that its only universally acknowledged target is the one he himself provided: Wall Street. He’s the one who repeatedly gave the marching order against corporate bogeymen. As Alinsky wrote in his most famous rule of all: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” This is exactly what Obama himself tried to do as a community organizer in Chicago. It is what he has done every step of the way as campaigner and as president, always finding someone to blame or be against: George W. Bush, greedy corporations, millionaires, Republican congressmen, or people who “cling to guns or religion.” The problem with Saul Alinsky — and for the protesters who still, knowingly or unknowingly, do his work — was that nothing was sacred. Rules for Radicals is, in Alinsky’s own words, officially dedicated to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.” Alinsky seemed to mean the dedication to be funny. But it’s no laughing matter, and neither are protests that violate common decency.

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Alinsky to Obama to Occupiers

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