Rush Limbaugh, last Friday:

I read something the other day that says in the last four years, surface temperatures on average have not gone up. They’ve gone down one-tenth of a degree Celsius. If they’re trending anywhere, they’re trending down the last four years.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 1/24/06:

The year 2005 was the warmest year in over a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world. “¦

The result indicates that a strong underlying warming trend is continuing. Global warming since the middle 1970s is now about 0.6 degrees Celsius (C) or about 1 degree Fahrenheit (F). Total warming in the past century is about 0.8° C or about 1.4° F.

“The five warmest years over the last century occurred in the last eight years,” said James Hansen, director of NASA GISS. They stack up as follows: the warmest was 2005, then 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004.

Rush may not like the scientific facts, but he’s not entitled to create his own.

The New York Times reports today that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) wrote a “sharply worded letter” to his ally President Bush in May stating that the “U.S. Congress should not have to play Twenty Questions to get information that it deserves under the U.S. Constitution.” Hoekstra appeared on Fox News this morning and said he wrote the letter because he “wanted to reinforce to the President…by law the requirement that they keep the legislative branch informed of what they are doing.”

Hoekstra debunked the administration claim that Congress is always kept informed of intelligence programs. Hoekstra revealed that administration whistleblowers have brought to his attention secret programs that Congress should have told about previously, including “at least one significant activity that we had not been briefed on that we have now been briefed on.”

More from TPM and Emptywheel.

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This morning on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume said North Korea’s missiles are “sitting there like the Washington Monument” and “knocking the missiles out” would be “a successful possible strategy.” Watch it:

Joe Cirincione explains why a preemptive strike on North Korea’s missles would be a disastrous blunder.

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