“as they were being ferried home after work in a fleet of buses” today.
State censorship in Kentucky.
The State of Kentucky has blocked a liberal, muckraking blog called Bluegrassreport.org on all state computers. The censorship comes the day after the NYT published a front-page story critical of the Kentucky administration which mentioned the site and its author.
Bush the Diplomat: ‘For Europe, September 11 Was a Moment. For Us, it Was a Change of Thinking.’
Today, President Bush held a press conference in Vienna, Austria as part of a diplomatic visit to Europe. He was asked by a member of the press why approval for his policies, particularly on national security issues, was so low in Europe. Bush explained that Europeans didn’t take the 9/11 attacks seriously. “For Europe, September 11th was a moment. For us, it was a change of thinking.”
85 Europeans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Bush added that “some people,” presumably Europeans who disagree with his policies, believe it’s “OK to condemn people to tyranny.” Watch it:
We’ve posted the transcript HERE.
House committee seeks NSA data-mining requests.
The House Judiciary Committee this morning “unexpectedly passed a Democratic resolution calling on the Justice Department to turn over all requests made by the National Security Agency and other federal agencies to telephone service providers to obtain information without a warrant.”
The Climate Skeptic Playbook
Jason Steort’s “clarification” of his misleading National Review cover story is accompanied by a letter-to-the-editor by Pat Michaels. Mr. Michaels is the one who told Steorts that 2002 was a “high-water mark for Antarctic ice” based on a grossly inaccurate interpretation of a study by Curt Davis.
In his letter, Michaels backs away from that claim, but offers a new argument:
Every modern climate model predicts that Antarctica will gain ice in the 21st century, resulting in a slight lowering of sea levels (which will, nonetheless, be largely compensated for as slightly warmer surface temperatures cause ocean waters to expand).
This argument is technically correct, but highly misleading.
Most of the ice loss in Antarctica is occurring in the coast. It’s not happening in a regular, linear fashion that can be captured by existing models. As a result, most of this ice loss is getting missed by the models. Richard Alley, who is writing the upcoming IPCC report on these issues, explains in a 2005 paper published in Science magazine:
[T]he models used in these projections lack some of the physical processes that might explain the rapid rates of ongoing coastal changes and lack the oceanic forcing responsible for inducing these changes…
Michaels’ shift is a good example of how climate skeptics operate. Throw out an argument and see what happens. If that doesn’t work, try something else. The goal here is not to win the argument, but just to keep things in doubt.
Fight back with the facts. Pledge to see An Inconvenient Truth:
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(Note: Even if you’ve already seen the film, make sure to pledge and be counted.)
ThinkFast AM: June 21, 2006
The two missing U.S. soldiers found yesterday were beheaded and showed signs of being “brutally tortured before their death.” Their remains are being sent to the U.S. for DNA testing, suggesting they “had been wounded or mutilated beyond recognition.”
The recently appointed head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection spoke out against a wall being built along the Mexican border. “I don’t support, I don’t believe the administration supports a wall,” Commissioner W. Ralph Basham said yesterday. “It’s not practical.”
The House will vote this week on an estate tax “compromise” bill from Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA). “To lure Democratic senators from Washington state and Arkansas, Thomas included a lucrative tax break for the timber industry, pushing the total cost of the bill to nearly $280 billion.”
Not exactly a free press in Afghanistan: “In a coordinated action this week,” Afghan intelligence operatives delivered an “unsigned letter” to TV stations and newspapers “ordering journalists to report more favorable news about the government.”
After revelations that AT&T set up a secret room in San Francisco that provided the National Security Agency with “full access to its customers’ phone calls,” Salon now reveals that AT&T has a “more integral” secret room in its Bridgeton, MO facility. “Although they work for AT&T, they’re actually doing a job for the government,” said a former AT&T employee. Read more
