Inside Politics

NOT TRUE

Contrary to assertions by some, including D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, President Obama has not received more threats than previous presidents.

Secret Service chief Mark Sullivan, appearing before the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday, said Mr. Obama had not had an extraordinary number of threats against his life, contrary to Mrs. Norton’s assertion, and that Mr. Obama had received no more such threats at this point in his term than his two predecessors.

DOWN WITH DOBBS

Lou Dobbs, who railed against illegal immigration during his years as a talk-show host on CNN, has sparked a backlash among those who think he has gone soft on the issue.

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) announced Thursday that it was discontinuing the Facebook “Draft Lou Dobbs for President or US Senate” group and the fan site LouDobbsForPresident.org after Mr. Dobbs expressed support for giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

LouDobbsForPresident.org was launched in early 2008 and has generated pledges of more than $660,000 if Mr. Dobbs were to run for office.

“While Mr. Dobbs claims his positions have not changed, however, that is not the perception of many of our mutual supporters,” said William Gheen of ALIPAC. “His recent comments on Telemundo and his national radio show supporting some kind of path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is inconsistent with positions of ALIPAC and the views of most American citizens.”

ALIPAC said it circulated the video of the entire Dobbs interview on Telemundo to more than 30,000 supporters.

ALIPAC was the first national organization to call on Mr. Dobbs to consider a run for president of the United States.

“Lou Dobbs has deeply offended his base of supporters and ALIPAC is going to remain loyal to those Americans who support our existing immigration laws instead of amnesty disguised as reform.” Mr. Gheen said.

SCIENCE AT RISK

“Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science,” Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger writes.

“The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once,” Mr. Henninger said.

“I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called ‘the scientific community’ had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

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