Lucid Links (031210, Morning)

Pathetic excuse of the week: In a story that is another element of the apparent press- and government-orchestrated effort to take down Toyota — an effort that early-March sales results indicate is fortunately backfiring — ABC News offers this “explanation” for including tachometer footage taken in a parked car while making viewers think it was shot during a “sudden acceleration” incident:

“This was a misjudgment made in the editing room,” Lenzner said. “They should have left the shaky shot in. But I want to make clear that the two-second shot that was used did not change the outcome of the report in any way.”

No, they never would have done the “not-shaky shot” unless the intent from the very beginning was to overdramatize and mislead.

The ABC story aired on Monday, February 22, which “just happens” to be the day after a Sunday report by the Detroit News’s David Shepardson — picked up by the Associated Press and then parroted in early Monday TV and other news reports — falsely characterized an internal Toyota presentation about recall results as one that “bragged” and “boasted.”

Once again, David, AP, and other press apparatchiks — in Japanese culture, and at Japanese-headquartered companies with operations in America, bragging is a cultural taboo, and it almost never happens, most certainly not in a presentation to a top Japanese executive.

Isn’t it amazing how all these things “somehow” came together at once, and just in time to intimidate Toyota officials about to testify at Congressional hearings?

The culturally tone-deaf enterprise conducted by a lot of people whose “diversity training” has supposedly enabled them to know better dances on the edge of xenophobia.

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HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press” that “(health) insurance companies (will) … ultimately pay … taxes“ imposed on them by the government.

Of course, she’s wrong. The Business & Media Institute’s Dan Kennedy correctly notes that the people who really end up paying in some combination are:

• Policyholders
• Employers
• Wage earners
• Investors

This leads Kennedy to ask, “Is the Administration Stupid or Lying?”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because regardless of whether postures such as these are ignorant or deliberate, they and the people who propound them are definitely dangerous.

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Awww, California RINO and gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman hearts Van Jones.

That would be former “green jobs czar” Van Jones, who is a 9/11 truther and a 9/11 “deserver.” — and who just recently was shown to have praised the so-called “human shields” who went to Iraq in a hopelessly naive attempt to “protect” Saddam Hussein and prevent the Iraq War from commencing in 2003.

Golden Staters deserve better choices in 2010 than Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown v. Whitman. It doesn’t look likely.

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Christopher Horner in “Climategate: Three of the Four Temperature Datasets Now Irrevocably Tainted” —

The warmist response to Climategate — the discovery of the thoroughly corrupt practices of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) — was that the tainted CRU dataset was just one of four independent data sets. You know. So really there’s no big deal.

Thanks to a FOIA request, the document production of which I am presently plowing through — and before that, thanks to the great work of Steve McIntyre, and particularly in their recent, comprehensive work, Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts — we know that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) passed no one’s test for credibility. Not even NASA’s.

In fact, CRU’s former head, Phil Jones, even told his buddies that while people may think his dataset — which required all of those “fudge factors” (their words) — is troubled, “GISS is inferior” to CRU.

… wo down, two to go.

Reto Ruedy refers his inquiring (ok, credulous) reporter to NCDC — the third of the four data sets — as being the gold standard for U.S. temperatures.

But NCDC has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere — Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts have found NCDC completely incredible, having made a practice out of not including cooler temperature stations over time, exaggerating the warming illusion.

Three out of the four temperature datasets stink, with corroboration from the alarmists.

The whole human-caused global warming argument is irrevocably tainted and stinks to high heaven, i.e., it’s a proven batch of globaloney.

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Congrats to My Pet Jawa’s Rusty Shackleford and all others who followed “Jihad Jane” (HT Michelle Malkin) and did the dirty work that led to her indictment (DOJ press release is here).

It’s not very often that a group of bloggers/citizen investigators can credibly say that they have made the world a bit less dangerous. This is one of those times.