Moore to the Point – Christ, the Church, and Pat Robertson

By Russell D. Moore - from Moore to the Point


This week on his television show Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said a man would be morally justified to divorce his wife with Alzheimer’s disease in order to marry another woman. The dementia-riddled wife is, Robertson said, “not there” anymore. This is more than an embarrassment. This is more than cruelty. This is a repudiation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Few Christians take Robertson all that seriously anymore. Most roll their eyes, and shake their heads when he makes another outlandish comment (for instance, defending China’s brutal one-child abortion policy to identifying God’s judgment on specific actions in the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, or the Haiti earthquake). This is serious, though, because it points to an issue that is much bigger than Robertson.

Marriage, the Scripture tells us, is an icon of something deeper, more ancient, more mysterious. The marriage union is a sign, the Apostle Paul announces, of the mystery of Christ and his church (Eph. 5). The husband, then, is to love his wife “as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25). This love is defined not as the hormonal surge of romance but as a self-sacrificial crucifixion of self. The husband pictures Christ when he loves his wife by giving himself up for her.

At the arrest of Christ, his Bride, the church, forgot who she was, and denied who he was. He didn’t divorce her. He didn’t leave.

The Bride of Christ fled his side, and went back to their old ways of life. When Jesus came to them after the resurrection, the church was about the very thing they were doing when Jesus found them in the first place: out on the boats with their nets. Jesus didn’t leave. He stood by his words, stood by his Bride, even to the Place of the Skull, and beyond.

A woman or a man with Alzheimer’s can’t do anything for you. There’s no romance, no sex, no partnership, not even companionship. That’s just the point. Because marriage is a Christ/church icon, a man loves his wife as his own flesh. He cannot sever her off from him simply because she isn’t “useful” anymore.

Pat Robertson’s cruel marriage statement is no anomaly. He and his cohorts have given us for years a prosperity gospel with more in common with an Asherah pole than a cross. They have given us a politicized Christianity that uses churches to “mobilize” voters rather than to stand prophetically outside the power structures as a witness for the gospel.

But Jesus didn’t die for a Christian Coalition; he died for a church. And the church, across the ages, isn’t significant because of her size or influence. She is weak, helpless, and spattered in blood. He is faithful to us anyway.

If our churches are to survive, we must repudiate this Canaanite mammonocracy that so often speaks for us. But, beyond that, we must train up a new generation to see the gospel embedded in fidelity, a fidelity that is cruciform.

It’s easy to teach couples to put the “spark” back in their marriages, to put the “sizzle” back in their sex lives. You can still worship the self and want all that. But that’s not what love is. Love is fidelity with a cross on your back. Love is drowning in your own blood. Love is screaming, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

Sadly, many of our neighbors assume that when they hear the parade of cartoon characters we allow to speak for us, that they are hearing the gospel. They assume that when they see the giggling evangelist on the television screen, that they see Jesus. They assume that when they see the stadium political rallies to “take back America for Christ,” that they see Jesus. But Jesus isn’t there.

Jesus tells us he is present in the weak, the vulnerable, the useless. He is there in the least of these (Matt. 25:31-46). Somewhere out there right now, a man is wiping the drool from an 85 year-old woman who flinches because she think he’s a stranger. No television cameras are around. No politicians are seeking a meeting with them.

But the gospel is there. Jesus is there.


Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  He can be reached by e-mail at rmoore@sbts.edu.

Moore to the Point – Christ, the Church, and Pat Robertson:

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Christie Blatchford: Bureaucracy calls shots on reservists | Full Comment | National Post

By Christie Blatchford - from the National Post

That Canada’s reserve army routinely gets the shaft comes as news to no one, least of all the country’s long-suffering reservists.

As one reserve officer I know says, “In the civilian world, we would be the third shift at the Ford plant … or the casual part-time force that has no union, no guarantees, no benefits and no representation.

“We’re almost like discretionary spending.”

Still, the report, which was released this week by the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and the Canadian International Council, is nonetheless startling.

Written by distinguished military scholar and veteran Dr. Jack English, it shows how the bureaucracy in Ottawa — an incestuous nest of regular army bosses with turf to protect and intractable civil servants — has consistently ignored or thwarted government directives to increase the size of the reserves.

What’s more, either those defence ministers whose pledges came to nought had the collective attention span of gnats, or they failed to grow a set of nuts sufficient to demand their instructions be followed, or they were simply shifted within Cabinet and the new fellow came in.

Any way you look at it, Dr. English says, the bureaucracy is calling the shots.

In the result, despite pledges to grow the reserves, the militia part-time head count remains still at about 16,500, or, as Dr. English wryly notes, about the size of National Defence Headquarters, or NDHQ as it’s called.

By the way, just getting the damn numbers out of NDHQ is a trick.

David Pratt, the former Liberal MP who wrote another report on Canada’s citizen soldiers for the CDFAI this spring — he takes a different approach, but certainly shares the view that the reserves have been neglected — first asked the Library of Parliament for an accurate count of reservists.

The library approached the Canadian Forces, which in turn essentially said it could go back only three years and couldn’t come up with a proper count.

In referring to this explanation in his report, Dr. English scornfully labels it “typical Byzantine, prevaricating gobbledygook.”

Virtually everyone who has studied the Canadian army, and their number is legion, agrees on a couple of things: The bureaucracy is obscenely bloated, far out of proportion for the size of the army; the citizen soldier, who until called up to full-time service costs only about 20% of the regular one, is a bargain for the taxpayer; the militia is more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than the regular army.

Easily the most important report was that done recently by Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie, an NDHQ insider who knew where to look for the skeletons and who has the courage to call them what they are. His findings buttress the veracity of Dr. English’s report.

As Lt.-Gen. Leslie writes in his executive summary of the myriad studies and reviews that preceded his, “These various efforts have resulted in hundreds of recommendations, some of which are innovative and first class, some of which are not.

“A number are quietly buried in the bowels of filing cabinets as being too hard or too threatening of the status quo.

“The eventual result was usually not what was originally intended, and in far too many instances, the headquarters and other overhead grew while ships were being decommissioned, regular and reserve battalions were disbanded and whole aircraft fleets cashed in.”

In other words, both men conclude in their different language, the bureaucratic tail is wagging the Parliamentary dog.

Part of the difficulty in any discussion about the reserves is that as a force based in armouries spread across the country, they are diffused, and don’t always speak with a single voice.

Part of the difficulty is that there are so many categories of reservists — Class A, the part-timers who serve in Canada; Class B, those employed full-time in Canada; Class C, those deployed on overseas operations — that the civilian brain, or this one anyway, can barely wrap her head around the distinctions.

And part of the difficulty is that the reserves are controlled by the leaders of the regular army. There are no reserve generals; the highest reserve position is a major-general, or two-star, role, and whoever has the job is outranked and outnumbered by the regulars.

This is no slur upon the regular army, troops or officers: Canada’s is among the best-fighting army in the world, as its magnificent performance in Afghanistan demonstrated. And on the battlefield level, with regular and reserve soldiers fighting (and dying) together in Kandahar, the differences disappeared.

But the senior leaders of the regular army have the same self-protection instincts as anyone else, and especially in rough economic times, they’re not likely to go to bat for their part-time brothers.

Canadians ought to care about the state of reservists: It’s these men and women who bring to the profession of arms not just the skills but also the sensibilities of the larger civilian world, who best straddle the divide. They are the living connection between the people of this country and the military, and for that reason alone should be treasured and nourished.

Yet it’s harder now to join up as a reservist — an application that used to take a week to process at the local level now takes as long as four months, thanks to that monstrous bureaucracy — than ever before.

Besides, the notion that the fonctionnaires have done and will do what they like, regardless of government orders, should offend everyone, even those who don’t give a fig about matters military.

National Post
cblatchford@postmedia.com

Christie Blatchford: Bureaucracy calls shots on reservists | Full Comment | National Post:

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Link between the Liberals and unions - Belleville Intelligencer - Ontario, CA

By Christina Blizzard - from the Belleville Intelligencer

I think of it as the missing link.

A slide deck sent to me in a sort of electronic brown envelope shows a link between the Liberal campaign team and union political advertising campaigns that have skewered Tories in the past three elections.

Until now, the Liberals have loudly proclaimed that those expensive ad campaigns a variety of unions have put on since the 2003 election have nothing to do with them.

There's no connection to the Liberal Party, they insist.

That's important, because during an election campaign, there are strict rules governing the amount of money the political parties may raise and how much they can spend on advertising.

There aren't the same kinds of spending rules around third-party advertising. That's why unions — mainly under the guise of the Working Families Coalition, but also through teacher unions — have been able to spend millions on TV ads.

But the presentation leaked to me shows that top Liberal campaign organizer — and fellow QMI Agency columnist — Warren Kinsella actually made a presentation to United Association Local 46, a plumbers' union, where he pitched the idea that they should become politically involved.

The 28-page presentation laid out talking points about the record of the Mike Harris and Ernie Eves governments and tied them to Tim Hudak.

The last two slides tell the union members to act: "Not just a lawn sign," it says.

"Contact your local newspaper. Submit letters to the editor. Open line radio shows." It also tells them to get involved with social media.

"Use paid media, such as radio or television ads," says the presentation.

It said, "politically charged campaigns launched by other unions have been successful in the past" — pointing to the controversial Working Families' "Not this time Ernie," campaign of 2003.

When I contacted him Thursday, Kinsella said the union requested the presentation.

"I was asked by the union to come and speak to them before the election about how to avoid a Hudak-PC government. I spoke to about 200 people, and they were introduced to me as members of all of the political parties," he said in an e-mailed response.

"I encouraged them to get involved in the democratic process in any way they could. One way they could do that is to advertise, and to, of course, ensure that they followed all of the Elections Ontario rules.

"To my knowledge, they have done no advertising at all."

Kinsella has posted the deck at his blog (warrenkinsella.com). He accuses me of being "snarky" in my e-mail to him, which makes me sad because I like Kinsella and wouldn't want to offend him.

I thought I was just being business-like. He also said I e-mailed the deck to him, which I didn't. I sent him a description of its contents.

I admire Kinsella enormously. He's a brilliant political strategist and would be the first person I'd call if I were to run for office. The guy's a genius, and Dalton McGuinty's last two election successes are largely due to him.

And trust me, when I get snarky, I get really snarky.

I believe it's wrong for unions — or any other third party — to be allowed to freely advertise during the election writ period because it makes a mockery of election financing laws.

This presentation shows the Liberals have been soliciting unions for support.

Why have election financing laws if Liberal friendly unions can flout them?

christina.blizzard@sunmedia.ca

Link between the Liberals and unions - Belleville Intelligencer - Ontario, CA:


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The Chicago Way: Union Boss Collects Pension After One Day on Job - Page 1 - Mike Shedlock - Townhall Finance

By Mike Shedlock - from Townhall.com

If you need evidence on how corrupt self-serving unions and union officials can be, then please consider Ex-labor chief's 1-day rehire nets $158,000 city pension

A retired Chicago labor leader secured a $158,000 public pension — roughly five times greater than what a typical retired public-service worker in the Windy City receives — after being rehired for just one day of active duty on the city payroll, local news reports said.

According to The Chicago Tribune, Dennis Gannon stands to collect approximately $5 million in city pension funds during his lifetime. He now draws the pension while working for a hedge fund, the Tribune reported.

Gannon, former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, was able to take a long leave from a city job to work for a union and then receive a city pension based on a high union salary. That arrangement is allowed under a state law signed by Gov. Jim Thompson on his last day in office in 1991, according to an investigation by the Tribune and WGN-TV.

The change has enabled a couple dozen labor leaders to become potential millionaires.

What is different in Gannon’s case is that he became eligible for the especially lucrative pension deal only because the city rehired the former Streets and Sanitation Department worker for one day in 1994, before granting him an indefinite leave of absence, according to the investigation. He retired from the city job in 2004 at age 50.

Gannon’s pension is so high that it exceeds federal limits and required Chicago’s pension fund to file special paperwork with the Internal Revenue Service to give it to him, the Tribune reported.

"I am extremely proud of my many years of service to the city of Chicago and the working men and women of organized labor," Gannon wrote in a statement provided to the Tribune.

The Tribune reports ...

The pension came on top of Gannon's union salary, which had grown to more than $240,000. He now draws the pension while working for a hedge fund, Grosvenor Capital Management, that does work with public pensions, including the Teachers Retirement System of Illinois. The firm also was one of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's largest campaign contributors.

Chicago Teacher's Pensions Massively Underfunded
Care to see the results Gannon presided over? Please consider Interactive Map of Public Pension Plans; How Badly Underfunded are the Plans in Your State?

Illinois has the worst public pension plans in the country as of April 2010. I am sure it is still true today. See link for more details.

Gannon says "I am extremely proud of my many years of service to the city of Chicago."

I believe he means one day of service for which he will collect $4 million for ripping off taxpayers for his own personal gain. Yes, that is something to be damn proud of.

For Dennis Gannon to go on leave after 1 day shows this was all planned from the outset. Moreover, by granting the leave, the corrupt Streets and Sanitation Department went along with it all the way.

Any guesses as to how many bribes and payoffs were associated with this chain of events?

It is time to end public unions entirely and all the associated graft.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

The Chicago Way: Union Boss Collects Pension After One Day on Job - Page 1 - Mike Shedlock - Townhall Finance:

Sand in the Shorts: All Means All, and Other Election Silliness...

By James Phieffer


All:

-the whole number of (used in referring to individuals or particulars, taken collectively): all students. -from dictionary.com

In a scene right out of a Marx Brothers film this week, the following things occurred:

• An All-Candidates meeting was held, for some of the candidates,
• Truman Tuck was criticized for wanting in when he was left out
• Todd Smith was criticized for staying out when he was wanted in,

Some thoughts on this.  First, it appears that certain community organizations and columnists (Chris Mallette – this means you) are still weak on the whole “definition of all” thing.  For them, and anyone else, I have included it at the beginning of the column.  All means all, to use a truism.  When the Affordable Housing Action Network announced, in it's invitations and it's signs, an all-candidates meeting, it made a clear statement – that this was to be a meeting where all of the candidates were invited to participate.  As such, when they excluded three of the seven local candidates, they made themselves liars – purveyors of an untruth.

If they had wished to have a meeting of only certain candidates, which is their right, they should have publicized it – and stated clearly in the invitations to candidates – that this was to be a meeting of specific candidates only.  They certainly have that right, as another columnist pointed out yesterday. But when they used the label of “All-Candidates”, they made a specific statement that this would include all registered candidates.

As to the decisions by Treat Hull (Green) and Todd Smith (Progressive Conservative) not to attend, it seems that Mr. Hull is getting off rather easily.  The focus of commentary has been on Mr. Smith, with the references to Hull being left to “he sent his regrets”.  Smith commented on why he decided not to attend, but left out one point.  Smith decided not to go after hearing that Hull wasn't going to attend, and after considering the need to to other necessary parts of his campaign.  It should be noted that Hull was also a no-show at the Canadian Association of Retired Persons meeting Thursday night.

While I give kudos to the NDP candidate, Sherry Hayes, and the Scarlet-Clad Tooth Fairy (Liberal Leona Dombrowsky) for making both events, the attendance of any candidates at all such meetings during this election will be no small accomplishment.  There are at least 10 of them during the campaign – and talking to Smith I found out from this past Monday to next Thursday, there are eight (8!) of these events.  When the campaign is 30 days long, that is too many to expect the attendance of every candidate at every meeting.

The onus isn't on candidates to attend – the onus needs to be on the multiple special interest groups to get their acts together and merge these into a more reasonable four or five – with one each for North and Central Hastings, and the County, and two for Belleville.  If there is a reasonable number of all-candidates meetings, then, and only then, will it be reasonable to jump up on the nearest soap box and decry a candidate's non-participation.  But as it stands, such criticism of either Smith or Hull is unreasonable.

And if the title is “all-candidates meeting” – make it one.

Irwin Cotler: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be locked out of the U.S. | World Politics | Full Comment | National Post

By Irwin Cotler - from the National Post

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s impending visit to United Nations is a cruel parody of law. Ahmadinejad will enter the U.S. despite being inadmissible under American law. He will address the United Nations General Assembly despite being in violation of its UN Charter and international law. And, he will be indulged — even feted — by universities, institutes and the media, thereby sanitizing his crimes and mocking the suffering of the Iranian people.

This charade — repeated annually since 2007 — ignores and undermines basic principles of domestic, international and humanitarian law.

First, President Ahmadinejad belongs on the U.S. “watchlist” of persons barred from entry — those who “aid terrorists … persecute religious minorities … or commit or incite to genocide.” Indeed, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation just last month barring entry for persons “who participate in serious human rights and humanitarian law violations and other abuses.”

The evidence of Ahmadinejad’s criminality on each of these counts is compelling. The recent U.S. State Department Annual Report lists Iran as a leading state sponsor of international terrorism. Iran directly supports terrorist proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah, whose platforms and policies are replete with genocidal calls.

Under Ahmadinejad, Iran has intensified its persecution and prosecution of religious minorities, especially the Baha’i — its largest religious minority — whose members are subject to harassment, repression, torture, imprisonment and execution. As for Christians, whose persecution has also accelerated, even praying together is a criminal act. These assaults on the religious rights of his own people, combined with the many other repressive acts carried out by his regime, are crimes against humanity.

Ahmadinejad’s violations of the Genocide Convention’s prohibition against “direct and public incitement to genocide” — symbolized by parading down the streets of Tehran with a Shiab-3 missile draped with the emblem “Wipe Israel off the map” — is cause alone for exclusion.

A person who pursues the world’s most destructive weaponry in violation of Security Council resolutions; who has already committed the crime of incitement to genocide in violation of international law; who is complicit in crimes against humanity; and who engages in massive domestic repression against his own people belongs in the dock of the accused, not at the world’s most watched podium.

Yet, Ahmadinejad has been admitted before and is likely to be admitted again. How can this be?

Sand in the Shorts: "An odd "all-candidates" debate" - Silliness Flies Courtesy Local Housing Group

By James Phieffer


Is the definition of an "All-Candidates" meeting that complex? In light of it being apparently beyond the ken of the Affordable Housing Action Network (AFAN), and after the Canadian Association of Retired People managed to screw up the concept in the last election, maybe it is beyond the abilities of some to understand. Interestingly, in both cases the poor grasp of democratic concepts was a problem for left-wing, or at least anti-conservative, organizations.

Here's the pertinent part of the article from the Intelligencer:

One candidate did more debating off stage than on leading up to what was advertised as an all candidates meeting.

Trueman Tuck, candidate for the People First Republic Party of Ontario, argued while the Affordable Housing Action Network called Wednesday's session an "all-candidates" meeting they had misled the public as only four candidates — those representing the Liberal, New Democratic, Progressive Conservative and Green parties — had been invited to participate in the actual debate.
"They won't let me on the stage. They won't let me speak," Tuck said minutes after arriving at the event and speaking with Gina Cockburn of the network, the hosting agency for the debate at Eastminster United Church.
Cockburn explained the agency had invited only the four candidates due to a systematic approach to the evening.
"We deliberately looked at statistics from the last provincial election and invited those candidates representing the parties that had received the most percentage of the votes," she said. "Unfortunately, only the NDP and Liberal candidates are participating."
Organizers did, in an effort to appease Tuck, permit him to present a three minute introduction but he was not permitted to remain on the stage and could not answer any questions.
Ontario PC candidate Todd Smith, when reached at home Wednesday evening, said while he had decided not to participate because he had learned only two of the seven candidates were planning on participating it was not the main factor in his absence.
"Basically what it came down to is it's a matter of time. We've got two weeks left in this campaign and, no offence to those people who showed up, but there's a lot of work to be done in those next two weeks and I had a lot of things that I needed to do to get caught up," Smith said.
Green candidate Treat Hull, the crowd of roughly 120 people were told, had "sent his regrets" as he was unable to attend the session.

In the comments section I posted the following (it should be made clear that the majority of comments targetted PC candidate Todd Smith's absence):

Sand in the Shorts: Premier Demonstrates Lack of Fiscal Understanding - or Lack of Honesty

By James Phieffer

In the September 21st, 2011 issue of the Belleville Intelligencer, a story appeared concerning the visit of Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty to Belleville, where he held a campaign event at the Kellogg's plant located in this city. In it, he challenged the Progressive Conservative's labelling of government subsidies as "corporate welfare.

From the article:

[Dalton McGuinty] added the Ontario PC Party refers to such incentives as "corporate welfare" which means many jobs across the province, including those at Kellogg which is expanding by 48 jobs, would not be created. The expansion means Kellogg will add Bran Buds and Kashi Heart to Heart brands to its line of locally-produced products.
"That's just evidence of the partnership that we've been able to strike with all our communities right across the province," McGuinty said. "We have found ways through various programs to partner with our communities and our private sector in order to combine our strengths and create jobs and prosperity." ----- 

The Myth of Middle-Class Stagnation — The American Magazine

By Steve Conover - from The American

It’s time to correct a misconception regarding middle-class income.

Conventional wisdom says that the middle class hasn’t caught a break for at least a decade and that incomes have stagnated or declined. But new research corrects a misconception regarding middle-class income, and therefore should come as a pleasant surprise—not just to members of the middle class, but also to pundits, journalists, and of course, politicians.

Speaking to an audience in Racine, Wisconsin, on June 30, 2010, President Obama repeated a winning theme from his 2008 campaign—the theme that the economic policies of the previous administration had failed those of us who consider ourselves middle class:

Nearly a decade of tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires led to little more than sluggish growth [and] a shrinking middle class. Your paychecks flatlined. Wages and incomes did not go up. Even when the economy was growing, it wasn't growing for you.

It was the same message we had been hearing for two years: the benefits of U.S. economic growth after the Bush tax cuts had allegedly been going to the rich and bypassing the middle class. By today, that mantra has become unchallenged conventional wisdom.

Today’s economy makes the problem even worse: the growth rate is somewhere between zero and pathetically anemic. So, even if the middle class did start getting its fair share of growth, that “fair share” wouldn’t amount to much. The rut just seems to get deeper and deeper for the middle class.

Wishful thinking?

Imagine a better outcome. For example, in the wake of the Bush tax cuts, wouldn’t it have been nice to see the middle class get its fair share of the overall economy’s growth? Wouldn't it have been even nicer if middle class income had grown at a faster pace than that of the rich?

All four versions of ‘middle class’ outperformed every definition of ‘rich’; in short, the gap between the rich and the middle class got smaller, not larger.

If the seven years before 2008 had yielded results like that, it might have driven that year’s political campaigns and subsequent debates away from the rear-view-mirror exercise of assigning blame for unfair distribution of past income growth and towards a forward-looking focus on our society’s choices for enhancing future economic growth. We could today be focusing on the single, overwhelmingly important problem facing our economy—jump-starting overall growth—armed with the confidence that the middle class, as before, would get at least its fair share of that growth.

But imagining those middle-class results is just wishful thinking, isn’t it?

No. In the seven years from 2001-2007 (inclusive), not only did the middle class get at least its fair share of overall income growth, the income gap between the rich and the middle class actually got smaller. In an apparent paradox, the same Census Bureau database that told us that median household income was essentially unchanged in 2007 versus 2000 also tells us that the middle class enjoyed a higher income growth rate than did either the overall economy or the rich—and therefore that their income gap versus the rich had actually decreased.

How is that possible? How could the same official database—the March Supplement to the Current Population Survey—lead us to the following two, seemingly polar-opposite, conclusions:

Lawrence Solomon: Warmed right over | FP Comment | Financial Post

By Lawrence Solomon - from the National Post

The global-warming theory is nearing its end as evidence against it mounts

Why do a majority of Canadians — 52% according to the latest Angus Reid poll — still hold the belief that humans are mainly responsible for global warming?

I think I know, based on the feedback I’ve received from literally thousands of Canadians who have commented in recent years on my articles dealing with global warming. Most of that 52% have so often been told that the science is settled on global warming, and so rarely that there is any credible dissent, that they have not yet twigged to straightforward information, such as the rejection by most top scientists of the global-warming dogma.

Just this week, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever resigned as a fellow from the American Physical Society, saying he could not live with its nonsensical endorsement of global-warming alarmism. Dr. Giaever joins a host of other eminent scientists who have dismissed concerns over global warming, including Freeman Dyson, a Princeton physicist and America’s best known scientist, Antonino Zichichi, the president of the World Federation of Scientists and Italy’s best known scientist, Claude Allegre, a former socialist Minister of National Education, Research and Technology and France’s best-known scientist, and America’s Reid Bryson, known as the “father of scientific climatology” and judged “the world’s most cited climatologist” by the journal of the Institute of British Geographers.

In contrast to this Who’s Who of the scientific world, the list of top global-warming scientists falls far short. No scientist has been awarded a Nobel Prize in a science field for his work on global warming because no piece of science in the field has achieved a major scientific breakthrough. This despite the global-warming issue’s dominance of the scientific world for more than two decades, garnering the lion’s share of scientific funding and an inordinate amount of coverage in scientific publications. The only Nobel Prize conferred on global-warming advocates came from the political wing of the Nobel Prize establishment, which awarded them a prize for peace in consolation for their failure to merit a prize for science.

The most celebrated global-warming scientist by far has been NASA’s James Hansen, whose 1988 testimony in the U.S. Senate first brought the climate change issue to the popular press. Hansen presented projections, based on his computer models, showing dangerously high temperatures in the decades between then and now. Had those projections been borne out, he would today have a Nobel Prize in science. Unfortunately for him, his models proved to be duds. And aside from his global-warming work, he has precious few scientific accomplishments.

Rex Murphy: The media’s love affair with a disastrous president | Full Comment | National Post

Larry Downing/Reuters

By Rex Murphy - from the National Post

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.

Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sychophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”

The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jermiah Wright. In the midst of the brief stormlet over the issue, one CNN host — inexplicably — decided that CNN was going to be a “Wright-free zone.” He could have hung out a sign: “No bad news about Obama here.”

The media trashed Hillary. They burned Republicans. They ransacked Sarah Palin and her family. But Obama, the cool, the detached, the oracular Obama — he strolled to the presidency.

Sand in the Shorts: A Horse, a Horse, My Kingdom for a Horse

By James Phieffer

As we pass the one week mark of the provincial election, I'm taking a moment to say I'm sorry to be proven right (so far). Tim Hudak's Liberal-Lite campaign has resulted in the Liberals erasing a ten point PC lead in the last month.

Why? Because Hudak has given Ontarians no reason whatsoever to vote Progressive Conservative rather than Liberal.

Locally, the PC's have a strong candidate in Todd Smith, although he is up against the Scarlet-clad Tooth Fairy (aka Leona Dombrowsky), a skilled campaigner and someone who has a strong base in Belleville. But he is being wasted as the PC deep thinkers allow themselves to be distracted by the insignificant story of the week. Add to that the “foreign workers” idiocy of week one, and the question has to be asked – whose running this circus?

This is still a winnable election, and as the old saw goes, “there's only one poll that counts”.

But for October 6 to be a good day for the PC's, and for the province as a whole, there has to be a change in how the Hudak campaign is run.

“A horse. A horse, my kingdom for a horse...”

The weak, flea-bitten glue piles that Hudak has tried to ride to victory thus far now need to be put down for good. There are plenty of strong steeds an able prince might ride.

Incontrovertible – I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means | RedState

By Caleb Howe - from RedState.com

In the latest blow to “consensus”, Dr. Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Laureate, has resigned from the American Physical Society over the group’s position on global warming. His resignation letter minces no words:

Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:
“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

“The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.

That’s his emphasis, not mine.

Dr. Giaever’s resignation doesn’t come out of the blue. Fox News reports that he was one of the cosigners of the 2009 letter to President Obama, along with over 100 other scientists,dissenting against the assertion of consensus.

I wrote about the cult of consensus at RedState last year. The point of my post was that it is not only false to state that the case is closed on anthropogenic global warming, it was directly counter to the spirit of scientific inquiry to suppose that it would be, or even to suggest that consensus equals truth. In any other research field, such a claim would be considered preposterous, if not downright heretical.

The news of Dr. Giaever’s resignation comes on the heels of another blow to the notion of “incontrovertible evidence” this past July. A study published in the journal Remote Sensing(PDF) highlights several discrepancies in previously relied-upon data. From the Tuscon Citizen: