American Policy Center » 2009 » December
- Year of Youth: Project 2012 to Save the Republic
- Climategate: Melting the Chains of Tyranny
- The Waste of Tax Dollars Never Ends
December 18, 2009
Issued By Tom DeWeese
Over this past year it has been my privilege to work with some outstanding young people in the fight for freedom. Considering that most have come through a public school system that teaches them next to nothing about America’s unique liberties, it’s quite surprising to hear their passion for the Constitution and their ability to articulate it.
We need these young people to be active and effective in coming campaigns. Now there is a movement organizing to do just that. It’s called Year of Youth: Project 2012.
In American politics one seldom sees political movements which advocate limited government positions targeting the youth. Just as rare are movements that work from the ground up, focusing on local campaigns and allowing federal involvement to grow up from the local level. This is precisely what is being attempted in Year of Youth: Project 2012. The idea is to expand youth involvement in the political process, train young liberty-minded activists on the campaign trail in 2010, and then run hundreds of youth campaigns for local offices nationwide in 2012.
Year of Youth recognizes that America’s leaders from both parties have done nothing to halt the expansion of the federal government or the increase of the enormous national debt. With this in mind, the organization focuses on three core tenets: localism, individual liberty, and fiscal responsibility.
The idea of localism, of course, comes from the observation that “the closer a government is to its people, the better the people are represented.” Local government, in Thomas Jefferson’s view, was the best way to protect freedom from federal oppression. Like Jefferson, Year of Youth states that governance is more effective at the local level, and therefore the focus of the youth’s campaigns should be upon local positions. Control by young people (who advocate the principles of freedom) in City Council, State Legislature, Board of Education, and so on can have a major influence on the lives of that area’s constituents. Specifically the organization’s manifesto states: “The likelihood of you achieving that goal, or any goal for that matter, is much more likely when it is voluntary, peaceful, and truly grassroots, at the local levels of society.”
The second issue of focus is individual liberty. Generally speaking, Year of Youth promotes the idea that each individual is free to live according to their own ends as long as that person does not violate the liberty of another. Government should stay out of our personal lives.
The third and final tenet in the “youth manifesto” is fiscal responsibility. It is unacceptable that trillions of dollars of debt are being accumulated by the current leaders to be thrust upon future generations without consent. Government should never commit to any spending which it cannot fund. The state cannot spend society into prosperity, especially on the backs of future generations.
If there is to be a halt in the expansion of America’s leviathan government, the youth must take responsibility to stop it.
These positions are all the basic foundation for a free society and the Republic our founders created. These young people involved in the Year of Youth are being trained to promote such ideals and take local action to make them reality. Every American who loves our unique freedoms and have worried about their possible demise should support the Year of Youth: Project 2012.
Congressional candidate Adam Kokesh says, “This will be the largest youth movement our country has ever seen.” In order to achieve these lofty goals Year of Youth needs to spark youth involvement nationwide. A large team of grassroots youth activists is essential to accomplishing this. All young people passionate about liberty are invited to apply for Year of Youth’s core team at www.yearofyouth.org and join the youth revolution.
I highly recommend that every freedom loving parent get their children involved. And if you can help support them financially, do that too. Year of Youth: Project 2012 is a major necessary step if we are to take America back.
Tom DeWeese is the President of the American Policy Center and the Editor of The DeWeese Report. TThe DeWeese Report is now available online, for more information click here.
December 8, 2009
By Tom DeWeese
Rarely has a political movement with so much power collapsed so fast, certainly not since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Beginning in 1990, Global Warming has been the battle cry behind schemes for global control of industry, energy use, water use, private property and community development. It has been the excuse for economy-killing legislation like Cap and Trade (that will extract $865 billion from an already overtaxed people who use energy), and global-to-local polices like Sustainable Development (that robs local communities of freedom to decide their own future development). As a result, the world economy is being transformed into a new Dark Ages of superstition and thought-control – all in the name of Global Warming – or more recently – Climate Change.
No stone has been left unturned in Global Warming zealotry and its drive to transform human civilization. It seemed the juggernaut could not be stopped. Proponents have controlled every branch of government, from federal to local. They have created international policy, from the 1992 Global Climate Treaty, to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, to the 15 annual meetings of the Climate Conference of the Parties (COP) with nearly 200 national delegations in attendance, and much more.
And of course, their fellow travelers in the media have deftly excluded any reports that may expose the Global Warming “consensus.” “Indisputable.” said Al Gore, as he won the Nobel Prize and the Oscar for his efforts to spread the gospel. “Go Green,” said nearly every corporation and school classroom. Barack Obama says firmly, “The science is settled.”
To enforce their agenda of top down control over the world economy based on Climate Change, the one factor they had to oversee with an iron hand was the science and how it was reported. They were well aware that any crack in public confidence of that science could mark their doom.
The cracks began to show just over two years ago as Senator James Inhofe took over chairmanship of the Senate Environment Committee. As he held hearings on the issue of Climate Change, for the first time those scientists whose research didn’t agree with official global reports were heard. It caused a sensation. Suddenly, the claims of consensus rang hollow. There was disagreement. There was debate. Truth began to leak through the cracks.
Over the following year the debate intensified. Those skeptical of the official findings of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) questioned the methods in which the conclusions were made that man was causing global warming and that temperatures were rising at an alarming rate. The skeptical scientists asked for documentation to show how the conclusions were made. They were not answered.
Meanwhile, the Global Warming proponents ramped up their attacks against anyone who dared question their statements. Skeptics were labeled as heretics who dared defy the “globally-acceptable truth” of the high priests of global warming. Some proponents actually called for “Nuremberg-style trials” of the skeptics, accusing them of endangering the entire planet simply for asking questions.
The attacks became official threats when, in October, 2006, two U.S. Senators, Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) sent a letter to ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson. The letter derided Exxon for helping to fund global warming “deniers,” (a term the global warming proponents use frequently to try and draw a parallel with those who deny the Holocaust). Said the letter, “we are convinced that ExxonMobil’s longstanding support of a small cadre of global climate change skeptics, and those skeptics’ access to and influence on government policymakers, have made it increasingly difficult for the United States to demonstrate the moral clarity it needs across all facets of diplomacy.”
The letter went on to say, “ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years.” The reference to the tobacco industry was a not-so-veiled threat that Exxon could face the crush of government regulation that could destroy their ability to sell their product. But the intimidation didn’t stop there. The letter continued, “We recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign…” The only thing the Senators left out were the words, “Science be damned.”
The last time human kind was strapped into such a mental straight jacket was during the Inquisition of the Dark Ages. The period was an era of ignorance, superstition, social chaos and repression. Anyone caught questioning the doctrine or power of the church was labeled a heretic and found his or her way to the rack or into the middle of a fire while tied to a stake. The church, of course, was practicing its own brand of “globally-acceptable truth.”
Still, the scientists came out against the global warming hysteria in ever- increasing numbers. Harvard scholar and climate scientist Willie Soon put it best saying “It’s the Sun, stupid.”
Dr. Mark Campbell, professor of chemistry at the U.S. Navel Academy in Annapolis recently wrote, “The sky is not burning, and to claim that it is amounts to journalistic malpractice.”
Said U.S. Government atmospheric scientist Stanley B, Goldenberg, “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.”
In the past year, more than 700 scientists from around the world have expressed their doubts. That’s 12 times the number of UN IPCC global warming alarmists.
Top that with the fact that more than 34,000 American scientists have signed a petition saying there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing disruption of the Earth’s climate.
To generally summarize the findings of those scientists who refuse to just go along with the Climate Change party line, their investigative research shows any warming actually stopped in 1999. And, in fact, they say the brief warming period we experienced in the past decade was completely natural, caused in part by storms on the sun, not CO2 emissions from SUVs. The sun storms have ended, say scientists, and now a cooling period has begun.
However, in spite of the growing evidence showing that the earth is not heating up, CO2 is not a pollutant, and man has not destroyed the earth, the drive to enforce draconian legislation has moved forward like an unstoppable express train. Cap and Trade passed the House of Representatives last fall and stands ready for approval any time in the Senate. The “Warm Mongers” have a gala event planned in Copenhagen where they intend to use climate change as an excuse to enforce global government. Local communities are enforcing legislation under Sustainable Development to control water use, land use, community development, even population control – again, all under the excuse of climate change; as the “go green” mantra grows ever more shrill in the complying media and in corporate advertising.
Unstoppable? Well, not so fast. Something interesting has happened to bring a real downer to the Climate Change party. It seems an adventurous hacker found his way into some very private e-mails – ten years worth of documents and correspondence – and suddenly things have changed.
The e-mails were in the files of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. And their importance to the Climate Change effort cannot be denied. The Unit’s director is Professor Phillip Jones, who is in charge of two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. The CRU has direct links to the Hadely Centre, part of Great Britain’s Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors ( the scientists and their reports chosen for the final IPCC documents that affect climate change treaties and policy).
Professor Jones’ global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely. The predictions in the CRU reports have steadily predicted that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Professor Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting the picture of world temperatures conveyed in Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which ten years ago turned climate science upside down by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history. It was that graph that started the stampede toward global warming hysteria.
So the correspondence to and from Professor Jones and his CRU is a window into the real thinking of the Climate Change community. That’s why the revelations from those e-mails have caused such a firestorm in the scientific and political community.
Just a few of the exposed e-mails reveal efforts to hide the fact that research was not supporting the global warming claims. Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote to Professor Jones, “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is as travesty that we can’t.” Professor Jones wrote that he had used a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a chart detailing recent global temperatures.
The correspondence clearly shows a pattern of intimidation to editors of scientific journals if they did not toe the line and keep out dissenting “skeptic” findings. In a particularly damning e-mail exchange from 2003, Michael Mann was alarmed when his “Hockey Stick” graph was discredited by research from another scientist. In the cited e-mail exchange, Mann and Jones discuss a scheme for getting rid of Hans Von Storch, the editor of the journal Climate Research for publishing the contrary research of distinguished fellow scientists.
Some of the e-mails appear to confirm concerns that Jones, Mann and others have destroyed data that could expose their fraudulent research methods. One e-mails shows Jones suggesting to Mann that he delete certain e-mails that apparently dealt with the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007. He also suggests that one of their colleagues delete related materials. Jones refused to comply with a Freedom of Information request by saying in an e-mail, “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send (it) to anyone,” and “We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”
Those raw documents show a pattern of deception, intimidation and fraud. In the words of respected scientist and skeptic Fred Singer, “The Climategate disclosures …, consisting of some thousands of e-mails between a small group of British and U.S. climate scientists, demonstrate that global warming is man-made after all – created by this small group of zealous scientists. They have used flawed data, phony statistics, and various tricks. They have covered up any contrary evidence and refused to open their work to the scrutiny of independent scholars. By keeping out intruders, by reviewing their own papers, by capturing scientific journals and intimidating editors, they have tried to suppress any dissent.”
In the short time since the disclosure of the documents, the sky has fallen in on the once seemingly invincible Climate Change juggernaut, prompting climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels to exclaim, “This is not a smoking gun, it’s a mushroom cloud.”
As I have been reporting for more than fifteen years, Global Warming and Climate Change have never been about protecting the environment. It is the excuse used to subvert free markets, industry, private property ownership, local development and our standard of living into a nightmare of control and regulation. It has been a scheme from the beginning to impose global government.
In the name of environmental protection and a legitimate concern over the survival of the planet, Americans and others around the world have voluntarily surrendered their freedoms because they were told it was necessary to survive. They would never have given up those freedoms simply to promote an ideology like Marxism. Global Warming was invented to cover the real intent.
Now, the truth has been exposed in gory detail, like a horrible crash with entrails spilled across the road way. People are shocked and angry as the magnitude of the betrayal comes into focus. Recent polls now show 59% of the American people say they fully believe scientists “falsified research data to support their own beliefs about global warming.”
The perpetrators like Phillip Jones and Michael Mann and others are trying to downplay the disastrous revelations of the e-mails, saying they were stolen. That fact does not change their content. The White House says the revelations make no difference. Obama intends to move forward with Climate Change legislation anyway. They continue to keep up the party line that “everyone agrees” that Global Warming is a real threat, caused by humans.
These, of course, are efforts to maintain a unified front to save what once appeared to be inevitable. But the lawsuits for more information have already started against agencies like NASA, were researcher Christopher Horner believes he will find more evidence similar to the Jones scandal. The scandal will grow, revealing to the world the greatest deception in the history of governance.
The Copenhagen Conference is already in disarray, as some of the head rats prepare to abandon ship. Most notably, Al Gore almost immediately announced plans to cancel a lecture on Global Warming he was to give at the Copenhagen gathering. The news media, which has been the best friend of the scam and the worst enemy of free and independent news, now shows signs of scuttling their former partners in crime as they seek to rat them out in sensational stories about the developing scandal.
For the average American, now is the time to take action against these scoundrels who sought to enslave you. The leaders who most deserve your wrath at the polls are Barbara Boxer and Henry Waxman, who are determined to pass Cap and Trade, no matter what. In fact, Boxer’s reaction to Climategate is not to express outrage that Warm Mongers were using her to enforce their scheme to rob taxpayers out of trillions of dollars for bogus climate change regulations. Of course not. Boxer wants to hold hearings to look into the “illegal actions” that were taken in obtaining the e-mails! She shouted with grand indignity: “That is a crime!”
And of course there are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who are determined to help them do it. Their continued pursuit of “Climate Change” rules and regulations will show beyond doubt that their true agenda has nothing to do with helping the environment – but everything to do with granting government more and more power to enforce their will.
Don’t leave out Barack Obama, who told the September economic summit in Pittsburg, “Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent droughts and crop failures breed hunger and conflict already thrives. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees…the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.” Every word of this fear mongering is a lie and Barack Obama remains fully prepared to enforce global policy in its name that will destroy your freedom and way of life.
Finally, now is the time to demand that state and local government officials roll back the policies of Sustainable Development and run the international organizations like ICLEI out of town. Controls on water, air, local development, curtailment of industry, regulations on what property owners can do with their own land, taxes on energy use, and much more have been put in place under the fear mongering of carbon emissions and global warming. The facts now reveal that all of this was a lie. That makes laws created in its name illegitimate and therefore void. Vote out any city council members of county commissioners who refuse to do it.
It is astonishing that the mighty force of Climate Change has fallen so hard – so fast. But it is a gift we must not waste. Now is the time for all lovers of freedom to rise up, throw the scoundrels out, throw off our “climate chains of tyranny” and take back our American freedoms.
Tom DeWeese is the President of the American Policy Center and the Editor of The DeWeese Report. TThe DeWeese Report is now available online, for more information click here.
- Items of Interest -
December 2, 2009
By Tom DeWeese
The Obama Phone
The nation is collapsing under the federal deficit and Washington can’t find a dime to cut from the budget. Here’s an idea. Stop the Obama phone. What’s the Obama phone, you ask? Well then, that tells me something important about you – you aren’t on welfare – you are just a stupid tax payer. Because everybody on the dole knows about the Obama phone.
It’s a government program called “Lifeline Benefits” that provides free telephone service to “income-eligible consumers.” Don’t you actually have to buy something to be a “consumer?” Apparently not in the era of “Change.”
So, in short, through this taxpayer-paid boondoggle, welfare recipients get; (1) a FREE new phone; (2) approximately 70 FREE minutes EVERY MONTH. The website states, “you will receive free cellular service, a free SafeLink Wireless cell phone and the assurance that you will get no bills and no contracts EVER!”
I wonder how many drug deals are being made over the Obama phones? Oh, to ask such a question would be profiling – and that would be wrong.
To see if you qualify for your very own Obama phone, (as a tax payer you actually paid for it) just go to the website www.safelinkwireless.com/enrollmentpublic/homes.aspx.
Don’t hold your breath until your new free phone arrives. Taxpayers just pay, silly.
Here’s something else you paid for….
But you will never get to use it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s shiny new jet. Yep, it’s a USAF C-32 Boeing 757 – just for Madam Speaker. She uses it to commute back and forth between Capitol Hill and her home in California.
She had a small C-20 jet, but was angered because that had to stop to be refueled, so she ordered a big 200-seat C-32. Nancy flies back and forth to California every week and she is only on the job about three days a week.
It costs taxpayers about $60,000 for fuel and crew – one way. But we have to bring her back so double that every week. That comes to $480,000 every month – and$5,760.000 every year. That’s just for her commute. If she decides to take a junket somewhere the price skyrockets ever higher.
Keep in mind, when Nancy is back in DC – working for us – she is busy carving out legislation to force you and me to “reduce our carbon footprint” with Cap and Trade legislation that will destroy our standard of living. Make our homes cold with government-controlled thermostats and small cars the family won’t fit into. And she does it all because she “has compassion for the working men and women in this nation.”
One more…. Clunker Math
This past Fall, turning in our clunkers for cash was all the rage. Obama even took credit for “stimulating” the auto industry back to health. Well, here’s the real financial result of the program.
If you traded in a clunker worth $3500, you get $4500 off the purchase of a new car, for an apparent “savings” of $1000. However, here’s a little known secret I bet the auto dealer didn’t mention – you have to pay taxes on the $4500 as income. If you are in the 30% tax bracket you will pay $1350 on that $4500. So, rather than save $1000, you actually pay an extra $350 to the feds.
In addition, now you probably have a car payment that will cost you for the next 4 – 5 years. But it gets even better. It appears than many of the car dealers actually raised the prices of the cars. Just before the Cash for Clunkers program began, LA Ford dealers were selling Ford Focus for about $12,500. During the program they stopped discounting them, instead selling for the list price of $15,500. Other dealers, from Chevy to Toyota did the same.
So here is the finally tally:
You traded a car worth: $3500
You got a discount of: $4500
——–
Net so far $1000
But you pay taxes: $1350
——–
Net so far: -$ 350
And you paid $3000 – more than the car was selling for a month earlier
——–
Net -$3350
There is also sales tax and interest on the car for the next five years.
Obama and crew convinced consumers that they were getting $4500 of government money. In reality you were giving away your own car and paying an additional $3350 for the privilege.
Now – on to FREE health care.
Tom DeWeese is the President of the American Policy Center and the Editor of The DeWeese Report. TThe DeWeese Report is now available online, for more information click here.
