…along with the entire western seaboard for that matter. Just don’t give them back…

The video is at CNN

More from StatesmanJournal.com (interesting comments).

Let me guess…if you disagree with cross-dressing Siverton, Oregon Mayor Stu Rasmussen, then you’re a homophobe? Just like if you disagree with Josef Stalin Barack Obama, you’re a racist and if you disagree with Mitt Romney, you’re a “religious bigot?”

And we’re supposed to take those allegations seriously after watching that video?

Give me a break.

From Golden, Colorado:

Jul 19, 2009 12:57 pm US/Mountain

Teen Thanks Man Who Saved Him From Drowning

There were hugs and tears of relief in Golden on Thursday after a teenager was rescued from Clear Creek.

Ryan Evans slipped on a rock while trying to cross the creek Tuesday evening. Evans was able to thank the man who saved his life on Thursday.

Matt Mulicka was tubing and saw Evans face-down in the water. He pulled him out and performed CPR on Evans.

“Thirty to 40 feet in front of me I see a body floating down about 6 inches under the water, face down,” Mulicka said.

Mulicka says everything happens for a reason. He says if he hadn’t stopped a few minutes earlier to open a gate and help a goose get to her flock he wouldn’t have been at the right place at the right time.

“All I could see is pictures of my family in my mind and I kind of felt myself dying … some kind of angels are watching me,” Evans said.

Golden fire awarded Mulicka a “Distinguished Citizen Award.” The fire department has rescued as many as five people from the creek this summer.

Go to the link for pictures and video.

A little over the top, but the vid (HT to an e-mailer) has enough truthful nuggets to be entertaining.

Even people who like the guy, if they have a sense of humor, should like it:

Obamaniacs who didn’t like it should note that, according to the YouTube info, it “debuted in front of the President himself …. at the Radio & Television Correspondents Dinner” in June.

There’s a one-minute commercial at the end for an outfit that gets high marks for creativity.

As global warming alarmists lose ground, the wire service engages in open advocacy.

_______________________________________

Note: This column originally appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday.

_______________________________________

Thanks to how the establishment heavily filters environment- and climate-related news — with more than a little irony, you might call it a bad-news blackout — a large majority of Americans, particularly of the 85% – 86% of us who are for better or worse relatively disengaged, likely believe that:

• The recently passed cap and trade legislation is a first-stage shining example of the U.S. “doing its part” to forestall alleged global warming, and its ultimate passage will lead other countries to follow our example.
• Whatever the U.S. can do to minimize its carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions will have a material impact on the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
• Much of the rest of the world is doing more than we are to fight alleged global warming.

Without the indispensable CCNet e-mail from English climate policy analyst Benny Peiser, yours truly could be buying into some or all of the above conventional “wisdom.” None of the above bulleted items is even remotely true.

The House’s passage of cap and trade hasn’t impressed the three countries that matter most, namely India, China, and Russia.

On Sunday, “(Indian) Environment minister Jairam Ramesh asserted …. in the presence of visiting US secretary of state Hillary Clinton that India would never take legally binding commitments to cut down on emissions.”

China? Yeah, like we’re in a position to boss around our biggest lender, whose holding of U.S. Treasuries at the end of May, at over $800 billion, were 60% higher than a year earlier, and where in early June an audience of students broke out laughing when Treasury Secretary and tax cheat Tim Geithner tried to tell them that “Chinese assets (invested in the U.S.) are safe.” That same month China, identified as the world’s leading CO2 emitter two years ago, “announced that they would not participate in a global initiative to control climate change air pollutants.” Russia did the same.

This means that the world’s number 1, 3, and 4 emitters, according to this 2006 chart with supporting spreadsheet, aren’t on board, and aren’t about to get on board, no matter what kind of “example” we set.

But even if the U.S. ultimately chooses aggressive carbon-reduction targets, thereby, according to many predictions, slitting its economic wrists and voluntarily becoming “a second-rate economic power” in the process, it won’t do much to stop worldwide emissions growth. The spreadsheet referred to earlier shows that China’s annual emissions increased by 600 million metric tons of CO2 per year from 2003-2006. If that country’s emissions have continued to grow at that rate, its emissions are already 30% higher than ours. Projecting further ahead at that same rate, China’s emissions will double ours by 2016. Even the EPA has had to sheepishly admit to the fundamental truth that the U.S. alone can do little to affect overall worldwide emissions growth.

In any event, the rest of the world isn’t eagerly jumping on board the CO2 reduction bandwagon. Earlier this month at the G8 summit, all the rich and developing countries could agree on was “only to ‘substantially reduce’ global emissions by 2050,” with no concrete goals. This result led Peter Glover of the Energy Tribune to predict that very little will be accomplished at the United Nations-sponsored Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in December. In fact, Glover opined, ”all the signs are that Michael Jackson has a better chance of recording new material than Copenhagen has of delivering a meaningful international accord.”

The reaction from Paul Taylor of Reuters to the summit’s lack of results was not nearly as humorous:

So the planet is saved after all. Before you crack open the low-carbonated champagne, consider the weasel wording of the Group of Eight summit communiqué.

….. Are such carefully-hedged words worth the paper they are printed on? What are these politicians committing themselves to do during their own term of office? Most will be dead and buried by 2050.

There’s your clue to why the three fundamental untruths I noted at the beginning have popular currency.

That the press in general is sympathetic to the tenets of global warming and environmental alarmism in general is nearly beyond dispute. But Reuters, the wire service that U.S. news outlets heavily rely on for international news, has taken its environmental bias further, and has crossed the line into open advocacy.

Consider a few graphics I captured at various Reuters reports during the past week. Here are the first two:

The first is a link I have frequently seen that tells the world that fighting global warming is a Reuters cause. It links to the wire service’s related FaceBook page, called “Help Reuters Fight Global Warming.”

Reuters has decided as a company that global warming is “settled science,” even though there is plenty of evidence that the seriousness of the issue, or even its existence, is far from settled. Though the page clearly has many members, it just as clearly doesn’t have many who are willing to put their money where their mice are.

Nonetheless, Reuters has clearly taken sides. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that commentary like Taylor’s above would spew forth in such a corporate culture, or that the following would be considered worthy of carriage:

Can they possibly be any more blatant about it?

No wonder we learn so little of the growing opposition to radical environmentalism run amok overseas. The open global-warming advocacy at Reuters, which we should recall was the originator of Palestinian-supporting fauxtography in 2006, is disgraceful, and should stop. Short of that, news consumers need to aggressively look elsewhere for the truth.

From Madrid, Spain:

Jul 23, 2009 / 01:00 pm

A group of Spanish professionals are using life-sized models of a 13 week-old fetus to respond to statements by the country’s Minister of Equality, Bibiana Aido, who said in an interview that fetuses at that stage of development are alive but are not human beings.

The group is offering replicas of the “Aido Baby” through its website www.bebe-aido.com to help raise awareness about the development of the unborn during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy.

“Its real size is 5-6 centimeters and all of its organs have already been formed. It only needs to mature and grow,” the group said.

On May 19, Minister of Equality, Bibiana Aido, said that a 13 week-old fetus is alive “but is not a human being, because there is no scientific basis for such a claim.”

However, organizers of the campaign said science has demonstrated that “human life begins at conception. Every manual of human embryology states that the zygote is already an unrepeatable human being, unique in its species, a different being from the mother and the father.”

…. “We have made thousands of ‘Aido Babies’ so that people in Spain can determine with their own hands whether or not the 12 week-old baby that some don’t want to protect is a human being,” she added. ….

Go here for the full story.

Watching Associated Press reports evolve, or as is all too often the case, devolve, can be a revealing exercise.

Example: What happened between 8 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m. Saturday that would have caused the Associated Press and writer Nancy Benac to water down the headline and opening paragraphs of their story about the Obama-Gates-Crowley situation from this ….

…. to this?

Why, 12 hours later, when there are no known developments in the story, is the situation no longer one that Obama “helped fire” or “stoke”?

While the AP headline writers and Benac eased up on Obama, Benac didn’t lighten up on Obama critics, as the following paragraphs from each report demonstrate:

(July 24, 7:57 p.m.) There were signs both that Obama’s statement had helped to ease tensions and that his critics were not about to let that be the end of it: A trio of Massachusetts police organizations issued a statement thanking the president for his “willingness to reconsider his remarks.” And a Republican congressman from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, said he would introduce a House resolution calling on Obama to apologize to Crowley.

(July 25, 7:53 a.m.) There were signs both that Obama’s statement had helped to ease tensions and that his critics were not about to let that be the end of it: A trio of Massachusetts police organizations issued a statement thanking the president for his “willingness to reconsider his remarks.” The statement said Crowley was “profoundly grateful” Obama was trying to resolve the situation. But a Republican congressman from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, said he would introduce a House resolution calling on Obama to apologize to Crowley.

In fact, even though nothing happened with the story during the intervening period, the added sentence in this morning’s version of the above makes Obama look like more of a peacemaking hero than the self-admittedly uninformed troublemaking busybody he has been through this whole quagmire.

Neither report mentions the pathetic stab at politicization attempted by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, when he implied that a contributing factor to the days-old controversy might be, as reported Friday morning at the Politico, that “I think the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed McCain, if I’m not mistaken.” This would be guaranteed early paragraph material if a Republican President’s PressSec had made such a remark.

Memo to AP: Subsequent revisions, when necessary (and this one wasn’t), are supposed to improve story content, not water it down.

The current AP dynamic link is here, so readers can see if and/or how Benac’s story further devolves.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From China and Washington, DC:

Jul 24, 2009 / 11:17 pm

Two teams of Chinese researchers reported a medical breakthrough this morning, creating living mice from connective tissue that had been reverted to its embryonic state, a development that may eliminate the “need” to destroy human embryos for research.

Researchers accomplished this by first inducing the cells from the connective tissue to revert back to their embryonic state. This feat was first achieved two years ago, however researchers had never been successful in creating new living animals from these “induced pluripotent stem” (iPS) cells, raising questions about their developmental potential.

Results published today by the online journals “Nature” and “Cell Stem Cell” answer those questions, as scientists have shown that the iPS cells truly do function identically to embryonic stem cells. This proves that like embryonic stem cells, iPS cells are pluripotent, or able to develop into any type of cell, rather than simply multipotent, as adult stem cells are, only able to develop into a limited number of cells.

Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, neuroscientist, staff ethicist, and director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, explained to CNA that the breakthrough offers hope that iPS cells may be effective in providing an ethically acceptable alternative to human embryonic stem cell research.

“This procedure does not require the destruction of human embryos,” Fr. Pacholczyk said. “Therefore, it is certainly preferable to embryonic stem cell research.” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

In late April, the Associated Press’s Calvin Woodward, in a “Fact Check” report (“Obama disowns deficit he helped shape”), hit President Barack Obama’s claims that he and his party don’t deserve much of the blame for the size of this year’s deficit pretty hard. It was such a surprise that I wondered who had put truth serum in his coffee.

Well, you might have guessed it would be Calvin Woodard doing the primary honors in an AP Fact Check that again takes aim at the President, this time over his health care bill. With the co-bylined help of Jim Kuhnhenn and contributions from Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Woodward and his team went after several claims made by Obama at his Wednesday press conference that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Here are excerpts relating to each:

OBAMA: “We already have rough agreement” on some aspects of what a health care overhaul should involve, and one is: “It will keep government out of health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it.”

THE FACTS: In House legislation, a commission appointed by the government would determine what is and isn’t covered by insurance plans offered in a new purchasing pool, including a plan sponsored by the government. The bill also holds out the possibility that, over time, those standards could be imposed on all private insurance plans, not just the ones in the pool.

Indeed, Obama went on to lay out other principles of reform that plainly show the government making key decisions in health care. He said insurance companies would be barred from dropping coverage when someone gets too sick, limits would be set on out-of-pocket expenses, and preventive care such as checkups and mammograms would be covered.

….. OBAMA: “I have also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade, and I mean it.”

THE FACTS: The president has said repeatedly that he wants “deficit-neutral” health care legislation, meaning that every dollar increase in cost is met with a dollar of new revenue or a dollar of savings. But some things are more neutral than others. White House Budget Director Peter Orszag told reporters this week that the promise does not apply to proposed spending of about $245 billion over the next decade to increase fees for doctors serving Medicare patients.

….. OBAMA: “You haven’t seen me out there blaming the Republicans.”

THE FACTS: Obama did so in his opening statement, saying, “I’ve heard that one Republican strategist told his party that even though they may want to compromise, it’s better politics to ‘go for the kill.’ Another Republican senator said that defeating health reform is about ‘breaking’ me.”

….. OBAMA: “If we had done nothing, if you had the same old budget as opposed to the changes we made in our budget, you’d have a $9.3 trillion deficit over the next 10 years. Because of the changes we’ve made, it’s going to be $7.1 trillion.”

THE FACTS: Obama’s numbers are based on figures compiled by his own budget office. But they rely on assumptions about economic growth that some economists find too optimistic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, in its own analysis of the president’s budget numbers, concluded that the cumulative deficit over the next decade would be $9.1 trillion.

Woodward et al could have done a bit better. Their “deficit-neutral” fact check point ignored Congressional Budget Office predictions that the legislation will add to the deficit, and to spending. The AP team could have further pointed to the history of federal programs in general, which rarely if ever stay within their anticipated spending constraints, or to Massachusetts’s government-run Commonwealth Care, supposedly a model for much of what is in ObamaCare, where costs are spiraling out of control.

Nonetheless, Woodward and ABC’s Jake Tapper remain virtually alone in the White House press corps in their willingness to report negative news about Obama when it occurs (unless it’s impossible to avoid, as in the Obama-Gates matter), or to criticize him in identified analysis items.

Will that ever change?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Someone at the Associated Press got a headline mostly right (“Obama rushes to quell racial uproar he helped fire”) — although you still have to wonder if it had been almost anyone else, if something along the lines of “xxxx stop short of full apology” would have been used instead.

AP writer Nancy Benac’s story does note a couple of clear negatives in Barack Obama’s behavior in the Henry Gates matter, but it also lapses into blather about “the nation’s keen sensitivities on matters of race.”

Benac also blew by an incendiary comment by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the President’s police union critics reported earlier today at the Politico — “I think the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed McCain, if I’m not mistaken” — that surely would not have been ignored had a Republican president’s PressSec had made a similar statement about a Democrat-endorsing group. It as if, in Gibbs’s world, partisanship is the only reason the FOP defended officer James Crowley.

Here are key paragraphs from Benac’s report (bold is mine):

Knocked off stride by a racial uproar he helped stoke, President Barack Obama hastened Friday to tamp down the controversy. Obama, who had said Cambridge, Mass., police “acted stupidly” in arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., declared the white arresting officer was a good man and invited him and the professor to the White House for a beer.

Obama conceded his words had been ill-chosen, but he stopped short of a public apology. He personally telephoned both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley, hoping to end the rancorous back-and-forth over what had transpired and what Obama had said about it.

…. Hours earlier, a multiracial group of police officers had stood with Crowley in Massachusetts and said the president should apologize.

It was a measure of the nation’s keen sensitivities on matters of race that the fallout from a disorderly conduct charge in Massachusetts – and the remarks of America’s first black president about it – had mushroomed to such an extent that he felt compelled to make a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room to try to put the matter to rest. The blowup had dominated national attention just as Obama was trying to marshal public pressure to get Congress to push through health care overhaul legislation – and as polls showed growing doubts about his performance.

…. The president did not back down from his contention that police had overreacted by arresting the Harvard professor for disorderly conduct after coming to his home to investigate a possible break-in. He added, though, that he thought Gates, too, had overreacted to the police who questioned him. The charge has been dropped.

Obama stirred up a hornet’s nest when he said at a prime-time news conference this week that Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” by arresting Gates, a friend of the president’s. Still, Obama said Friday he didn’t regret stepping into the controversy and hoped the matter would end up being a “teachable moment” for the nation.

Oh, it was “teachable,” all right. One lesson is that an AP writer covering Obama can wait until the sixth paragraph to report the President’s long since-refuted claim that the police overreacted. Another is that a Press Secretary’s blatant politicization of a clearly non-political event can be ignored at the Essential Global News Network and still meet whatever remains of its journalistic standards.

Commenters can weigh in on other lessons learned.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Indeed…

Who’s in YOUR Wallet?

PJTV rocks.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

The column demonstrates that the conventional wisdom in current news releases about climate-change developments is provably wrong. Beyond that, Reuters, as shown in the graphic at the top right, has gone beyond biased reporting, which is bad enough, and has descended into open climate-change advocacy as a corporate policy. This has served to make the wire service’s so-called “journalism” even more opinionated than one might expect, and far beyond what its audience should be willing to tolerate.

__________________________________________

Related:

Early in the piece, I mentioned the indispensable CCNet email from English climate policy analyst Benny Peiser.

Peiser has also chronicled the BBC’s dive into openly-admitted climate-change bias. His latest cross-reference is to a July 15 column in the UK Daily Mail by retiring BBCer Peter Sissons.

Sissons’s column is worth reading for reasons beyond BBC’s environuttiness, as the network’s professionalism and standards in general appear to be in free-fall. But here is the key excerpt relating to the network’s climate-change/globaloney bias (bold is mine):

On a wintry Saturday last December, there was what was billed as a major climate change rally in London.

The leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, went into the Westminster studio to be interviewed by me on the BBC News channel. She clearly expected what I call a ‘free hit’; to be allowed to voice her views without being challenged on them.

I pointed out to her that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions.

Well, she was outraged. I don’t have the actual transcript, but Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC – the BBC! – should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.

I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change.

The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that ‘the science is settled’, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t.

But it is effectively BBC policy, enthusiastically carried out by the BBC environment correspondents, that those views should not be heard – witness the BBC statement last year that ‘BBC News currently takes the view that their reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made’.

Politically the argument may be settled, but any inquisitive journalist can find ample evidence that scientifically it is not.

I was not proud to be working for an organisation with a corporate mind so closed on such an important issue. Disquiet over my interview with Miss Lucas, incidentally, went right to the top at the BBC although, naturally, they never sought to discuss it with me.

For me, this is not an issue about the climate, it is an issue about the duty of the journalist.

But BBC doesn’t seem interested in journalism any more, only in propaganda, particularly in environmental matters.

It also seems that the inmates are running the asylum:

At today’s BBC, a complaint I often heard from senior producers was that they dared not reprimand their subordinates for basic journalistic mistakes – such as getting ages, dates, titles and even football scores wrong – it being politically incorrect to risk offending them.

To subscribe to Peiser’s CCNet e-mail, send an e-mail to listserver@ljmu.ac.uk (Subject Line “subscribe cambridge-conference”). Even if you never get past the daily headlines list, that alone will be a breath of fresh, non-warming air.

Item: “Democrats Block GOP Health Care Mailing”

Well, nothing personal, GOP Congressguys and Congressgals, but not a lot of people have been opening your mail recently.

But Congressman Kevin Brady and others deserve props for the work they have done representing reality, so I’ll publish the chart here to assist them in their educational effort (link will open in a BIIIIIIG new window; HT Moonbatttery):

Readers can spread it far and wide to people who will actually look at it.

The Roll Call article indicates that the Democrats have an “eight-point memo” documenting their objections to the chart’s details. Given the fact that there are hundreds of boxes, lines, and intertwined relationships on the chart, that would seem to be an admission that the GOP chart is 98%-99% accurate.

(begin sarcasam)

Addendum: Well, by all means, include their objections in a helpful insert included with the mailer. Tell the Dems that once the few who are brave enough to open their congressional mail read the accompanying insert, they will will be soooooo relieved that the chart of what health care will look like isn’t really as bad as the “real,” 1000-page-plus plan.

Or perhaps the GOP can yellow-line or otherwise highlight the areas of dispute. That will set everyone’s mind at ease that the healthcare system won’t be taken over by an unwieldy, unmanageable, unaccountable bureaucracy.

(/saracasm)