Lickety-Split Links (120109, Noontime)

Question that must be answered — Did the BBC’s Paul Hudson write this October 9 item wondering about global warming’s decade-long disappearing act before or after he received “some of the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia more than a month ago – but did nothing about them.” That is, when exactly was “more than a month ago”? (HT Sweetness & Light)

______________________________________________________

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason on Larry Summers and his role in Harvard’s endowment investments losing millions — “Under ordinary circumstances anybody who contributed to the destruction of Harvard would be hailed as a national hero, but Summers has gone on to make the whole country poorer.” Indeed.

______________________________________________________

From the “He’s hoping they’re too busy playing video games and texting to notice” Dept. — “Barack abandons the young: The President’s policies hurt the generation that put him in office.”

“Hurt” is putting it mildly.

______________________________________________________

Missing a point at the WashTimes:

Mr. Obama’s meeting Monday with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was closed to the press, even photographers, the White House said.

“It’s surprising and quite unusual that President Obama meets with an allied leader like the prime minister of Australia and there’s no photo op at the beginning or end of the session,” said Mark Knoller, a longtime White House reporter for CBS Radio.

The Times’s Joseph Curl thinks it’s a generalized, PR strategy-based pullback. I don’t think so. I think Obama and Rudd were scrambling to figure how to salvage their global climate change agenda and didn’t want to risk being asked about the criminal conspiracy known as Climategate.

______________________________________________________

Lachian Markay, at NewsBusters:

On World AIDS Day, Media Won’t Acknowledge Bush Successes

MSNBC noted on its website a recent U.N. report that found that new cases of the syndrome are “stabilizing.” “There are now 4 million people on lifesaving AIDS drugs worldwide, a 10-fold increase in five years,” the article noted, adding that those drugs have saved roughly 3 million lives, according to the report (h/t NB reader Tom M.).

Yet MSNBC makes no mention of President Bush or his tremendous efforts to combat the global AIDS epidemic. It’s not as if his contribution to the fight is ambiguous. U.S. News reports that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is credited for saving roughly 2 million lives.

I wrote a column about PEPFAR’s success in April 2008.

This is another one of those credit-assigning items concerning which the historians are going to have to do the cleanup work. That’s because much of PEPFAR’s success had to do with abstinence education. The worldwide establishment media would literally prefer that people die in the name of condoms uber alles than acknowledge that fact.