it’s now been four weeks since anyone in the outside world heard from illegally-imprisoned us special forces soldier jack idema. since it seems likely (though by no means certain) that if jack had been killed or seriously injured in clashes with karzai’s troops, news of this would have been released by now, those of us working to bring this man home have every reason to be more hopeful than was the case two weeks ago.

however. jack’s inability to reach either a sat-phone or internet connection is still a huge cause for concern. indeed, this extended silence raises the possibility that he is no longer in his compound at pulacharke at all, but has been moved to tawab keef prison.

as anyone following this story will remember, way back in october of last year, the following preparations for such a transfer were put in place:

at tawab keef prison near the us embassy in kabul, cells 2 and 10 await. the previous occupants, about 20 afghans, were cleared out about two days prior to the dinner at pulacharke with the commandant. and everyone at tawab keef knew who the two americans were who were about to arrive.

at that time, of course, jack’s second-in-command, brent bennett, was also being held in pulacharke. both men were expected to attend a dinner with the prison commandant, at which point they were to be ambushed and forcibly transferred to a pair of solitary confinement cells at tawab keef. by chance, however, jack was unwell that day, and since karzai’s goons were unable to seize both men at that time, only brent was captured. faced with the prospect of jack raising hell about brent’s whereabouts, Karzai was forced to settle for having him removed from Afghanistan.

Since then, Jack’s compound at Pulacharke has been under siege from soldiers loyal to Karzai. In January this year, these troops renewed their attempts to dislodge Jack, as evidenced by the last photos we have of him, fighting for his life with a baseball bat and Molotov cocktails.

So, question: After months of trying, have Karzai’s soldiers finally managed to move Jack to Tawab Keef? This would certainly explain why no one has heard from, or of, him in a month.

So what can we do? Well, anyone reading this with their own blog can sign up for the weekly Free Jack Idema Blogburst by emailing Cao or Rottweiler Puppy for details. I’d urge everyone to do this, as we’re still terribly short on takers. If you want to know more about the story, Cao’s Blog has a large section devoted to Jack Idema. There’s also a timeline here, and, of course, a huge amount of information is available over at SuperPatriots, without whose work none of us would have learned about Jack’s story.

You should also contact the following people and make your feelings known,
especially to write letters of complaint about this despicable situation:

Secret US EMBASSY Fax: - 301-560-5729
(Local US Fax: Goes RIGHT TO Ambassador)
c/o US Ambassador Ronald Neuman
US Embassy- Afghanistan
6180 Kabul Place
Dulles, VA 20189-6180

US Consul Russell Brown - 011-93-70201908 (Fired)
US Consul Addie Harchik- 011-93-70201908
(denied them water and mail at Thanksgiving- Gone)
US Consul Edward Birsner- number yet unknown
US Embassy Translator Wahid - 011-93-70201902
US Embassy Asst Consul Bashir Momman- 011-93-70201923
US Consul (friend) Dawn Schrepel- 011-93-70201908 (Fired)

Ambassador Massoud Khalili
(wounded with Massoud)
(Great and Kind man)
Islamic State of Afghanistan
Embassy of Afghanistan
Ankara, Turkey

H.E. Said Tayeb JAWAD (Afghan Ambassador- powerful in US)
(Northern Alliance Good Guy Fired- New Pro Taliban Ambassador)
Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington
2341 Wyoming Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20008
Tel: (202) 483-6414
Fax: (202) 483-9523

Mr. Jahed Hamrah, Consul General (pro-Taliban)
CONSULATE GENERAL OF
AFGHANISTAN IN NEW YORK
360 Lexington Avenue,
11th Floor New York,
New, York, NY 10017
Tel.: (212) 972-2276 or 972-2277
Fax: (212) 972-9046

Chairman Peter Hoekstra
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
H-405, U.S. Capitol
Washington, DC 20515-6415;
Office: 202-225-4121 / Fax: 202-225-1991
Toll Free: (877) 858-9040

M. Cherif BASSIOUNI
Independent Expert of the Commission on Human Rights
On the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
UNOG-OHCHR
CH-1211 Geneva 10
Ph: +41(0)22 917 97 27 Fax: +41(0)22 917 90 18

Senator Steven Saland (Jack’s Rep and Neighbor)
9 Jonathan Lane
Poughkeepsie, NY 12603

Senator Elizabeth Dole (Jack’s Rep)
United States Senate
555 Dirksen Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Ph: 202-224.6342
Fax: 202-224.1100

Senator Richard Burr (Interested)
United States Senate
217 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-3154 / Fax: 202-228-2981

Senator Bill Nelson (in the fight on Jack’s Side)
United States Senate
Hart Senate Office Building
Room 716
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-5274 / Fax: 202-228-2183
FL Fax 407-872-7165

Senator Dianne Feinstein (Bennett’s Representative)
United States Senate
Hart Office Building, Room 331
Washington, D.C. 20510
202-224-3841

Representative Mike McIntyre (Jack’s Representative)
United States Congress
2437 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: 202-225-2731 / Fax 202-225-5773

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
(Reference Captain Bennett- CA citizen)
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: 916-445-2841 / Fax: 916-445-4633

Finally, PLEASE NOTE: The SuperPatriots and Jack images on this site are used with WRITTEN COPYRIGHT PERMISSION and any use by any third party is subject to legal action by SuperPatriots.US

jack idema
afghanistan
Technorati Search for Jack Idema

The Free Jack Idema Blogroll:

The Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill
The Lone Voice
Kender’s Musings
Irate Nate
The Devil’s Kitchen
Cao’s Blog
Big Dog’s Weblog
Theodore’s World
NIF
Rottweiler Puppy
Right For Scotland
Freedom Folks
The City Troll
Sacramento Boxing
Causes of Interest
Concatenation of Events
Hyscience
Stuck On Stupid
The Daily Blogster
You Don’t Know Jack
Right Wing Nation
Ron’s Musings
Right Voices
7.62mm Justice
Special/Blown-It
And Rightly So!
Causal Nexus
Death To The Swiss

Cheers to Wednesday–what some folks call “hump day” because once you’ve reached the afternoon, you’re over the hump on the way to the weekend!

Trackback with one of your posts that you think deserves some special attention from this past week.

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The global warming hype is still heated, lol. If I knew where this article came from, I would supply a link, but the subject matter is so important, I couldn’t resist putting it up. I might have to take it down later, though. This was sent to me through email. All emphasis in this article is mine.

Dr. Roy Spencer (according to Wikipedia) is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville, has served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and is the recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. He is principally known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society’s Special Award. He is is skeptical of the view that human activity is primarily responsible for global warming.

NOT THAT SIMPLE
GLOBAL WARMING: WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

By ROY W. SPENCER

Roy W. Spencer is principal research scientist at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala. He is also U.S. team leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA’s Terra satellite.

February 26, 2007 — REPORTS on the global-warming debate have now become part of our daily diet of news. Actors, musicians, politicians, columnists and even the occasional climate scientist all weigh in on how soon planetary disaster will strike, who’s to blame and what we should do about it. With claims that manmade warming is anywhere from an undeniable fact to a hoax, anyone can be excused for feeling a little bit confused.

The media is, almost by definition, most interested in extreme views on the issue, so reporting seldom reveals that broad scientific uncertainty still exists. In fact, a silent majority of scientists still think that global warming could end up falling anywhere between a real problem and a minor nuisance: They can see reasons for it going either way. Call them the global-warming moderates.

How can different scientists look at the same atmosphere and yet come to such a wide variety of conclusions? It all depends on their level of faith in our understanding of the atmosphere. We put equations into a computer that describe the basics of how we think the atmosphere works, and then we expect the computer to predict how much warming we will get when we turn up the greenhouse gas “knob.”

The Earth’s natural “greenhouse effect” traps infrared (heat) radiation because of water vapor, clouds, carbon dioxide and methane. You have probably heard that the greenhouse effect keeps the Earth “habitably warm.” So if burning of fossil fuels keeps adding more of a greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide (CO2), the Earth should keep on warming up, right?

Well . . . it’s not that simple.

CO2 concentrations - now running at 380 parts per million (ppm), up about 40 percent in the last century - are indeed one possible explanation for our current warmth. But we also know that our climate is a nonlinear, dynamic system - which can go through sizeable gyrations all by itself.

Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world - possibly none - have a sufficiently thorough, “big picture” understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.

Here, for example, is an insight that even many climate scientists are unaware of: The one atmospheric process that has the greatest control on the Earth’s climate is the one we understand the least - precipitation.

Over most of the planet, water is continuously evaporating, humidifying the air to form the Earth’s dominant greenhouse gas: water vapor. Climate scientists will tell you that the extra CO2 we are putting in the atmosphere causes a “warming tendency” at the surface, which will evaporate even more water, which will amplify the warming. This positive water vapor feedback, so the theory goes, ends up turning the relative benign direct warming effect of CO2 - only 1 degree of warming late in this century - into a much more serious problem.

But surface evaporation is not what determines how much water vapor, on average, resides in the atmosphere - precipitation systems do. These not only control the water-vapor portion of the greenhouse effect, they directly or indirectly control most of the next most important greenhouse ingredient: clouds.

These systems continuously recycle the Earth’s air, and so exert strong controls over the entire climate system. For instance, the rising air in precipitation systems is what causes the sinking, cloudless air over desert areas. Vast oceanic areas of stratus clouds form below a temperature inversion that is also caused by air being forced to sink by precipitation systems, usually thousands of miles away.

So, what does all this have to do with global warming? Unless we know how the greenhouse-limiting properties of precipitation systems change with warming, we don’t know how much of our current warmth is due to mankind, and we can’t estimate how much future warming there will be, either. To solve the global-warming puzzle, we first need to learn much more about the precipitation-system puzzle.

What little evidence we now have suggests that precipitation systems act as a natural thermostat to reduce warming. For instance, warm, tropical systems are more efficient at converting water vapor to precipitation than their cool high-latitude cousins. Hurricanes are believed to be the most efficient of all.

I believe that negative feedbacks such as this are the only way to explain the relative stability of our climate. Computerized models of our climate have had a habit of “drifting” too warm or too cold. This because they still don’t contain all of the temperature-stabilizing processes that exist in nature. In fact, for the amount of solar energy available to it, our climate seems to have a “preferred” average temperature, damping out swings beyond 1 degree or so.

I believe that, through various negative feedback mechanisms, the atmosphere “decides” how much of the available sunlight will be allowed in, how much greenhouse effect it will generate in response, and what the average temperature will be.

Finally, remember that phrase, “the Earth’s greenhouse effect keeps the Earth habitably warm?” I’ll bet you never heard the phrase that is, quantitatively, more accurate: “Weather processes keep the Earth habitably cool.”

Were it not for weather, the natural greenhouse effect would cause the surface of the Earth to average 140 degrees. Wonder why we never hear that fact stated?

I believe that when the stabilizing effects of precipitation systems are better understood and included into the models, predictions of global warming will be scaled back.

Despite current inadequacies, climate models are still our best tools for forecasting global warming. Those tools just aren’t sharp enough yet.

Michelle Malkin points out another one of the hypocritical factoids with regard to the Clintonistas:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former president Bill Clinton have operated a family charity since 2001, but she failed to list it on annual Senate financial disclosure reports on five occasions.

But it’s just an ‘oversight’….what the hell do they care about ‘ethics’…Clinton is forbidding anyone to mention her husband’s impeachment.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a new commandment for the 2008 presidential field: Thou shalt not mention anything related to the impeachment of her husband.

Do as I say, not as I do, “we’re going to take things away from you for your own good.” The list of despicable actions on the Clintons’ part is piling up. Yet, they continue on. Faced with that reality and the reality of the Heinz-Kerry’s, and George Soros…I’m really afraid for what’s to happen in the future for our country. I mean you can take Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s monetary influence over politics alone, and it trumps all the conservative foundations combined.

But the Clinton Foundation has had its own part in significant contributions to leftist causes:

The foundation has enabled the Clintons to write off more than $5 million from their taxable personal income since 2001, while dispensing $1.25 million in charitable contributions over that period.

Clinton’s spokesman said her failure to report the existence of the family foundation and the senator’s position as an officer was an oversight. Her office immediately amended her Senate ethics reports to add that information late yesterday after receiving inquiries from The Washington Post…

…The charity is separate from the New York-based William J. Clinton Foundation, which has directed $10 billion in corporate money and resources toward slowing the global spread of AIDS, addressing climate change, and reducing hunger and poverty in developing countries.

The smaller family foundation lists as its address a post office box in Chappaqua, N.Y., where the Clintons live. Hillary Clinton is listed as secretary and treasurer, Bill Clinton as president and the couple’s daughter, Chelsea, as a director. None takes any compensation.

The charity has been funded with money from lucrative book deals for both Clintons and from speechmaking by Bill Clinton since they left the White House in 2001. The foundation’s tax filings are available on an Internet repository for IRS documents. The only time the Clintons mentioned the foundation on her ethics report was in 2002, in a footnote about their $800,000 donation that year, but it did not disclose as required her position or other information about the foundation. In subsequent years, they made no mention of it.

$10 billion in corporate money! Those eeevvvilll corporations! I guess the only time it’s acceptable for them to make profits is when the money is funneled into helping destroy Amerikka. “Addressing climate change”. It doesn’t leave you wondering very long what THAT means.

Reference here.

Kerry refused to interview key witnesses and ordered committee staff to shred important intelligence documents….The committee’s final report…concluded there was “no compelling evidence that proves” that American POWs were still alive in Vietnam….Kerry and his committee…made no attempt to identify those who had been abandoned, how they had died, who killed them, or where their remains might be. As he had done twenty years earlier, former naval lieutenant Kerry turned his back on those with whom he had served. (Reckless Disregard, by Buzz Patterson, p. 63)

I’ve talked about how Kerry continued to hurt the men who served in Vietnam and their families, long after he’d come back to the States; not only serving as a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but serving on the Senate Select Committee for POW/MIA Affairs to buried evidence that there were survivors, or that any of our men were still there; dead or alive. His ‘normalizing’ relations with Vietnam did his Forbes cousin some good businesswise and dollarwise, but it is another abomination where our armed forces are concerned.

But these sentiments of his carry over to today. And his throwing his medals over the wall, but somehow ending up with medals on the wall in his office, leads us to question what precisely happened and why he continues to flip flop back and forth, depending on the popular sentiments of the day.

Go to the Gathering of Eagles website and see that the Tom Haydens and Jane Fonda’s of the world have still not given up on their utopian dream; Jane Fonda has come out of retirement to join Cindy Sheehan and the rest of the anti-war moonbats to start protesting the War in Iraq by visiting the Vietnam Wall and disrespecting our dead.

And that’s just for starters. They seem to think they’re going to recreate another Vietnam scenario…and with the democrats in control, I can see that and other horrible things happening on the horizon. Unless people wake up, of course.

Socialists are masquerading as democrats in the Senate…and it’s time we let them know how we feel about the disgusting peace movement.

Look at how the guys in Iraq feel about the President’s ’surge’ and ask yourself if these guys REALLY WANT TO SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.

Kerry might not be there with Jane Fonda physically, but in view of his past history, I’m certain that he’ll be with them in spirit.

We are still calling for Kerry to release his records; we didn’t fall for the sleight of hand where he re-released the same records that were already out there to his biographer at the Boston Globe.

Join the blogbursts to help FREE Kerry’s 180 every Tuesday!

We’ve formed a blogburst group and here are the bloggers who are contributing so far. If you want to join the blogroll for Free Kerry’s 180, click here to email me, include the url for your blog. The blogburst is every Tuesday, so don’t forget to blog about it. All you have to do is encourage Kerry to set his 180 FREE, I’ll send you the code for the blogroll.

Image: LindaSog.com

The more people we have, the merrier!

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

Editor’s note: Jane Fonda and Cindy Sheehan are going to be at the Washington protest on March 17th. The group Gathering of Eagles was started in order to defend our Vietnam Wall against those mealy mouthed anti-war leftists who don’t give a damn about our boys or the Iraqis. You can get this poem on a t-shirt, and I would suggest getting one in honor of this occasion even if you can’t make the protest on March 17th. See what it looks like, here. The reason for this is-it’s going to cost about $25,000 according to organizers and they’re going to need every dime they can raise. Russ isn’t making a dime from this.

Fly High you Eagles, soar (a poem)
by Russ Vaughn

Fly High you Eagles, soar
On you we all depend.
To serve, to stand, support our war,
Our fallen to defend.
Stand firm, stand brave before our Wall;
Deal those a sorry fate,
Who answer Fonda’s hateful call:
Our nation they must hate.

Fly high you Eagles, soar,
Your keen eyes see below,
The leftist fools oppose this war,
To them no low’s too low.
They seek our Wall to desecrate,
To enhance their losing cause;
They seek to doom our nation’s fate;
They see nothing but our flaws.

Fly high you Eagles, soar,
Above those who seek defeat,
Who seek submission, nothing more,
To a terror they can’t meet.
They falter when the course is long;
They’re weak-willed, failed and bitter;
Got it all entirely wrong,
So typical of a quitter.

Fly high you Eagles, soar,
Stand proud before our Wall;
You are the nation’s heart, the core,
The essence of us all.
Know that we stand there with you,
In spirit and in soul,
America’s not lost, not through,
We’ve a long, long way to go.

Fly high you Eagles, soar, from your lofty, special station,
Know this is true forever more; you’ve the blessing of your nation.

Russ Vaughn
Vietnam Veteran

Reference

This table demonstrates in a simple visual format that Lindzen’s theory about cloud cover is completely accurate, and that the majority of ‘greenhouse gases’ are made up of water vapor. As you can see, man’s contribution is barely visible here, because it’s minimal! Greenhouse gases are natural; industrialization has done nothing to with the environment. Industrialization, burning of fossil fuels, actually adds to the wonderful protective blanket that filters harmful rays from the sun and protects our atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are not detrimental to the environment; these gases feed a healthy environment and are natural; not pollution. It’s a beautiful set up: we exhale CO2, plants breathe and thrive on CO2, and expel oxygen. Increased CO2 in the air is as a result of warming, not the other way around; and it’s nature’s cyclical corrective mechanism that we’re witnessing.

The industrial age didn’t bring about intensive global warming; historical data (ACCURATE HISTORICAL DATA) shows us that. There was a time when there was more CO2 in the air back before the industrial age started; and the temperatures were virtually the same.

We should bear all this in mind with Al Gore and the UN’s power grab coming up.

Thanks to Francis T. Manns, Ph.D., P.Geo. (Ontario), with Artesian Geological Research, who sent me three extremely technical papers on warming, one is a very easy to understand powerpoint presentation, and that’s where this graphic came from.

When reviewing the science behind the protective blanket in our atmosphere, I’ve been amazed by the orderliness and purpose of so many things that we are still discovering. It isn’t just in climatology (which, I was reminded is not ‘weather’), but it’s in other areas, like genetics, origins science, geology, and a number of other areas that I’ve been reading about lately. Even to the point of understanding what the purpose really is behind those vestigial organs. It’s simply fascinating.

The theory of order and purpose in our world also applies in the area of personality typing, which I’ve been so fascinated with as of late, that I’m tempted to get certified as a Myers Briggs trainer.

What I’ve found interesting is the many books there are about typing and spirituality. In God’s Gifted People: Discovering Your Personality As A Gift, the author, Gary Harbaugh, discusses the roles in a church congregation, and what roles you should gravitate to where you’d feel comfortable, based on personality type.

This just dispels the idea that the world is random; this completely goes contrary to the notion that things have just happened randomly. There is order in the world, there is order to the way things are constructed, down to the most minute details. And it’s true, also, for the 16 personality types. Knowing and understanding the 16 types is going to become more and more advtantageous in the coming months and years.

I’m awaiting another book to arrive, which is entitled The Art of Speed Reading People: How to Size People Up and Speak Their Language, by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. Clearly, we all have things to gain by understanding one another, and the differences between how we put together thoughts, ideas, and problem solve. But what appears to be necessary and sometimes is missing in today’s business world, is the idea that we should encourage people to be more of who we are, instead of trying to change people into copies of ourselves.

This page characterizes the different types in very funny ways. What I found to be particularly illuminating was the description of this type:

ESTP: The Conman

As an ESTP, you are driven to succeed and to win. Your personality is dominated by your drive to test yourself and to triumph over your fellow man.

This generally expresses itself as an overwhelming urge to prove your self worth (and fatten your wallet) by taking advantage of the suckers, marks, and dupes who surround you–after all, isn’t that what they’re there for? It’s not your fault that their stupidity and gullibility lets them believe you when you say that Hershey’s Kissesses exposed to your patented psychic amplifier rays will let them fly! As your hero and fellow ESTP, P. T. Barnum, once said, “it is morally wrong to let a sucker keep his money.”

As an ESTP, your greatest fear is failure. Under no circumstances will you permit yourself that kind of weakness, which makes you ideally suited for a job at Enron, where your natural talents can be recognized and rewarded.

RECREATION: ESTPs enjoy recreational activities such as card sharking, pool sharking, and conning little old women out of their lives’ savings. They’re often fond of polo as well.

Famous ESTPs include P. T. Barnum and DR. PETER OKOYE, SON OF THE LATE PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA M. B. OKOYE, WHO REQUESTS YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE IN HELPING TO TRANSFER $150,000,000 (THE SUM OF ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION USD) INTO YOUR U.S. BANK ACCOUNT SO THAT IT MAY BE DISTRIBUTED TO NEEDY CHILDREN, IN GOD’S CHARITY.

It’s Sunday, folks, say a prayer for Jack and Brent, that they’ll be kept safe and alive until one day they can come home.

C’mon and trackback! Put up a post that you think deserves some special attention from this past week.

Watch for Open Trackbacks here on Fridays, Sundays and Wednesdays.

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Subscribe to B.O.! This is hilarious, but lefties don’t have a sense of humor…which reminds me. Cox and Forkum has a very well done cartoon about Obama and Hillary, here.

Thanks to Justin, I was looking for this last night…I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it, and of course Google is absolutely no help where things like this about George Soros’ hand picked candidates are. You just can’t find anything about Obama except for glowing reports of his star quality. Forget the issues, he has STAR POWER!

Al Gore is re-energizing the movement advocating Kyoto compliance — the biggest UN power-grab in history.

I urge you to sign this petition now, please. We already have over 30,000 electronic signatures. We want to deliver 100,000 signatures to the Senate by the time Al Gore reaches the podium at this Sunday’s Academy Awards.

It takes only 20 seconds to sign online, link to:

http://PatriotPetitions.US/StopGore

To sign by e-mail, send a blank e-mail to: Stop Gore

Update 5:49 a.m. 2/25: Thanks to everyone who signed this, we now have 104315.

Thanks to Justin at Right on the Right, OTB, Right Voices, Diary of a Mad Pigeon, The Virtuous Republic, The Pink Flamingo, Conservative Thoughts, High Desert Wanderer, Pirate’s Cove, Basil, Perri Nelson’s Website, A Blog For All, Right Pundits, stikNstein… has no mercy, Allie is Wired, Shadowscope, Random Dreamer, Maggie’s Notebook, Jo’s Cafe.

As you can see here at Malkin’s, where she describes a lefty who brings his chickenhawk argument up close and personal and it winds up being a physical fight. I think the amazon.com video of Al Franken getting physical with a conservative is where we’re headed in these ‘discussions’, which doesn’t look very good.

It’s the same type of ‘discussion’ that I have with people who disagree with me on Jack Idema. To my horror and amazement, I discovered that Kathryn Cramer actually PAID JOE CAFASSO to come to Illinois to stalk me! In my mental review over this, it’s just because she doesn’t agree - or Cafasso doesn’t agree (same thing) - with my just questioning the circumstances around Idema, Bennett and Caraballo winding up in one of the most notorious prisons in the world alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

huh.

Now I’d like to reference this great post over at Causal Nexus about Tod Robberson, who gained access to their living quarters on or about October 19 or 20th of 2004. Robberson is one of the ’smear jack’ cabal members, who wrote about Jack early on. He made a trip to Afghanistan and stole documents while Jack, Ed, Brent and Zorro were in Kabul at their trial.

Read the whole thing.

There are several things that are completely disturbing about this, but the most glaring problem that I see is:

…it is believed that Robberson was working with two American women named Mariah Blake and Stacy Sullivan. Robberson gave their names and numbers to an Afghan translator and said he was working with them on a story which would “finally kill Jack Idema”.

Another example of people going to extraordinary lengths and measures to see to it that someone is destroyed. And it sounds to me as though they’re deadly serious and mean to do so in the most literal sense. This is the grownup version of what that college student endured. Big warning flares are going up for me in my head…this is not good at all, but it’s what I suspected all along.

Let us not forget that Cafasso would have done anything to get his hands on the Al Qaeda tapes; and went so far as to advocate Jack’s assassination.

Thanks to Justin at Right on the Right, Jo’s Cafe.

Not that this comes as much of a surprise, but it is certainly disgusting. From the Washington Times:

By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 24, 2007

Federal authorities yesterday charged the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, who serves as a leader of youth sports organizations in the state, with receiving and possessing child pornography. Charles Rust-Tierney, 51, of Arlington, was named in a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria and was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Arlington County police.

Being that the ACLU goes to the defense of pedophiles, rapists, murderers, terrorists and NAMBLA, the fact that one of their own former presidents would be exposed as belonging to a group that his organization defends shouldn’t be a surprise, but it IS disgusting, nevertheless.

Pursuing Holiness has a nice post about this, and it’s something that I’ve been discussing with several reporters lately. The disconnect between their worldview and that of mainstream America marks a deep divide.

This article discusses Helen Thomas’s ejection from the front row seat that she’s occupied at White House press conferences for the past 46 years. It’s something that she’s reluctantly accepting, but the fact is, she’s been dislodged BY HER PEERS. This is a woman who is so disconnected from reality that she repeatedly asks repeatedly argumentative questions often sympathetic to “Palestine”, who continuously asks how many more will die in Iraq.

This is a woman who seems to completely have missed what the goal is, what happened, what the mission is, etc. Not to mention - completely taking the Code Pink side of the argument, which I think has no place in journalism, but which seems to be the line they tow.

You should read Laura’s entire post on the subject, but she finished with a flourish:

Having elevated themselves to such a position of authority, the press has an obligation to not be partisan or arbitrary, and to exercise sound judgment. That they refuse to do so has earned them the disgust of the majority of Americans. A recent Zogby poll has revealed that 71.4% of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism. 55.4% describe blogging as “important to the future of journalism.” While 85.3% of people describe “professional journalism” as important to the future of journalism, “citizen journalism” is also described as important to the future of journalism by 74.4% of the people surveyed. 65.4% of people believe that traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, where only 23.6% believe it is not.

The inevitable result of their hubris is that the media is talking themselves out of their jobs. While this may serve the cause of justice - they don’t deserve their jobs anymore - it doesn’t serve the American people. We need a free press to aid - not replace - our constitutional system of checks and balances. The situation can be salvaged if they would just return to their original mission: to deliver facts impartially. It will be a tragedy if they do not.

It seems so easily debunked, yet people are falling for it; I have to wonder why. Are people really this stupid?

Gribbit at Gribbitonline has a great post up, talking about the global warming scare and why people shouldn’t be falling for it, the reference is a Canadian website called Friends of Science. If this compilation of resources isn’t enough to dispel the global warming myth, perhaps these succinct points should drive the point home:

MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.

FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8 Cover the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (”heat islands”), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (”land use effects”).

There has been no catastrophic warming recorded.

This is because, as common sense would indicate, concrete absorbs heat. If you eliminate the readings from the country or from forests, you will automatically arrive at a higher temperature reading. Since our ‘climatologists’ are either too lazy to get those readings which would reflect cooler temperatures, or are purposely skewing their readings, the result is the same; overinflated temperature readings from heavily populated areas; which to them, means man’s destructive influence on the environment. Hooey!

MYTH 2: The “hockey stick” graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature increase for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.

FACT: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the “average global temperature” has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare.

The “hockey stick”, a poster boy of both the UN’s IPCC and Canada’s Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.

In order to produce the ‘hockey stick’, they had to completely eliminate the warming period of the middle ages.

MYTH 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.

FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth’s oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

There is no proof that man is the main cause of global warming as a result of man-made CO2. The fraction of CO2 as compared to natural CO2 in the air is minimal. There IS proof that CO2 and temperatures are cyclical.

MYTH 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.

FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3 % of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, (about 97%) of water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O, of which carbon dioxide is the largest amount. Hence, CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. While the minor gases are more effective as “greenhouse agents” than water vapour and clouds, the latter are overwhelming the effect by their sheer volume and – in the end – are thought to be responsible for 60% of the “Greenhouse effect”.

Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention this important fact.

Facts are rarely considered by the global warming fascists, though. That’s because they’re using emotionalism and hysteria to drive legislation to further restrict human activity and grow government.

MYTH 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.

FACT: Computer models can be made to “verify” anything by changing some of the 5 million input parameters or any of a multitude of negative and positive feedbacks in the program used.. They do not “prove” anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of properly including the effects of the sun, cosmic rays and the clouds. The sun is a major cause of temperature variation on the earth surface as its received radiation changes all the time, This happens largely in cyclical fashion. The number and the lengths in time of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which are CO2. Solar radiation interferes with the cosmic ray flux, thus influencing the amount ionized nuclei which control cloud cover.

The computer models they’ve used are obviously manipulated, and the data is skewed in order to produce the desired result.

MYTH 6: The UN proved that man–made CO2 causes global warming.

FACT: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are:
1) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.”
2) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man–made causes”

To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.

To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.

MYTH 7: CO2 is a pollutant.

FACT: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government has included CO2 with a number of truly toxic and noxious substances listed by the Environmental Protection Act, only as their means to politically control it.

This has been covered before, CO2 is a natural waste product made by humans, but is a natural ‘food’ for plants. It’s a basis for the entire global food web, and GROWS plants!

Thanks to Justin at Right on the Right