From the Met Office's mistakes to Gordon Brown's wind farms, the cost of 'green' policies is growing, warns Christopher Booker
Impeccable was the timing of that announcement that directors of the Met Office were last year given pay rises of up to 33 per cent, putting its £200,000-a-year chief executive into a higher pay bracket than the Prime Minister. As Britain shivered through Arctic cold and its heaviest snowfalls for decades, our global-warming-obsessed Government machine was caught out in all directions.
For a start, we saw Met Office spokesmen trying to explain why it had got its seasonal forecasts hopelessly wrong for three cold winters and three cool summers in a row. The current cold snap, we were told with the aid of the BBC – itself facing an inquiry into its relentless obsession with “global warming” – was just a “regional” phenomenon, due to “natural” factors. No attempt was made to explain why the same freezing weather is affecting much of the northern hemisphere (with 1,200 places in the US alone last week reporting record snow and low temperatures). And this is the body on which, through its Hadley Centre for Climate Change and the discredited Climatic Research Unit, the world’s politicians rely for weather forecasting 100 years ahead.
Then, as councils across Britain ran out of salt for frozen roads, we had the Transport Minister, Lord Adonis, admitting that we entered this cold spell with only six days’ supply of grit. No mention of the fact that the Highways Agency and councils had been advised that there was no need for them to stockpile any more – let alone that many councils now have more “climate change officials” than gritters. Read it all.
From PowerLine:
From NeoNeocon:The Obama administration's decision to treat Umar Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant is indefensible on the merits. It is also incredibly costly in terms of foregone intelligence. The administration's combined arrogance and stupidity would be laughable if their consequences weren't so serious.
Today's Telegraph carries Philip Sherwell's article quoting former Senator and 9/11 Commission member Slade Gorton on the issue. Speaking of Abdulmutallab, Gorton says:
"He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up," Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.
"I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal."
Why is the Obama administration treating Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant? It is an unbelievable fact that we have as yet no straightforward answer to this question. There is, in any event, no good answer to it. If we are at war with al Qaeda, as Obama himself asserted last week in the statement to which Gorton alludes, why are we treating Umar Abdulmutallab (not to mention Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) like John Gotti?
JOHN adds: Check out, too, Marc Thiessen's excellent piece which explains the unique value of intelligence gained from captured al Qaeda terrorists.
Are Obama’s lies politics as usual?
Most people now recognize that Obama has been lying about a lot of things. But it’s often said that’s just business as usual for politicians, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is being naive.
Blogger Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club, a writer with a keen mind and a graceful style, as well as more than his share of that rare commodity known as wisdom, has this to say on the subject:
An Election Promise is now almost synonymous with a Lie. Few voters believe that an election promise will actually be kept, but many vote according to what they are promised anyway…
From Just One Minute:
What Columbia And Harvard Man Could?
From a Mark Steyn headline:
Something we have been thinking here at our house now posted in an article from Bookworm:Posted by Tom Maguire
Well of course he can't - having elected a properly educated Columbia and Harvard man, we look to Obama for leadership on critical issues such as the proper distinction between "who" and "whom", not to mention the vital national security matter of ending sentences with prepositions. C'mon - this is the President who returned the Churchill bust, so we can hardly look to him for Churchillian leadership.
Now, if Obama could tell us with whom we are at war, that might be helpful. But can we handle the truth? Eric Holder seems to think we are at war with the Evil BushCo legacy.
Bookworm on Jan 10 2010
I’ve been harping for years now about the fact that Obama’s emotional connection isn’t to America, but to something else. I’ve thought it was to Leftism. Rabbi Spero makes the very good argument that Barack Hussein Obama’s emotional affiliation is to Islam. He doesn’t say that Obama is a religious Muslim. He just notes that Obama’s emotions, when not tied to Leftist causes, resonate with a desire to admire and, to America’s cost, protect Islam.
Great. Just what we need in our White House: a Lefty Islamophile.
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