Clash over ‘global warming’ ratcheted up another degree

Congressman wants funding stopped; scientists plan retaliation campaign

Posted: March 05, 2010
9:50 pm Eastern

By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

The clash over “global warming” has been ratcheted up another degree this week, with one member of Congress demanding U.S. taxpayer funding for the research be halted and scientists who have been accused of slipshod and deceptive work planning a campaign of retaliation against their critics.

The controversy moved to the front burner late last year when a series of e-mails was hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain that indicate scientists were hiding and manipulating data and trying to marginalize critics.

University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit

The revelations were significant, because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed two findings Dec. 7 that concluded greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The EPA’s rulings could mean thousands of dollars in additional taxes for individual consumers.

Now,  Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Joe Barton, R-Texas, is citing the doubts about the integrity of “climate change” science in a letter asking for an accounting of U.S. taxpayer support for the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.

The U.S. since 1994 has given some $50 million to the panel, and contributions under Obama now have doubled.

Send President Obama, House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid a Constitution!

arton, writing to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asked the State Department to stop any contributions until an up-to-date audit is released.”In recent months, the IPCC has come under significant criticism for the quality of its principal work product: the periodic assessments of the causes of climate change and related impacts from a changing climate,” Barton wrote.

“Various reports have identified problems concerning quality-control procedures, peer review, and political influence on the assessment writeups, raising serious questions about the scientific integrity of the enterprise,” he said.

The congressman asked Clinton to provide details of U.S. funding and state what controls – if any – have been placed on the funds.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports “global warming” scientists are preparing to strike back at their critics.

The report by Stephen Dinan said the newspaper had obtained private e-mails in which climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences said they were tired of “being treated like political pawns.”

The e-mails revealed a strategy to form a nonprofit group that would challenge “global warming” critics in public newspaper ads. One suggested “an outlandlishly aggressively partisan approach” that would gut credibility of critics.

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails obtained by the newspaper.

Many of the scientists in the “climate change” advocacy camp have been “under siege,” the newspaper reported, since the East Anglia e-mails revealed discussions about skewing data to push chosen results.

Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., has suggested the Justice Department investigate scientists for potentially falsifying data.

Judith Curry, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said scientists should be shoring up their own research and eliminating mistakes.

“Hinging all of these policies on global climate change with its substantial element of uncertainty is unnecessary and is bad politics, not to mention having created a toxic environment for climate research,” she told the newspaper.

In the Telegraph in the U.K., writer James Delingpole who has followed the “Climategate” scandal as the purloined e-mails have been dubbed, said the arguments are beginning to border on paranoia.

The issue, he said, no longer has anything to do with climate, global warming or even science.

See how deep corruption runs in all of today’s science … in “Hijacking Science.”

“It’s about economics. Politics. Money. The taxpayer versus Big Government,” he wrote.

Writer Sindya N. Bhanoo at DotEarth blogs at the New York Times agreed.

That report said Americans would be looking at $7-a-gallon gasoline if they are required to meet President Obama’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The report cited work from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which concluded a “carbon dioxide tax” would have to start at $30 a ton in 2010 and grow to $60 a ton in 2030, for the dollars to line up.

The Orange County Register has posted a chart for consumers to try to keep up with all the scandals developing in the “global warming” community.

Among the scandals listed are:

• ClimateGate: The scandal over the CRU e-mails from East Anglia.
• FOIGate: In which British officials are investigating whether East Anglia scientists refused to follow that nation’s freedom of information law about their work.
• ChinaGate: In which dozens of weather monitoring stations in rural China apparently have simply disappeared. This would lead to higher temperature averages since city levels frequently are warmer.
• HimalayaGate: In which an Indian climate official admitted in January that he falsely claimed Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 to prod governments into action.
• And PachauriGates I and II, SternGates I and II, AmazonGate (in which a claim that global warming would wipe out rain forests was exposed as a fraud), PeerReviewGate, RussianGate I and II and nearly a dozen others.

WND reported recently when the St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, petitioned the EPA to re-examine its decisions in light of the controversy over the scientists’ e-mails.

The company noted the “seriousness of the flaws” in the work.

Given the EPA’s “extensive reliance on those reports, “the “agency has no legal option but to re-examine the Endangerment Finding in light of this new information,” the petition said.

On its website, the company said the EPA’s earlier ruling “could mean regulation of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of buildings, farms, businesses and other facilities in the U.S.”

“Peabody believes that EPA ignored its obligation to render sound judgment and conduct a rigorous review of science, instead relying almost exclusively on the work of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a major basis for its recent endangerment finding,” the company said.

That panel “is not subject to U.S. data quality standards,” and further, the EPA “outsourced its scientific obligations to an agency whose work has since been shown to be deeply tainted by flaws, in light of multiple instances of errors, manipulated data and gaps in information that make conclusions unreliable.”

At the ClimateGate.com website, commentator John O’Sullivan noted the petition covers the entire body of “leaked e-mails.”

“Peabody is, in effect, challenging the right of the current U.S. federal government to introduce cap and trade regulations by the ‘back door,'” O’Sullivan noted.

“[The] civil action lists most of the principle scientists such as Professor Phil Jones, of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit, who recently admitted there has been no ‘statistically significant’ global warming for 15 years and agreed the Medieval Warm Period may have been just as warm, if not warmer than current global temperatures,” O’Sullivan said.

He pointed out that the Peabody legal challenge uses e-mails from climatologists to make its points. One, from Keith Briffa, said, “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.”

The e-mail continued, “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”

Texas officials also have filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of using “tainted” information to arrive at the EPA conclusion and it asks that the EPA’s decisions be set aside. Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, also filed a petition demanding the EPA reconsider its greenhouse gas finding.

The scientific community actually is anything but unanimous on climate change.

The disunity is documented by the Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered. The effort by Art Robinson, a research professor of chemistry and cofounder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in 1973, now lists tens of thousands of qualified scientists who endorse the following statement:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Among the original e-mails hacked from East Anglia and posted online was, “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 (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

The Democratic Party is Destroying Itself

By Daniel Greenfield  Saturday, March 6, 2010

The Republican party is destroying itself. That’s the message you’ll see repeated in media outlet after media outlet. That is the liberal talking point that has been spread throughout 2008 and 2009 by the press over and over again. It’s the one they’re still repeating now, even as the Tea Party movement has gone from a populist movement that the media ignored and then smeared when they couldn’t ignore it anymore, to a national force in politics. It’s the mantra that they’re still chanting even as so many Democratic congressmen are departing that it almost feels like a coup.

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As the Soviet Union kept insisting in the 70s that world capitalism was on the brink of destruction—the Greenwalds, the Krugmans and their meme spreading diggbats are insisting that the Republican party is about to be destroyed as a force in national politics. Just as the Republican party is due for a major comeback in the midterm elections. As Obama’s ratings keep sinking faster than a wet Koran in a toilet and the Democratic congress finds itself chained to a wildly unpopular health care plan that would force everyone to buy insurance from their health insurance industry backers—the old record keeps spinning. The Republican party is destroying itself.

But that is the price you pay for living in an echo chamber. The echoes may sound pretty, but only to someone who is deeply in love with the sound of his own voice. The USSR formed itself into one giant echo chamber in which everyone repeated the lies that the government wanted them to believe, until the government believed them too. And that is the real punishment of a liar, not that he will not be believed when he tells the truth, but that he will come to believe his own lies as the absolute truth. So when every level of government and media in the USSR repeated that last year’s harvest was 96 percent successful, no one could logically reconcile that with the fact that there was no actual bread anywhere to be found. Forced to choose between believing in the propaganda of a successful harvest or the reality that there was no bread—they went on believing in the propaganda, because lies had become their reality.

When in the aftermath of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts victory, Howard Dean went on Hardball to explain that the actual vote had been in support of the Public Option, you could almost see the hammer and sickle waving over his head. His argument made absolutely no logical sense, even to famous leg-tingler Chris Matthews. But they were never meant to make any kind of logical sense. Howard Dean was proceeding from the absolute belief that the American people want the most extreme legislation that Democrats can possibly think of. Not the opinion, not the ideal… but the belief. This is an absolute belief that millions of liberals share. The fact that most Americans do not want their legislation is not a fact that they can process. When confronted with it, just ignore it. Because when your premise is that Americans want your legislation, then the fact that they don’t want it does not compute.

Ideology programs people to believe things in the same way that a computer is programmed to believe things. At that point, reason and facts have absolutely nothing to do with it. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan went off to war fueled by faith that their own superiority would cause them to prevail. Setbacks and defeats could not be processed logically by their leadership—because their ideology said that setbacks and defeats were impossible. Hitler ignored the pleading of his own generals to retreat. In the last days, his bunker became an echo chamber in which his followers remained convinced that Germany would prevail even as its armies had been destroyed, and children were being thrown into the battle. And when the facts couldn’t be ignored any longer, Hitler killed himself. Just as Hideki Tojo tried to kill himself. Just as Stalin had contemplated killing himself when German troops had initially flooded across the border. Just as the Democratic party is now trying to kill itself.

Democrat nutroots insist that the only reason the party is suffering setbacks is because they aren’t being extreme enough

The madness of the left is holding the Democratic party hostage, as the nutroots insist that the only reason the party is suffering setbacks, is because they aren’t being extreme enough. Which is how rigid ideologies deal with setbacks. Which is why ideological revolutions quickly devolve into mass graves as the leadership and the cadres look for new targets to blame for “sabotaging” the revolution. Because the revolution itself can’t be flawed. Its ideas are as perfect as the sky above and as pure as the driven snow. It is the unbelievers and the heretics, the “moderates”, the “Conservative Democrats” who are the forces of reaction, who are responsible for the setbacks. The party must rededicate itself to its revolutionary purity of 2008 and remain in the vanguard of the struggle to destroy health care in America. Madness? No, this is what George Soros paid for. This is what imprisoning an entire party under a glass dome of ideology looks like. This is what Communism looks like.

Using Reconciliation to pass health care, Howard Dean’s nutroots vectored proposal, that even Chris Matthews derided as insane, has gone mainstream now. Or as mainstream as anything that Obama backs, but won’t actually say straight out, can possibly be. Nancy Pelosi is warning congressmen that they should be prepared to lose their jobs to pass health care legislation. But why would they be in danger of losing their jobs unless the voters didn’t want them to pass it? The third most powerful figure in the Democratic party is urging her fellow Democrats to ignore democracy. And this backhanded way is her only acknowledgment that she has dedicated itself to a plan that the public opposes. That she knows the public will punish at the ballot box.

But oh yes, after winning the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, and taking Ted Kennedy’s seat in the bargain, thereby terminating the Democratic party’s Supermajority (an event that the polls showed the public strongly favoring)… the Republican party is destroying itself. All that’s left for Obama is to take off his shoe at his next address to congress and bang it on the podium, screaming, “We Will Bury You All”. Though perhaps with the current state of the White House, that job would most properly fall to Joe Biden.

In the halls of congress, there’s still talk of reviving Cap and Trade—a piece of legislation that should properly be called, “HR: 1917 We Will Bury You All”. Because what America most needs right now to speed up its economic recovery is to completely destroy what’s left of its industrial and manufacturing base. Such is the mad logic of Los Angeles, where increasingly demented Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is preparing to saddle Angelinos with a Carbon Surcharge. Fresh from his appearance on All My Children, Villaraigosa has temporarily put his patented “One Million” proposals on hold long enough to come up with a new plan to bankrupt Los Angeles that doesn’t involve building a subway system. This at a time when the California economy is already approaching a state of disaster.

Democrats switched to wearing “I’m with Stupid” t-shirts every time they posed with Obama

There’s no madness like ideological madness. That’s the species of insanity that drives a Krugman to insist that we’re not going into debt fast enough to fix the economy. That’s the kind of madness that leads a victorious party to go down a blind alley in order to pass a health plan that only health unions and health insurance companies want. A few months after winning on a platform of “It’s the Economy, Stupid”, the Democrats switched to wearing “I’m with Stupid” t-shirts every time they posed with Obama.

And it won’t be fixed by repeatedly referring to their plan as health care reform and promising to challenge all the big evil health insurance companies, by forcing the public to be their customers. Despite all of Obama’s glib telepromptered rhetoric, it hasn’t fooled the voters. And it won’t, no matter how many times Obama channels the spirit of Castro in nationally televised addresses to be broadcast on every network.

Because if Congress passes a bill that forces every American to have his or her clothes dry cleaned once a week, no one in their right mind will buy it as a reform plan or be grateful to the politicians who forced it on them. If Congress passes a bill forcing everyone to buy Tofu, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the only people who benefit are Tofu manufacturers and distributors. The health care plan doesn’t benefit American consumers, it benefits the Democratic party’s base of dole voters who live off taxpayer funded freebies, the health insurance industry, their affiliated unions, and everyone else who profits from entangling government and business into one big Gordian knot.

And so onward go the Socialist Soldiers of the Democratic party, marching as to war. And if they can ram through health care with 50 Senators, the only certainty is that this is how many they won’t have next time around. Because the people may be slow to react, but they do watch and they do punish. And what goes around comes around. If the Democrats have failed to learn from Massachusetts, when their attempt to pass an unpopular health care plan helped cost them a Senate seat in one of the most liberal states in America, then they will get the chance to learn from numerous other races in 2012—particularly if they attempt to illegally ram through a piece of legislation that is now more unpopular than ever.

The Democratic congress can use reconciliation or just drive up tanks to Capitol Hill or stationed armed guards at the doors to keep Republicans out. But unless they suspend elections, there will still be a price to pay at the ballot box. And forgetting this is a true sign that the Democratic party is blindly and willfully destroying itself. The left wing takeover of the party has doomed it to act like Chavez without having the kind of broad powers that a Latin American tyrant can wield. And so all that’s left is the echo chamber, the propaganda memes echoing from wall to wall as the faithful assure each other that victory will soon be theirs.

Meanwhile, the New York Times and a number of other dead-tree magazines are busy running stories warning that Rupert Murdoch’s empire is about to fall apart. Even at a time when News Corp is one of the few companies turning a profit, primarily thanks to FOX News—while the New York Times is laying off workers and borrowing money from shady Mexican billionaires to stay afloat. But of course it’s the New York Times that is going along swimmingly, while poor profitable News Corp is at the edge of the abyss.

As Iraq had fallen, the Iraqi Minister of Information was still insisting that there were no American troops in Baghdad. Not even within a 100 miles of Baghdad. That they were shooting down hundreds of American cruise missiles. That most of the American forces were already dead. That the rest would perish soon. Today the Iraqi Minister of Information would have no trouble getting a job in the White House because every echo chamber needs a good echo before it plummets into the abyss.

The ghost scientists on the Arctic expedition that never happened

By Judi McLeod  Sunday, March 7, 2010

Many vessels on dignified missions have gone down to watery graves in the challenging Arctic Sea.

Without the disinfectant of sunlight, the Canadian icebreaker and research ship Amundsen will remain lost in the permanent fog of yet another Global Warming fraud.

Known and even famous for plowing its way through ice for others, the Amundsen has been played a Ship of Fools.

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Thanks to a roving band of 300 scientists—who were not even where they were reported to be—Canada has now become Al Gore’s top student in Global Warming Hype’s Class of 2010.

Undated “breaking news” from the Winnipeg Free Press with quotes used very similar to those of BBC correspondent David Shukman after a voyage of the Amundsen during the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008, the world was warned that the sea ice in Canada’s fragile Arctic is melting more quickly than ice cream on an August afternoon.

“University of Manitoba Prof. David Barber, the lead investigator of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System study, said the rapid decay of thick Arctic Sea ice highlights the rapid pace of climate change in the North and forecasts what will come in the south.” (Winnipeg Free Press, 2/06/2010).

“We’re seeing it happen more quickly than what our models thought would happen,” Barber said at a student symposium on climate change at FortWhyte Alive.  “It’s happening much faster than our most pessimistic models suggested.”

Barber said the melting sea ice could be compared to disappearing rainforests.

It was not this winter but another-during the peak of global warming hype and before Climategate—when “more than 300 scientists from around the globe” braved winter’s blast on the Amundsen in the Arctic, all to study the impact of climate change.

We don’t know if the downed martinis drowned out all sense of geography during this voyage because the Amundsen—nowhere near the Arctic on February 6, 2010—was preoccupied doing icebreaking duty as usual on the the St. Lawrence River!

Funny how reader Paul Pekarek, who had checked the Canadian Coast Guard website, which confirmed indeed that the Amundsen was on the St. Lawrence, never heard back from the Winnipeg Free Press.

And as Canada Free Press (CFP) reader Jim Vanne points out, the logistics of this fateful Arctic trip are a tad off.  The Amundsen has a total complement of 10 officers, 26 enlisted men—and only 26 additional berths: “Presumably this expedition was doubly politically correct, in that not only were these scientists checking global warming, but they must have all been gay, as they were sleeping a dozen per bed.  Even better than the gay penguins story!”

The Feb. 6, 2010 expedition of the Amundsen that never happened would be the Global Warming joke of all time were it not for the fact that the Canadian government provided $156 million for the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System study.

When will the Canadian government and other governments ever learn?

The last time Canadians went circumpolaring during former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson’s $1-million, 2003 taxpayer-paid tour, reason of which she haughtily described as “to affirm our Northern identity”, UN poster boy and carbon credit booster Maurice Strong was one of the passengers.

Now that man-made Global Warming has been exposed worldwide as an utter fraud, it is time for the Canadian Government to bring the Amundsen back in out of the fog.

‘Hate’ laws could label 5-year-olds ‘offenders’ Government procedures demand paperwork on playground spats

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BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS

‘Hate’ laws could label 5-year-olds ‘offenders’

Government procedures demand paperwork on playground spats

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Posted: March 05, 2010
9:55 pm Eastern

By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

A British Christian organization reports children as young as 5 years old soon could have their names added to “hate registers” of people accused of showing disrespect to homosexuality in violation of “hate crimes” laws.

According to the Christian Institute, a nondenominational charity committed to upholding the truths of the Bible, already a 10-year-old child was added to the registry after he called a friend a “gay boy.”

The case was reported by the London Daily Mail, which said teachers are being ordered to write up even minor incidents as “serious bullying” and add them to a database that will follow a student through a school career.

The report confirmed that when small children use “homophobic” or racist words without knowing what they mean, they still must be written up.

The parents of the 10-year-old, Peter Drury, a student in Somerset, were told his name would be registered as an offender, according to the paper.

The report said an assessment from a civil liberties think tank estimated 40,000 children have such accusations, mostly involving alleged racism, added to their school records annually.

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Further, government officials are considering rules that also would require education officials to report incidents to local authorities.

“This is totally appalling,” Margaret Morrissey, founder of the campaign group Parents Outloud, told the London paper. “The use of such language is part of the learning process. Children need to learn where the boundaries lie. And I very much doubt they understand what they are saying.”

Drury’s mother, Penny Drury, 43, reported she was summoned to her son’s elementary school recently when he was accused of using “homophobic” language, the newspaper said. She was informed he would be registered, his behavior watched and his records monitored.

“He must have picked up the word from somewhere and thought it to mean stupid,” she said.

Parents and educators in the U.K. agree the slang use of the word “gay” for children means “inferior.”

The Christian Institute reported Penny Drury commented, “He doesn’t even understand about the birds and the bees, so how can he be homophobic?”

The government has explained its goals are to prevent “gender bullying.”

The issue of hate – real hate – has been addressed in “HOW EVIL WORKS: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America,” the newest book from WND Managing Editor David Kupelian.

Citing the deaths of 7 million when Stalin ordered his military to confiscate food from Ukraine in the 1930s, the Nazi Holocaust, the deaths of tens of millions on the orders of China’s Mao Zedong and other atrocities, he writes, “We frequently ask ourselves how human beings can sink to this level of cruelty. There’s no precedent for it among even the most fearsome predators in the animal kingdom. What, then, makes us capable of such extreme evil?

“We’re witnessing not only a toxic philosophy at work, but also the magic ingredient that makes that philosophy come to life – namely, hatred.

“Underneath all the smiles, underneath the ‘devout’ faith, underneath whatever persona is masking the overwhelming fear, confusion, and jihadist programming that have been cultivated in them since birth, lies the nuclear reactor core of their being – a smoldering fireball of suppressed rage,” he wrote.

WND also has reported on the move toward “hate crimes” plans in the United States similar to those in the U.K.

A law ultimately was enacted under President Obama’s direction last year.

A campaign recently was launched in Montgomery County, Md., to classify the speech of advocates for people who choose to leave the homosexual lifestyle as “hate speech,” which then could be banned under Obama’s law.

“Hate speech is unwelcome in Montgomery County Public Schools,” said an e-mail to the offices of Regina Griggs, national director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays, known as PFOX. “I would like to ask that you immediately cease distribution of your flyers at our public schools.

“We intend to pursue every method possible to protest your actions if you choose to continue,” the message warned.

The conflict was sparked by competing flyers distributed to public school students, one from PFOX, which reaches out to all those leaving the homosexual lifestyle regardless of religious affiliation, and the other from the homosexual-rights group PFLAG, or Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

The PFLAG flyer said if “homosexual” students can’t talk to their family members, “there are still people you can talk to.”

The PFOX flyer explained “former homosexuals do not think something is wrong with them because they decided to fulfill their heterosexual potential by overcoming unwanted same-sex attractions.”

The flyer from PFOX offered resources to help with “tolerance for everyone regardless of sexual orientation” for parents and students such as event speakers, books for libraries and brochures.

It said, “No one should be labeled based on the perception of  others. Get smart! Explore the origins of your same-sex attraction. … The decision of a prom date, a car, or whether to super-size those fries can be based on a feeling, but important decisions should not be made on feelings alone.”

The law signed by Obama also was targeted recently by a lawsuit alleging it violates the civil rights of Christians and pastors, who according to the complaint now can become the target of federal investigations, grand juries and even charges for no more than opposing the activism of homosexuals.

The lawsuit was filed by the Thomas More Law Center in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on behalf of Pastors Levon Yuille, Rene Ouellette, James Combs and Gary Glenn, the president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center, said at the time the lawsuit over the “hate crimes” law was filed, “There is no legitimate law enforcement need for this federal law. Of the 1.38 million violent crimes reported in the U.S. by the FBI in 2008, only 243 were considered as motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation. Moreover, [Attorney General] Eric Holder himself testified at a Senate hearing that the states are doing a fine job in this area.”

He called it a “political payoff” to homosexual advocacy groups for support of Obama in the last presidential election.

“The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin. It elevates those persons who engage in deviant sexual behaviors, including pedophiles, to a special protected class of persons as a matter of federal law and policy,” Thompson said at the time.

The Hate Crimes Act was dubbed by its critics as the “Pedophile Protection Act,” after an amendment to explicitly prohibit pedophiles from being protected by the act was defeated by majority Democrats. During congressional debate, supporters argued that all “philias,” or alternative sexual lifestyles, should be protected.

The law was promoted by its advocates as a crackdown on “bias” crimes motivated by a person’s “actual or perceived” “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.”

Obama signed the “Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act” in October after Democrats strategically attached it to a “must-pass” $680 billion defense-appropriations bill.

Obama boasted of the “hate crimes” bill when he signed it into law.

“After more than a decade, we’ve passed inclusive hate-crimes legislation to help protect our citizens from violence based on what they look like, who they love, how they pray or who they are,” he said.

The bill signed by Obama was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which called it a “menace” to civil liberties. The commission argued the law allows federal authorities to bring charges against individuals even if they’ve already been cleared in a state court.

Mitt Romney Offers Bold Blueprint for America With ‘No Apology’

Monday, 01 Mar 2010 07:55 PM

By: Mitt Romney

Former Massachusetts governor and 2008 presidential candidate Mitt Romney is offering a dramatic new blueprint for the nation to confront our most critical issues. Newsmax is pleased to present exclusive excerpts from Gov. Romney’s just-released book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” In “No Apology,” Gov. Romney exposes how the Obama administration and even the Republican Party are failing to confront budget deficits, declining global competitiveness, a weakened military, inadequate healthcare, failing education, and our energy needs. In this exclusive excerpt for Newsmax.com, Gov. Romney discusses how he came to the realization that America needed to be set back on track:

I’ve run for office three times, losing twice, winning once. Each time, when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn’t done an adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say. Some of that is because debate answers are limited to sixty seconds, ads are thirty seconds, and lengthy position papers are rarely read at all.

This book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign. That established, my interest in writing the book goes back well before my political life. My career in the private sector exposed me to developments abroad and conditions at home that were deeply troubling.

At the same time, I saw that most of us were not aware of the consequences of blithely continuing along our current course: We have become so accustomed to the benefits of America’s greatness that we cannot imagine any significant disruption of what we have known.

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I was reminded of a book I had read when I was in France during the late 1960s. Jean- Jacques Servan-Schreiber was a journalist and a businessperson, and he became convinced that France and Europe were in danger of falling far and irretrievably behind the United States.

His book, “The American Challenge,” stirred his countrymen to action and helped galvanize pan-European economic and political collaboration. While I am sufficiently realistic to recognize that this volume is highly unlikely to have as great an impact as did his, it is my hope that it will affect the thinking and perspectives of those who read it.

Thus, this is not a collection of my positions on all the important issues of the day; in fact, a number of issues I care about are not included. This is not a policy book that explores issues in greater depth than do scholars and think tanks—I treat topics in a single chapter that others have made the subject of entire volumes. Nor is this an attack piece on all the policies of the Obama administration, although criticism is unavoidable with policies that I believe are the most harmful to the future generations of America.

This is a book about what I believe should be our primary national objective: to keep America strong and to preserve its place as the world’s leading nation. And it describes the course I believe we must take to strengthen the nation in order to remain prosperous, secure, and free.

There are some who may question the national objective I propose. I make no apology for my conviction that America’s economic and military leadership is not only good for America but also critical for freedom and peace across the world. Accordingly, as I consider the various issues before the nation, I evaluate our options largely by whether they would make America stronger or weaker.

In my first chapters, I consider geopolitical threats and lessons from the history of great nations of the past. In subsequent chapters, I describe domestic challenges to our national strength and propose actions to overcome them. My final chapter is intended to provide a means for future Americans to gauge whether we have been successful in setting a course that will preserve America’s greatness throughout the twenty-first century. It describes as well the source of my optimism for America’s future.

These are difficult times: homes have lost value, nest eggs have been eroded, retirees have become anxious about their future, and millions upon millions of Americans are out of work. Inexcusable mistakes and failures precipitated the descent that has hurt so many people. But even as we endure the current shocks, we know that this will not go on forever; we know that because America is a strong and prosperous nation, the economic cycle will eventually right itself and the future will be brighter than the present.

While I will touch upon today’s difficulties, my focus is on the growing challenges to the foundations of our national strength. How we confront these challenges will determine what kind of America and world we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren.

This is a book about securing that future of freedom, peace, and prosperity in the only way possible: by strengthening America. A strong America is our only assurance that prosperity will follow hardship and that our lives and liberty will always be secure.

The strength of the nation has been challenged before—at its birth, during the Civil War, in the peril of world wars. It is challenged again today. In our past, Americans have risen to the occasion by confronting the challenge honestly and laying their sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. We must do so again.

Facing Our Challenges Head-On

I can remember only one time during my life when most Americans presumed that we didn’t really have any great challenges. It was during the period that largely coincided with the Bill Clinton presidency. George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan had pushed the Soviet Union to the wall and won. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and here at home, there was talk of a “new economy” that sent the bulls running on Wall Street. Columnist Charles Krauthammer has called it our “holiday from history.” We believed that peace and prosperity were here to stay—without threat, without sacrifice.

In some ways, we advanced as a nation during these years. The Internet boomed, and the pockets of millions of average Americans grew deeper. But did these years of ease make us a stronger, more free or secure nation?

We shrunk our military by 400,000 troops during the 1990s, retired over one hundred ships from the navy, and decreased the size of our air force by more than a quarter. More ominously, we gutted our human intelligence capabilities, and never took any real steps to infiltrate the violent jihadist groups like al-Qaida that had declared war on America.

At home, births to teenage mothers rose to their highest levels in decades, teenage drug use climbed, and pornography became the Internet’s biggest business. Our dependence on foreign oil rose from 42 percent of our total consumption in 1990 to 58 percent today.

I don’t wish challenges and hard times on this nation, even though I believe they have made us the country and people we are today. But neither do I fear them. My sole concern is that Americans will choose not to act, not to face our challenges head-on, not to overcome them.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, our economy has suffered its worst crisis since the Great Depression. We have amassed an unprecedented amount of debt and liabilities, and added to that, the Obama administration plans trillion-dollar deficits every year. Russian belligerence is on the rise. China holds over $750 billion of U.S. obligations. Iran and North Korea threaten the world with unbridled nuclear ambition. Violent jihadists like those who attacked us on 9/11 plot our destruction. The consequence of failure to act in response to these perils is unthinkable.

America will remain the leading nation in the world only if we overcome our challenges. We will be strong, free, prosperous, and safe. But if we do not face them, I suspect the United States will become the France of the twenty-first century— still a great country, but no longer the world’s leading nation. What’s chilling to consider is that if America is not the superpower, others will take our place. What nation or nations would rise, and what would be the consequences for our safety, freedom, and prosperity?

The world is a safer place when America is strong. Ronald Reagan remarked that “of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.” America’s strength destroyed Hitler’s fascism. It stopped the North Koreans and Chinese at the 38th parallel and allowed South Koreans to claim their freedom and reach prosperity. American strength kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and later pulled him out of his spider hole.

There are a number of thoughtful people around the world who don’t welcome America’s strength. In 2007, several reputable polls asked European citizens which nation they perceived as the greatest threat to international peace. Their answer was the United States. I was incredulous when I first read this, and presumed the respondents must have had the Iraq War on their minds when they answered. Surely they hadn’t considered what Russia would do in Eastern Europe if America was weak; what China would do in Taiwan; what the Taliban would do in Afghanistan; what Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong-Il, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have in mind for their neighbors. The very existence of American power helps to hold tyrants in check and reduces the risk of precipitous war.

Does America make mistakes? Absolutely. We never fully understood the enormously complex political, economic, and military issues we faced in Vietnam, and we were wrong in our assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. But in every case throughout modern history in which America has exercised military power, we have acted with good intention—not to colonize, not to subjugate, never to oppress.

During my tenure as governor of Massachusetts, I had the opportunity to join a small group of people in meeting Shimon Peres, Israel’s former prime minister and current president. In casual conversation, someone asked him what he thought about the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Given his American audience, I expected him to respond diplomatically but with a degree of criticism. But what he said caught me very much by surprise.

“First, I must put something in context,” he began. “America is unique in the history of the world. In the history of the world, whenever there has been war, the nation that is victorious has taken land from the nation that has been defeated— land has always been the basis of wealth on our planet.

Only one nation in history, and this during the last century, was willing to lay down hundreds of thousands of lives and take no land in its victory— no land from Germany, no land from Japan. America. America is unique in the history of the world for its willingness to sacrifice so many lives of its precious sons and daughters for liberty, not solely for itself but also for its friends.”

Everyone in the room was silent for a moment, and no one pressed him further on his opinion about Iraq. I was deeply moved. And I was reminded of former secretary of state Colin Powell’s observation that the only land America took after World War II was what was needed to bury our dead.

Some argue that the world would be safer if America’s strength were balanced by another superpower, or perhaps by two or three. And others believe that we should simply accept the notion that our power is limited.

British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his book, “On Empire,” asserts, “It is also troubling that there is no historical precedent for the global superiority that the American government has been trying to establish and it is quite clear to any good historian and to all rational observers of the world scene that this project will almost certainly fail.”

I take a different view. The United States is unique. American strength does not threaten world peace. American strength helps preserve world peace.

It is true that the emergence of other great powers is not entirely up to us— several other nations are building economic and military power and we will not stop them from doing so. But we can determine, entirely on our own, that we will not fall behind them. And the only way I know to stay even is to aim unabashedly at staying ahead.

Mitt Romney is a former governor of Massachusetts. Best known for his 2008 race for the Republican nomination for president, he has a remarkable career in private business, with his investment company, Bain Capital, helping to grow companies like Staples, Domino’s Pizza, FTD Florists and The Sports Authority, among others. In 1998 he left Bain to serve as CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. A frequent speaker and national television commentator, Mr. Romney has recently formed the Free And Strong America Political Action Committee. His latest book is “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” from St. Martin’s Press.