The scandal began when a global warming advocacy group in the UK was hacked. Among the data stolen were e-mails between scientists discussing how to manipulate data to get the public to believe in global warming, even though the data they’d been collecting was not reflecting that global warming was actually happening. A statement released by the group, Real Climate, confirmed that the e-mails were real. Over 1,000 e-mails were stolen.

Newsbusters has most of the info, like some of the e-mails.

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: //’;l[1]=’a';l[2]=’/';l[3]=’<';l[4]=' 110';l[5]=' 114';l[6]=' 111';l[7]=' 98';l[8]=' 115';l[9]=' 111';l[10]=' 46';l[11]=' 88';l[12]=' 88';l[13]=' 88';l[14]=' 64';l[15]=' 97';l[16]=' 102';l[17]=' 102';l[18]=' 105';l[19]=' 114';l[20]=' 98';l[21]=' 46';l[22]=' 107';l[23]='>‘;l[24]=’\”‘;l[25]=’ 110′;l[26]=’ 114′;l[27]=’ 111′;l[28]=’ 98′;l[29]=’ 115′;l[30]=’ 111′;l[31]=’ 46′;l[32]=’ 88′;l[33]=’ 88′;l[34]=’ 88′;l[35]=’ 64′;l[36]=’ 97′;l[37]=’ 102′;l[38]=’ 102′;l[39]=’ 105′;l[40]=’ 114′;l[41]=’ 98′;l[42]=’ 46′;l[43]=’ 107′;l[44]=’:';l[45]=’o';l[46]=’t';l[47]=’l';l[48]=’i';l[49]=’a';l[50]=’m';l[51]=’\”‘;l[52]=’=';l[53]=’f';l[54]=’e';l[55]=’r';l[56]=’h';l[57]=’a ‘;l[58]=’<'; for (var i = l.length-1; i >= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == ‘ ‘) document.write(”&#”+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+”;”); else document.write(unescape(l[i])); } //]]> k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich

Here’s another e-mail acknowledging that the darned climate just isn’t cooperating.

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)

***

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

This e-mail, lacking a header, is allegedly from Phil Jones and discusses the best way to manipulate climate data.

Options appear to be:

Send them the data

Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

Here’s one allegedly from a Dr. Tom Wigley to Jones:

Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”. Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH — just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols. The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note — from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not) — but not really enough. So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.) This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have. Tom.

Newsbusters has even more e-mails, so be sure to go check it out.

Now, it’s unknown if any of these e-mails have been tampered with or not. However, I think they’re probably real. After all, Jones did confirm that they were real. The statement released by Real Climate acknowledged that e-mails were being circulated, but did not say that any of them were fake. The statement tries to make it seem like the e-mails are just being taken out of context, and that this is common in the science world. I’m not a scientist, so that very well may be true. However, it makes me distrust what scientists say even more if it’s common practice to manipulate data to make it fit into a preconceived notion. Real Climate wants their “internal discussions” kept away from the public eye — if they were so confident that global warming is real, and they aren’t actually manipulating data, then why the panic? Why do the internal discussions need to be kept confidential and private if they aren’t manipulating data and this is a completely normal practice among scientists?

Now, I don’t know that I believe that this is a conspiracy. I think that many of these scientists are believers of the global warming cult, and because they believe so fanatically, will do anything to make the data fit into their theory. Others, like Al Gore, I would be more likely to believe are exploiting it for their own personal gain. Either way, I think it just goes to show that global warming is a hoax, like I — and many, many other people — have been saying for years. Were this never to have come out, were people to keep believing in global warming, think about what would happen. Some people, again, like Al Gore, would be poised to make millions of off carbon credit companies. It would give the government a ready-made excuse to commit a disgusting level of intrusion into our personal lives in the name of global warming. Think of the Kyoto Treaty. Think of cap and trade. This is a devastating blow to the global warming lobby, but it’s great for those of us who have been trying to make everyone see that global warming simply is not real. Global temperatures have stopped rising over the last ten years. Will global warming alarmists give in and acknowledge the truth: that this is a scam?

Despite all of the evidence, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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That was what he replied when asked where in the Constitution did Congress have authority to mandate health care on every American.

Using the general welfare excuse is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for liberals. The Constitution is not a particularly long document, nor is it a complicated one. But it does not agree with government controlling industries, or mandating what Americans can or cannot have, or government regulation of religion, and so on. Yet all liberals have to do is pull out that little golden ticket: general welfare. To liberals, it cancels out everything else the Constitution says. They can do whatever they want, as long as it’s supposedly “for our own good”. They can use those two little words — general welfare — to excuse all manner of evils. And while there are plenty of wonderful words in the Constitution they could zero in on — freedom, justice, liberty — liberals will always hone in on the one phrase they can use to excuse all the wrongs they’re committing. It’s a perverted meaning, but what does that matter? It gives them the ability to excuse anything they try to shove onto us — amnesty, government run health care, abortion, civilian trials for terrorists — and still be able to say it’s “in the Constitution”.

Don’t think of this as a flaw by our Founding Fathers. It isn’t. What liberals are doing is a distortion and a perversion, and deep down, they know it. The Constitution of the United States is one of the most profound documents ever written in the history of man, and all liberals want to do is twist it around to use it for their own sick means.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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Such thinking was once dominant in Anglo-Saxon philosophy schools but the great expansion of tertiary education in recent decades has meant that many less rigorous thinkers have been employed as philosophers, some even being third-rate enough to find enlightenment in the words of an obsolete economist called Karl Marx. So philosophy schools are now replete with people who seem to think they are being profound when they say: “There is no such thing as right and wrong” or “There are many realities”. To an Anglo-Saxon empiricist, such statements are simply confused.

Such confused thinking is usually described (rather fancifully) these days as “postmodernism” but for historical purposes it is probably best subsumed under the broad category of “existentialism” — and there were many prominent existentialist thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, particularly in Germany. And many existentialist thinkers at that time were sympathetic to National Socialism (Nazism), just as their counterparts today are solidly in favour of all sorts of Leftist thinking. So existentialist thinking and Leftism have always been intimately associated among many who call themselves philosophers. And it should therefore be no surprise that prewar existentialists sound very profound to existentialists today.

The Nazi connection is however embarrassing. Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, DeMan and others sound very good and wise and profound to Leftist philosophers today so how do you cope with the Nazi connection? Easy: In the traditional Leftist way of dealing with all inconvenient facts — by ignoring it.

One of the holier of today’s existentialists has however recently upset the applecart by pointing out that the great god Heidegger was a Nazi and calling for all Heidegger’s thinking to be denounced and renounced. Leftists are not letting go of such an inspiring (to them) figure as Heidegger, however. What Heidegger says is central to what they say, so to denounce Heidegger would be to denounce most of their own thinking. And there the matter rests at the moment. A small excerpt from a NYT story about the matter below. That Nazi thinking is one subset of socialist thinking is, of course, never acknowledged:

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

The book is the most radical attack yet on Heidegger (1889-1976) and would upend the philosophical field’s treatment of his work in the United States, and even more so in France, where Heidegger has frequently been required reading for an advanced degree. Mr. Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris, Nanterre, not only wants to drum Heidegger from the ranks of philosophers, he wants to challenge his colleagues to rethink the very purpose of philosophy and its relationship to ethics.

At the same time scholars in disciplines as far flung as poetry and psychoanalysis would be obliged to reconsider their use of Heidegger’s ideas. Although Mr. Faye talks about the close connection between Heidegger and current right-wing extremist politics, left-wing intellectuals have more frequently been inspired by his ideas. Existentialism and postmodernism as well as attendant attacks on colonialism, atomic weapons, ecological ruin and universal notions of morality are all based on his critique of the Western cultural tradition and reason.

I go into some detail about the confusions of “postmodernist” thinking here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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When scientists mistrust their data, they do they same thing you do when you think your watch is off: they check another clock. To diagnose the problem in the Atlantic, Willis needed to compare ocean temperature measurements from multiple sources. The first source he turned to was sea level data from satellite altimeters.

Because water expands when it absorbs heat, and contracts when it cools, sea level is physically connected to heat content in the upper ocean. Satellite altimeters measure sea surface height with radar. The radar sends a pulse of energy toward the Earth’s surface and listens for the echo. The time delay and intensity of the echo reveal the altitude of the sea surface.

Willis also had ocean-based data sets, including temperature profiles from the Argo robot fleet as well as from expendable bathythermographs, called “XBTs” for short. XBTs are the equivalent of a disposable razor. A temperature sensor is spooled out behind a ship by thin copper wire. It sinks, making measurements at increasing depths, transmitting them back to the ship via the wire until the line snaps and the sensor sinks to the bottom of the ocean, discarded.

The devices are manufactured to free-fall through the water at a known rate; scientists infer the depth of the temperature measurements by the time lapsed after the sensor hits the water. They have been used by the U.S. Navy and oceanographers since the 1960s.

“Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”

The digging led him to the data from the expendable temperature sensors, the XBTs. A month before, Willis had seen a paper by Viktor Gouretski and Peter Koltermann that showed a comparison of XBT data collected over the past few decades to temperatures obtained in the same ocean areas by more accurate techniques, such as bottled water samples collected during research cruises. Compared to more accurate observations, the XBTs were too warm. The problem was more pronounced at some points in time than others.

The Gouretski paper hadn’t rung any alarm bells right away, explains Willis, “because I knew from the earlier analysis that there was a big cooling signal in Argo all by itself. It was there even if I didn’t use the XBT data. That’s part of the reason that we thought it was real in the first place,” explains Willis.

But when he factored the too-warm XBT measurements into his ocean warming time series, the last of the ocean cooling went away.

More HERE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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On MSNBC on October 27, Rachel Maddow interviewed Jane Hamsher, well-known Hollywood roustabout and left-wing blogger for FireDogLake.com. The subject was the progress of Obamacare in the Senate and Senator Joe Lieberman’s warning that he might join a Republican filibuster of the Baucus bill if it contained the so-called public option.

During the discussion, however, Hamsher went off on a tangent about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and made the allusion that the famed anti-civil rights Dixiecrats joined Republicans to stand in the way of civil rights during the 1964 debates.

Maddow: Let me ask you about the statistic I attributed to you in my intro there – I know you have been doing some digging on this issue – of a Democrat joining a Republican filibuster. How, how unprecedented would a move like this be for Senator Lieberman?

Hamsher: Well, we have seen a number of the other party cross overs…well we remember the Dixiecrats joining the Republicans in the sixties on civil rights filibusters …

Naturally, host Maddow did not correct Hamsher’s misleading claim that the GOP stood in the way of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In reality, Republicans were great supporters of the legislation. Leave it to MSNBC to continue the left’s favorite myth that Republicans are against civil rights for blacks.

Of course, the truth is, the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw strong Republican support. In fact, of the total number of Republicans then serving in Congress, support never dipped below 70% on any of the final vote counts. The original House version got 80% GOP support, the Senate version got 82% and the final vote in the House was 82% of Republicans in support. On the other hand, Congressional Democrats never saw higher than 69% of its membership in support of civil rights for blacks.

And who was one of the leading voices in favor of passage? It was Illinois Senator Edward Dirksen, a Republican. Who was a leading voice opposing civil rights? Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia and still serving in that chamber.

If it were up to Democrats in 1964 the Civil Rights Act would never have passed. Yet here is the uninformed Hollywood Author Jane Hamsher of the extremist website FireDogLake falsely claiming that it was the GOP that stood in the way of civil rights for blacks. And it is MSNBC letting her get away with the falsity.

(Hamsher’s bit is at around the 4:10 mark)

(H/T ProteinWisdom.com)

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Furthermore, evidence that the creepy-crawlies are NOT a good proxy for temperature is readily to hand. The whole point of their claim is that there has been a temperature upsurge just in the last 50 years — and yet we have REAL temperature measurements for that time, and indeed for a century or so before that. So we can test the validity of using creepy-crawlies as a proxy for temperature. And a test shows them to be in fact invalid. They do not measure temperature. As a correspondent observed: “The original article is in PNAS and (like a lot of things in lightly reviewed PNAS) is a joke. Not one reference to real-world temperature records that are nearby and show nothing like what is in the paper.”

Another correspondent draws attention to the fact that the paper depends on the old “correlation is causation” fallacy. They don’t look for alternative explanations of what they have observed. The correspondent writes:

For what it’s worth, two things occur to me.

1. “several types of mosquito-like midges that for many thousands of years thrived in cold climate surrounding the lake suddenly began declining at around 1950″ — Have they accounted for the use of DDT, then? Seems to me that DDT on Baffin Island could have been very popular among trappers and the military in the 50s. Possibly pertinent too:

DDT and its breakdown products are transported from warmer regions of the world to the Arctic by the phenomenon of global distillation, where they then accumulate in the region’s food web. See here. Thus there might be a human impact on this parameter, but of another kind.

Beyond that, though, if the authors are suggesting that CO2 has caused a mosquito or midge shortage up north, they should consult caribou herds, whose route of wandering is traceable to wind direction, so desperate are these animals to escape the floating bloodsuckers.

In the Canadian Arctic, researchers who bared their arms, legs, and torsos in an experiment reported as many as 9,000 [mosquito] bites per minute. See
here

Who knows, then? Changing wind patterns and a consequent shift of caribou migration (the supporting host) or DDT usage might account for the decline of midge bodies in this particular study of Ayr Lake. But CO2?

2. “The Earth is now some 600,000 miles (966,000 kilometers) further from the sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice than it was at the time of Jesus Christ” — A sad example of allegation that’s already become a repeated “fact” simply because no one’s bothered to investigate it. I have, and find no indication that this million km claim is true.

Warmism is very destructive to real science.

EVIDENCE THAT THE CANADIAN “HOCKEYSTICK” IS NOT REPLICABLE

As expected, it is looking very much like a one-off. Below is the abstract of what appears to be a very similar but more cautious study, complete with diatoms and chironomids (midge larvae) but with very dissimilar results.

Similarities and discrepancies between chironomid- and diatom-inferred temperature reconstructions through the Holocene at Lake 850, northern Sweden

By I. Larocque and C. Bigler

Abstract

A quantitative temperature reconstruction using chironomids and diatoms has been attempted from a high elevation lake in northern Sweden (Lake 850). Since 7000 cal. years BP, both chironomids and diatoms recorded similar temperatures (in the range of present-day estimates) but the correspondence between chironomid and diatom-inferred temperatures was highest in the recent Holocene (2500 cal. years BP to the present). Between ca. 9000 and 7000 cal. years BP, inferred temperatures from chironomids were warmer than today (ca. 1–2°C), in accord with other climate reconstruction using pollen, plant macrofossils and oxygen isotope analysis in lakes of northern Scandinavia. In contrast, diatom analysis did not infer warmer temperatures during this period. The insensitivity of diatoms to temperature in Lake 850 between 9000 and 7000 cal. years BP could be attributed to other environmental factors affecting the diatom assemblages through time, especially lake-water pH. Diatom-inferred pH showed a gradual decrease (0.5 pH units) between 9000 and 7000 cal. years BP while it remained more or less constant since 7000 cal. years BP. Changes in lake-water pH acting on diatoms seem to mask the effect of climate, leading to temperature reconstructions that are inaccurate. Ways of disentangling climate and other environmental factors when attempting climate reconstruction should be further investigated.

SOURCE

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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UN “Special Rapporteur” Martin Scheinin recently filed a report with the UN titled “Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism” in which he states that human gender is not a fixed thing but a mere “social construct” that is “changeable over time.”

In this paper Scheinin, the “Special Rapporteur” — I do get a kick out of the pretentiousness of that grandiose title — and the UN leadership (a word I use advisedly) wants terribly to deny both genetics and simple reality. Page eight of this report asserts that a man is not necessarily a man and a women… well, maybe she’s something else entirely… but what ever they are their gender is but a temporary designation determined at the whim of society.

Catch this PC garbage:

Gender is not synonymous with women but rather encompasses the social constructions that underlie how women’s and men’s roles, functions and responsibilities, including in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, are defined and understood. This report will therefore identify the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures both on women and men, as well as the rights of persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. As a social construct, gender is also informed by, and intersects with, various other means by which roles, functions and responsibilities are perceived and practiced, such as race, ethnicity, culture, religion and class. Consequently, gender is not static; it is changeable over time and across contexts. Understanding gender as a social and shifting construct rather than as a biological and fixed category is important because it helps to identify the complex and inter-related gender-based human rights violations caused by counter- terrorism measures; to understand the underlying causes of these violations; and to design strategies for countering terrorism that are truly non-discriminatory and inclusive of all actors.

Of course, it is patently obvious what this sort of rhetoric is meant to do and that is play to the radical homosexual lobby. If gender is defined as something that can’t be defined, this would help to further legitimize homosexual, transgender and other aberrant lifestyle choices, many of which have been considered mental illnesses in the recent past and in some countries may still be.

The UN has many times tried to get this definition of gender to become de rigueur but has thankfully failed thus far to convince the world’s representatives to go along with such an absurd artifice. But there is a problem here and that is the fact that this language was shoehorned into an official UN report. It is language not accepted by the world, but language snuck into a sanctioned report and presented as accepted fact. It is surreptitious gay activism and nothing else but this sort of underhanded advocacy helps smooth the way for activism later.

After all, at some point, some militant gay activist will present this report as “proof” that gender is subjective and not objective or at least use the fact that this is an official UN report to help buttress their activism. Make no mistake, however, this is what activists want and also why this language was slipped into this report. These activists will not stop until they get their way so anyone that opposes this nonsense must continue to fight against it, must continue to point out the illegitimacy of reports such as this.

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I am not a Mark Kirk fan. For me he is, and always has been, far too “moderate” on social issues and his now (maybe) retracted Cap and Tax vote sticks in my craw pretty badly. But Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly blog Political Animal, unfairly and illicitly slammed Kirk on something he said in an interview with The News Gazette of Danville, Illinois.

Benen was ticked at Kirk’s answer about the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy of the U.S. Military. In an effort to show [support for] his LGBT, or BLGT, or BLT fans… whatever they call themselves this week… Benen jumped on Kirk’s claim that DADT works well and that “keeping that all out of the workplace makes common sense.”

But, Benen’s pandering to the fringe, militant gay lobby isn’t my concern here. Benen’s other jab at Kirk was as follows:

By the way, in the same interview, Kirk endorsed sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan because Illinois is home to “the tallest building in North America.”

This verges on a lie from Benen. The way Benen phrases Kirk’s reply, it is as if Kirk linked the war in Afghanistan to Illinois having a tall building as if that was the whole of the point Kirk was making. But Kirk’s point was obviously not as quixotic and simple-minded as Benen portrays it.

Here is what Kirk actually said:

He supports Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has recommended increasing U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan.

“We have no failure option in Afghanistan,” he said. “I think we have a unique concern representing Illinois, because we have the tallest building in North America. Our job is to make sure that everyone working in the Sears, Willis Tower comes home safely every night.”

In the long term, he said, the United States must support Afghan police and army units until they are well-established, a process he said would take “three to four years.”

Only an idiot (perhaps one like Benen) could miss the point Kirk was trying to make. I agree that he did not make it well, but it is painfully obvious that Kirk was saying that keeping the pressure up in Afghanistan will help prevent the Sears Tower (Now the Willis Tower) from coming down in a World-Trade-Tower-like heap at the hands of the terrorists, terrorists that would be made busy over there and not here.

Benen’s ignorant spin against Kirk is a political hatchet job plain and simple.

But, this is the sort of left-wing crap we should expect by a card carrying member of the Old Media.

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Media Matters has come to quickly defend Obama’s “safe school czar”, stating the fact he praised a NAMBLA member is a smear. Their defense is weak, and Zomblog completely deconstructs it.

Media Matters –

You have recently assumed the attack-dog role in the Jennings/Hay/NAMBLA scandal, releasing a nonstop barrage of announcements condemning what you characterize as “right-wing smears.” Before you continue down this road, pause to consider the consequences of this strategy…

Why are you taking actions that will damage Kevin Jennings’ career and get the Obama administration entangled in an embarrassing scandal?

…By advising Jennings to dig in his heels on a story that is only bound to grow in intensity, you are only exacerbating the problem. Enough evidence has already emerged (with more to surely emerge in the near future) that you should recognize the need for Jennings and the Obama administration to enter “crisis management mode”: In other words, they should get in front of the story, apologize, acknowledge mistakes, and vow to never repeat them.

Furthermore, your defense of Jennings is so weak, and so easily debunked, that you have now put your own reputation on the line, not just Kevin Jennings’.

But it’s not too late. I invite you, Media Matters, to join me in encouraging Kevin Jennings to make a public statement condemning Harry Hay in no uncertain terms, and to retract his earlier praise of him.

Jennings was also a member in the extremist gay activist organization Act Up.

These two associations help us to understand Jennings’ agenda behind his major accomplishments: founding GLSEN, and pushing the Massachusetts law banning “sexual orientation” discrimination in the state’s schools.

Jennings worked closely with another Act Up radical, David LaFontaine, who convinced Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld to establish the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth — which directly promoted homosexuality in the schools. (See Jennings, Mama’s Boy, Preachers’ Son, p. 196, excerpt online.) LaFontaine appeared at a 1990 Act Up protest in Boston (the mob reportedly numbered 700), “in which homosexual militants pelted newly ordained Catholic priests (and their relatives) with condoms as they left a church induction ceremony.”

I think these associations reveal a clear agenda from a guy put in a perfectly strategic position to push this agenda. I’m sick of people pushing agendas on my children. Can we get a chorus of people demanding this guy resign already???? C’mon folks!

Gateway Pundit reports that 53 Republicans are demanding Jennings be fired! Get on the phones to your reps! This guy has gotta go!

Fifty-three House Republicans have written President Barack Obama asking him to remove “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings from that position.

The lawmakers accused Jennings of “pushing a pro-homosexual agenda” and said that Jennings’s past writings exhibit a record that makes him unfit for the position.

“We respectfully request that you remove Kevin Jennings, the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, from your Administration,” the Republicans wrote. “It is clear that Mr. Jennings lacks the appropriate qualifications and ethical standards to serve in this capacity.”

Jennings has come under scrutiny from conservative personalities like talk show host Sean Hannity for his handling of an alleged incident involving underage sex, as well as Jennings’s own reported personal history with drugs and alcohol — charges the GOP members echoed.

The letter was primarily assembled by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), and was joined by 52 Republican colleagues, including two members of leadership: House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (Ind.) and House Republican Conference Vice Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.).

Jennings, who founded the Gay and Lesbian Independent School Teacher Network (GLISTeN), was appointed by Obama to head the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, a position Jennings assumed in July.

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Much has been made about Meg Whitman’s spotty voting record by many, including me. When the Sacramento Bee’s Andrew McIntosh first reported that records for Whitman’s voter registration going back a decade or so were nearly non-existent it seemed that the anti-Whitman camp(s) out there had quite an issue to hang their hats upon. It sure made me wary of her campaign, to be sure.

After all, wouldn’t it say something interesting if this purportedly life-long Republican candidate had little history of even voting at all — much less for other Republicans — until recently? Whether its a fair question or not, it does make one wary of such a candidate. How could the voters be asked to vote for someone that herself hasn’t seemed too interested in voting?

Of course, this whole question is only legitimate if the newspaper that broke the story had all of its facts straight. Now, it is starting to look like the Bee’s story is not as cut and dried as it was presented.

Today, California radio talker Hugh Hewitt tried to get Bee editor Amy Chance to answer a few questions about the paper’s article. The results are telling. (Hewitt has the audio on his website.)

Hewitt said that one of the things that raised a “red flag” about the Bee’s report on Whitman’s voting record was how lightly sourced it was. One oddity from the Bee account is that the report states that the San Francisco County elections office no longer retains voting records prior to 1992, but the Bee takes as gospel that some unknown and unidentified source in that office claimed that if Whitman had been registered then a record of that registration would have been noted in the new system. But, there are no records as they’ve been destroyed and there is no way to confirm anything. So, how can the Bee just assume that this record didn’t fall through a hole in the updated system? Truth is, it cannot.

The Bee also reported that when Whitman lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, “Neither Ohio state elections officials nor Hamilton County Board of Elections officials found a record of Whitman registering or voting there.” Whitman’s campaign, however, disputes this and claims it has a letter from the County stating the opposite.

The Sacramento Bee wrote that Meg was not registered to vote in Ohio. Yet, we have a letter from the Hamilton County Board of Elections confirming that she was registered to vote there from 1980 to 1982.

The Whitman campaign addressed these controversies with a letter to the Sacramento Bee protesting the Bee’s slipshod journalism. That letter points out something else that is quite interesting.

In an attempt to confirm our findings, we then asked the registrar to provide voting information for several prominent San Franciscans, including Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi. (Dianne Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988. Nancy Pelosi has lived in San Francisco since 1969 and was elected to Congress in 1987.) The registrar’s office came back in writing with the same result. There are no records in any system of Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi voting in San Francisco prior to 1992.

The problem we have here is that the Bee presented its inability to find Whitman’s voting records prior to 1992 as damning evidence that she was not registered and did not vote, despite that Whitman has claimed she did vote during that era.

But if no one can prove through definitive official records that anyone, even other prominent Californians, voted or how they voted during that same time period, how is it germane to focus on Whitman’s lack of records here? The truth is, the Bee has made a leap of logic that damns Whitman unjustly.

Whitman herself has admitted that politics didn’t interest her a whole lot until she got the bug to work for Mitt Romney’s campaign, thence to McCain’s and ultimately to her run for the big seat in Sacramento. But she has always maintained that she’s been a life-long Republican. The Bee’s story put quite a dent in that claim. But now there is an awful lot of reason to doubt the veracity of the Bee’s story.

The main question now is, has the damage to Whitman’s campaign been done? We have many months ahead to find that out.

The text of Whitman’s letter to the Sacramento Bee follows.

Letter from Meg Whitman Campaign to The Sacramento Bee:

Dear Amy:

Thank you for our conversations in recent days regarding The Sacramento Bee’s September 24th story on Meg’s voting history. As we discussed, the campaign has been in the process of reconciling its information and Meg’s recollections with The Bee’s coverage. So far, we have found a number of disturbing discrepancies that raise serious questions about the quality of The Bee’s reporting and the integrity of your newspaper.

For starters, The Bee reported that while Meg lived in San Francisco from 1981 to 1989, she was not registered to vote and did not vote. The problem we have with this is that Meg clearly remembers voting on multiple occasions, including the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections.

As Meg prepared to enter the race, our campaign requested her voting records from the San Francisco registrar and was told that no records were available from 1981 to 1989. We have a letter from the registrar confirming that fact.

After your story ran, we went back to the San Francisco registrar and asked them to confirm your assertion that Meg had not registered or voted in San Francisco between 1981 and 1989. They could not. The registrar’s office again confirmed in writing that it no longer has records for voters prior to 1992. Records from that period were never transferred and they simply don’t have them.

In an attempt to confirm our findings, we then asked the registrar to provide voting information for several prominent San Franciscans, including Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi. (Dianne Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988. Nancy Pelosi has lived in San Francisco since 1969 and was elected to Congress in 1987.) The registrar’s office came back in writing with the same result. There are no records in any system of Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi voting in San Francisco prior to 1992.

Clearly, Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein voted in San Francisco during the 1980s, and so did Meg Whitman. Based solely on a mysterious unnamed source at the registrar’s office, The Bee conveniently asserts that Meg never voted in San Francisco. This flies in the face of any information actually available at the San Francisco registrar’s office.

And the list of errors in your September 24th story goes on and on:

The Sacramento Bee wrote that Meg was not registered to vote in Ohio. Yet, we have a letter from the Hamilton County Board of Elections confirming that she was registered to vote there from 1980 to 1982.

The Sacramento Bee wrote that the first voter registration it found for Meg was in San Mateo County in 2002. Yet, through voting archives, we have confirmed Meg’s registration in Santa Clara county beginning in February 8, 1999. The affidavit number for Meg’s registration is 70CE223397.

The Sacramento Bee stated that Steve Poizner had regularly voted in elections. Yet, the next day, after our campaign pointed out your mistake, The Bee acknowledged that Poizner failed to vote in statewide primary elections in 1994 and 1998.

The Sacramento Bee stated that there is no record of Meg voting as a young woman in Suffolk County, New York. Yet, when we contacted the registrar in Suffolk County multiple times, we were told that there was no conclusive evidence either way. They did not confirm or deny the registration or voting history.
Finally, using public records, we have so far been unable to confirm your assertion that Steve Poizner voted regularly during his years in Texas, which is not surprising given the condition of records going back to that period. However, you appear to have given Poizner the benefit of the doubt.

When Meg launched her campaign in February, she openly acknowledged that her voting record was far from perfect. She was open about the facts as she remembered them. And her campaign collected all the documentation available to support her claims.

The number of errors in your story, plus the convenient use of a mysterious unnamed source to contradict the information publicly available at the San Francisco registrar’s office, leaves the impression that your newspaper or its sources set out to deliberately misrepresent Meg’s voting history. While Meg makes no excuses for the votes she missed, the record she does have should be accurately reported.

We expect The Sacramento Bee to correct the record as soon as possible. In particular, your newspaper should retract its assertion that Meg never voted in San Francisco or provide a credible on-the-record source to support the claim.

Regards,

Tucker Bounds
Director of Communications
Meg Whitman for Governor

(Cross posted at RedCounty.com.)

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