No Oil for Pacifists

Forget all that indecorous talk of animal flatulence, cow burps, vegetarianism and global warming. Welcome to Cowgate.

Lower consumption of meat and dairy products will not have a major impact in combating global warming -- despite persistent claims that link such diets to more greenhouse gases. So says a report presented Monday before the American Chemical Society.

It is the bovine version of Climategate, complete with faulty science and noisy activists with big agendas.

Cows and pigs have gotten a "bum rap," said Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert at the University of California at Davis who authored the report. He is plenty critical of scientists and vegetarian activists such as Paul McCartney who insist that livestock account for about a fifth of all greenhouse-gas emissions.

He also is critical of highly-publicized campaigns that call for "meatless Mondays" or push the motto "Less Meat = Less Heat," a European campaign launched in December during the Copenhagen climate summit. Talk of pricey air pollution permits of a "cow tax" for already cash-strapped farmers has surfaced in the U.S. and abroad.

Mr. Mitloehner said the claims that livestock are to blame for global warming are both "scientifically inaccurate" and a dangerous distraction from more important issues.

1. Before Barrack Obama's next televised speech, prepare your "Bullshit Bingo" card by drawing a square -- I find that 5" x 5" is a good size -- and dividing it into columns -- five across and five down. That will give you 25 1-inch blocks.

2. Write one of the following words/phrases in each block:

. Restored our reputation
. Strategic fit
. Let me be clear
. Make no mistake
. Back from the brink
. Signs of recovery
. Out of the loop
. Benchmark
. Job creation
. Fiscal restraint
. Win-win
. Affordable health care
. Previous Administration
. Greed on Wall Street
. At the end of the day
. Empower (or empowerment)
. Touch base
. Mindset
. Corporate greed
. Ballpark
. Game plan
. Leverage
. Inherited as in "I inherited this mess"
. Relief for working families (alternate -- "unprecedented")

3. Check off the appropriate block when you hear one of those words/phrases.

4. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout:

"BULLSHIT!"

Testimonials from past satisfied "Bullshit Bingo" players:

"I had been listening to the speech for only five minutes when I won." - Jack W., Boston

"My attention span during speeches has improved dramatically." - David D.,
Florida

"What a gas! Speeches will never be the same for me after my first win." - Bill R., New York City

"The atmosphere was tense in the last speech as 14 of us waited for the fifth box." - Ben G., Denver

USPS recently reported that it has more retail facilities than McDonalds, Starbucks, and Walgreens combined. Further, it stated that its post offices average about 600 visits per week, representing only 10 percent of average weekly visits to Walgreens.

An ad by a Palestinian youth organization, PYALARA, which is funded by UNICEF, shows an axe destroying a Star of David. The UNICEF logo is right on the ad. The large Star of David that has been destroyed has on it pictures of stars and stripes, presumably representing the USA, and an additional smaller Star of David.


source: PMW Bulletin

On the axe that destroys the Star of David is the word: "Boycott!" in the imperative tense. Youth are invited to watch the PA TV program calling for a boycott of Israel.

[T]he left side of the blogosphere sees it as its role not to debate conservative bloggers and pundits, but to destroy us and preclude us from being heard. Nobody on our side of the aisle should be under any illusion about the depths of personal enmity harbored towards us by the left blogs, nor the fact that they will spare no effort to go after us personally. . .

Partly it was the Left’s increasing bitterness after their thumping in the 2002 elections exposed the fiction of their view that Bush’s victory in 2000 was an illegitimate aberration. Partly it was the increasing partisan temperature that came with the Iraq War. Partly it was the nature of the Online Left as people: dissatisfied with the existing order of society, often childless and thus with more time on their hands and fewer checks on perpetual immaturity, apt to treat the personal as political and the political as personal, and frequently irreligious and tending to put politics in the place where others put religion. . .

But most likely the largest cause of all was money and the lust for power. With its party leadership discredited and its official organs subject to campaign finance laws that don’t regulate blogs, the Left began pouring serious money and man-hours into the blogosphere after the 2002 elections. Billionaire George Soros (also a chief funder of think tanks like John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, founded in 2003) was the most prominent of these donors/investors, but hardly the only one; Arianna Huffington was another. Left-wing interest groups like SEIU and other unions mustered advertising dollars for major left-blogs, effectively putting them on retainer. That gave the blogs the tools to do activism, polling, fundraising, investigative muckracking, and simply to generate a lot of ways to go after people and waste their time. . .

The professionalization of the Online Left created a sense of entitlement -- left-bloggers tended not only to crusade for their policy goals, but to work for a personal seat at the table for themselves and their colleagues, becoming an interest group of their own and thus even more personally invested in the accretion of power to their own side. . .

What disappeared along the way was any semblance of a sense that left-wingers should debate the Right, or even accept as legitimate the existence of conservative bloggers and pundits as participants in public debate.

Residents stone, slash would-be suicide bomber to death

[I]n 1979, [James] Lovelock published the book-length version of his Gaia theory, which postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of super-organism, with millions of species regulating its temperature. Despite initial scepticism from the Darwinists, who refused to believe that individual organisms could act in harmony, the Gaia theory has been widely accepted and now underlies most atmospheric science.

One has to remember that the literal meaning of the word "jihad" is effort or struggle, and that the greater jihad was defined by the Prophet as the jihad an-nafs (the war against the soul). The priority thus accorded to inward, spiritual effort over all outward endeavors must never be lost sight of in any discussion of jihad. Physical fighting is "the lesser jihad" and only has meaning in the context of that unremitting combat against inner vices, the devil within, that has been called the greater jihad.

Muslims hold that an outer jihad can only be declared by a lawful and legal authority who is himself a Muslim, but they differ significantly on just who such an authority actually is. Islamic law also states that such a Jihad may only be carried out against those who are themselves actively oppressing Islam.

An orthodontist in southern Germany has refused to treat a 16-year-old whose first name is Jihad, which is Arabic for holy struggle or holy war, because she took offense at his name, reports the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (in German), citing a local magazine.

The name, popular among Muslims worldwide and even used by some Christians in the Middle East, has become controversial because militant groups often incorporate it into their names and use it as a rally cry.

Everybody got that? "Jihad" doesn’t mean "inner struggle".

It means "holy war".

[T]he figure above shows effective marginal tax rates for a married couple with two children. The effective marginal tax rate is about 50 percent for families making as little as $22,000 -- for each additional dollar earned the couple gets a net benefit of only 50 cents. This is as high as the effective rate on very high-income individuals, and clearly presents a strong disincentive for families in this income category to work and save more. Hence, proposals to extend the refundable tax credits have the effect of prolonging an anti-growth tax policy.

The accomplishments of those who struggle on despite difficulty are diminished by redistribution. If you rescue everyone up to $X, you have slapped the person who has sweated, risked, and deprived himself to make $X+1. All his effort and sacrifice -- worth only $1.

"history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life." (Ralph Nader)

"eliminating federal highway safety requirements . . . are equivalent to a death sentence to thousands of Americans back home." (Joan Claybrook, president of the Naderite advocacy group Public Citizen)

The U.S. Department of Transportation today announced that the number of overall traffic fatalities reported at the end of 2009 reached the lowest level since 1954, declining for the 15th consecutive quarter. According to early projections, the fatality rate, which takes into account the number of miles traveled, reached the lowest level ever recorded.

"[T]he odds have shifted toward much larger downpours," Gore said. "And we have seen that happen in the Northeast, we’ve seen it happen in the Northwest -- in both of those regions are among those that scientists have predicted for a long time would begin to experience much larger downpours."

But Gore had a specific example in mind. He explained this recent soaking in the Northeastern United States was "consistent" with what global warming alarmists were projecting.

"Just look at what has been happening for the last three days," Gore said. "The so-called skeptics haven’t noted it because it’s not snow. But the downpours and heavy winds are consistent with what the scientists have long warned about."

The justification for [the Iraq] war under international law, and as made by those who led it, did not centre on regime change for humanitarian reasons. But the moral case for getting rid of Saddam depended on this from day one. To suggest otherwise is an act of deliberate self-blinding.

With power prices around €50/MWh in Europe currently, solar is costing consumers around €60bn more than they otherwise would have paid for electricity. We calculate a German household is now paying €130 in annual solar subsidies and rising rapidly. We fear an increasing backlash against overly generous subsidies.

Coal is 'cheap' and abundant. The world's coal reserves are not expected to run out for another 120 years. . . Coal is also available from less politically unstable countries than gas and oil.

[I]f you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

Gimmick No. 1 is the way the bill front-loads revenues and backloads spending. That is, the taxes and fees it calls for are set to begin immediately, but its new subsidies would be deferred so that the first 10 years of revenue would be used to pay for only 6 years of spending.

Even worse, some costs are left out entirely. To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office’s tabulation.

Consider, too, the fate of the $70 billion in premiums expected to be raised in the first 10 years for the legislation’s new long-term health care insurance program. This money is counted as deficit reduction, but the benefits it is intended to finance are assumed not to materialize in the first 10 years, so they appear nowhere in the cost of the legislation.

Another vivid example of how the legislation manipulates revenues is the provision to have corporations deposit $8 billion in higher estimated tax payments in 2014, thereby meeting fiscal targets for the first five years. But since the corporations’ actual taxes would be unchanged, the money would need to be refunded the next year. The net effect is simply to shift dollars from 2015 to 2014.

In addition to this accounting sleight of hand, the legislation would blithely rob Peter to pay Paul. For example, it would use $53 billion in anticipated higher Social Security taxes to offset health care spending. Social Security revenues are expected to rise as employers shift from paying for health insurance to paying higher wages. But if workers have higher wages, they will also qualify for increased Social Security benefits when they retire. So the extra money raised from payroll taxes is already spoken for. (Indeed, it is unlikely to be enough to keep Social Security solvent.) It cannot be used for lowering the deficit.

A government takeover of all federally financed student loans -- which obviously has nothing to do with health care -- is rolled into the bill because it is expected to generate $19 billion in deficit reduction.

Finally, in perhaps the most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting, the legislation proposes to trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future. Instead, Congress is likely to continue to regularly override scheduled cuts in payments to Medicare doctors and other providers.

Removing the unrealistic annual Medicare savings ($463 billion) and the stolen annual revenues from Social Security and long-term care insurance ($123 billion), and adding in the annual spending that so far is not accounted for ($114 billion) quickly generates additional deficits of $562 billion in the first 10 years. And the nation would be on the hook for two more entitlement programs rapidly expanding as far as the eye can see.

Among the needed pay reforms are rules to tie executive payouts to long-term results, like prohibitions against cashing out equity-based compensation until many years after options or shares have vested. Bonuses need to be delayed to ensure that the profits on which they are based do not prove transitory. An insightful reform recommended by Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law professor and director of the law school’s Program on Corporate Governance, would require that executive compensation be tied not only to the company’s stock performance, but also to the long-term value of the firm’s other securities, like bonds. That would encourage executives to be more conservative about using borrowed money to juice returns to capital, because it would expose them to the losses that leverage can exert on all the firm’s investors.

As you know, the global economic crisis is taking its toll on a broad range of businesses and sectors, here in the U.S. and around the world. We have reported in our own newspapers and on our own Web sites that the economy is likely to continue struggling throughout this year and possibly longer.

Given this economic outlook and the changes occurring in the media business, we, regrettably, must take even more steps to lower costs. We have been, and continue to, reorganize and reduce our staff, which means we are saying goodbye to many of our close colleagues. Now, in addition, we are lowering salaries through the end of this year for all remaining nonunion employees and, in exchange, providing additional time off. We plan to approach the Newspaper Guild in New York to ask for its participation in the program and to continue working with our unions in Boston and our other locations on lowering our costs, including wage reductions.

The salaries of all employees at The New York Times Media Group (with the exception of the IHT, which is working on other cost reduction measures), The Boston Globe, Boston.com and Corporate in New York will be rolled back by 5%, starting this April, and these employees will receive 10 additional days off to use before the end of the year.

New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and President and Chief Executive Janet L. Robinson received big increases in their 2009 compensation despite weakness in advertising markets and broader worries about the future of print media.

The media company did have a relatively upbeat fourth quarter, as earnings more than tripled on one-time gains and advertising spending picked up for its newspapers, Web sites and other platforms.

Sulzberger's overall pay more than doubled to $6 million in 2009 as nonequity incentive-plan compensation quadrupled to $2.4 million. The change in pension value and nonqualified deferred-compensation earnings climbed to $1.2 million from $559,826. Robinson's overall compensation rose 32% to $6.3 million, and similarly sharp increases in those two pay categories were partially offset by $1.1 million less in stock awards.

Shares of New York Times were recently down 0.3% at $11.49. The stock has nearly tripled over the past year.

Federal agencies haven't lived up to President Barack Obama's promise of a more open government, increasing their use of legal exemptions to keep records secret during his first year in office.

An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.

Among the most frequently used exemptions: one that lets the government hide records that detail its internal decision-making. Obama specifically directed agencies to stop using that exemption so frequently, but that directive appears to have been widely ignored.

Major agencies cited that exemption at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, up from 47,395 times during President George W. Bush's final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies. Obama was president for nine months in the 2009 period.

Departments used the exemption more even though Obama's Justice Department told agencies to that disclosing such records was "fully consistent with the purpose of the FOIA," a law intended to keep government accountable to the public.

The TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] program affects millions of American children and families and deserves a full and fair debate. Under the rules, the reconciliation process does not permit that debate. Reconciliation is therefore the wrong place for policy changes and the wrong place for the proposed changes to the TANF program. In short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility has been hijacked to facilitate reckless deficits and unsustainable debt.

Nonpaying status used to be a sure sign of poverty or near-poverty, but Congress and the President have changed the tax laws to pull much of the middle class into the growing pool of nonpayers. The income level at which a typical family of four will owe no income taxes has risen rapidly, now topping $51,000. . .

Figure 1 shows the fluctuation in the number and percentage of nonpayers since 1950 and how that has soared over the past decade. The percentage of tax returns with no liability was fairly low in the 1960s and again in the early 1980s. The recent growth in the number of nonpayers was accelerated by two major tax changes enacted during the 1990s, followed by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.

Figure 1


source: Tax Foundation Fiscal Fact No. 214

Entering the 2000s with one in four tax filers owing nothing, the nonpayers pool was supercharged by the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003--especially by the doubling of the child credit to $1,000. By 2004, when the credit expansion was fully phased in, the number of nonpayers increased by 10.5 million, a 32-percent jump in the space of four years.

In tax year 2008, the major tax change that created a record number of nonpayers was the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which included a tax rebate of $300 per person, $600 per couple. A family of four was eligible for a rebate of $1,200. These tax rebates boosted the number of nonpayers to nearly 52 million, 19 million more than the number of nonpayers in 2000 when President Bill Clinton left office. This represents a 58.6 percent increase in the number of nonpayers in less than a decade. By contrast, the total number of tax filers grew by only 10 percent during the same period.

For the life of me, I just don't get why the White House continues to try to pick a fight with the Supreme Court. . . But after Chief Justice John Roberts made some entirely reasonable remarks yesterday -- and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs just had to respond -- it's now getting ridiculous.

Whether the White House has a short-term or long-term strategy or no strategy at all, it's flat-out absurd and ill-advised for the administration to think it should always have the last word. It's like my 6-year-old: "I don't LIKE your idea. I like MY idea."

It wasn't enough that Mr. Obama, for the first time in modern history, took a direct shot at the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address, when he slammed the justices for their recent campaign finance reform decision. Six of them looked on -- including the author of the opinion, key swing vote Anthony Kennedy -- while Democrats jumped up to whoop and holler.

All that, of course, was too much for Justice Samuel Alito, who shook his head and silently mouthed, "not true."

The next day, the White House just couldn't let it rest. It again had to have the last word. It put out a "fact sheet," trying to prove it was Mr. Obama -- not Justice Alito -- who was right.

Now the Chief Justice, speaking yesterday at the University of Alabama Law School, has weighed in. Responding to a question from a clearly insightful Alabama law student, Roberts said he thought the whole scene was "very troubling." . . .

Gibbs should have let this go.

This administration is going to have to be dealing with this Supreme Court for at least three more years, if not more. Its lawyers are going to have to appear before these justices to defend presidential initiatives or federal laws in case after case, big and small.

I'm not suggesting they won't get a fair shake simply because the White House is trying to stick it to the conservative justices. George Bush repeatedly got slapped down by this Court, even though he never lashed out at the justices.

But at some point -- and I'd say that point is now -- the Obama Administration is working against its interests.

They'd do well to remember that on a lot of the issues they care about, the Supreme Court gets to decide. No matter how much they stomp their feet and shout, "I don't LIKE your idea; I like MY idea," the Supreme Court is going to get the last word.

Swiss prostitutes trained to use defibrillators in brothels to prevent clients dying

[C]redit derivatives are merely a financial tool that can be used by those exposed to credit risk, say a default by the Greek government or General Electric, to share that risk with others. This lowers the costs of borrowing and helps spread risk. In addition, third parties with no exposure to the particular credit risk can bet on whether the Greeks will default. These secondary-market transactions are the same as an individual buying stock in General Electric betting it will rise. Importantly, these bets provide a liquid market for credit risk, which lowers the cost of hedging for those with primary exposure, and provides the market with better information about whether Greece or General Electric is a good credit risk. Those who might lend to the country or company, those conducting other business with it, and those who might face the risk of default in other ways, can use this information to better plan their activities.

I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant you know, academically approved approach to health care. And didn't have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it. And just go ahead and have that passed. But that's not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people. Many of whom have their constituents best interests at heart.

Unfortunately???? Damn Democracy! Obama sees it as "unfortunate" that in a Democracy we have to do "a lot of negotiation with a lot of different people", ie: Congress.

"I have hundreds" of threatening emails, Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University in California, told Tierramérica.

He believes scientists will be killed over this. "I'm not going to let it worry me... but you know it's going to happen," said Schneider, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world. "They shoot abortion doctors here."

Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.

4. The Commission also finds that in Venezuela, not all persons are ensured full enjoyment of their rights irrespective of the positions they hold vis‐à‐vis the government’s policies. The Commission also finds that the State’s punitive power is being used to intimidate or punish people on account of their political opinions. The Commission’s reportestablishes that Venezuela lacks the conditions necessary for human rights defenders and journalists to carry out their work freely. The IACHR also detects the existence of a pattern of impunity in cases of violence, which particularly affects media workers, human rights defenders, trade unionists, participants in public demonstrations, people held in custody, campesinos (small‐scale and subsistence farmers), indigenous peoples, and women.

5. The Commission begins by analyzing how the effective enjoyment of political rights in Venezuela -- rights that by their very nature promote strengthened democracy and political pluralism -- has been hampered. The IACHR’s report indicates that mechanisms have been created in Venezuela that restrict the possibilities of candidates opposed to the government for securing access to power. That has taken place through administrative resolutions of the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic, whereby 260 individuals, mostly opposed to the government, were disqualified from standing for election. The Commission notes that these disqualifications from holding public office were not the result of criminal convictions and were ordered in the absence of prior proceedings, in contravention of the American Convention’s standards.

6. In its report, the Commission also notes how the State has taken action to limit some powers of popularly‐elected authorities in order to reduce the scope of public functions in the hands of members of the opposition. In its observations to the present report, the State indicated that the modifications made to the instruments governing the powers and scope of authority of governors and mayors would have been made regardless of who was elected in 2008 and that they also apply to authorities of the government’s party. Nevertheless, the IACHR has noticed that a series of legal reforms have left opposition authorities with limited powers, preventing them from legitimately exercising the mandates for which they were elected.

7. In this report, the IACHR also notes a troubling trend of punishments, intimidation, and attacks on individuals in reprisal for expressing their dissent with official policy. This trend affects both opposition authorities and citizens exercising their right to express their disagreement with the policies pursued by the government. These reprisals are carried out through both state actions, including harassment, and acts of violence perpetrated by civilians acting outside the law as violent groups. The Commission notes with concern that, in some extreme cases, criminal proceedings have been brought against dissidents, accusing them of common crimes in order to deny them their freedom on account of their political positions.

8. Similarly, the Commission notes a trend toward the use of criminal charges to punish people exercising their right to demonstrate or protest against government policies. Information received by the Commission indicates that over the past five years, criminal charges have been brought against more than 2,200 people in connection with their involvement in public demonstrations. Thus, the IACHR considers that the right to demonstrate in Venezuela is being restricted through the imposition of sanctions contained in provisions enacted by President Chávez’s government, whereby demonstrators are accused of crimes such as blocking public highways, resisting the authorities, damage to public property, active obstruction of legally‐established institutions, offenses to public officials, criminal instigation and criminal association, public incitement to lawbreaking, conspiracy, restricting freedom of employment, and breaches of the special secure zones regime, among others. In its report, the Commission describes cases of people facing criminal charges for which they could be sentenced to prison terms of over twenty years in connection with their participation in antigovernment demonstrations. . .

9. At the same time, the IACHR notes that exercising the right of peaceful demonstration in Venezuela frequently leads to violations of the rights to life and humane treatment, which in many cases are the consequence of excessive use of state force or the actions of violent groups. According to information received by the Commission, between January and August 2009 alone, six people were killed during public demonstrations, four of them through the actions of the State’s security forces. This situation is of particular concern to the IACHR in that repression and the excessive use of criminal sanctions to criminalize protest has the effect of dissuading those wishing to use that form of participation in public life to assert their rights.

Particularly shocking is the commission's account of the role that violence and murder have played in Mr. Chávez's concentration of power. The report documents killings of journalists, opposition protesters and farmers; it says that 173 trade union leaders and members were slain between 1997 and 2009 "in the context of trade union violence, with contract killings being the most common method for attacking union leaders." The report says that in 2008 Venezuela's human rights ombudsman recorded 134 complaints of arbitrary killings by security forces, 87 allegations of torture and 33 cases of forced disappearance. It also asserts that radical groups allied with Mr. Chávez "are perpetrating acts of violence with the involvement or acquiescence of state agents."

There has been no accountability for these acts. "Impunity," says the report, "is a common characteristic that equally affects cases of reprisal against dissent, attacks on human rights defenders and on journalists, excessive use of force in response to peaceful protests, abuses of state force, common and organized crime, violence in prisons, violence against women, and other serious human rights violations."

To read the report is to be dismayed anew by the silence of Venezuela's neighbors and of the principal OAS organs.

The populist demagogue President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela obviously believes the Internet has got it in for him. He's accusing the web of "spreading false information" about him and his grandiose plans and so has decided that he wants it regulated -- on his terms, naturally. . .

The enraged Chavez said, "This is a crime. The Internet can't be something free where anything can be done and said. No, every country has to impose its rules and regulations It can't be that they transmit whatever they want poisoning the minds of many people -- regulation, regulation, the laws!"

If the goal is job growth, we need to admit one fact: Political entrepreneurs create fewer jobs than do market entrepreneurs. We need new mass markets, really big markets of the sort Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie created. Great employment markets are discoverable only by people who create opportunities or see them in the cracks of what already exists--a Federal Express or Wal-Mart. Either you believe that the philosopher kings of the Obama administration can figure out this sort of thing, or you don't. I don't.

FDIC chief Sheila Bair whacked bank bonuses Tuesday. People on the East Coast spend too much time around the finance and insurance industries. If the price of rediscovering the American job machine is some people across the land getting really rich, it's a small price.

Half the solar power installed globally in 2008 was installed in Spain. . . [A]s low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain’s plateaus, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own.

In September the government abruptly changed course, cutting payments and capping solar construction. [The] brief boom turned bust. Factories and stores shut, thousands of workers lost jobs, foreign companies and banks abandoned contracts that had already been negotiated.

[The] wrenching fall points to the delicate policy calculations needed to stimulate nascent solar industries and create green jobs, and might serve as a cautionary tale for the United States, where a similar exercise is now under way. . .

In 2008 the nation connected 2.5 gigawatts of solar power into its grid, more than quintupling its previous capacity and making it second to Germany, the world leader. But many of the hastily opened plants offered no hope of being cost-competitive with conventional power, being poorly designed or located where sunshine was inadequate, for example. . .

In its haste to create a solar industry, Spain made some miscalculations: solar plants can be set up so quickly and easily that the rush into the industry was much faster than anticipated. And the lavish subsidies inflated Spanish solar installation costs at a time when they were rapidly decreasing elsewhere -- in part because of increasing competition from panel makers in China, but also because higher volumes produced economies of scale.

[G]reen jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you. They are the antidote to economic malaise, an underskilled labor force, the inherent unwillingness of the public to suffer any significant economic and personal dislocation in order to save the environment. They enhance nationalistic vigor. (If we don't act now, the Chinese will steal all of our green jobs!) They stave off aging of stale political platforms. And I'm pretty sure they're good for bunions, too.

Obviously it is true that if we subsidize various environmental activities, this will create jobs for some people. Unfortunately, it will also destroy jobs for other people--people who make the things that would otherwise have been purchased with tax dollars. They may partially offset the economic losses of switching off a very efficient, cheap, high density energy source. They will also, hopefully, give us cleaner, cooler air to breathe. But they do not represent a net improvement in either GDP or the unemployment rate. They represent a loss.

But they're green! And green is such a pretty color. Also, everyone loves frogs. So who could possibly be against my green jobs except some cranky libertarian?

He admitted withholding data about global temperatures but said the information was publicly available from American websites.

And he claimed it was not 'standard practice' to release data and computer models so other scientists could check and challenge research.

The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change. . .

The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.