The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression awards the top 3 Jefferson Muzzles for 2014 to the Obama Administration:
(1) The U.S. Department of Justice
(2) The White House Press Office
(3) The National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security
http://tjcenter.org/muzzles/2014-jefferson-muzzles/#item01
“…the Obama years are a benchmark for a new level of secrecy and control. It’s created quite a challenging atmosphere for The New York Times, and for some of the best reporters in my newsroom who cover national security issues in Washington. There have been seven of them [i.e prosecutions], and one of them right now threatens my colleague James Risen who has been subpoenaed in one of these cases. Collectively, they have really put a chill on reporting about national security issues in Washington.” ~ Jill Abramson, Executive Editor of the liberal-leaning New York Times
“Sources who want to come forward with important stories that they feel the public needs to know are just scared to death that they’re going to be prosecuted,” she says. “Reporters fear that they will find themselves subpoenaed in this atmosphere.”
“The amount of friction and confrontation involved in just going about what I see as perfectly normal coverage, that in the past wouldn’t have even provoked a discussion, becomes a protracted and somewhat exhausting process,” she says.
“In the 21st century Washington has established as its hallmarks every manifestation of tyranny: illegal and unconstitutional execution of citizens without due process of law, illegal and unconstitutional indefinite detention of citizens without due process of law, illegal and unconstitutional torture, illegal and unconstitutional rendition, illegal and unconstitutional surveillance, and illegal and unconstitutional wars. The executive branch has established that it is unaccountable to law or to the Constitution. An unaccountable government is a tyranny. ”
The Senate Intelligence Committee took four years to investigate of the CIA’s torture programs. “The Committee found, unequivocally, that the CIA lied about the extent of the torture and kidnappings, that detainees did not undergo some mild form of “enhanced interrogation” but were subjected to brutal and inhumane torture, that the CIA, contrary to its claims, did not get even one piece of useful information from its grave crimes against humanity…During the entirety of the investigation, the CIA illegally spied on the Senate staff conducting the investigation.”
“Is the public ever to see this report beyond the parts that have been leaked? Not if the CIA and Obama can prevent it. President “change” Obama has decided that it is up to the CIA to decide how much of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation will be made public. In other words, unless someone leaks the entire report, the American public will never know.”
~ Paul Craig Roberts, American economist and a columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and was noted as a co-founder of Reaganomics. (Wikipedia)
Born: April 3, 1939 (age 75), Atlanta, GA
Education: Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Virginia
PaulCraigRoberts.org
Here’s what really matters in the dispute between the Bundy’s of Nevada and the Bureau of Land Management.
Excellent.
Repost of excerpts from Matt Ridley’s blog post “Adapting to climate change,” April 6, 2014 (link below)
“The received wisdom on global warming, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was updated this week. The newspapers were, as always, full of stories about scientists being even more certain of environmental Armageddon. But the document itself revealed a far more striking story: it emphasised, again and again, the need to adapt to climate change. Even in the main text of the press release that accompanied the report, the word ‘adaptation’ occurred ten times, the word ‘mitigation’ not at all.”
“The distinction is crucial.”
…”For instance, references to ‘hundreds of millions’ of people being affected by rising sea levels were removed from the summary, as were statements about the impact of warmer temperatures on crops. The report bravely admits that invasive alien species are a far greater threat to species extinction than climate change itself. Even coral reefs, the report admits, are threatened mostly by pollution and overfishing, which might be exacerbated at the margin by climate change.”
….”the report firmly states that the impact of climate change will be small relative to other things that happen during this century: ‘For most economic sectors … changes in population, age structure, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation and governance will be large relative to the impacts of climate change.’ ”
“But the one truly bonkers thing to do would be to go unilaterally into a policy of subsidising the rich to install technologies that drive up the cost of energy, desecrate the countryside, kill golden eagles, clear-cut swamp forests in North Carolina, turn grain into motor fuel, so driving up the price of food and killing people, and prevent poor people in Africa getting loans to build coal-fired, cheap power stations instead of inhaling smoke from wood fires cut from virgin forests.”
“All this we are doing in this country, with almost no prospect of cutting carbon emissions enough to affect the climate. That’s the very opposite of adaptation — preventing the economic growth that would enable us to adapt while failing to prevent any climate change.” http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/adapting-to-climate-change.aspx
‘In a stunning admission, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy revealed to House Science, Space and Technology Committee that the agency neither possesses, nor can produce, all of the scientific data used to justify the [very expensive] rules and regulations they have imposed on Americans via the Clean Air Act.’
“In short, science has been trumped by the radical environmentalist agenda…The EPA and their leftist allies are essentially saying “trust us,” even as they denigrate climate change skeptics for their failure to embrace “settled science.”…
“As it stands now, only EPA-funded researchers do the work and review the work, and nobody gets to see the data,” explained [Johns Hopkins-trained biostatistician Steve] Milloy, who posted its results on his junkscience.com website, revealed the fraud the EPA has been perpetrating for decades.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-epas-science-problem/
Professor Dr. Leslie Woodcock says there is ‘professional misconduct by Government advisors around the world’ when it comes to claims of man-made climate change. “Global warming is nonsense.”
“The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ – in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent.”
“There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased [global temperature] in the last 100 years.”
“The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis’ – ‘Carbon dioxide has been made out to be some kind of toxic gas but the truth is it’s the gas of life. We breath it out, plants breath it in. The green lobby has created a do-good industry and it becomes a way of life, like a religion.”
“The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”
“If you talk to real scientists who have no political interest, they will tell you there is nothing in global warming. It’s an industry which creates vast amounts of money for some people.”
“The reason records seem to be being frequently broken is simply because we only started keeping them about 100 years ago. There will always be some record broken somewhere when we have another natural fluctuation in weather.”
“It’s absolutely stupid to blame floods on climate change.”
“This is not the way science works. If you tell me that you have a theory there is a teapot in orbit between the earth and the moon, its not up to me to prove it does not exist, its up to you to provide the reproducible scientific evidence for your theory. Such evidence for the man-made climate change theory has not been forthcoming.”
“It’s become almost an industry, as a consequence of this professional misconduct by Government advisors around the world, not just UK – you can’t blame ordinary people with little or no science education for wanting to be seen to be good citizens who care about their grandchildren’s future and the environment.”
“In fact, the damage to our economy the climate change lobby is now costing us is infinitely more destructive to the livelihoods of our grand-children. Indeed, we grand-parents are finding it increasingly expensive just to keep warm as a consequence of the idiotic decisions our politicians have taken in recent years about the green production of electricity.”
“Carbon dioxide has been made out to be some kind of toxic gas but the truth is it’s the gas of life. We breath it out, plants breath it in. The green lobby has created a do-good industry and it becomes a way of life, like a religion. I understand why people defend it when they have spent so long believing in it, people do not like to admit they have been wrong.”
Emeritus Professor Leslie Woodcock, University of Manchester, UK was educated in the UK and received his PhD at the University of London in 1970. He has held academic appointments at the University of Cambridge, University of Amsterdam, University of Bradford and UMIST where he is Emeritus Professor of Chemical Thermodynamics. He has also served as senior research consultant at Wright-Patterson Air Force Laboratory, as a consultant to Unilever and the International Fine Particle Research Institute, a visiting professor at the University of Singapore, and a guest scientist at the U.S. National Institute of Standards. Most recently, he was teaching a class for a faculty of engineering at Universiti Teknologi MARA in Malaysia on “Modeling Chemical Processes at the Molecular Level.”
Prof. Woodcock is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a founding editor of Molecular Simulation, and a recipient of a Max Planck Society Visiting Fellowship. Over his career, he has received wide recognition for his research contributions to understanding the behavior of liquids and complex materials. Prof. Woodcock has more than 70 published journal papers in Chemical Physics (Letter), Journal of Physics, Nature (physical Letter), Nature (Letter), Nature (Scientific Correspondence), Journal of Chemical Society (Faraday Transactions), Chemical Physics Letters, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, Chemical Engineering Science, Powder Technology, progress in Colloid and Polymer Science, Physical Chemistry and Chemical physics, Molecular Physics, Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Molecular Liquids, AlChe.E Journal, Ind. Eng. & Chem. Res. Journal, and Journal of Chemical Engineering Data.
Email: leslie.woodcock@manchester.ac.uk
Tel: 0161 306-4481
Brandeis should be ashamed and re-examine its own principles.
Here’s an excerpt from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s intended speech at Brandeis and the rest is at the link below: “I stand before you as someone who is fighting for women’s and girls’ basic rights globally. And I stand before you as someone who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight…The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.”
“So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.”
“Is such an argument inadmissible? It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.”
“The motto of Brandeis University is “Truth even unto its innermost parts.” That is my motto too. For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom and equality of the sexes.” ~ Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304512504579493410287663906?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304512504579493410287663906.html
“What is additionally repugnant about [Brandeis University president Frederick] Lawrence’s actions is that he blames his cowardice on the students, whose “extraordinary” accomplishments must be the “focus” in “celebrating and honoring”. If the poor little lads and lasses will have their delicate feelings hurt by what Ayaan Hirsi Ali says, then they are neither intellectually nor personally mature enough to be receiving a college degree.” ~ D.C. Alan, Washington D.C., http://www.steynonline.com/6263/wrong-said-fred
“Brandeis said they had changed their mind about Ms Hirsi Ali’s degree because “we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values”. Presumably, Tony Kushner’s statement that the state of Israel shouldn’t exist is entirely consistent with Brandeis University’s core values, because no one bothered rescinding his honorary degree.” ~ Mark Steyn.http://www.steynonline.com/6250/degrees-of-separation
The war on women? Where is the feminist anger now? http://www.bostonglobe.com/…/0EsU60OhyLPk3th…/story.html
budbromley 
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