Opinions vs. facts: A climate change primer By Viv Forbes

Climate is always changing, but luckily, we live in an era with a stable, benign, warm climate and a healthy, abundant biosphere.

Alarmists who claim that today’s climate changes are unprecedented have not checked climate history written in the rocks, the ice cores, the satellite registers and the tide gauges.

Ice core records show that current temperatures and sea levels are not extreme – they are more stable than they were as the last ice age ended just 12,000 years ago. At that time, global temperature increased quickly, the great ice sheets melted, sea levels rose rapidly (130 meters), and the warming seas expelled much of their dissolved carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As a result of this natural global warming and the additional moisture and carbon dioxide plant food in the atmosphere, plant life recovered, and the great forests and grasslands were re-established.

Check the Ice Core Records:
http://carbon-sense.com/index.php?s=ice+cores&Submit=Go
http://carbon-sense.com/2009/10/03/taxing-ambulances/

Hillary’s ‘Genocide’ Lie By Jack Cashill

When the late William Safire called Ms. Clinton a “congenital liar,” he knew whereof he spoke. Her debate comments on Libya clearly reveal that mendacity is in Hillary’s DNA.

“Well, let’s remember what was going on,” Hillary Clinton told Anderson Cooper Tuesday night in Las Vegas in response to his question about the bombing of Libya. “We had a murderous dictator, Qadaffi, who had American blood on his hands, as I’m sure you remember, threatening to massacre large numbers of the Libyan people.”

Before going any further, we might want to note that In April 2009, Qaddafi’s son Mutassim had a cordial meeting with Secretary of State Clinton in Washington. At that time she was apparently not too squeamish about the blood on his old man’s hands. “We deeply value the relationship between Libya and the United States,” Hillary told the press with the tall, Western-looking young man standing beside her.

Back to Las Vegas. “We had our closest allies in Europe burning up the phone lines begging us to help them try to prevent what they saw as a mass genocide, in their words,” Hillary continued with a straight face.

EPA ‘Running a $160 Million PR Machine’ Open the Books finds wasteful spending in the agency BY: Elizabeth Harrington

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spent over $15 million on outside public relations consultants despite employing nearly 200 full-time in house PR workers.

A new report on EPA spending released by Open the Books, a nonprofit organization dedicated to transparency, found numerous examples of questionable expenditures within the agency.

Among them, the EPA spent over $15.1 million on outside public relations consultants between 2000 and 2014. The funding was on top of the $141.496 million in salaries and $1.5 million in bonuses on full-time public affairs officers the EPA has spent since 2007. As of 2012, the EPA employed 198 public affairs employees. The average EPA employee salary is $111,165.

“Everyone is under the impression that the EPA is spending money to ‘clean the environment.’ But, it turns out EPA is running a $160 million PR Machine, $715 million police agency, a near $1 billion employment agency for seniors, and a $1.2 billion in-house law firm,” said Adam Andrzejewski, the founder of Open the Books.

EPA’S $160 MILLION SPIN MACHINE: OPEN THE BOOKS

EPA’S $160 MILLION SPIN MACHINE
Last night, Special Report with Bret Baier showcased our OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – U.S. Environmental Agency. Why does a major federal agency have nearly 200 PR staff employees?

Recently, the New York Times exposed the EPA for PR excess which was covered last night on Special Report…

Using a Thunderclap social media product to generate nearly one million online “grassroots comments” on new regulations regarding the Clean Water Act. 90% of the comments were positive. But, the Anti-Lobbying Act prohibits the use of tax dollars to advocate for a public position.

Our story first broke on Monday at Washington Free Beacon by reporter Elizabeth Harrington – click here to read the article.

“The EPA wasting $160 million on public relations dwarfs our recent exposure of their high-end furniture purchases ($92 million), Nothing is emblematic of government excess like an army of highly compensated PR agents sitting in their easy chairs. It’s simply waste.” OpenTheBooks

Power Play at the Supreme Court Another illegal rule against fossil fuels may be overturned.

The Obama Administration’s crusade against carbon returned to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, as the Justices heard an important federalism challenge to an energy scheme that usurps state powers to promote the green agenda. The oral arguments suggested they may be queueing up another judicial rebuke.

The culprit this time is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which regulates most of the electric grid. In 2011 FERC ordered transmission operators to pay retail energy users to reduce their power consumption during peak periods, a program known as “demand response.” The idea is to send a price signal to encourage large consumers to use power when the most capacity is available—instead of, say, on a hot summer afternoon when everybody’s air conditioners are running.

In FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association, the problem is that Congress explicitly limited the commission’s mandate to the interstate power markets—i.e., to the wholesale power supply. Under a 2005 law, the “exclusive jurisdiction” of retail pricing and patterns of energy consumption belongs to the states.

David Feith: What Lies in the South China Sea China’s claims rely on historical fiction and face an imminent challenge from the U.S. Navy.

The U.S. and China are headed for a showdown at sea. U.S. officials say that within days the U.S. military will conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea’s strategic Spratly archipelago. That area lies more than 700 miles off China’s coast, between Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, but China’s government has warned that it is “seriously concerned” about U.S. action and “will absolutely not permit any country to infringe on China’s territorial waters.”

Now’s a good time, then, to clarify what’s going on. The U.S. and its Asian partners are trying to curb a Chinese campaign to conquer one of the world’s most vital international waterways. The South China Sea is home to rich natural resources and half of all global shipborne trade: some $5 trillion a year in oil, food, iPhones and more. By asserting “indisputable sovereignty” over its nearly 1.35 million square miles, including vast swaths of sea belonging to its neighbors, Beijing threatens to hold hostage—and to wage war over—the economic heart of East Asia.

Daniel Henninger:Bernie Loves Hillary Bernie Sanders isn’t going to be the Democratic party’s nominee, but he represents its future.

The Democratic presidential nomination was fun while it lasted.

It ended late on Oct. 13 with Bernie Sanders’s incredible dismissal of Hillary Clinton’s email quagmire. The smile that illuminated Hillary’s face as Bernie folded actually looked genuine. She accepted Bernie’s political pardon with a handshake and an effusive, “Thank you, Bernie, thank you.”

In normal political competition, you don’t blow off your opponent’s main vulnerability, in Hillary’s case, her credibility. Notwithstanding an official FBI investigation, that problem looks to be behind her now, at least with unsettled Democrats.

From wherever Joe Biden was sitting Tuesday, the hill to the presidency just got steeper, because Democratic donors from New York to Hollywood were concluding that she’s going to be all right. A residual minority of progressives will stick with Sen. Sanders through the primaries, but an American politician preaching “revolution” won’t win a presidential nomination.

Obama Lobbies the FBI He publicly intervenes in the probe of Clinton’s private email server.

President Obama’s interview on CBS ’s “60 Minutes” Sunday has rightly received attention for his defensiveness about Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria. But the President made other news that deserves more attention: to wit, his legal advice to the FBI and Justice Department about Hillary Clinton’s email server.

The FBI has acknowledged it is investigating the former Secretary of State’s use of a private server for official communications, especially her mishandling of classified information. Though she denied in April that classified material had crossed her server, we now know that was false. Hundreds of emails sent to or from her server contained national secrets, some highly classified. She used her own email system in violation of the Federal Records Act and in order to protect her emails from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, and this evasion made her emails vulnerable to foreign hacking.

Yet when Steve Kroft asked if the server posed a security risk, Mr. Obama dismissed the idea by saying “I don’t think it posed a national security problem.” But how would he know unless his lawyers are filling him in on the investigation? Mr. Obama must know as a lawyer how inappropriate it is for a President to comment on a case being conducted by executive-branch officials who work for him.

Turkey’s Grisly Dances with the Islamic State by Burak Bekdil

If a “mere” 11.3% of Turks thought so generously of the Islamic State, it meant that there were nearly nine million Turks sympathetic to jihadists. Only 5% of that would mean an army of nearly 450,000.

Apparently, the people of Turkey did not “rise up and fight against these atheists [Kurds], these Crusaders and these traitors.” So they had to be killed by jihadists in suicide-bombing attacks. IS promised to attack, and it did.

450,000 minus two (suicide-bombers) leaves behind too big a number. Turkish cities are unsafe.

Davutoglu cannot admit that jihadists alone had simply murdered people en masse in a twin bomb attack.

Minorities in the Muslim World by Harold Rhode

How does Islam understand the concept of non-Muslims or “different” Muslims? Do Sunnis believe non-Sunni Muslims have rights equal to Sunnis? Is there one central authority that can decide today who speaks for all Muslims?

Sadly, the Muslim world is in total turmoil. We could discuss the traditional Muslim legal code regarding non-Muslims, but, given the political upheaval now going on in the Muslim world, none of the historic answers seem relevant.

Why is this so? Though we in the West tend to view Islam as a religion and understand it in that context, Islam has always had another side—the political side—that throughout Islamic history has often been the dominant factor in Islamic politics. This is true both when the Muslim world is stable, and most definitely so when that Muslim world is filled with instability, as it is today.

Those who know their place