Two interesting pieces coming out of the Washington Times today. The first deals with efforts by the Democrats to inhibit the efforts of American intelligence agencies to gather information about terrorists and their plans for future attacks.
Senators Harry Reid, Patrick Leahy, Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold (all Dems) are all set to kill the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on February 1, 2008. From the Times:
| After they failed on Monday to block Republican efforts to retroactively bar lawsuits against telephone companies that helped the government monitor suspected jihadist communications after September 11, Mr. Reid pulled from the floor legislation to modernize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the primary law governing the monitoring of electronic communications. Unless Congress acts, on Feb. 1 U.S. intelligence agencies will lose the ability to monitor at least some overseas terrorist telecommunications without first obtaining court approval. Some special-interest groups would be very happy to see FISA expire. With the support of groups like People For the American Way, the ACLU and the blog DailyKos, Messrs. Feingold and Dodd have been working feverishly to deny the telephone companies protection from lawsuits over their participation in terrorist surveillance efforts. ... No case on the public record better illustrates the heightened dangers Americans will face than the case of three soldiers from the Army's 10th Mountain Division who were ambushed May 12 south of Baghdad, apparently by al Qaeda. One soldier was found dead on May 23, while the other two remain missing. As coalition forces searched for the missing soldiers on May 13 and May 14, intelligence officials learned about insurgent communications they believed to be related to the ambush. On May 14, a special court overseeing FISA issued an order permitting some suspected terrorist communications to be monitored. The following day, lawyers and intelligence officials spent more than nine hours discussing the need for a FISA order to monitor these communications before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales authorized monitoring. Critics attribute the delays in the search to bureaucratic "bungling" — an intellectually dishonest argument, because it overlooks the fact that the FISA court had issued several rulings earlier this year that called into question the government's authority to act without prior court approval. Mr. Reid this week was faced with a choice between fixing the problems and pandering to special-interest groups who want to make it impossible for the military to do its job. Once again, he made the wrong choice. |
And when it came to choosing between allowing terrorists to continue their planning of killing innocent people and the safety of innocent Americans, the Dems have once again sided with the terrorists.
You can access the complete article on-line here:
Sen. Reid's Stink Bomb
The Washington Times Editorial
December 19, 2007
And the Global Warming alarmists are not going to like this one, but apparently their theories and predictions about the demise of the planet and the human species have all been wrong.
Writing for the Washington Times, David Deming is a geophysicist, an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis, and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma:
| Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn't increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S. South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency. Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered. Last January, $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a devastating five-day freeze. Thousands of agricultural employees were thrown out of work. At the supermarket, citrus prices soared. In the wake of the freeze, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked President Bush to issue a disaster declaration for affected counties. A few months earlier, Mr. Schwarzenegger had enthusiastically signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a law designed to cool the climate. California Sen. Barbara Boxer continues to push for similar legislation in the U.S. Senate. |
Now, according the Global Warming theory, none of this should have happened. In fact, Global Warming predicited the opposite.
Deming goes on:
| Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years. ... Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. |
And Al Gore got an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for the junk science known as Global Warming.
You can access the complete column on-line here:
Year Of Global Cooling
David Deming
The Washington Times
December 19, 2007
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