The Light: Hillary

Reprinted from Consortium.com with the express permission of Mel Goodman, whose bio is at the end of this article.

Consortium Editor’s Note: President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to rock Washington’s boat after he won Election 2008 — his desire to "look forward, not backward" — continues to haunt him.

One of these areas of difficulty remains the U.S. intelligence community which evaded meaningful accountability for the crimes and abuses of the George W. Bush era, as former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman notes in this guest essay:

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While he has been successful in addressing the CIA’s renditions, detentions and interrogations programs, he has failed to appoint leaders willing to address the culture of cover-up that exists at the CIA and to make the necessary strategic changes.

Until President Obama is willing to address the militarization and centralization of the intelligence community, he will retain his grade of C+ in managing the community.

The President deserves high grades for ending the CIA’s use of torture and abuse, closing down the CIA’s secret prisons and restoring a legal framework to the renditions policy that has brought embarrassment to the CIA and the United States.

His attorney general, Eric Holder, proved to be particularly tough-minded in releasing the four torture memoranda drafted by John Yoo and Jay Bybee over the loud protests of both the director of national intelligence (DNI) and the director of the CIA. Holder also has held firm in his decision to investigate possible criminal behavior by CIA personnel.

The President has not officially ended the odious use of renditions, but apparently there have been no renditions in the past year due in part to the extreme opposition of West and East European countries. European countries have been embarrassed politically over the use of European sites and facilities for both CIA "black sites" and the conduct of extraordinary renditions.

President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones also deserve credit for resolving a recent food fight between Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and CIA Director Leon Panetta over the naming of intelligence representatives to high-ranking positions overseas and to attend NSC meetings in the White House.

In an obtuse bureaucratic battle over turf, both Blair and Panetta behaved poorly in failing to resolve differences over the naming of senior intelligence representatives or "station chiefs" overseas, the role of the DNI in the conduct of covert action and the naming of intelligence representatives to NSC meetings at the White House.

The donnybrook between Blair and Panetta was an embarrassment to the Obama administration, and Vice President Biden had to step in to settle these matters, tilting in favor of the CIA on virtually all issues.

President Obama has reversed the efforts of the Bush administration to weaken the external oversight responsibilities of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) and the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), which are designed to ensure that the intelligence agencies obey federal laws and follow presidential directives.

The Obama administration also has restored the IOB’s responsibility for informing the attorney general about violations of federal laws and its ability to demand sensitive information and assistance from the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

President Obama also appointed two capable and experienced co-chairmen of the PIAB, former Sens. Chuck Hagel and David Boren. President George W. Bush had ignored both groups.

Unfortunately, President Obama has not been willing to take a strong leadership role in addressing the problems of the CIA, and therefore the culture of cover-up continues. Neither Blair nor Panetta has a strong strategic sense of the need for change; neither may understand the culture that prevails.

As a result, the operational leaders of the CIA, Steve Kappes and Mike Sulick, are managing agency policies. Kappes and Sulick were deeply involved in the programs of renditions, detentions and interrogations (RDI) that proved to be such a national embarrassment.

Both have an interest in protecting themselves and their colleagues – much as they have done in covering up the events surrounding the shooting down of a missionary plane that resulted in the deaths of American citizens over Peru in 2001.

The White House (and the Senate intelligence committee), moreover, have abandoned the need for internal oversight of the CIA by not pursuing a statutory inspector general to replace John Helgerson, who announced his retirement more than nine months ago.

Helgerson is responsible for the only authoritative assessment of the RDI programs, which was completed more than five years ago and has not been supplemented in the interim.

Panetta has joined three previous directors of the CIA in undermining the position of the inspector general and in ensuring that the Office of the Inspector General was monitored by the CIA’s Office of the General Counsel. This violates the federal law that established the IG 20 years ago.

Blair and Panetta have been particularly active in covering up the transgressions of the CIA over the past decade, fighting the release of the torture memoranda of the Bush administration and the decision of Holder’s Justice Department to review interrogation files for potential prosecution.

Blair and Panetta also joined forces with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to successfully stop the release of photographs that would document the conduct of torture and abuse by military and intelligence officers.

Panetta has done his best to protect the equities of the National Clandestine Service; the White House even had to step in to make sure that important intelligence information on covert action was shared with Blair, the so-called intelligence czar.

It is obvious that Blair and Panetta are not working as a team. This can only damage the cooperation that creation of the DNI was intended to strengthen.
President Obama demonstrated his own lack of trust in the community by failing to ask for a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) during the current high-level substantive discussions over troop levels for Afghanistan.

NIEs are the only corporate product of the intelligence community and they have become a required item during decision-making involving the use of force.

CIA estimates on Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s argued that the French would not prevail in Vietnam, that the Ngo Dinh Diem government was incapable of leading the struggle against North Vietnam and that US combat forces and systematic bombing would not save South Vietnam.

Sadly, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations failed to use these estimates to counter mounting pressure from the Pentagon to send U.S. troops to Vietnam.

Despite obvious problems within the CIA and the intelligence community, President Obama has not changed direction from the Bush administration in key areas. His administration has threatened the British government with the cut-off of sensitive intelligence if a British court revealed details of CIA renditions in Europe and has resorted to a state security defense to prevent revelations of renditions policies in U.S. courts as well.

Obama is following too many of his predecessors, who simply hoped to control controversy at the CIA by failing to address problems directly. This approach has not worked in the past and presumably will fail once again. President Obama would be better served by tackling these issues directly.

In appointing Blair and Panetta, the president is signaling that accountability and transparency should have no role in reforming intelligence policy.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. [This story originally appeared at Truthout.org.]

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Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, is a former intelligence analyst at the CIA (1966-1990) and the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. Mr. Goodman is a longtime friend of Larry Johnson’s and gave his express consent to reprint this article. We strongly suggest that you read Mr. Goodman’s other op-eds published here at No Quarter.

The Senate is back in session this week, and will begin its work on hammering out the new bill they put forth before the Thanksgiving recess on Health Care Reform. Here is a reminder of Senator Reid’s presentation of the new bill:

Who wants to place bets on whether or not Charles Krauthammer will have to eat his hat given the dollars Reid claims will be saved by this particular Health Care Reform bill? I will go out on a limb and say I think Dr. Krauthammer’s hat is safe.

What, then, is to be done? Well, Dr. Krauthammer thinks both bills should be killed, and we need to start all over again:

The United States has the best health care in the world — but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

Worse, they are packed into a monstrous package without any regard to each other. The only thing linking these changes — such as the 118 new boards, commissions and programs — is political expediency. Each must be able to garner just enough votes to pass. There is not even a pretense of a unifying vision or conceptual harmony.

The result is an overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency. Throw a dart at the Senate tome:

– You’ll find mandates with financial penalties — the amounts picked out of a hat.

– You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third — numbers picked out of a hat.

– You’ll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies — percentages picked out of a hat — that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle- class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.

Okay, I already have a headache just reading this. No wonder Krauthammer reaches this conclusion:

The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

Then do health care the right way — one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness and inefficiency.

First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do.

In the 4,000-plus pages of the two bills, there is no tort reform. Indeed, the House bill actually penalizes states that dare “limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.” Why? Because, as Howard Dean has openly admitted, Democrats don’t want “to take on the trial lawyers.” What he didn’t say — he didn’t need to — is that they give millions to the Democrats for precisely this kind of protection.

Tort reform has been a common refrain for what is glaringly absent from this Health Care Reform bill, and one component conspicuously absent. But that’s not the only problem:

Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn’t, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter.

And the answer to the resulting high Wisconsin orange prices wouldn’t be the establishment of a public option — a federally run orange-growing company in Wisconsin — to introduce “competition.” It would be to allow Wisconsin residents to buy Florida oranges.

But neither bill lifts the prohibition on interstate competition for health insurance. Because this would obviate the need — the excuse — for the public option, which the left wing of the Democratic Party sees (correctly) as the royal road to fully socialized medicine.

That’s an interesting take on it. And still more:

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues — the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget.

This reform is the most difficult to enact, for two reasons. The unions oppose it. And the Obama campaign savaged the idea when John McCain proposed it during last year’s election.

Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 — and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury. letters@charleskrauthammer.com)

I tend to agree with Krauthammer – I think we need to deep-six these two bills and start over. Additionally, I do not want anything in these bills that has NOTHING to do with Health Care Reform. No pork, no bribes, nothing that is not strictly related to issues of health care reform. But that’s just me. At the very least, both houses need to start over, and do it right this time, not throwing together whatever they can in the shortest amount of time possible. This is a serious issue, and merits serious consideration, not political expediency.

If Congress does THAT, starts completely over, leaves out the pork, does what’s best for American citizens and not their respective political parties, I’ll eat MY hat…

* bumped up *

(Editor’s Notes: Last night (Sunday), John Batchelor revealed on his radio show that Michaele and Tareq Salah are longtime friends of Rashid Khalidi, the former PLO terrorist and current professor at Columbia University. Khalidi is a longtime, close friend of Barack and Michelle Obama. Batchelor reported a photo of the Salahs with Obama dated 2005, and I found that photo. Please share more that you’ve learned in the comments section. See also: Larry Johnson’s post, “Who Is Barack Obama?,” and NoQuarter’s extensive archives on Khalidi’s relationship with Obama.)

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Not the Joads at the White House

It is the cranky Puritan in me, the Calvinist thought-scourge, my vain John Adams over-bookishness and practiced cynicism, yet there it is, and my first, second and third opine of the gate-crashing of the trite Virginia duo, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, is to recall the crisis of the “Grapes of Wrath.”

Once upon a time, the economy collapsed, and the banks and confidence went cliff-diving, and the nation entered a ten-year long slide. The deprivation was genuine. Through 1933 and into 1934, the world markets staggered. Meanwhile in New York and London and Paris, the well-to-do carried on with some success, because the national deflation phenomenon meant that stockpiles of assets grew in buying power.

Steinbeck’s Joads were meant to be the everyman — who were shoved so far outside of civilization it was as if the road back from brutality and want had disappeared around them.  At the same time, the swollen swells in New York and London were tipsy, racy snobs who lived in alienation and ignorance even while the nation failed west of Broadway.

I have read over the newspaper clips.  From the London Times, January 1, 1934: “Restaurant managers agree that that New Year’s Eve business was exceptionally good.  ’Everyone seems anxious to welcome the New Year which promises greater prosperity,’ was the comment.” 

Thanksgiving at the White House, 2009.

Watching the foolishness in the warm-air-blown, glass-roofed tent raised on the South Lawn of the White House, it came to me that the elite are sure to over interpret their good luck just because they too sense like sly predators that we are headed down, so eat faster.

The prancing, the video cameos, the grinning, powdered aimlessness, the prop of the stately India PM Manmohan Singh, and the gregarious male-model POTUS, and then here comes the silly duo to pretend they were invited to a pretense of national worthiness.  The dinner plate was forgettable.  The crowd was a hodge-podge of Chicago wannabees mixed with Clintonist leftovers — the predictable, glamorous, prickly Democratic swells.

What warns me is that the celebration was out of time.  There is nothing to celebrate.  The jobless number is climbing.  The banks remain unsolved.  The GDP is false.  Overseas markets are fragile.  The dollar is a waif.  There is more, but you see it all, and I go over it in many angles all the days.

The scenario is remarkably similar to New Year’s 1934.  The next leg down is ahead of us and it will be a long trough.  Within days of the pointless extravaganza on the South Lawn, we hear that the Dubai World default has ripped through markets like a chill.  Gordon Brown says that Dubai’s now highly-suspect $80B shopping mania, using a credit card honored at Euro banks such as the rotten RBS and the rotten HSBC, that this splurge is “containable.”  We are told that Abu Dhabi has a $.5 Trillion rainy day fund that can bail out little cousin Dubai.

Show me the money.  

The Pranksters.

The Secret Service continues the investigation of how Michaele and Tareq Salahi knew they could get away with walking in on that particular checkpoint.  The photos of the Salahi’s greeting POTUS now deepen the game of gotcha. (The Salahis look headed to soft time, the pillory and massive fines; and what about the fact that they are not in custody yet: who is in charge of Homeland Security, a maitre-de?)

The White House looks revealed as a victim of a prank.  Yet the state dinner celebration itself was part of the prank.  There is no checkpoint on the economy, no security for the banks, no pay-off.  We are in prankland, with gold rising like helium, showing that inflation is now uncontrolled.  There is no recovery.

The next twelve months will be a brutal, numbing, inconsistent droning of metrics that point nowhere and expectations that come to no certainty, no spending, no hiring, no bottom.  However there will be lots of happy talk, lots of chatter about POTUS leadership and Congress courage and international comity.

It is a pattern.  We have seen this before:  Lieutenant General Sir George Macdonogh, president of the Federation of British Industries, “The improvement in British trade, which has been progressively apparent during the year which lies behind us, justifies the hope that 1934 may…”  Dated January 1, 1934.

Phony hope sounds.  Clinking glasses at a phony state dinner.  Camera clicks at a prankish phony reception.  Silent dread that Dubai World is our phony world, a cheat.

*This importance treatise on the Obama presidency has been bumped up *

During the presidential campaign, Peggy Noonan rhapsodized about an Obama presidency, trashing Hillary Clinton to the bargain. Recent months have seen Ms. Noonan pen several articles deconstructing her prior romantic notions, reaching the same conclusions as the very people she derided for not jumping on Obama’s bandwagon. In her WSJ piece, He Can’t Take Another Bow, Noonan complains that the Obama White House is “coming to seem amateurish”:

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington’s Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.

From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, “a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man.” They once held “an unromantically high opinion of Obama,” and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn’t “the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought.”

Misjudged? What other politician have you ever heard of who got a lot of important people to stake their reputations on his “integrity” without ever having offered any more than “words, just words” attesting to the same?

Noonan and Drew should not be surprised that another big Obama supporter now sits under his bus. Greg Craig was a highly respected operative and his early endorsement of Obama and simultaneous belittling of Hillary’s foreign policy street cred carried a lot of weight with beltway insiders. What a difference a year makes…

[Ms. Drew] scored “the Chicago crowd,” which she characterized as “a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team.” The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—”an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment.”

And speaking of an older and wiser choice, this is the most telling part of Ms. Noonan’s article:

As I read Ms. Drew’s piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, “Well, I was for Hillary.”

Thanks, Peggy, so was I. Noonan then worries that “No one loves Barack Obama; they’re not dazzled and head over heels. That’s gone away.” Is she kidding? The sycophantic press and his virulent supporters have not shown enough love? If she is wondering why the love has gone, I would like to point out one can only be dazzled by a movie trailer once. Having then paid for your ticket and bought your popcorn, you expect the film itself will deliver the goods. If the two minute trailer is as good as it gets, patrons will turn off very quickly.

“He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support.”

Now Noonan’s figuring out he’s a chilly customer? There’s no there there. There never was. Please tell me which constituency or issue he has ever gone to the mat for? Noonan continues…

…In the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president’s Asia trip suggested “a disturbing amateurishness in managing America’s power.” The president’s Afghanistan review has been “inexcusably clumsy.”

He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama “seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably”—he should begin to bow to “the voices of experience” in Washington.

When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.

It appears Obama’s cheerleaders, The New York Times and Newsweek, concur with this thinking. During the primary, wine rack liberals I knew who supported Obama said “Congress does everything anyway. He’ll surround himself with really great people.” I wonder what they’re saying now about the “good judgment” they touted. One could say he exercised good judgment in appointing Hillary as SoS, yet he has been accused of hamstringing her at every turn. Many suspect the appointment was to ensure she was no longer a threat to him politically.

Aside from Noonan’s condemnation of the current health care bill “as a poor piece of legislation that Obama ought to scrap so that he may live to fight another day,” most shocking is her acknowledgment of what Democratic holdouts feared from the beginning:

There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama’s rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demands baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.

She then brings us back to the issue of Obama once again bowing to a foreign head of state.

In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn’t that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He’d been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.

But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford’s policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.

Noonan is right about perception. Last week, I spoke with a young urban professional male, who I would have thought was Obama’s demographic. There were some things he did not know about Obama’s policies but he did know about the “bows” and he didn’t like it. Ms. Noonan concludes:

It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.

The Obama bowing pictures…express a growing political perception … that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.

You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year.

Punditry is allergic to a long view and demands to stay vital by offering grand pronouncements daily so Noonan passing judgment on a snapshot in time is hardly evidence of anything. Yet we have seen one after another of these types of indicators, well stated in Steven Stark’s brutal RCP article last week, Has Obama Peaked? Yes, He Has. Stark states that the high point for Obama was the night of his election, but:

“[Y]ou can only be elected the first African-American once.”

Now that we, as a nation, have awakened from our post-election, post-racial dream state, we’ve begun to notice that our president may not be much interested in being a chief “executive,” given that he’s never run anything before or expressed the slightest inclination to do so. He has big ideas, to be sure, but that’s only a small part of the job. The hard, nitty-gritty labor of figuring out how government can actually work better – the operative word is “governing” – seems to hold no appeal for him.

Put another way, where are our flu shots? It’s worth recalling that, in what seems a lifetime ago, it was Clinton – not Obama – who promised to be ready on Day One.

More in the pundit class are wistfully mentioning Hillary, the work horse, not the show horse. It’s a shame they spent so much time kicking her around instead of lauding her when it would have mattered. I wonder if the glowing write up of “her brilliant career” in December’s Vogue Magazine sent the WH frat boys Gibbs-y and Favreau spinning? I’m sure they are looking for new ways to trash her and her ever increasing popularity.

Mr. Stark seems to think Obama needs to “come down from the mountaintop” and stop talking at us, i.e., campaigning, and start listening to the American people, yet he wonders if the President is capable of such a transformation. He rightly points out we are waiting for Obama “to lead us in real time.” When Governor Rendell of PA endorsed Hillary, he stated that the real work of governing is much more suited to Hillary’s knowledge, work ethic and indefatigable nature. Obama’s endless need for campaigning and photo-ops are not what is required now. Understanding proper protocol wouldn’t hurt either.

Stark points out that President Obama’s outsourcing of important legislation to Congress without offering adequate leadership, putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse by appointing Tim Geithner Treasury Secretary, and basically continuing the policies of President Bush, along with his many other rookie mistakes are making many raise the “c” word in Washington.

Competence. What a concept.

Editor’s Note: Tune in at any time to John Batchelor’s archived radio show which featured Larry Johnson’s exceptional commentary on Barack Obama’s image as indecisive on critical issues like Afghanistan. Follow these precise instructions to listen live via iTunes. (At 11:35 p.m. the show is still on.)

Maybe not, if the recent revelation regarding a data dump in this article is correct, “Climate Change Data Dumped.”

Before I go any further, let me say I have been shocked by the revelation found in recently hacked emails from New Zealand that raise great sus[icion regarding the validity of Global Warming. I have long supported organizations fighting against global warming, even giving monthly contributions to the Union of Concerned Scientists. I bought Al Gore’s documentary, for pete’s sake. I’m telling you, I have long been one of those yelling about the damage we have done/are doing to this planet.

And now we are finding out that it may have all been a bunch of hooey (or at least hyped up)?? Are you kidding me??

Here is more from the “Data Dump” article:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

Oh, boy. Well, gosh – I guess when we were demonizing this “climate sceptics,” we were, um, wrr, wrrrooo, ahem – um, wrong to do so. Dammit. Don’t you just HATE when that happens? (Huh – probably how a lot of former Obama sycophants are feeling right about now…)

There’s more:

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

Well, yes, that’s what they say, but I think everyone can agree that the whole thing about SCIENCE is having DATA to use to formulate scientific conclusions. Absent of that information, it is simply, well, opinion.

This revelation, from the emails to the data dump, is being referred to as “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation ,” highlighting why this is so important:

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Are you as taken aback by this as I am? How many years have we been hearing about global warming? When the scientists who are working on this admit in emails their duplicity, it calls everything into question:

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

And now you know why this is being referred to as “Climate Gate” by James Delingpole of the Telegraph(UK). This is also why many are calling for the meeting in Copenhagen to be called off immediately until this can all be sorted out. That is not a bad idea, and one I would certainly support.

Until then, I am trying to wrap my head around the very real possibility that we all have been sold a bill of goods on a massive scale. Not only is that infuriating, but the possibility of that happening is extremely disconcerting when you start to realize the sheer magnitude of this scandal. Staggering that so many of us around the globe may have been had…

How are some people able to see the forest for the trees? Why do certain individuals look left when everybody else is going right? What drives people to embrace risk?

We can learn so much from studying the career paths, thoughts, and views of those who have achieved remarkable accomplishments. That said, where can we go and what can we study that addresses the common characteristics and highlights the common denominators of these individuals?

You have come to the right place as this Sunday evening (8-9pm ET) No Quarter Radio’s Sense on Cents with Larry Doyle welcomes Rick Smith. Who is Rick Smith?

Rick Smith

Rick Smith is the bestselling author of The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great (Portfolio), and the author of the popular blog, RickSmith.me. He is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal and Business Week bestseller The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, which has been sold into 13 languages and remains one of the top-selling professional career books of all time.
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* bumped up because the Reverend is our in-house expert who tracks the ACORN story like few others *

And circumvents the Congress, even the President, in the process. Yes, it turns out that, according to DOJ lawyer, David Barron, it is A-Okay for ACORN to receive funds from American taxpayers, according to this NY Times article.

Yes, it is a little more complicated than that, but not a lot. I believe the term is “grandfathering” the contracts in:

The Justice Department has concluded that the Obama administration can lawfully pay the community group Acorn for services provided under contracts signed before Congress banned the government from providing money to the group.

The department’s conclusion, laid out in a recently disclosed five-page memorandum from David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, adds a new wrinkle to a sharp political debate over the antipoverty group’s activities and recent efforts to distance the government from it.

Since 1994, Acorn, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has received about $53 million in federal aid, much of it grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for providing various services related to affordable housing.

But the group has become a prime target for conservative critics, and on Oct. 1, President Obama signed into law a spending bill that included a provision that said no taxpayer money — including money authorized by previous legislation — could be “provided to” the group or its affiliates.

Here’s a little newsflash – it isn’t just Conservatives who are angry that this organization, which has engaged in MASSIVE voter registration, as well as voter, fraud, is receiving our tax dollars. Then there’s the pesky little issue of the videos taken in their offices mentioned below. But I digress…

This will warm the cockles of your heart, just who it was who asked that funding be restored. Yes, another government agency:

A Housing and Urban Development Department lawyer asked the Justice Department whether the new law meant that pre-existing contracts with Acorn should be broken. And in a memorandum signed Oct. 23 and posted online this week, Mr. Barron said the government should continue to make payments to Acorn as required by such contracts.

The new law “should not be read as directing or authorizing HUD to breach a pre-existing binding contractual obligation to make payments to Acorn or its affiliates, subsidiaries or allied organizations where doing so would give rise to contractual liability,” Mr. Barron wrote.

The deputy director of national operations for Acorn, Brian Kettenring, praised Mr. Barron’s decision.

“We are pleased that commitments will be honored relative to Acorn’s work to help keep America’s working families facing foreclosure in their homes,” Mr. Kettenring said.

Mr. Barron said he had based his conclusion on the statute’s phrase “provided to.” This phrase, he said, has no clearly defined meaning in the realm of government spending — unlike words like “obligate” and “expend.”

Citing dictionary and thesaurus entries, he said “provided to” could be interpreted as meaning only instances in which an official was making “discretionary choices” about whether to give the group money, rather than instances in which the transfer of money to Acorn was required to satisfy contractual obligations.

Since there are two possible ways to construe the term “provided to,” Mr. Barron wrote, it makes sense to pick the interpretation that allows the government to avoid breaching contracts.

Moreover, he argued, requiring the government to cancel contracts with a specifically named entity — “including even in cases where performance has already been completed but payment has not been rendered” — would raise constitutional concerns best avoided by interpreting the law differently.

In other words, it all depends on how you define the term. Wow, that’s some major lawyering going on right there, isn’t it? “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is…” Great.

You may recall that ACORN has filed a lawsuit, too, claiming it should not be cut off from our funds, despite it clearly being a partisan organization:

The Constitution prohibits “bills of attainder” — legislation intended to punish specific people or groups. Acorn has filed a lawsuit arguing that the statute banning the government from providing it money amounts to a bill of attainder.

Founded in Arkansas in 1970, Acorn describes itself as the nation’s largest grass-roots community organizing group. It provides financial services to poor and middle-income families, conducts voter registration drives, and advocates for higher minimum wages and more affordable housing.

Conservatives have long complained about Acorn’s voter drives in poor neighborhoods, citing instances in which workers fraudulently registered imaginary voters like Mickey Mouse. Acorn has argued that it is the real victim of such incidents, which its employees have often brought to the attention of the authorities.

Criticism of Acorn escalated in September, when two conservative activists released videos they had recorded using secret cameras of Acorn workers in several cities. The activists had posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking financial advice. Instead of raising objections, the Acorn employees counseled the couple on how to hide their illicit activities and avoid paying taxes.

Conservatives seized on the videos to criticize the group further, highlighting that the Obama campaign had paid an Acorn affiliate for get-out-the-vote efforts. Congress then enacted the ban on providing money to it.

Acorn has fired several of the employees depicted in the videos.

Again, I am no attorney, and certainly welcome comments from those who are (jbjd!), but I’m thinking that when the Constitution is heralded as a foundation for not discriminating against certain “groups of people,” it doesn’t mean partisan political organizations like ACORN, but more like Native Americans, or disabled Americans, et al. But I could be wrong.

I hope I’m not, though – can you imagine the Constitution protecting a political group that constantly works to circumvent our very laws, like, say, child prostitution? Or, voter fraud? Or embezzlement? Yeah, me, neither.

It makes me wonder about our Department of Justice, though. So far, we have it supporting DOMA, in which it likens GLBT people to pedophiles and incest perpetrators; allowing someone who committed an act of war in which thousands were killed to have a civilian trial with all the inherent rights of an American citizen, as is the case with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and now does an end-run around the Legislative and Executive Branches to continue funding a disreputable company. They sure have their priorities straight, don’t they? Uh huh.

I guess this is more “change we can believe in”? And just in time for the holidays, too…

Have you noticed this too? That, all of a sudden, wherever you turn, there’s yet another former Obamabot aka Obama groupie lamenting what their (vision of) Obama has become as president. Those Obamabots fell for the speeches, which of course were written mostly by others, and for what they saw as a “cool dude.” To me, he was always a cipher. An undefined being. A zero. A sum of nothing.

He is someone who has seemingly floated through life, relying on a modicum of charm and some brains, but who never really put his heart and soul into anything unless it was to win some new title. Who never worked hard at anything unless it was to bestow on himself acclaim and notoriety. That’s why he runs his presidency as a campaign: He only knows how to run for something, not BE anything.

Today, Andy sent us NQ writers a great commentary by the ever-sharp Jennifer Rubin, which accompanies an NPR discussion on “The Case Of The President’s Missing Charisma.” (The link takes you to both a transcript and the audio.)

Here’s Jennifer Rubin from her “Questioning What Went Wrong“:

Politico’s Arena section recently featured back-to-back questions for discussion. “Obama’s Charisma, Where Did He Leave It?” was followed by “Should Obama hit the reset button on the White House?” Well, that speaks volumes, huh?

Like a Saturday Night Live skit, the questions depend on shared understandings that Obama isn’t who the liberal intelligentsia once thought he was and that his presidency isn’t doing so well. One of the ordinary folk who chimed in on the topic of charisma, reminded readers that not all of us thought Obama was so charismatic to begin with:

Lest you forget: millions of people, me included, never found Obama charismatic at all. Half the country, the truth to tell. I voted against a Democrat for the first time in over 40 years because of his candidacy – he always seemed to me exactly as he has turned out- a man who probably can take a test well, but has zero imagination, a man who thinks leading is telling people what he wants (though he sometimes doesn’t even do that), a man who constantly speaks ambiguously in order to always have an out.

But a great many people, ignoring the vapidity of Obama’s rhetoric about lowering the oceans and “we are the world,” did think s0 and were in full swoon. Now they no longer are. That includes a great many self-styled moderates and many members of the liberal media. The import is clear for the presidency: Obama is neither galvanizing the public opinion nor leading. His countless health-care speeches have done nothing to sway public opinion on ObamaCare. Even the rest of his agenda (e.g., cap-and-trade, card check) seems to be on permanent hold. His decisions on Guantanamo and KSM have been wildly unpopular. And on the world stage, the IOC, the mullahs, and the parties in the Middle East — well, just about everyone — are unmoved by Obama’s supposed mystique.

So we move to the “reset” question: since his poll numbers are tumbling and his agenda is on the skids, shouldn’t he do something about it? Well, we get bizarrely self-contradictory advice (”Resetting toward an agenda that creates jobs quickly and kicks Wall Street speculators in the face will make President Obama and the Democrats very popular next November.” Uh. . . I think Wall Street is where the investment for job growth comes from). There are others who just want to tough it out. Still others are dreaming of a different presidency altogether (”Imagine if he admitted that spending cuts and free trade, not tax hikes, bailouts for unions, and protectionism, were the keys to prosperity.” Well, that was the other 2008 candidate, I think.) And Lanny Davis says it’s the media’s fault. (My, how things have changed.)

But so far, the Obami themselves show no concern over their political belly flops. … Read all.

Vapidity. That’s a word that Jennifer Rubin uses to describe Obama. It means something that is undefined. I actually prefer my word of choice, cipher. And that’s simply because I don’t believe that there is any there there.

Larry Johnson, but of course, hit the nail on the head last week in his commentary, “Barack Losing Mojo and Modo“:

When New York Time columnist Maureen “The Modo” Dowd decides that butt snorkeling for Obama is no longer fun, you know the hopey-changey holiday season is kaput. …

Oh, do read Larry’s post. You’ll nearly pass out from laughing so hard. If you’re not also crying. For us and for this nation.

Larry included the unforgettable SNL skit, and added his thoughts as only Larry can:

Too bad this wasn’t cable. Then the writers could have said it outright–”if you’re going to fuck me I want to be kissed and get some flowers and candy.” In other words boys and girls the lamestream media is catching on that we’re being ravaged by an incompetent politician. Sweet!

Alas poor Barack, we knew he wasn’t ready.

I’ll go further: Someone like Barack will never be ready. He doesn’t have what it takes, which is to be a fully integrated human being with a work ethic and gifted leadership skills.

We had that person. A woman with the gift of leadership qualities and the dogged desire to work her tush off to do right by the American people. But The One’s ones were so enraptured, they savaged her and naively, stupidly believed that a speech means that one can be a great leader. Nothing could be further from the truth. Besides, Hillary had the speech-making skills — that she honed through sheer hard work — and now, too late, the American people realize what a truly great public servant she is.

Regrets, I have a few. But I will always be so damn proud that Hillary was my choice for president and that Barack never did it for me. I don’t always make the best choices, but this time I had it right. And so did you readers.

(May I share my fantasy with you? Everyone says it’s silly. But i imagine Hillary running in 2016. She’ll still be young enough. She’ll still have the same energy, the same drive, the same discipline, and this time she’ll arrive on the campaign trail having already won the hearts and minds of a sobered-up American people.)

Editor: Bumped up because this t-shirt says it all — well, almost all — because Reverend Amy’s accompanying commentary is a must-read. Stay tuned for more to come on how rapidly Obama’s supporters are turning on him. If only they’d listened to us …

I’ll say. And what a fantastic depiction on this t-shirt. Here’s more from the article, “Hope Is Fading Fast: A Devastating Take On The Iconic Obama Poster. Ouch.” Oh, and I am sure you can appreciate the neutrality of the title. Ahem:

A new offensive has been launched against President Obama, and if it catches on it may make as much noise as a Birther at a Town Hall. It’s the new “Hope Is Fading Fast” t-shirt from LA streetwear company Freshjive — a sad, disappointed take on the iconic “HOPE” poster by Shepard Fairey. Here’s how FreshJive describes it on its website:

Pre-releasing on Black Friday is the t shirt design, “Hope is Fading Fast”. This is actually the first item releasing without the Freshjive brand name on it. Read the recent post on the World’s Got Problems blog regarding how the Obama administration is maintaining continuity with its disgraced predecessor.

I would say this is an excellent first t-shirt for this l

abel, but that’s just me. Seems the author of this story might not feel similarly: Ouch. FreshJive founder Rick Katz (sic)is well-known locally as both a streetwear pioneer as well as a provocateur (he was protested, for example, by the Jewish Defense League with two controversial Palestinian-themed shirts last June). This shirt will probably cause a more conflicted reaction as Democrats debate whether it’s fair or unfair, and Republicans will probably love it. What makes this image significant, of course, is that it comes from the left: In October 2007 Katz (sic) said, “Really in the end what drives me is making that one t-shirt that says ‘Fuck off, Bush.’” Two years later, he seems to be sending Obama pretty much the same message.

Here is FreshJive’s list of grievances against Obama, here is Politifact’s “Obameter” to track campaign promises…

The founder’s name is actually Rick KLOTZ, but whatever – he’s clearly a disrespectful man going after Obama like this, so why get his name right? I might add, the whole Jewish Defamation League issue is a bit of a red herring, and it makes me wonder why the author, Rachel Sklar brought it up. Oh, why do I say that? Because Klotz is, well, Jewish!

Anywho – this t-shirt design seems to be pretty accurate to me, especially as Obama’s poll ratings continue to decline, our deficit, the highest it has been since WWII, continues to rise, along with unemployment being in double digits.

Or maybe it is Obama shattering, SHATTERING, the spending record for first year presidents. Obama spent $3.5 TRILLION in the first year. By comparison, Bush spent $1.8 Trillion, and Clinton $1.6 Trillion. Maybe it’s all those parties he’s been throwing…But I digress.

I might add, the t-shirt is a timely design – a perfect holiday gift for the Kool Aide drinker in your family! Oh, wow, wouldn’t that be fun? Just make sure you have the videocam at the ready.

I sure, um, hope, this is just the beginning of these t-shirts. I would think there is a wealth of possible slogans from which to choose. I bet some imaginative readers can come up wit some other slogans. I’d love to see them!