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Polar bear population counts are estimates only, derived from the most “rudimentary” of scientific knowledge and made up largely to meet the expectations of the public, researchers said in an email to a science blogger. Dag Vongraven, chairman of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Polar Bear Specialist Group, sent an email to Polar Bear Science blogger Susan Crockford to clarify that a report that’s about to go public to give updates on the animal’s worldwide population level contains estimates, not hard facts. “As part of past status reports, the PBSG has traditionally estimated a range for the total...

link only: http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/letters/2014/05/26/bernie-sanders-blocked-va-accountability-act/9614547/

Liberals wanted a national enrollment system under Obamacare. They might just get it. Right now, 36 states rely on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, to enroll people in health coverage. At least two more states are opting in next year, with a few others likely to follow. Only two states are trying to get out. That’s precisely the opposite of the Affordable Care Act’s original intent: 50 exchanges run by 50 states. The federal option was supposed to be a limited and temporary fallback. But a shift to a bigger, more permanent Washington-controlled system is instead underway — without preparation, funding...

Imagine the press letting a Republican or conservative try to get away with trying to avoid uncondtionally calling something as infuriating and outrageous as the Veterans Administration waiting list scandal a real scandal. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did that on Monday (HT Patterico and Real Clear Politics) in an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein, who naturally let it slide right on by:

North Carolina Democratic Congressional candidate Clay Aiken declined to say whether Secretary of the Veterans Administration Eric Shinseki should resign Tuesday on NBC.The former American Idol runner-up offered a somewhat bizarre rationale, telling the Today Show because he was not in the publicly broadcasted Senate hearing and “hasn’t paid attention to those details” he could not say whether Shinseki should go.“I think we have a lot of people who are making decisions without being in the room,” he said. “I’m not going to be one of those folks who wasn’t in the hearing and hasn’t paid attention to those details...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

<p>The White House says there is a surge in traffic to HealthCare.gov (which briefly went down) amid today’s deadline to sign up for ObamaCare. Health and Human Services reports that more than six million people have signed up as of March 27 and the government expects to reach its original goal of seven million enrollees by the end of today.</p>

The Census Bureau’s Philadelphia office wasn’t just corrupting the nation’s unemployment rate by fabricating data. It was also filing false information about inflation in this country. Just how large an effect this fraud was having on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — and consequently the cost of living adjustments for Social Security recipients and others — is not yet known.

This week, a report from the Congressional Budget Office acknowledged that ObamaCare would reduce full-time employment by 2.5 million over the next ten years. And that is on top of news that 92 million Americans who could be working are not. What a devastating assessment for the unemployed or underemployed, particular millenials seeking to transition from internships and part-time jobs to career-building full-time jobs. Yet the predictable spin from the White House and major media outlets is that this is good news, liberating workers from the chains of employment. To quote President Obama, from the 2008 campaign, "You can put...

As ugly as this was, it is worse than it seems. Briffa’s trees did match Hansen, 1981. The next graph overlays Briffa on Hansen, 1981 northern latitude temperatures. The match was almost perfect.

While the planet's surface temperatures over the past century have risen to unprecedented levels, records have shown a slowdown in the pace of warming over the past 15 years. Scientists have proposed several theories of natural climate variability and heat redistribution that may have contributed to the slowdown to varying degrees. A new study, however, suggests that the slowdown itself may be a mirage — the result of temperature records that have considerably underestimated the pace of warming since 1997. The global coverage of temperature measurements is incomplete, and that can cause biases in temperature records — research datasets deal...

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated. And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Mr. Obama took ownership and said he would fix the cancellation problem – giving the Democrats some cover. As for me, I don’t doubt for a moment that the nation will survive if some Democrats lose in 2014 because they worked to fix the law. Anyone remember when some politicians were courageous? “And, to the Republicans, the Constitution mandates Congress to make policy, not gloat and mock. Obamacare is after all a program originated under Republican former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney that is being implemented by an African-American president that they love to hate. I will wait to see if...

According to the BLS household survey, part-time jobs fell 594,000 in September while full-time workers were up 691,000. This was one hopeful nugget in an otherwise lackluster jobs report. Workers are considered to be "part time" if they work under 35 hours a week. Earlier this summer, when part-time numbers looked like they might be on the rise, some speculated that the shift was due to the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act.

Say what you will about us millennials—we’re a wilting bouquet of narcissistic, socialistic, overeducated, underemployed, tatted-up hipsters who still live at home—but, from this day forward, don’t you dare say we’re climate change deniers. A strong majority (66 percent!) of young independent voters, ages 18 to 34, accept as dogma that man and his dirty deeds are causing, and will continue to cause, climate change—this according to a study conducted by a bipartisan pair of political strategy groups for the League of Conservation Voters.

Global warming alarmists have been caught doctoring the results of a widely cited paper asserting there is a 97 percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming. After taking a closer look at the paper, investigative journalists report the authors’ claims of a 97 percent consensus relied on them misclassifying the papers of some of the world’s most prominent global warming skeptics. At the same time, the authors deliberately presented a meaningless survey question that allowed them to twist the responses to fit their own preconceived global warming alarmism. Misleading Question Global warming alarmist John Cook, founder of the misleadingly named...

A year ago Feb. 26, neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and within a month every sentient person on the planet knew “Trayvon” by name. What they did not know was Martin’s background. Sanford Police Department (SPD) investigator Chris Serino, for instance, said publicly of Martin, “This child has no criminal record whatsoever.” He called Martin “a good kid, a mild-mannered kid.” The media almost universally sustained this tragically false narrative. Martin had the seeming good fortune of attending school in the Miami-Dade School District, the fourth-largest district in the country and...

More gun laws = fewer deaths, 50-state study says By By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer – 14 hours ago CHICAGO (AP) — States with the most gun control laws have the fewest gun-related deaths, according to a study that suggests sheer quantity of measures might make a difference. But the research leaves many questions unanswered and won't settle the debate over how policymakers should respond to recent high-profile acts of gun violence. In the dozen or so states with the most gun control-related laws, far fewer people were shot to death or killed themselves with guns than in the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans seeking unemployment aid fell to a seasonally adjusted 340,000 last week, driving down the four-week average to its lowest level in five years. The drop is a positive sign ahead of Friday's report on February job growth. Applications for benefits fell 7,000 in the week ended March 2, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's near five-year lows reached in January. And the four-week average, a less volatile measure, dropped to 348,750. That's the lowest since March 2008, just a few months into the Great Recession. Weekly applications are a proxy for layoffs. When...

In the wake of the discovery that the Rachel Maddow show has been promoted by multiple fake twitter accounts, a liberal blogger has found MSNBC host Ed Schultz guilty of the same "sleazy but legal" behavior. A portion of what he found: "Also, the blog Help The 99ers has examples of Twitter spam involving the Ed Show... and these accounts are different. In these cases there's a connection to an actual company that offers web promotion services. Here are phrases promoting the show that seem to involve spammers: Hahahahahaha, what threatening e-mails. #edshow #p2 #p21 Oh boy, Michael .E.Dyson is...