Inside Politics

OH, NO

Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore on Monday begged President Obama not to send more troops to Afghanistan.

“Do you really want to be the new ‘war president’? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8 p.m.) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple,” Mr. Moore said in an open letter to the president posted at www.michaelmoore.com.

“And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do - destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true - that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.”

‘CLIMATEGATE’

“A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term ‘Climategate’ to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the Internet more than 9 million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed,” Christopher Booker writes in the London Telegram, referring to e-mails in which leading climate scientists admitted to falsifying research, resisting data disclosure and blackballing skeptics of man-made global warming.

“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 U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” Mr. Booker said.

“Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the U.K. Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely - not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

“Dr. Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history. …

“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 e-mails 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.”

NADER VS. DODD?

“When consumer scold Ralph Nader had a later-life crisis a decade ago, he ran for president,” John Fund writes at www.opinionjournal.com.

“Claiming to be fed up with the compromises Democrats had made with big business, he threw his hat in the ring as an independent three times, only to have it stomped on by liberal voters who, in other circumstances, were rather fond of him,” Mr. Fund said.

“Now Mr. Nader may be adjusting his ambitions down the political food chain as he contemplates running for Senate in his native Connecticut, challenging banking committee Chairman Chris Dodd, whom he views as an ethically challenged symbol of the Democratic Party’s failure to stand up to special interests. Last week, he criticized Mr. Dodd for being ‘very concessionary to the banks and the brokerage houses for years.’

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