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They weren't preventing dissenting opinions from being accepting into peer reviewed journals - they expressed disappointment in the fact that the peer review process wasn't doing its job: weeding out bad science.

I don't think you've captured the true flavor of their hijinks.

Rigging a Climate 'Consensus' - About those emails and 'peer review.'

This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted in a March 2003 email, after the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal!"

Mr. Mann went on to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.

Scientists actually are pretty skeptical people by nature,...... Most "skeptics" are nothing more than contrarians; skepticism to me implies a willingness to investigate the issue for one's self, but most of the denial movement shows such a poor grasp of the science that they clearly haven't done so.

When it comes to climate, there seems to be two groups - skeptics, and believers. It is amazingly difficult to get believers to reevaluate new data (and perhaps endanger millions in grants?).

Climate of Fear - Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.
Physics Group Splinters Over Global Warming Review
Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Can most scientists afford to be skeptics?

To which Paul Vaughan responded as follows:

Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW.
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.

Follow the money -- perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.

Opposing toxic pollution is not synonymous with supporting AGW.

After all, there is huge money to be made and transferred due to "Climate change", even if it all turns out to b

I'm not taking up the questions of whether global warming is a fact, or whether it is primarily caused by CO2, or whether human activity is directly responsible.
I was making an ad hominem, and questioning whether certain scientists are credible. It was not directly about whether their conclusions happen to be accurate, but about whether we can trust them on face-value.
This was, I believe, also the OP's point: Can we trust this report or is it spun to fit an agenda.
The fact is that global warming has unfortunately become a highly politicized issue (not NPOV). There is a tremendous amount of government money to be had in the field, and the people writing the checks expect certain results.
Some of the stolen emails are quite frank in speaking about systematically discrediting and silencing scientists who doubt some or all of the accepted account. That isn't the method of cold objective science (where people are silenced by being refuted, and discredit themselves when they write bad papers), that is the method of politics or ideology.
Once a topic becomes politicized I think it is perfectly reasonable to question the authority of the authorities, and give a fair hearing to dissenters. In fact, I think it would be irresponsible not to.

Try taking ethics. If we followed your slippery slope logic we'd start killing people when they hit retirement age. After all, they'll never again go back to work and 'pay back' their value after they start collecting social security. Same for the mentally retarded, just drown them right?

You say that like we're supposed to think "oh no, that could never happen", but have you seen Denmark recently? They don't just go out and kill people explicitly, sure; you make it a social thing. Guilt them into it. Or, wait until they're sick and miserable and provide no meaningful outlets for palliative care. There's lots of ways you can do it. And the retarded?

When I phoned Amsterdam's Academic Medical Center, a spokeswoman told me that she approved of involuntary euthanasia for disabled infants: "It is the same in all the hospitals in the world; we are just more open about it." Most hospitals try heroically to save disabled children, but the contrary view seems to be widely held among the Dutch.

--The Dutch Way of Death, The Wall Street Journal

Great, someone modded me flamebait for pointing out the truth. See here for more information on the exxon disinformation campaign. There's tonnes of information out there, if you read the references and follow the sources.

It has its flaws, as any large institution does, but these are flaws that are siezed upon by opponents and used as propaganda (check out the raft of TV commercials on US TV during Clinton's attempt to get a national system running in the US - "you can't choose your own doctor! you won't have access to cutting edge treatments! the doctors don't get paid a decent wage! you'll have to wait years for lifesaving surgeries!)

And what part of that is not true in different health care systems around the world? More importantly, what part of that was not true with Hillary care that was being pushed in 1993?

Now, in a system like the UK NHS you do have long wait times for certain things if the system is busy, and if there's one major criticism to be levelled at it, it's that it is a behemoth organisation with a lot of bloat in it, soaking up money like a sponge, yet still requiring huge investment with a lot of faults. It is still recovering from 15 years of neglect from a Tory government in the 80s, but it is coming around gradually.

If by coming around you mean providing substandard treatments, denying treatment to anyone they can justify, and killing treatment for anyone who wants to pay the difference for better treatment, then I guess your right.

Even with the horror stories that the newspapers and private healthcare shills love to jump on (I waited 4 hours in the ER when I broke my leg!), these are totally atypical of the experience, and even with these issues that arise (which do need to be addressed), it is still vastly superior to the US system which exists solely to make drug companies, senators, congressmen and other select individuals very rich and has nothing to do with actual health care, other than as a side effect.

Read some of the links I provided above. This isn't a 4 hour wait for a broken leg. It's a refusal to provide effective treatment, long wait times for things like MRI scans and medically necessary procedures and so on in the various different health care systems.

And yes, it's so bad in Canada that it's economically viable for insurance companies to offer wait list insurance that will take you to another country is necessary to get treatment. Try taking a look at medical tourism where a lot of brits seem to be going to India and parts Asia if not just others parts of Europe for cheap medical coverage that they already have in the UK.

You obviously don't know what the waits are about then.

It isn't for emergency care or to just be seen. It's about once your seen and the doctor says you need to see X specialist or your need Y procedure. Even an MRI in Canada can take over 4 months at times to get if it wasn't done on an emergency basis. Getting to that point seems to be simple in both systems. What comes after that is so bad on government health systems that it has sparked a medical tourism industry where 10% or better of the people covered in some/most of these government health systems attempt to find user pays medical coverage in other countries.

I can't find my link now, but the specific one I'm looking for (and your google fingers will work just as well) stated the above and referenced Germany who was spending massive amounts of money attempting to get their quality of care to be on par with the US's to attract a portion of Europe's medical tourism the currently goes to India and Japan. It stated that Canada's people go to the US and Mexico by and large and even referenced the "Wait Insurance" being sold in Canada to it's people (with a massive outcry of the Canadian governments) where private citizens are paying for health insurance to guarantee medical access within a reasonable amount of time even if they have to leave their province or country to get it. In 2006 or so, the Canadian supreme court in the Chaoulli decision ruled that Quebec's health care systems laws violated the rights to life, liberty, and security of person with Seven of seven judges ruled that patients experienced physical and psychological suffering", and all ruled that the system imposed the risk of death and irreparable harm to patients waiting for care. Look at statement number eight in this PDF for a little more on that. You should be able to find better sources from that. And yes, that was an industry piece.

Are there waits in the US too? Sure there is when you can't pay or skimped out and purchased a cheap insurance policy. But in the US, the government doesn't tell you not to make provisions on your own then throw you down a hole hoping to save the costs by your eventual death instead of providing the care needed to save your life or stabilize your quality of life so you can get back to normal. In the US, that's all up to you to "choose" to do, not some bureaucrats sitting 2000 miles away claiming your taken care of when your not. Of you belay the new car, sit back from the toys, you can most likely afford your own health care, but you get to choose how good or bad your coverage is and you get to have some say in how much or little you can pay verses spending the funding on a new big Screen TV so you can see the zits on Brittany's face when she checks in/out of rehab again.

If Robert Anson Heinlein still was alive you could have asked him since he did put the concept of the water bed into public domain.

Anyway that was described back in 1934 and the publication of it in three of his books was enough to consider it prior art.

So even a limited spread of the data has to be considered prior art.

I suspect that if you read enough Science Fiction books you will be able to invalidate a huge amount of patents. Things may not be named the same, but they may be described sufficiently to work as prior art.

Seriously. Go read about it at many of the sites linked to here. I especially liked the part where

More than 10% of senior citizens who responded to a recent survey, which did not mention euthanasia, volunteered that they feared being killed by their doctors without their consent.

-- http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000390

What you are talking about is assisted suicide turning into euthanasia by putting undue pressure on those with terminal illnesses to choose death early to stop being a burden to society. I see where you are coming from. I don't know if it will ever get that far, but I can see your point.

Do some research into euthanasia in the Netherlands. It's gone that far.

Many old people now fear Dutch hospitals. More than 10% of senior citizens who responded to a recent survey, which did not mention euthanasia, volunteered that they feared being killed by their doctors without their consent. One senior-citizen group printed up wallet cards that tell doctors that the cardholder opposes euthanasia.

-- http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000390

"Thousands" of scientists?

And where do you get that figure? From the news? And you also believe that there is a "majority consensus" among scientists?

Keep a few things in mind:

Al Gore's "hockey stick" graph has been shown to be based on seriously flawed science; the authors of the paper that contained that graph have acknowledged as much, and withdrawn it from their research and conclusions.

Al Gore has claimed that the oceans would rise tens of feet (and others, many meters). NOAA has issued a report stating that with the worst case CO2-warming-based scenario, the oceans might rise as much as 4 inches in the next 100 years.

So are you really hearing this stuff from "the scientists", or from the alarmists? (I acknowledge that OP mentions that this is a NOAA scientist. I believe this study will be discredited very soon.)

The doom-saying IPCC report of a couple of years ago has largely been retracted and amended by the UN's IPCC. A number of the original scientists who contributed research to the IPCC have since asked that their names not be included in the list of scientists who support the IPCC's conclusions. (On the basis that their science does NOT support those conclusions.) If you don't believe that, here is a link to just one of them:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000318chris_landsea_leaves.html

Naomi Orestes' study on "consensus" among scientists regarding global warming (the source of these claims that "the overwhelming majority of scientists" support the theory), has been shown to be fatally flawed. There is no such consensus, and never was.

And so on. No, I have not "dismantled the work of thousands of scientists". Obviously. Nor was that the intent. But my point here is, there were never "thousands of scientists" doing real science that supported the theory anyway. I am sure you think there are or were, but you would be wrong.

Here is another interesting link, just for fun: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220

So, sorry. But I am the one challenging the common worldview: yours. And you don't seem to like it. So look in a mirror.

Oh it gets worse then that. Companies are selling health insurance to private individuals in Canada. That's right, in the same country that refuses to allow you to pay for your own health care, people are purchasing health insurance policies because they aren't getting the treatment they deserve.

But to add to the list of things wrong. In some European countries, the governments are Euthanizing it's seniors by denying them life saving treatments after a certain age. This practice extended to some severely injured young people but it recently started getting bad publicity in the UK and they are stopping it. Then there is the 50k limit. It seems if a life saving procedure costs more then 50k, you simply will not get it at all. Now this isn't the cost-effectiveness analysis where they attempt to determine if your life is worth saving or not, it's just the cut off line where you won't get the treatment. And at least in the UK, apparently if you go around them on that 50k limit or bypass their denial from the cost analysis, you lose your government medical rights altogether.

Most people have some glory minded image of government health care. It's probably engraved into their minds by activists like Michael Moore and their mockumentories. But evidently, it isn't what it seems.

You're being rather disingenuous, aren't you.

No more disingenuous than you.

1.5% is significantly lower than 4%, 5% or 6%, yet I don't recall hearing about the massive numbers that turned out to support Bush.

Really? Because I do:

The huge voter turnout of some 120 million--the largest as a share of the electorate since 1968--adds to the mandate because it means the country was fully engaged in this national debate.

More Americans voted for Mr. Bush for president than have voted for any other presidential candidate in American history, more even than the 54.5 million who voted for Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide.

But I've -- very rarely, I can't think of a time that an incumbent president, particularly one in trouble, has succeeded while expanding turnout; 120 million ballots were cast in this election. And the president did a remarkable job of bringing more Republicans, people who have never voted before in the Republican side, to the polls.

And back to your argument:

Voter turnout was within 2% of this election in 2004, 1992, and 1972. As much as the media would like to portray massive voter turnout and a Obama landslide, the facts don't support it.

I've never argued that this election was a "landslide", but to say that Obama didn't bring record numbers to the polls would be flat out lying. To use rhetoric from the WSJ, "the huge voter turnout of some [130 million] -- the largest as a share of the electorate since 1968", can only be attributed to Obama.

If any evidence that led to the war was trumped up, it was not done by anyone in the administration. It is a lie that Pres. Bush lied to us to start the war in Iraq.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540

I'll admit that the authors of the op-ed pieces are biased (who isn't?), but they have their facts straight and have good sources, which is more than anyone who ever said that Pres. Bush lied to us to start the war in Iraq. I'm certainly no fan of war and I don't think we should have ever started the war in Iraq but I'm tired of people conveniently forgetting that all major intelligence agencies, including the UN believed that Hussein was a threat and that he had WMD and was planning on using them - either on his own country or on another country. It wasn't until the U.S. went in to Iraq that we discovered that there were no WMDs (but there was evidence Hussein was trying to make some).

Those are all opinions no matter how much you believe them. Democrats were the ones trying to steal the 2000 election. We were not lied to about Iraq http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story and http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540, etc.

Well, assuming you are referring to the lower taxes, increased revenue, how about this article from the Wall Street Journal?

Can you cite things to back up what you claimed above?

[note lack of naming your views as something derogatory such as unsourced radical left wing propaganda].

Funny. After taxes were cut in 2001, government tax receipts increased, substantially.

Cite please?

Sure. How's this one:

Mr. Bush signed the most recent tax cuts into law in the spring of 2003. In the past 33 months the size of America's entire economy has increased by 20%--or, as National Review Online's Larry Kudlow put it, "In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy."

In the 2 1/4 years before the 2003 tax cuts, economic growth averaged 1.1% annually; in the three years since it has averaged 4% per year, and in the first quarter of this year it was 5.6% on an annualized basis. Inflation-adjusted per capita GDP has grown 7.8% from 2003 through the first quarter of this year.

Read the whole thing. Sure, it's an opinion piece, but the facts are still facts.
Here's one from the NYT just for balance.

Or, you could just use Google. I searched for "government tax receipts bush" (no quotes), but I'm sure you could come up with your own search and find the same data.

Maybe UPann's Health care plan and the health care un Penn in general isn't as good as other areas of the country. I haven't needed to wait to see a specialist but this isn't really the same as in other countries.

In America, when we know what is wrong with someone, we schedule an appointment to take care of it. In countries with socialized health care, you sometimes go on a list and have to wait until your number is ready and if there isn't anyone in more need then you, you go. If there is someone who can, they will jump in front of you and you go back onto the list. Now, have you had your appointment bumped after waiting 2 months to see the specialist just to have to wait longer? And yes, you had the option of going somewhere else, even if that meant further away then your local area to see the specialist sooner. In other countries, you don't, you get what they give you.

This waiting isn't about someone waiting for a specialist to get time, you are after all, under the care of another doctor, it is about waiting 10 years for bowel surgery and having to goto other countries to get procedures done. It is about doctors deciding who gets treatment and who doesn't, regardless of anyone's ability to pay but because of perfectly legal acts like smoking or growing old. Sure, you can drink, but you won't get any surgury if you do, but it is still legal right? But there are other stark contrasts between the US system and other countries like England's. This piece actually offers a pretty good comparison so take the time to read it.

I know I have been picking on England's system so lets get into some of the problems with Canada's. Canada has wait time to see general practitioners that makes your specialist appointment look like a week long vacation. Granted the government is working on the problem and has supposedly worked out a plan that will be implemented in 10 years or so, but what about until then and what about everything up until people complained loudly enough for the government to act. It is so bad that companies are offering medical insurance in Canada that will take you to another location and even out of the country if your wait times are too long. Imagine that, the people of Canada are buying health insurance when they already had free health coverage from their very own government because the times they wait to get treatment is way to long.

Now maybe you just don't know about the wait and thing a 4 week wait or an 8 week wait to see a specialist is similar to a 16 week wait to see your general practitioner or having to wait 16.2 weeks to see an orthopedic surgeon, and another 24.2 weeks for treatment to be performed after the initial visit. Now those numbers are averages, this means that some are longer and some are shorter. But we every one that's shorter, there is one or more that is longer. You may think, well that isn't too long. Most back problems have healed themselves in 3-6 months, if the healing is improper (which is why surgery is often used), there will be problems with the back for the rest of the patient's life. So lest see, 14 weeks is over 3 months already. 24 weeks is six months longer, there is a good chance of a patient needing an orthopedic surgeon never regaining normal use and comfort levels in their back again simply from the wait between seeing and treatment. Of course this isn't always the case but it gets introduced and it shouldn't be there.

Only one anonymous hater?
C'mon internet, I know you can do better than that!

what you consider to be "Econ 101" has been proven over and over to not be a universal truth

I didn't claim it was a universal truth, but it certainly applies to our current situation as the "Bush tax cuts" the dems are so eager to "rollback" raised revenues.

Here's some pesky Econ 101 for ya.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006842
From the article above:

Earlier this month the Congressional Budget Office released its latest report on tax revenue collections. The numbers are an eye-popping vindication of the Laffer Curve and the Bush tax cut's real economic value. Federal tax revenues surged in the first eight months of this fiscal year by $187 billion. This represents a 15.4% rise in federal tax receipts over 2004. Individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded like a cap let off a geyser, up 30% in the two years since the tax cut. Once again, tax rate cuts have created a virtuous chain reaction of higher economic growth, more jobs, higher corporate profits, and finally more tax receipts.

This Laffer Curve effect has also created a revenue windfall for states and cities. As the economic expansion has plowed forward, and in some regions of the country accelerated, state tax receipts have climbed 7.5% this year already. Perhaps the most remarkable story from around the nation comes from the perpetually indebted New York City, which suddenly finds itself more than $3 billion in surplus thanks to an unexpected gush in revenues. Many of President Bush's critics foolishly predicted that states and localities would be victims of the Bush tax cut gamble.

The Bush administration never lied about WMD or an al Qaeda connection in Iraq (please read my whole post and the two articles I link to before dismissing my comment. As a note: I don't think we ever should have invaded Iraq but we did and there's no changing that). I think it's pretty convenient for so many people to forget that all major intelligence agencies around the world (and all major, interested nations) said repeatedly that there were WMD in Iraq. No one seriously doubted this - not even the UN weapons inspectors. Here are a couple articles about the whole topic (one is from the Wall Street Journal, the other the LA Times):

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story

As far as al qaeda connection goes, the WSJ article also mentions that:

"What of the related charge that it was still another 'lie' to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to 'meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives.'"

"Black Shirts in Red China? Beijing today is more fascist than communist."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=105001682

"classical fascism should be the starting-point for our efforts to understand the People's Republic. Imagine Italy 50 years after the Fascist revolution, Mussolini dead and buried, the corporate state intact, the party still firmly in control, the nation governed by professional politicians and a corrupt elite rather than the true believers. A system no longer based on charisma but on political repression, cynical not idealistic, and on formulaic appeals to the grandeur of the "great Italian people," endlessly summoned to emulate the greatness of its ancestors."

No, it was political. Clinton fired all 93 US Attorneys in one day.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009784

For constitutional purposes, the joint resolution passed with but a single dissenting vote by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, was the equivalent of a formal declaration of war. The Supreme Court held in 1800 (Bas v. Tingy), and again in 1801 (Talbot v. Seamen), that Congress could formally authorize war by joint resolution without passing a formal declaration of war; and in the post-U.N. Charter era no state has issued a formal declaration of war. Such declarations, in fact, have become as much an anachronism as the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal (outlawed by treaty in 1856). Formal declarations were historically only required when a state was initiating an aggressive war, which today is unlawful. --- FISA vs. the Constitution ROBERT F. TURNER, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law

Well, that's kinda funny considering that I was replying to a post citing to Wikipedia. Exactly who created the Wikipedia article and who were they funded by?

You realize, of course, that if I should discount the website because of its funding, then I should also discount all the research done by scientists whose research funding would dry up if Climate Change proved to be a fiction. They're not neutral either.

If there's a scientific consensus, then I would expect nearly every scientist to agree on that consensus. (After all, isn't that the definition?) Yet, these pesky scientists seem to have a tough time agreeing. Here's another example. If there was a consensus, I would expect an MIT professor of Atmospheric Science to, at least, be aware of it.

Paul Broun ran on a "Ron Paul" ticket for Georgia and won based on those views. No doubt he's a decent politician (if I can use those terms).

Article about his Paul-like ideals

Maybe the Republic IS moving towards more freedom and less tyranny. 400 more like these guys and I may actually shut up about 70% of my gripes. Not all, but most.

Which is why China is a mature fascist country as opposed to a communist country.

see http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=105001682

Snippet:
China is not, as is invariably said, in transition from communism to a freer and more democratic state. It is, instead, something we have never seen before: a maturing fascist regime. This new phenomenon is hard to recognize, both because Chinese leaders continue to call themselves communists, and also because the fascist states of the first half of the 20th century were young, governed by charismatic and revolutionary leaders, and destroyed in World War II. China is anything but young, and it is governed by a third or fourth generation of leaders who are anything but charismatic.

The current and past generations of Chinese leaders, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, may have scrapped the communist economic system, but they have not embraced capitalism. To be sure, the state no longer owns "the means of production." There is now private property, and, early last June, businessmen were formally admitted to the Communist Party. Profit is no longer taboo; it is actively encouraged at all levels of Chinese society, in public and private sectors. And the state is fully engaged in business enterprise, from the vast corporations owned wholly or in part by the armed forces, to others with top management and large shareholders simultaneously holding government jobs.

This is neither socialism nor capitalism; it is the infamous "third way" of the corporate state, first institutionalized in the 1920s by the founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini, then copied by other fascists in Europe.

OK, I won't pretend I understand anything about Economics. But I do know a good bit about what creates and maintains the conditions for peace. Even if you are the most die-hard Al Gore fan, and a true believer in Global Warming (or Climate Change or whatever its called this month), surely you wouldn't think that work on GL-CC trumps the brave work of the monks in Burma, or the brave blue-thumbed Iraqis, or any of a dozen other individuals and groups working to end war, famine, and oppression around the world?

So, if the Nobel committees can so blow this prize, going back to giving it to the dictator Yasser Arafat, do the other prizes have meaning? Are they better vetted than the Peace Prize? How and Why?

OK. I can not let this ignorance stand, lest others read this and believe it:
Or how about the Muslim men that were asked to leave a flight because they spoke in Arabic?

I can only assume you are talking about the "Flying Imams" case at the Minneapolis airport here, because I know of NO ONE who has been thrown off a plane merely for speaking Arabic. So from here on out, I am talking about said "Flying Imams."

No one was tossed from a plane for speaking Arabic.

The six Imams were removed from the plane because:
1. They were speaking loudly, praising Osama Bin Laden
2. They were speaking loudly, praising Saddam Hussein and saying they would do anything to avenge him. This bit comes from another passenger on the plane who spoke Arabic, unrelated to the six imams, who was one of numerous passengers to alert the flight crew about said Imams suspicious behavior.
3. Two took seats in first class, for which they did not have tickets. Two took seats at the midplane exit doors, and two took seats at the rear of the plane. This seating arrangement--first class, mid-plane, and rear of the plane--fits a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks.
4. Three of these Imams asked for seat belt extenders, even tho they were not overweight. Then, instead of putting them on, they placed them under their seats.

There are other details that fully justify these six Imams being removed from an airplane, but these are probably the most significant.

In short, the Flying Imams case had nothing to do with bigotry against Arabic speakers, or overreactions of passengers or authorities. It was a manufactured event so that Rep Ellison and CAIR could get some press time and show how "bigoted and racist" all those non-Muslim Americans are.

Best still-active link I can find at the moment:
Wall Street Journal: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009348

-john

Ultimately, because there is not enough money to be made in online banner style advertising. The typical newspaper is over 50% advertising, inches upon inches of it, all at a lovely 200 dpi. A typical web page supports about 20% advertising, at much lower resolutions. Also, newspaper can't charge as much for each person who views one of their online ads, primarily because they have very effective competition from search engine advertising, which is actually very highly effective.

Take a look at newspaper publisher's 10K and 10Q filings. Online readership is high and growing, but online advertising revenue sucks. Borrell Associates has crunched the number here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010038. Typical print subscriber yields $500-$900 in ad revenue annually. Typical unique web site visitor yields $5-$10 per year. So as readership moves online, revenue is dropping by two orders of magnitude. This would be a bit more palatable if costs of running an online newspaper were also two orders of magnitude less than the cost of running a print paper. But they aren't. Writing stories is pretty much fixed. We aren't getting much faster at producing 10 inches on the city council on deadline. According to http://www.inlandpress.org/Main.asp?SectionID=61&SubSectionID=244&ArticleID=1031, typical newsroom costs at a paper are around 12-13% of overall revenue. But the best performing newspaper in the US only earns 8.4% of their revenue from online advertising.

The only ad supported internet sites that are making any money are the ones that avoid content creation costs. Look at Flickr, MySpace or YouTube. Billions of photos and videos, all surrounded by advertising. What were their content creation costs? Zero.

This is why newspapers are screwed. Producing content is a sucker's bet. Controlling distribution (online, read: traffic) is where the money is made. Newspapers used to control news distribution because printing presses were expensive. Online, they aren't. NYT is finding itself in the same position that most actors, musicians, book authors, artists, bloggers and, ironically enough, their own journalists have always been in: no bargaining power, lots of competition and low wages.

Clean the rolls, and I bet 99% of all "election fraud" issues go away... I'd say force everyone to reregister, nation-wide. Proof of citizenship and proof of residence must be provided, or you don't get to register. Provisional ballots? Throw them out... Mail in ballots? Unless you're physically incapable of making it to the polls (medical condition or overseas), you gotta get your butt down to the polling station - no mail in ballots for you. And you have to provide proof of identity at least as good as if cashing a check at a bank - two pieces of ID, please.

The power of the vote is one of the most important powers that citizens have. It should be protected and cared for at least as vigorously as the Bill of Rights. The fact so many scream about supposed infringement of their "rights" but are lackluster at best towards voting is truly the scary part...

Read and learn: http://opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110010400 - if a 97% FAKE rate isn't enough to make you question the motives of ACORN, you're a lot more partisan than you think I could ever be...

"Convicted monopolist". You guys crack me up. That phrase has 0 legal meaning.

The Court of Appeals judged the case on merit rather than on prejudice. Microsoft lost on every single point. The court held that:

        * Microsoft does indeed poses a monopoly.
        * Microsoft has leveraged their monopoly in clear violation of the law.
        * The guilty verdict is completely sound and there is no reason to reconsider it.
        * Breaking up Microsoft is not an overly harsh penalty and could be re-imposed.

he problem for people who don't accept the 100+yr old repeatable observation that C02 acts as a GHG is to point to an alternative explaination for the observed warming. In other words natural "forcings" have been accunted for, so where is the extra warming coming from if not from GHG emmissions?

For constitutional purposes, the joint resolution passed with but a single dissenting vote by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, was the equivalent of a formal declaration of war. The Supreme Court held in 1800 (Bas v. Tingy), and again in 1801 (Talbot v. Seamen), that Congress could formally authorize war by joint resolution without passing a formal declaration of war; and in the post-U.N. Charter era no state has issued a formal declaration of war. Such declarations, in fact, have become as much an anachronism as the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal (outlawed by treaty in 1856). Formal declarations were historically only required when a state was initiating an aggressive war, which today is unlawful. -- FISA vs. the Constitution by ROBERT F. TURNER, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, served as counsel to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, 1982-84

Victory in Iraq will come only when the country "can sustain itself, govern itself and defend itself,".... -- President Bush

Then could you explain what the difference is between censorship laws and censorship by the back door because the press don't want to loose their privileged access to the president?

Planning to get sued by WSJ?

Blatant copy of
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?%20id=1100077 60

Additionally there were no allegations when Clinton fired the US attorneys that the whitehouse or Democrats were interfering with investigations to help out their friends.

News to me. The firings saved Dan Rostenkowski's bacon and kept anyone competent from the Little Rock post. See here.

Just because you say something while being ignorant of the facts, does not make them true. Clinton also had an all Democrat congress, so yeah, he had to get Democrats approved by Democrats. Big deal.

Considering Bush can't even get his nominee for ambassador to Belgium to get a vote because John Kerry's feelings are hurt, that isn't petty? You think he'll have an easy time getting any attorneys through Leahy and Schumer?

I can't think of no better way to refute this sort of spew than to quote one if its finest purveyors back at you. Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2005:

And here is follow-up to that article (from April, 8th) of the same interest,

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.ht ml?id=110006534

1. The first article is simply a group asking a question about whether or not there was anything wrong. They're not yet saying there WAS something wrong done.

2. The NYT article is a guy pissed off he got fired. Not exactly an unbiased source. Let him testify under oath and we'll see what comes out.

3. Just because there are 9100 articles on Google News about it doesn't prove wrong doing either -- it proves a lot of people are talking about it. Of course -- it's a media sensation. I'm sure there were hundreds of thousands of articles written about Clinton getting his knob polished, too.

Pointing at 9100 articles and saying "here you find the proof I'm wrong!" isn't going to work, because I'm not the one out there making claims.

And: one of the fired attorneys was a Bush loyalist.

RTFA, momo.

This is only an opinion piece, but it has some perspective. SPECIFICALLY:

Equally extraordinary were the politics at play in the firings. At the time, Jay Stephens, then U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, was investigating then Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and was "within 30 days" of making a decision on an indictment. Mr. Rostenkowski, who was shepherding the Clinton's economic program through Congress, eventually went to jail on mail fraud charges and was later pardoned by Mr. Clinton.

I'm not a fan of the Bush administration, but of all their faults, this story is one of the lamest I've heard about him. (However, at least it guarantees that idiot AG won't be on the Supreme Court.) But fishy firings and political reasonings? Nothing new.

Not true. They are in almost complete agreement that it is primarily anthropogenic in nature

No, they're not.

Can you name one climatologist who disagrees with that statement? If they're not in almost complete agreement, that should be an easy request. Just name one, and provide an article they've written which backs up your assertion.

Not true. They are in almost complete agreement that it is primarily anthropogenic in nature, and that greenhouse gases are the anthropogenic culprit. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Heck, even Lindzen says so:

At some level, [that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system] has never been widely contested.

Find one by an actual climatologist and not by an author who has also warned us about the "summer of the shark". The truth is that during this global cooling scare manufactured by Time and Newsweek, real scientists were already doing research on global warming.

It is the height of meglomania to suggest that human beings have a greater impact on the planet than that big-ass hot thing that comes over the horizon every morning.

Humans tend to think that the span of our lifetimes are significant, when in the scope of Universe, our lifespans, and indeed human life on this planet are nothing but a blip, a footnote, a grain of sand on the beach.

It's the height of ignorance to believe otherwise. If you don't trust environmentalists, perhaps you'll believe what Lindzen himself has said:

At some level, [that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system] has never been widely contested.

The scientific community isn't saying that global warming isn't happening; they're just not agreeing about how it is being caused.

At some level, [that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system] has never been widely contested.

While it [sort of] correlates to CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, it correlates to other things as well.

But I do agree that there's just as much money to be made on the Green side of the fence as on the Exxon-Mobil side (or whatever).

From the Wall Street Journal (Friday, February 2, 2007), teachers actually make on average $34.06 an hour. That's a bit more than I make as a Software Engineer in the private sector. The whole reason teacher's salaries look low is that no one counts the massive amounts of time off teachers get (or all the civil servant benefits) that private sector workers can only dream about. The full article is available here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.ht ml?id=110009612

Indeed, so you'd find it surprising then that given the number of Scientists who are against Climate Change that none of them have managed to change to consensus in anything like the way Lavoisier did? Can you think of any reasons why this is the case ?

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. [...]

In 1992, [senator Al Gore] ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. [...]

In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

Europe's demographic issues will lead to worse relations with the US, unless the US intervenes in some unforseen way.

I only skimmed rapidly and superficially through the page that you linked to about that subject, because I found it very ranty and unconvincing. But it seems his main point is that in a future Europe with lots of Muslims we will see the end of our Western values.

Note, however, that for many, many centuries, Muslim parts of Europe have been far more tolerant than Christian parts of Europe. Where is the fundamental difference that changes this age-long difference?

Today, in Muslim countries, small groups of extreme religious fundamentalists that are intolerant and hateful have gained tremendous notoriety. But in our countries the extreme Christian fundamentalist are also often intolerant and hateful. Fundamentalism is conducive to intolerance and repression.

Christian fundamentalists are less extreme, but this seems to be because modern society influences them to be less extreme. In medieval Europe Christianity was repressive, intolerant and murderous, as exemplified in the above links. Most of the notorious Muslim fundamentalists either live in, or have their roots in, societies that remain largely medieval today. Medieval conditions are conducive to intolerance, and to giving intolerance a stronger influence.

Another factor that is conducive to extremism is that in most Muslim countries the people are repressed by undemocratic governments.

Note also that one of your closest friends in Europe is a Muslim country, namely Turkey.

Affluence and commerce tends to lead to more tolerance and openness in society at large. This is to a great extent because you have a large middle class that has very strong incentives to achieve and protect stability. If the number of Muslims in Europe increases, they will in due time be a large part of that middle class, and will have this desire for openness and stability.

It evades the problem instead of solving it. The problems are Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and some other enemies. Your plan to send teachers and librarians to somewhere else (Monaco?, Belize?, where?) to improve relations with the US simply doesn't address the difficult problems.

Sheesh, am I that unclear? Obviously Monaco and Belize have nothing to do with the problems at hand. And do you really consider Monaco cautiously friendly?

Countries where such programs might have good effects would perhaps be Jordania, Pakistan or Bangladesh. You need Muslim countries that are cautiously friendly, where you can gain substantial goodwill by helping them raise people's economic independence, well-being and democratic influence, sufficiently so that the peoples of other Muslim countries will yearn for similar prosperity and democracy.

Another interesting country is Afghanistan. You have already invested heavily in removing the Taliban government. You should protect this investment, and get substantial goodwill, by making sure people there get substantially better opportunities. Since conditions there are generally pre-medieval, you can probably get more noticeable improvement at less cost, compared to many other countries.

With judicious foreign aid you could really get lots of goodwill and influence. Clearly this is unmined territory. Both in foreign aid per capita and in foreign aid as percentage of GDP your chart bars look pitiful.

Give some really noticeable contributions to raise two countries out of poverty and illiteracy toward economic independence -- say A