Bye bye Frannie, Bye bye Freddie

Is a little reason actually coming from the administration?  This would indicate it may be.  Maybe some of the adults are giving advice nowadays.  The Washington Post has these articles.  Guess I should go check out what the New York Times is saying about it.

Obama report on Fannie, Freddie plan may boost mortgage rates
By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Brady Dennis

The Obama administration wants to raise fees for borrowers and require larger down payments for home loans as part of a long-term effort to restructure the nation's housing market. But it warned that these measures could boost mortgage rates and make it harder for home buyers to secure the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, a mainstay of American home buying for decades. 


In a long-awaited white paper, the administration said it intends to wind down the federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and curtail the Federal Housing Administration to help reduce the government's outsized role in mortgage funding.

The housing finance system, which has ensured that Americans can get home loans, came crashing down in the financial crisis, helping fuel millions of foreclosures and the recession.

Obama administration proposals to reduce federal role in housing market
By Dina ElBoghdady

The future of Fannie and Freddie
The White House is going to propose a range of options to reform Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the mortgage market, which could cause changes to the face of American housing.

The Obama administration is pressing to scale back the federal government's role in the mortgage market. On Friday, it presented Congress with several proposals that would raise the costs of federally backed loans, a move designed to help the private sector better compete with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. Here are some highlights from the administration's report:

FEES

-NOW: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac negotiate "guarantee fees" with lenders. Those fees are usually included in the interest rates paid by borrowers. When borrowers fall behind or default on their mortgages, Fannie and Freddie use these fees to pay their mortgage bond holders. As for the Federal Housing Administration, it charges borrowers an annual premium that is used to compensate lenders for loans gone bad.

- LATER: The administration proposes raising guarantee fees over the next several years, which would boost interest rates on loans backed by Fannie and Freddie. Starting April 18, the FHA will raise its annual premium by a quarter-percentage point. For the vast majority of loans, the premium will rise from 0.9 percent to 1.15 percent. That means that a borrower who takes out a $170,000 mortgage (the average FHA loan size) would pay an extra $34 a month.

There is much more explanation, read it here.

Here is the startling part:(Didn't they start this mess?)

It's all about Dodd-Frank
By Ezra Klein

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be wound down. The government will continue to use taxpayer money to make it cheaper and safer for Americans to take out mortgages on home purchases. The administration is offering a range of options for how that commitment will be structured in the future, as they don't want to commit to any one path only to see the Republicans tear them apart for it. Those, I think, are the headlines out of the Treasury Department's new report on the future of housing finance. But I'd add one more: The implementation of Dodd-Frank really, really matters.

More here.

This from a Federal Reserve Member:

Federal Reserve board member: U.S. investigation into mortgage servicing has found 'widespread weakness'
By Ariana Eunjung Cha

The preliminary results of a multi-agency federal review of the mortgage industry has found "widespread weaknesses" that impair the function of the housing market and hurt consumers, according to Federal Reserve board of governors member Sarah Bloom Raskin.

"We have reached the point where this sign of failure is hindering our economy's ability to rebound," Bloom Raskin said in remarks prepared for delivery to mortgage finance executives at a conference in Utah Friday evening.

Bloom Raskin said that she has seen "little to no evidence of improvement" until now despite the government scrutiny and that things remain similar to when the crisis began in 2007.

Bloom Raskin offered what she called her "initial thoughts on how to rebuild an important but currently dysfunctional sector of the housing market."


One of the major problems, she said, is that mortgage servicing operates on a "flawed business model that creates misaligned incentives."

For instance, she said servicers are paid on an annual fee basis by loan originators but that means that they are being paid too much when the loans are current but perhaps not enough when the loans are delinquent because there are additional costs associated with managing troubled loans.

"The current model also rests on the expectation that, in good times, servicers are using some of the residual income to build out systems and procedures to handle the pressures that come with worse times," she added. "Unfortunately, as we have seen, this has not happened."

Bloom Raskin also suggested that the pooling and servicing agreements that govern securitized mortgages should be more detailed about what a servicer can or cannot do: "They should explicitly allow for loan modifications and other non-foreclosure workout actions when they are determined to lead to a smaller loss to the investor than would a foreclosure."

Bloom Raskin called on "relevant private sector actors need to think beyond their bottom line and focus on how their firms' actions are or are not contributing to the economic recovery."

While Bloom Raskin said in her speech that she did not want to dwell on how the industry came to such a crisis and instead focus on solutions, she did take some time to issue a harsh reprimand to mortgage brokers, loan originators, loan securitizers, sub-prime lenders, Wall Street investors and ratings agencies whose "selfish free-for-all," she said, "ultimately led to an economic slide the effects of which are still visible in the boarded-up houses and sheriffs' foreclosure notices posted all over America.

It's interesting to see there is some logical reasoning going on.  But nowhere have I see it said on the Washington Post that the government wishing to "spread the wealth" and create more homeowners caused the problem.  Somehow maybe they have gotten the message that people who cannot afford homes should not buy them.

Have you heard about Texas WatchDog? They are reporting on a $5.6 million federal stimulus contract halted in Abilene,

I check it about once a week.  This week has this story I want to share with you.

$5.6 million federal stimulus contract halted in Abilene, subpar work found statewide in Texas' weatherization program
By Mark Lisheron

State inspectors have found administrative, workmanship and accounting problems in Texas' $326 million federal stimulus program to weatherize homes. An Abilene program has been stopped.

AUSTIN -- State officials ordered Community Action Program Inc. of Abilene to stop work on a $5.6 million federal weatherization stimulus program after inspectors detailed mismanagement at the core of the organization.

And the stimulus screw-ups aren't just going on there. There are problems statewide.

In all, inspectors for the Department of Housing and Community Affairs found administrative, workmanship and accounting problems with seven community groups that have state contracts with the $326 million Weatherization Assistance Program in Texas, a review of monitoring reports obtained by Texas Watchdog shows.

The others are: Cameron and Willacy Counties Community Projects, Brownsville; Concho Valley Community Action Agency, San Angelo; Arlington Housing Authority; Economic Opportunities Advancement Corporation of Planning Region XI, Waco; Community Action Center of Victoria; Bee Community Action Agency, Beeville.

This also comes on the heels of problems in Houston with the state's second-largest recipient of weatherization stimulus cash: Click here to see the Texas Watchdog story on those widespread problems -- and the fallout.Click HERE (TEXAS WATCHDOG) to see the rest of this story.

We are back to the Gee, Who Knew posts, this time on utilities for the poor.

From the Houston Chronicle

Feds wasted millions in utilities program for poor
By KELLI KENNEDY
MIAMI — A federal program designed to help impoverished families heat and cool their homes wasted more than $100 million paying the electric bills of thousands of applicants who were dead, in prison or living in million-dollar mansions, according to a government investigation.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent $5 billion through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program in 2009, doling out money to states with little oversight of the program. Some states don't verify applicants' identifies or income. For example, the program helped pay the electric bill of a woman who lives in a $2 million home in a wealthy Chicago suburb and drives a Mercedes, according to the yet-to-be released report obtained by The Associated Press.
The Government Accountability Office studied the program after a 2007 investigation by Pennsylvania's state auditor found 429 applicants received more than $162,000 using the Social Security numbers of dead people.
The GAO investigated Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Virginia, which represented about one-third of the program's funding in 2009. The agency found improper payments in about 9 percent of households receiving benefits in those states, totaling $116 million.
The report comes after a dramatic increase in the size of the assistance checks as fuel oil costs soared in 2008 and 2009.

Read more here.  Are you disgusted by this, I am.  I know there are many non-government programs that help people in need.  I would bet they do not have this rate of fraud.

Goldman's chief executive visited the White House at least four times.

via Drudge Report from McClatchy News:
Goldman's White House connections raise eyebrows
by Greg Gordon
While Goldman Sachs' lawyers negotiated with the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially explosive civil fraud charges, Goldman's chief executive visited the White House at least four times.
White House logs show that Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein traveled to Washington for at least two events with President Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign received $994,795 in donations from Goldman's political action committee, its employees and their relatives. He also met twice with Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers.

Another of Those "Gee, who knew?" Moments - Part II

You just knew that some people will fall for anything if it is "politically correct for the environment"- this is from the Seattle Times via Lucianne.com

Phony products impress federal Energy Star program

by Clement Tan, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators who submitted phony products, such as a gasoline-powered alarm clock, to the government's energy-efficiency certification program found it easy to obtain approval and say the program is "vulnerable to fraud and abuse."

Investigators with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said they obtained Energy Star approval for 15 of 20 fictitious products they submitted for certification with fake energy-savings claims. Two were rejected and three did not receive a response.

Two of the certified products received purchase requests by real companies because four bogus firms, developed for the purpose of the investigation, were listed as Energy List partners.

Among the phony products that obtained Energy Star certification was a "room air cleaner" that, in a picture prominently displayed on the Web site of a bogus company, showed an electric space heater with a feather duster and strips of fly paper attached to it.

"Certification controls were ineffective primarily because Energy Star does not verify energy-savings data reported by manufacturers," investigators said in a GAO report released Fridayabuse."

Read the rest here.

Only Nancy Pelosi

Could use the words great pride and humility in the same sentence while claiming them for herself and the Democrats. Hypocrisy, not democracy, is what we have seen tonight.

AGW, Enviromentalism, it's all about the money

From Watts Up With that:
North and Booker on Amazongate: A billion dollar cash cow

Dr. Richard North of the EU Referendum sends word of this new revelation. North and Christopher Booker were the first to point out the money trail with Pachauri. Now the have followed the money on IPCC’s “Amazongate” all the way to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Here’s an excerpt from both.

Appearing in the Booker column is an account of how the “conservation” group WWF hopes to turn Amazonian trees into billions of dollars, all in the name of saving the planet. The background briefing on which Booker relied is posted below, detailing how the rainforests are to become a monstrous cash-making machine.

The Amazon – a “green gold-rush”

The WWF and other green campaign groups talking up the destruction of the Amazon rainforests are among those who stand to make billions of dollars from the scare. This “green gold-rush” involves taking control of huge tracts of rainforest supposedly to stop them being chopped down, and selling carbon credits gained from carbon dioxide emissions they claim will be “saved”.

Backed by a $30 million grant from the World Bank, the WWF has already partnered in a pilot scheme to manage 20 million acres in Brazil. If their plans get the go-ahead in Mexico at the end of the year, the forests will be worth over $60 billion in “carbon credits”, paid for by consumers in “rich” countries through their electricity bills and in increased prices for goods and services.

The prospect of a billion-dollar windfall explains the sharp reaction to the “Amazongate” scandal, in which the IPCC falsely claimed that up to 40 percent of the rainforest could be at risk from even a slight drop in rainfall.

Here, the IPCC was caught out again making unsubstantiated claims based on a WWF report. But unlike the “Glaciergate” affair where its claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was conceded to be an “error”, the IPCC stood firm on its Amazon claim, stating that the assertion was “correct”. What makes the difference is that there is no serious money locked into melting glaciers. Amazonian trees, however, are potentially worth billions.

In standing its ground, the IPCC was strongly supported by the WWF, and by Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist from the US Woods Hole Research Centre. Relying on an assiduously fostered reputation as a leading expert on the effects of climate change in the Amazon rainforests, Nepstad – who works closely with the WWF – posted on the Centre’s website a personal statement endorsing “the correctness of the IPCC’s statement”. Bizarrely, his own research failed in any way to substantiate the claim.

Read the rest of this entry at the EU Referendum here

Also see the Booker column in the Telegraph

One Way to Save Money on Health Care

From the Houston Chronicle:
Three plead guilty in Houston Medicare fraud case
by Mike Glenn

The owner and two employees of a Houston medical supply company pleaded guilty in federal court today for bilking the government out of almost $1 million in fraudulent claims.

Bassey Monday Idiong, 30, Linda Eteimo Ere Kendabie, 27, and Modupe Babanumi, 42, face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, authorities said.

Idiong was the owner of B.I. Medical Supply while Kendabie was an administrative assistant and Babanumi recruited patients for the company, said officials with the U.S. Justice Department.

According to federal authorities, the defendants billed Medicare $4,000 each for a collection of braces and other devices they referred to as “arthritis kits.” However, their patients received less-expensive products that were not medically necessary. In one case, a patient with only one leg received a kit that had two knee braces, authorities said.

The company submitted about $846,000 in fraudulent claims to Medicare, officials said.

I can't say much more about this, except to multiply this in your mind, by say ten, and you are still probably way under the total amount of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.  What do you think will happen with total healthcare?
 Read more here.

ACORN'S New face

Big Government has a good article on ACORN's plans to put a new name on the same ole, same old.
ACORN Official: Gangster Group Will Be Bankrupt Soon But Fake Spinoff Groups Will Carry On The Corruption
by Matthew Vadum
The ACORN crime syndicate is not going away anytime soon, but it’s going to look different.

ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up in the next week to carry on ACORN’s business, a leaked email from ACORN’s online director suggests.
“The truth is that it is hard for us to forsee [sic] any scenario where ACORN continues beyond the end of 2010 and some of us think it might not last that long,” writes Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, in an apparently authentic Feb. 22 email.
“Last one to leave turn out the lights and wipe the server,” he writes at the end of the message.

In the email Henderson-James explains the subterfuge ACORN will use to lead Americans to believe ACORN is breaking apart.
“It is definitely true that over the next week or so we should see a dozen or more organizations launched on the state level by staff who used to work for ACORN and leaders who developed their skills as ACORN members. These are not just simple name changes, but reimaginings of how best to organize low and moderate income constitiuencies [sic] without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.”
It is a “tactically smart…reaction to the global situation that helps the work of building power for poor people to continue,” writes Henderson-James, an ACORN employee since 1997.
Read it all here.

Call it by its real name, a federal crime

The American Spectator is not afraid to report on this and call it by its name. And they have the facts.
White House Accused of Federal Crime in Specter, Bennet Races
By Jeffrey Lord

"Whoever solicits or receives … any….thing of value, in consideration of the promise of support or use of influence in obtaining for any person any appointive office or place under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both." -- 18 USC Sec. 211 -- Bribery, Graft and Conflicts of Interest: Acceptance or solicitation to obtain appointive public office.

"In the face of a White House denial, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak stuck to his story yesterday that the Obama administration offered him a "high-ranking" government post if he would not run against U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary."

-- Philadelphia Inquirer, February 19, 2010

D.C. job alleged as attempt to deter Romanoff"

--Denver Post

September 27, 2009

A bombshell has just exploded in the 2010 elections.

For the second time in five months, the Obama White House is being accused -- by Democrats -- of offering high ranking government jobs in return for political favors. What no one is reporting is that this is a violation of federal law that can lead to prison time, a fine or both, according to Title 18, Chapter 11, Section 211 of the United States Code.

The jobs in question? Secretary of the Navy and a position within the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The favor requested in return? Withdrawal from Senate challenges to two sitting United States Senators, both Democrats supported by President Obama. The Senators are Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Michael Bennet in Colorado.

Much more at the American Spectator, go read it all.

Links on the Climate Gate Scam

It is proving more and more scandalous. When I think of the money we could have saved that has been spent on the religion of global warming AKA climate change and as well as the greenie religion that grew out of it, I am afraid my blood pressure shoots up into real global alert territory.

Here are just todays headlines and links:

World may not be warming, say scientists

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

The Greening Of Africa Destroys IPCC Credibility

Many meteorologists break with science of global warming

Climategate's Phil Jones Confesses to Climate Fraud

And for all the latest from the scientist check out Watts Up With That.

The Stolen Valour act

Via Yahoo News

Federal law barring lies about medals is tested

By Dan Elliott, Associated Press Writer

DENVER – The federal courts are wrestling with a question of both liberty and patriotism: Does the First Amendment right to free speech protect people who lie about being war heroes?

At issue is a three-year-old federal law called the Stolen Valor Act that makes it a crime punishable by up to a year in jail to falsely claim to have received a medal from the U.S. military. It is a crime even if the liar makes no effort to profit from his stolen glory.

Attorneys in Colorado and California are challenging the law on behalf of two men charged, saying the First Amendment protects almost all speech that doesn't hurt someone else. Neither man has been accused by prosecutors of seeking financial gain for himself.....

This looks pretty innocous so far but it was first written after some were using it for financial gain. Further in the article we find:

In one case, a man posing as a Marine war hero was accused of using his hero status to receive discount airline tickets and a free place to stay near Phoenix....

.....One of the men challenging the law is Xavier Alvarez of Pomona, Calif. He had just been elected to a water district board in 2007 when he said at a public meeting that he was a retired Marine who received the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration.

Again, this was for personal gain, political power. Another is a little more iffy, but still not justified, it was fraud:

The other person challenging the law is Rick Glen Strandlof, who claimed he was an ex-Marine wounded in Iraq and received the Purple Heart and Silver Star. He founded an organization in Colorado Springs that helped homeless veterans.

A veteran who is for the law says:

Army veteran Pete Lemon of Colorado Springs, who received the Medal of Honor for turning back an enemy assault and rescuing wounded comrades in Vietnam while injured himself, supports the law, saying that pretending to have a medal can bring undeserved rewards.

"It gives you the power to entice somebody into marriage," he said. "It could give you the power to be able to join an organization, get special treatment with regards to getting tickets to a football game, getting license plates, getting preferential treatment in a job situation."

Doug Sterner, a military historian, said the law embodies the wishes of the nation's first commander in chief, George Washington. Sterner noted that Washington created the Purple Heart, the nation's first military decoration, and wrote:

"Should any who are not entitled to these honors have the insolence to assume the badges of them, they shall be severely punished."

"I think that speaks to the intent of the framers," Sterner said, "that George Washington saw this kind of lie outside the scope of this freedom-of-speech issue."

I am not a lawyer but even if the law is not valid in its conception, the issue of fraud is valid. Read the parts I left out here.

Katrina Scandals are Still Surfacing

On a weekend in which Ray Nagin is replaced by a Democratic party machine candidate named Landrieu, the New York Post has this story.

Soaked by pols' Katrina charity

By Melissa Klein and Isabel Vincent

It's the Big Sleazy.

Devastated Hurricane Katrina survivors from New Orleans were left high and dry by a charity set up to help them by state Sen. Malcolm Smith and Rep. Gregory Meeks of Queens.

Only $1,392 of at least $31,000 raised to help Katrina families was paid, tax records show, and just about everybody involved with the charity -- including the two Democratic pols -- claim ignorance as to where the rest of the money went.

Meeks said in a statement that "the funds were utilized to help sustain displaced evacuees," but refused to provide further detail. He said money was administered by an unidentified director and that "a committee of community representatives functioned as advisers to the fund."

But three of those advisers said they had no idea whether cash was given out by the group, New Yorkers Organized to Assist Hurricane Families, or NOAH-F.

Read more here.

More on Climategate - UN Panel Losing Credibility

The wheels seem to be coming off the bus on a lot of the Global Warming IPCC claims
From the Times Online:

Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

by Johnathon Leake

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.

Read the rest including these links for background.

* The IPCC's Synthesis Report (See section 3.3.2)
* International Institute for Sustainable Development - report on how climate change might affect crop yields
* Climate change speech by Ban Ki-Moon, UN secretary-general

A Science Reporter's Mea Culpa

From the Spectator (UK) comes a mea culpa from a longtime global warming believing science reporter:
The global warming guerrillas
by Matt Ridley
Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus

Of course, reporters have been going native for decades. The difference is that they cannot now get away with it. When acid rain was all the rage in the 1980s, I was a science editor and I relayed all sorts of cataclysmic predictions from scientists and greens about its effect on forests. (Stern magazine said in 1984 that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying and that experts believed all — all! — its conifers would be gone by 1990.) Today, we know that these predictions were wildly wrong and that far from dying out, forests in Germany, Sweden and North America actually thrived during that decade. I should have been more sceptical.

Yet, this time round, despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference?

In a word, the internet. The Climate Consensus may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to cameras and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm. The main blog used by the Consensus, realclimate.org, exemplifies this problem, because it was set up by a PR company and is run by an employee of Nasa, who ties himself in knots trying to show that he does the blog in his spare time. It is also characterised by a tone of weary condescension and censoring of dissent that you do not find on most sceptic sites

This is a long article with good reporting. It does have a fault in not linking some of the blogs and articles to which it  refers. I would like to read some of those articles.  Read all of this article here.

Scientific Integrity is a Must

Two years ago I disagreed with a government scientist who wrote an article concluding overfishing had depleted a specific species of fish in a specific bay. (He used computer modeling as the basis for his conclusion.) I emailed and asked for the 30 years of fish population data he cited. 30 years of several different species for a dozen different bays. It was an enormous amount of data, and enormously valuable. He promptly sent it to me.

I looked at the data, graphed much of it to explore my own thoughts on the decline in the population, compared it to other populations in similar bays (where there was no decline) and I verified the accuracy of the graphs in his article. And guess what, I found nothing wrong with the data or his presentation of the data.

I still didn't agree with his conclusion -- based on the computer modeling's inconsistency with other trends going on in other, adjacent bays. But I could clearly see that he was presenting the data accurately. And if I thought the data was made up, I had enough information to verify it further. (I had no reason to suspect this data's integrity.)

His willingness to share this data is what science is all about. Especially government-funded science. And this was gov't funded science.

On a side note, the fact that "we" paid for it is enough reason to share. Did you know any photo (or video) taken by NASA or its astronauts is available to any US citizen? All you have to do is pay for the cost of the duplication (the print). Incredible shots of earth taken from the moon, satellite photos of any part of the earth, pictures the space shuttle astronauts take of each other doing goofy things in zero gravity -- all of it is yours for the asking -- because your tax dollars paid for it. You do have to pay for the postage, too. And that's how it should be.

Temperature data taken by a US gov't agency should be readily available to the taxpayers. As well as any thing the gov't does related to those temperatures.

Much is being written about the stolen climate science emails. The real story is in the links within these articles -- links to the actual documents and actions by the people many of these stolen emails are about. People like me who disagreed. People who wrote to get the data (like I did in the previous case). But these people were told "no" -- for political reasons.

Hmmm. Good science?

All of this climate muck is a lot to read. That's one of the reasons it's been difficult to challenge global warming alarmists -- they hide behind the complexities of the science and calculations. It is very easy for them to bog down any discussion with the EXTREMELY complex way they have built layer upon layer of assumptions, deductions, calculations and theories. And piled this into computer models -- where you then have to read computer code to understand what is going on.

And the science itself -- radiation forcing and gases and pressure and solar activity and moisture and tree rings and ice cores and blah, blah, blah...

It's like a big recipe. But by the time you've gotten to the end, you've died of starvation.

Despite this, as we now know, when dedicated truth-seekers plodded on anyway to get the data, key scientists resorted to unethical (and possible illegal) means to keep the data hidden. And probably the truth. They are more interested in politics than scientific integrity.

These are sad days for science.

If you have the time (who does!?) you can read deeper by clicking on links within any of the climate articles listed in this blog.

Two good recent ones by Douglas J. Keenan, who wrote a paper formally alleging fraud in a temperature article published by a climate scientist. His filed a very formal claim of fraud with the universities in question. There was an investigation and a report -- and then a dead end. They wouldn't show him the report, but told him there was no fraud. When he filed a Freedom of Information request for the report, he was denied. But then, he found the report in the hacked emails. (Links below). And the report said there might be merit to his claim of fraud.

Political integrity is now a contradiction in terms. And I see that in Republicans as much as Democrats. We're like a corrupt 3rd-world nation, except it's hidden behind the pretense of "lobbying" and influence peddling and "the system". You pretty much have to be convicted of a felony first these days for a congressional ethics committee to even review your case.

Who do you think wrote the current healthcare bill? The Senate didn't... they just published it. Most of our Senators still haven't even read it...

Scientific intergrity is a must. And certainly now that so much science is political (environmental science).

We can draw the line here, we can and we must.

Always read deeper (the links to the actual emails, and people they are about). That's where the truth is. The scientific truth. The political truth. And the real truth.

Remember when there just used to be "the truth"?

--------------------------

Keenan's paper alleging fraud in temperature data collection.
http://www.informath.org/pubs/EnE07a.pdf

The chronology of Keena's actions, and the report on his accusations (that he was denied access to) which he found in the stolen emails -- and it (the report) shows his claim had credibility.
http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620.htm

Climategate Update

An Aptly named blog The Strata Sphere has some important updates on the scandal.
Climategate Forces UK Review Of Warming Data & Results
by AJ Strata

Climategate is not going away. As I noted in my previous post this is not about emails where so called scientists suborning the peer-review process and scientific method while colluding to side step legal freedom of information requests. No, the problems discovered in Climategate are in the code and data and uncertainties.

When professionals who are versed in science, engineering and math, and the quality requirements normally imposed upon us in our careers (mine being space and defense systems), review the crap that is the basis for global warming hysteria we all see the problem crystal clear. The alarmists were hiding their data and processes for good reason.

I am confident in this because of what just happened in Europe. Not only did the cocky IPCC chair have to come out and do a 180° (not C there slick) political U-turn and support an investigation. The UK Met Office has decided to redo all the global warming assessments, computations, etc. since the CRU leak exposed the current conclusions to be based on shoddy work.

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.…

The Met Office’s published data showing a warming trend draws heavily on CRU analysis. CRU supplied all the land temperature data to the Met Office, which added this to its own analysis of sea temperature data.

Since the stolen e-mails were published, the chief executive of the Met Office has written to national meteorological offices in 188 countries asking their permission to release the raw data that they collected from their weather stations.

The Met Office is confident that its analysis will eventually be shown to be correct. However, it says it wants to create a new and fully open method of analysing temperature data.

You don’t invest 3 years rechecking into a supposed emergency unless the picture is really that bad. It is really that bad.

Since the ‘raw’ land sensor data shows the Earth today is very similar to the 1930’s and 1940’s, and since there really was an MWP shown in hundreds of sites in many, many peer reviewed papers I suspect the review is going to put the final nail in the AGW scam.