Archives for February 2014

The woman who vanquished the Equal Rights Amendment more than a generation ago is now focused on stopping what she considers amnesty for people in the country illegally, who will never vote Republican and often don’t respect America’s founding principles.

Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly is also disgusted by the recent spate of federal judges striking down voter-approved laws and state constitutional amendments that define marriage only as the union of one man and one woman.

On the issue of immigration, Schalfly compiled the results from a number of recent independent polls on her eagleforum.org website.  She says the consistent results are proof positive that making illegal immigrants U.S. citizens will lead to greater advancement of the liberal agenda.

“These millions of foreigners coming in will of course take jobs from Americans, for one thing.  But they are not going to vote conservative.  They’re all going to vote for big government because that’s what they believe in.  A lot of these polls show exactly that and they corroborate each other,” said Schlafly.

“Pew found that 75 percent of Hispanic immigrants and 55 percent of Asian immigrants, who are the two largest groups, want a bigger government providing more services.  Now you ask any Republican or conservative if that’s what he wants, he’s going to say no, but only 19 percent of Hispanics and 36 percent of Asians want a smaller government,” she said.  “So why is it any surprise that 71 percent of Hispanics and 73 percent of Asians voted for Obama in 2012.  It’s no surprise.  That’s the way it is.”

In addition to the leftward political bent of most immigrants, Schlafly says the polling data also indicates a troubling lack of respect among them for our Constitution.

“One poll showed that 67 percent, that’s two-thirds, of native-born citizens think our Constitution is a higher legal authority than international law, but only a third of naturalized citizens share that view.  Naturalized citizens have already taken a solemn oath to renounce all of their connections and allegiance to where they came from.  And yet they’re coming in here thinking international law should trump our Constitution.  Give me a break!” said Schlafly.

The push for comprehensive immigration reform appears to be on hold.  Just days after he and other House GOP leaders unveiled their principles for reform, House Speaker john Boehner recently announced nothing would be moving forward because a large percentage of Republican lawmakers simply don’t trust President Obama to faithfully enforce provisions with which he disagrees.

Schlafly is encouraged by the delay but says opponents are fighting a tough battle against elements in both parties.

“I hope he’ll never bring it up because what is mislabeled reform is actually amnesty and the lobbyists who are for this type of amnesty are very powerful and very well-financed.  The Democrats are for it because they know it will create more Democratic Party votes.  It’s the big business Republicans who want the cheap labor,” said Schlafly.

National Republican Party leaders see things very differently.  In the Republican National Committee’s report on the 2012 elections, the only policy recommendation was passage of comprehensive immigration reform.  In addition to advocating tighter border security, greater e-verify enforcement and a robust guest worker visa program, the party also believes it needs to find a way to connect with the nation’s fastest-growing demographic.

GOP officials say the issue may not be the only thing that matters to Latino voters but until Republicans address it in a substantive way, it will be nearly impossible to start a dialogue on many other issues that might otherwise attract Latinos to the party.

Schlafly isn’t buying it.

“(RNC Chairman Reince) Priebus is part of the establishment and we have another ‘choice not an echo’ fight between the establishment Republicans, who are mostly the big business and the internationalist Republicans, against the grassroots.  The grassroots is almost solidly against this amnesty they mislabel reform.  It isn’t reform at all.  It’s amnesty.  It’s letting in as many people as possible.  And there’s no good argument for it,” said Schlafly.

Even the most liberal advocates of immigration reform insist they are not in favor of amnesty.  So what do they mean by “amnesty” and what does Schlafly mean?

“When I say amnesty, I mean any of these different views that are mislabeled reform.  Anything Chuck Schumer’s for, we should be against.That’s why we encouraged the House never to go into conference with him, because Schumer would just out-talk anybody else,” said Schlafly.

Schlafly is also one of the nation’s leading voices on social conservative issues.  She is incensed that federal judges are creating a pattern of overturning voter-approved constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.  Since December, judges in Utah, Oklahoma and Virginia have struck down amendments.  A judge in Kentucky recently ordered the commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, despite voters explicitly giving the state power to reject them.

Many of the judges are basing their rulings on last June’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling on United States v. Windsor, which struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and found that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages in states where it is legal.  The justices did not address DOMA’s provisions allowing states to set their own definitions of marriage and decide whether they would recognize marriages same-sex marriages performed in other states.

“Judges are thinking they’re trying to be on the right side of history, but they’re not and I think what they’re doing is not constitutional.  The Windsor case that they’re relying on did not uphold same-sex marriage, but they’re all acting like it did and made it the law of the land.  It is not the law of the land,” said Schlafly.

“It was 35 states I believe that have voted for marriage to be one man and one woman.  They’re ignoring that and that Utah decision was particularly outrageous and contrary to everything we know is right and just in this country.  Several years ago, I wrote my book called ‘The Supremacists’, about how these judges are getting to think they are God Almighty and can do anything they want,” said Schlafly.

“What Obama says he going to do anything he wants now, the judges have been doing for years and they label it under the words living Constitution,” she said.  “I think the American people have got to stop this dictatorial attitude of Obama, who thinks he can do anything by executive order and the judges who think they can do anything they want by calling it a living Constitution.”

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review discuss whether a GOP focus on Bill Clinton’s legacy (including Monica Lewinsky) is legitimate for the 2016 campaign.  They also elaborate on reports of the highest political donors of the last 25 years being dominated by organized labor. Finally, they poke fun at the hypocrisy of John Kerry’s comments on climate change in light of the carbon emissions of his current trip.

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert says he’s not sure if he’s more disappointed in President Obama regularly legislating on Obamacare and other issues from the Oval Office or Congress for letting him get away with it.

The tea party favorite also ripped the Obama administration for trying to get business leaders to lie about Obamacare.  He also aimed choice words at GOP leaders for allowing an extension of the debt ceiling with no conditions and for claiming they can’t really rein in spending until the GOP also controls the Senate and White House.

Earlier this week, President Obama declared another delay in the implementation of the employer mandate, specifically the part impacting businesses employing between 50-99 people.  Those employers now have until 2015 to comply with the mandate.  Republicans are characterizing this as another example of Obama unilaterally changing laws rather than enforcing them and ignoring the constitutional role of Congress to create or alter legislation.

Gohmert agrees with that assessment but says there’s more blame to go around.

“Not only is it egregious that someone in the executive branch is legislating -heck, I left the bench to run for Congress so that I could participate in legislation, because I knew the judiciary and the executive is not supposed to.  Not only is that egregious, but the fact that Congress isn’t standing up against that sort of usurpation.  Shame on the Democrats that won’t stand up against that,” said Gohmert, who lamented that the mandate delay is once again a lifeline for businesses while individual Americans get no such reprieve.

“It is helping business and screwing over middle class Americans who are going to have to pay for this.  It also points out how dishonest and disingenuous Harry Reid was when he shut down the government.  We passed a bill that would postpone this for all Americans in our third compromise we offered.  They wouldn’t do it.  Now we see they were willing to do it.  They just wanted to shut down the government because they knew the mainstream would blame Republicans.  It is really outrageous,” said Gohmert.

Gohmert is also livid at revelations the Obama administration is forbidding employers from reducing staff in order to avoid qualifying for the mandate.  The U.S. Treasury is reportedly telling employers they can make the staff reductions so long as they swear, under penalty of perjury, that Obamacare was not the reason for the jobs being eliminated.

“It’s this president and this executive branch putting a financial gun to the head of employers and saying you’ve got to go under oath and lie or you’re not going to be able to stay in business because the Obamacare penalty is going to hurt you so badly.  It is really outrageous to force them to make a political statement for the administration in order to get what should be rightfully theirs under the law.  Their is nothing in the law that says they can’t let employees go to get down to a certain level,” said Gohmert.

“They were going to force people to lay off employees and now they’re going to force them to lie about why they laid them off.  It is really just so wrong, so immoral on so many levels,” he said.

Another major story in Congress this week was both the House and Senate comfortably passing a debt ceiling extension that gives President Obama borrowing authority for more than a year.  The Senate version passed on Democratic votes, although a dozen Republicans helped them defeat a filibuster attempt.  In the House, Speaker John Boehner bluntly informed the GOP Conference he was bringing forward a “clean” extension, with no demands on spending cuts, the Keystone XL pipeline or anything else attached.  Democrats provided most of the votes for passage in the House as well, although 28 Republicans also backed the plan.

Sources close to the Republican leaders say Speaker Boehner offered a laundry list of conditions to attach to the debt ceiling hike but that he was stymied by a large contingent of GOP members who refused to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances.  Gohmert says that’s simply not true.

“They should get out and talk to real members instead of just talking to themselves before they make statement’s like that,” said Gohmert.

“The executive branch should never have been given a blank credit card for the next year unless there were some measures on that bill that would have helped save America for the future,” he said.

“I don’t know how they came to a conclusion that they couldn’t get 218 (votes to pass a bill with conditions) because I talked to a number of people who are normally ‘no’ votes on raising the debt ceiling and proposed a couple of things that they said they’d be hard pressed not to vote for that.  They thought they probably would.  And these are people that were not whipped or checked by our leadership.  So I don’t know how they could conclude, ‘No, we’ll never get enough people on anything, so let’s just throw in the towel completely,'” said Gohmert.

Republicans were widely believed to have little stomach for a debt ceiling fight just months after taking much of the blame for the two-week partial government shutdown and just months before a midterm election in which the GOP appears poised to keep the House and make a strong run at winning back a majority in the U.S. Senate.

Many Republican lawmakers and commentators also assert that Republicans need to accept the political reality of Democratic control of the House and Senate.  They say until the GOP controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, advancing conservative principles is next to impossible.

Gohmert says that rationale is deeply flawed on multiple fronts.  First, he argues that Republicans have tremendous power on issues like debt and spending because the House controls the purse strings.

“You cannot get one dime appropriate for anything, including all of the pet projects of the White House, unless the Republicans in the House go along with it.  We have the most important half of the legislative branch.  Because we haven’t been willing to stand up for the Constitution and stand up for an end to this massive deficit spending like never in our history that’s going on under this president, the country is hurting,” said Gohmert.

The congressman also flatly rejects the notion that Republicans should not do anything too ambitious or controversial that could rock the boat in an election year.  Gohmert says recent GOP history proves that strategy is a loser.

“I heard similar things back in the first of the year conference in 2006 when we had a Republican president, a Republican House and Senate majority.  We were told at that time, ‘Gee, there’s a small chance we might lose the majority in November of 2006 so we better just hold up and not do anything.  Our plan is we’re not going to do anything big.  We’re just going to try to get through the year without ruffling any feathers and then in January 2007 we’ll come back,'” said Gohmert.

“I pointed out, ‘Look, if you think there’s any chance we could lose the majority here in the House, this has to be the year we stand up for what we believe in.’  It sounds like we’re going back into that now and saying, ‘Gee, we have the majority.  The American public gave it to us because we promised if you gave us the majority in the House, we will stand up for America, and now we’re making it conditioned on getting the Senate and the White House before we stand up for what we believe?’ asked Gohmert.

“The Democrats are certainly standing up for what they believe.  Harry Reid certainly stood up in his war against children by spending future children’s money that we don’t even have, when he last September and October said, ‘No, I’m not negotiating at all,'” said Gohmert.

“If we felt as strongly about our principles as Harry Reid does about shutting down the government unless they can keep spending children’s and grandchildren’s money, then I think we would be able to prevail on things that would help America,” said Gohmert.

As a major storm brought ice to the South and snow to the Northeast, the Capitol Steps bring in former Vice President Al Gore for his climate change analysis and try to figure out if this means Gore was dead wrong or that he was right since climate change activists contend all weather is proof of global warming.  We also chat about some of the oddities at the Winter Olympics in Russia.  Our guest is Steps co-founder and star Elaina Newport.

The leader of a prominent grassroots organization targeted for unlawful scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service says she is not surprised by evidence of collaboration between the government and liberal organizations in reviewing applications for tax-exempt status.

As reported this week, the IRS essentially subcontracted its responsibility to review the applications to the Urban Institute, a liberal organization that gets some federal funding but also gets significant financial back from George Soros.  Specifically, online applicants are directed to the Urban Institute’s website if they take in less than $50,000 in annual receipts.

True the Vote President Catherine Englebrecht, who ripped the IRS for its heavy-handed tactics and not conducting any meaningful investigation into alleged abuses, says this sort of cozy working relationship should not surprise anyone.

“It is exactly as it seems to be.  They are weaponizing government against private individuals and non-profit organizations that oppose current policy or the performance of this administration.  They want them silenced,” said Englebrecht.  “It doesn’t shock me in the least.  This is the bare-knuckle politics that we sadly see being used by agencies within the government that are not about representing the people but are about maintaining their own power.”

Englebrecht says she can’t think of any legitimate reason for the IRS and a group like the Urban Institute to be working together on matters involving that kind of sensitive information the government requires from tax-exempt applicants.

At least one conservative organization, the National Organization for Marriage, learned its donor list ended up in the hands of the Human Rights Campaign, its chief rival in the marriage debate.  Englebrecht says True the Vote cannot be certain whether its confidential information was transmitted to opposing groups as well.

“That’s a tough question to answer because we been attacked so soundly on so many fronts.  Whether or not information is being used, there’s so much out there about us, it’s entirely possible.  And that is one of the things we’re asking to be addressed in our lawsuit when we sued the IRS, is the discovery of certain documents that we can’t get our hands on otherwise will be revealed in this lawsuit.  We should be able to figure out who was pointing the cannons in our direction,” said Englebrecht.

True the Vote is an organization dedicated to cleaning up the voter rolls across the nation by weeding out the dead and those who have left a state.  They also back legislation requiring voters to present photo identification before casting ballots.  The Obama administration, Democrats at the state level and liberal advocacy groups staunchly oppose such efforts.

In addition to submitting paperwork about the group’s voters, Englebrecht says the IRS made other demands that were clearly absurd.

“There were questions that still cause the hair on the back of my neck to stand up, questions like, ‘We want to know everywhere you’ve ever spoken since the inception of your organization and to whom you spoke and what you said.  That particular question was asked in 2012 (and) they wanted to know everywhere I intended to speak through 2013.  That goes so far beyond the pale.  It is such a clear effort to chill political speech.  On the basis of that question alone, I think we should have had an investigation,” said Englebrecht.

Englebrecht isn’t convinced any investigation into IRS abuses is taking place and if there is one, she believes getting to the truth is a pretty low priority.

“It is smoke and mirrors.  There is no intent to actually get to the bottom of who knew what when and why it all happened like it did.  In fact quite the opposite, as we now see the IRS suggesting that it’s going to impose new regulations on (501 (c) 4 non-profits), shutting down their ability to educate and reach voters and fundamentally changing the landscape of pro-liberty non-profits in this country.  That’s where we’re headed is the codification, the legalization of the type of targeting that this administration is all too keen to just gloss over,” said Englebrecht.

Englebrecht says she cannot be certain if her group was singled out for even greater scrutiny than the other affected conservative organizations because of its work to ensure that voter rolls are up to date and elections are conducted with integrity.  She says there’s no good reason not to have voter ID but believes there is a crystal clear reason for the opposition on the left.

“What is it that these organizations are trying to protect?  What I submit is they are trying to protect an environment of hostility and agitation, using race-baiting to keep Americans falsely at odds with one another because in that wedge they derive power,” said Englebrecht.  “They need to keep people upset so that they can provide the solution.  It is victimization as an art form.”

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Betsy Woodruff of National Review cheer an appeals court ruling striking down California laws requiring residents to have a “good cause” before receiving a concealed weapons permit.  They also lash out as the Obama administration forces business owners looking to dodge the employer mandate from to say the job losses are not because of Obamacare.  And New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio says it was better for kids to be in school than at home during the snow storm because there’s no better place for kids to be in terms of getting shelter, nutrition and a place to stay when their parents are working.

Powerful forces at the United Nations, in national governments and inside the scientific community make life very difficult for scientists disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change, both personally and professionally, even though the real science is on the side of the skeptics.

That’s the assertion of Dr. Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg.  He is also the author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”  In the first part of our coverage on this story, Ball detailed how the modern climate change movement finds its roots in the Malthusian notion that the population must be lowered to avoid running out of food and other resources.  He says that theory led to the demonizing of industrialized nations and, in turn, fossil fuels and carbon dioxide in particular.

He also explained how Maurice Strong used his position as head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to set a political agenda towards purportedly backed up by the latest in climate science.  Ball also says the UN then collaborated with the World Meteorological Organization to present the IPCC findings as settled science and shame or deny funding to any scientists who disagreed with their conclusions.

For scientists bold enough to speak out anyway, finding any interest from scientists or the media in hearing opposing viewpoints proved very difficult.

“It made the counter-argument almost impossible because one of the things they started is that they defeated the scientific method.  Scientists create hypotheses and the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis was that humans are producing more CO2.  If you increase CO2 in the atmosphere the temperature will go up and therefore we can predict runaway global warming because humans are going to keep expanding their industries,” said Ball.

“What would normally happen with a hypothesis is that other scientists would challenge that and those other scientists would challenge it as skeptics because all scientists are skeptics or should be,” said Ball, who says the climate change activists turned that natural, professional skepticism into a public buzzword that branded Ball and others as part of an ideological fringe.

“We were marginalized in blocking the scientific method.  And then, of course, we were marginalized because of public relations attacks based on who was funding us or what our agenda was,” he said.

Ball says while few scientists are willing to publicly denounce the conclusions of the IPCC, many agree that the science is faulty.

“I even had (Canadian) scientists say to me, ‘Look, I’m a socialist and if I say I agree with you, then I’m immediately branded a conservative and I don’t want that to happen to me.’  I’ve also had a lot of scientists say, ‘I’ve watched what you’ve gone through with lawsuits and everything else.  I’m keeping my mouth shut.’  So the intimidation factor has just been tremendous,” said Ball.

One of the most publicly compelling arguments on the conventional side of this debate, however, is there is near unanimous consensus that climate change is real and human activity is playing a major role in an increasingly volatile climate.  Ball believes the real breakdown is closer to 50-50, but he says that whole argument is meaningless.

“I’m not in favor of these surveys and the consensus argument.  As soon as they started using that, that proved to me this was political because consensus has no place in science.  As Einstein said, ‘I can have a hundred things that prove me right and only one thing to prove me wrong and that’s the end of it,'” said Ball.

In addition to describing what he considers the long-term corruption of science, Ball also spends time in his book explaining what the full climate science record does tell us.

“The reality is the major change of climate change is the sun.  They pretend to eliminate the sun but they only look at one portion of the sun, that is the electromagnetic radiation.  There are many changes in the sun that cause climate change, such as the changing orbit, the changing tilt and the effect of the sun’s magnetic field upon cosmic radiation coming into the earth, which then creates low clouds, which effects temperature.  None of that is included in their IPCC reports,” said Ball.

“I think it’s important that if you’re going to say they’re wrong then you have to provide an explanation that covers what they’re doing or what they’re ignoring,” said Ball, noting that the IPCC shows no interest in investigating ideas for the changing climate other than rising levels of carbon dioxide.

This fight over climate science comes at a heavy price for those in disagreement with the IPCC and its allies.  Ball is no different.  He says the response to his outspoken opposition is taking a heavy toll.

“I’ve often thought if I had to do it again I wouldn’t do it.  Until you have experienced, like some are having with the IRS attacking them in the U.S.  You cannot relate to other people exactly what it’s like when you are sitting in your little condo and you’ve spent all of your savings on legal fees.  And (when there’s) a knock on the door at four o’clock on a Friday and your wife starts crying because she’s afraid it’s the sheriff delivering a legal summons.  People have no idea what that’s like.  I’m not sure that I would do it again.  I’m almost at the point where if the world wants to be fooled, let it be fooled.  I’m not going to fight for it again,” said Ball.

“That’s why a lot of scientists said to me, ‘We’re not prepared to go through what you’ve gone through.’  I sort of sympathize with that, but like Edmund Burke said, evil triumphs when good people stand idly by.  That’s really the challenge in an open democracy like you have in the United States with free speech,” said Ball.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review enjoy watching Democrats like Kirsten Powers admit they’re tired of defending Obamacare.  They also discuss House GOP leaders endorsing a clean debt ceiling extension, with Jim saying it’s a reflection of current political reality and Greg suggesting Republicans missed an opportunity for concessions and now have a hard time making the case they’re the party of fiscal restraint.  And they have fun with Texas State Senator Wendy Davis now saying she’s really not all that opposed to late-term abortion bans.

The climate change movement is ultimately designed to thin the earth’s population and the science behind the movement is deeply and deliberately flawed in order to further a political end, according to climatologist Dr. Tim Ball.

In his new book, “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”, Ball also lays out how he believes those perpetrating this massive scientific fraud managed to keep the truth hidden from mainstream scientists and later intimidated most them to keep them quiet.

Ball is one of the leading voices from the climatology community to loudly condemn the conclusions and tactics of those calling for major public policy changes to combat the purported threat to our climate posed by human activity.

According to Ball, the motivation for the climate change movement’s leaders is nothing new.  He says they are the latest incarnation of of an effort that goes back to the 19th century writings of Thomas Malthus, who argued that the human population was growing so fast that the earth’s resources could never sustain it.  He therefore advocated population control to ward off mass disease and starvation.

Malthus and others ultimately identified industrialized nations as the greatest consumer of resources and suggested the advance of industry needed to be stopped.  As the years went on, Ball says, the focus narrowed to the fossil fuels powering the economy in advanced nations.  He says that obsession ultimately led the modern day activists to settle on carbon dioxide as the culprit for the earth’s dangerous climate trends but required an ingenious approach to get the public on board with the idea.

“If you can shut off the flow of fossil fuels, that will stop the engine of those industrialized nations, but people would scream immediately if that happened.  But if you could show that the byproduct of the combustion of that fossil fuel, carbon dioxide, was causing runaway global warming and climate change, then you could use that for a vehicle to introduce legislation to shut down those industrialized nations,” said Ball.

“That’s been the whole driving force of everything Maurice Strong is doing and, of course, underlies what Obama’s pushing,” said Ball.

Ball sees Maurice Strong as one of the most pivotal figures in the advancement of what he considers the modern-day assault on industrialized nations.  He says Strong grew up in socialist Canadian family and rose to prominence in a way many might not expect.

“He’s a superb organizer of bureaucracies and he made a lot of money in industry.  That’s the irony of these people like Bill Gates.  They get money and then they’re going to go save the planet,” mused Ball.

Strong ultimately worked his way into becoming the head of the United Nations climate program in the 1980s.  That role led to his calling for the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992 and the creation of a larger UN vision known as Agenda 21.  Later in the 1990s, Strong shepherded the creation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where Ball says Strong wielded immense power.

“Strong, in an interview with Elaine Dewar, in a book called ‘Cloak of Green’, she said what he’s doing is using the United Nations to establish world government and total control.  When he made the comment to her about how we’ve got to shut down industrialized nations, she said, ‘Why don’t you run for politics?’  He said, ‘You can’t do anything as a politician.  I’m going to go to the UN and get all the money I want and not be accountable to anybody,'” said Ball.

Ball says the fix was in from the start and that the IPCC was only tasked with one job, proving that global warming was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

“They did that by directing them to only look at human causes of climate change.  Of course, if you don’t know how much natural variability there is, you can’t possibly determine the human portion.  They didn’t care about that.  They just wanted to be able to say the science is settled and we’re 95 percent certain that human carbon dioxide is causing global warming.  That’s why they picked on CO2 and that was Maurice Strong’s role in it,” said Ball.

One of the most difficult arguments for the public to believe from climate change skeptics like Ball is that there was and continues to be some grand conspiracy to produce results concluding that human activity is triggering higher carbon dioxide and that urgent actions to curb emissions must be taken.

Ball says the UN’s climate panel was very carefully constructed to limit who actually saw the data and who made policy recommendations based on the research.  He says the IPCC had three working groups.  One did the scientific research that was predestined to show alarming climate change.  The second group then projected how the climate would change if new policies weren’t adopted.  The third group formulated policies for industrialized nations to follow in order to avoid the dire predictions.  Ball says the results were an odd combination of admittedly bad science and a tight circle of experts turning out the finished products.

“In Working Group One, they tell you everything that’s wrong with their computer models.  They set it all out.  They say, ‘Look, we don’t know this.  We don’t know that.  This is wrong.  That’s wrong.  But they set up a separate group called the Summary for Policy Makers, which includes politicians and bureaucrats and a few very carefully selected scientists.  Most of these were scientists at the Climactic Research Institute (CRU), where all the leaked emails about what they were doing came from.,” said Ball.

“They controlled critical chapters (in the IPCC reports).  They controlled the chapter on data and they manipulated the data.  They controlled the chapter on paleo-climate data, that is reconstruction of past climates,” said Ball.  “So they set about through that Summary for Policy Makers, creating a completely false image of what their findings were.

“The Summary for Policy Makers, by their own rules, is released before the science report is released and they know that’s going to get media attention.  It says the temperature is going to rise by this much and all of the other nonsense and that is what gets the media headlines.  Then a few months later they bring out the science report, which of course they know nobody’s going to read,” he said.

“But when you compare the science report with the Summary for Policy Makers, it’s more than the difference of night and day.  It’s like two completely different planets.  This is done deliberately to deceive,” said Ball.  “Everything’s been manipulated to create a completely false and extreme scenario of what their research actually shows.”

Even if Strong and his allies at the UN and CRU managed to close ranks in conducting research and presenting the findings, how did such a large consensus of scientists around the world come to agree with the IPCC conclusions if the data is clearly flawed?

Ball says some just don’t understand the science well and for others the lack of public opposition pretty much boils down to money and power.

“The vast majority of people, and even scientists, they don’t understand climate science.  That’s part of the difficulty.  They might know their own area of physics or their own area of biology but they didn’t know what the climate science was, so they just accepted it,” said Ball, noting that the bulk of scientists didn’t examine the science report and merely read through the Summary for Policy Makers.

Ball says another brilliant stroke taken by Strong and the IPCC was to enlist the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).  That group is made up of bureaucrats from every national weather agency.  Ball says the WMO then proclaimed the IPCC findings to be national policy in all member nations and the few political figures who dared to question the findings were dismissed as lacking standing in climate science.

Independent scientists were also silenced because the WMO and its member nations only provided money to scientists who adopted the official line.

“Because all of the national weather agencies were involved in this, then they directed funding only to those researchers that were proving what the IPCC was saying.  As a result, people that were daring to question didn’t get funded,” said Ball.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see another delay of Obamacare’s employer mandate and suggest it will never be implemented.  They also react to the Ohio National Guard creating a terrorism drill based on pro-gun Americans lashing out with weapons of mass destruction and taking orders from a white supremacist leader.  And they have fun with the news that 21 Iraqi suicide bombers in training were killed while making a demonstration video about suicide bombings.