Posted on 05/24/2007 6:09:59 PM PDT by neverdem
Yesterday we noted that the lovely and talented John Edwards, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, had repudiated the "global war on terror," disparaging the entire enterprise as "a slogan designed only for politics" and "a bumper sticker, not a plan."
But in 2004, when Edwards was the sunny No. 2 of Kedwards, he sang quite a different tune, as Greg Sargent of TPMCafe.com notes:
On CNN on October 21, 2004, he said that stopping terrorists before they harm us is "by far the most effective way to win this war on terrorism." A few days earlier he said that Bush's Iraq invasion had turned "the focus away from the war on terror." There are other examples from that year and before.
Indeed, in the vice presidential debate of Oct. 5, 2004, Edwards offered this complaint about the Bush administration:
When we had Osama bin Laden cornered, they left the job to the Afghan warlords. They then diverted their attention from the very people who attacked us, who were at the center of the war on terror, and so Osama bin Laden is still at large.
Now it turns out that bin Laden & Co. are at the center of nothing more than a "bumper sticker," which rather diminishes this force of this argument.
So what caused such a drastic change in Edwards's views? Sargent quotes "an Edwards campaign adviser," left unnamed, who emailed this explanation:
John Edwards has seen the Bush administration use the phrase to justify everything they do. So although he believes that there are terrorists and terrorism, the phrase itself has become a political tool the right uses to justify whatever they want to do--like Guantanamo, like Abu Ghraib, like warrentless [sic] wiretapping of Americans here at home.
Has...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Tonight, as soon as the standoff on war funding ended. Pace and Gates quoted about planning for scaling back combat role and reducing the number of troops in Iraq to support role. I was pretty sure it was a constitutional fight for the president and a big show for Dems, as Maliki was saying that Iraqis would be ready to take over in October.
the lovely and talented John Edwards
Snort...
You know I have forgotten what was John’s talent in the Miss America pagent?
Not sure, but did you know that kerry served in Vietnam?
"We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, perhaps after a meteorite struck.
"Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct," he said.
"The cause: human activities."
A "Red List" of endangered species, however, lists only 784 species driven to extinction since 1500--ranging from the dodo bird of Mauritius to the golden toad of Costa Rica.
Craig Hilton-Taylor, manager of the list compiled by the World Conservation Union grouping 83 governments as well as scientists and environmental organizations, said the hugely varying figures might both be right, in their way.
"The U.N. figures are based on loss of habitats, estimates of how many species lived there and so will have been lost," he told Reuters. "Ours are more empirical--those species we knew were there but cannot find."
The U.N. estimate has a pretty wide margin for error, but let's take three species an hour, which amounts to 26,298 species a year, as a middling estimate. The U.N. is claiming that 33.5 times as many species go extinct every year as the WCU says have gone extinct in the past 507 years.
Or, to put it another way, the U.N. estimates three species an hour, or 26,298 a year, go extinct. The WCU estimate amounts to 0.00018 species an hour or 1.54 species a year. The difference is four orders of magnitude!
And you have to love the way Hilton-Taylor damns the U.N. with faint praise. "Ours are more empirical"--in other words, ours are based on fact, whereas the U.N. just makes stuff up.
So how does Reuters report this? Under the headline "U.N. Urges World to Slow Extinctions: 3 Each Hour." The first paragraph:
Human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour and the world must do more to slow the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs by 2010, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Not until the ninth paragraph do we learn that the U.N.'s numbers are quite possibly bogus. That actually turns out to be a pretty good story, whereas "U.N. Issues Alarmist Report on Environment" is dog-bites-man if anything is. So not only are the Reutervillians allowing their political prejudices to show; they don't even have any news judgment.
Actually, this critique of the UN "species are all dying" portion of Taranto's article is just as interesting as the Edward's portion.
Four orders of magnitude difference in the figures, but "...both might be right, in their own way."... LOL ... I don't know why anybody believes these liberal maroons.
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