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Climate change skeptics have suggested a recent slowdown in the warming of the Earth is evidence that global warming is a farce and that climate models can't be trusted, but new research suggests the slowdown, or "pause," was not a significant disruption of larger trends. The planet has been slowly warming over the last century or more. But in the last 15 years, that rate of warming has slowed. Temperatures are still high by historical standards; but between 1998 and 2013 they were slightly below what climate models had predicted. A small number of scientists and policy makers have pointed...

Valeria Tanco (L), and Sophy Jesty pose with their new baby girl, Emilia, at their home in Knoxville, Tennessee April 7, 2014.Several liberal media organizations are reporting the results of a new same-sex parenting study which suggests that gay parents do a better job of raising children than the general population. There are four imporant points to understand about that study, however.Here are a few of the headlines:CBS News: "Children of same-sex couples healthy, well-adjusted, study finds"NBC News: "Children of Same-Sex Parents Are Healthier: Study"The Huffington Post: "Children Of Gay Parents Are Happier And Healthier Than Their Peers, New Study...

97% Climate Consensus ‘Most Nonsensical, Stupid Number in the World’ Climate alarmism is "the biggest fraud in the field of science" and the 97% consensus claim is nonsensical, Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham tells MRCTV in a preview of his presentation at the upcoming Heartland Institute climate conference, July 7-9. "Since about 2000, I looked farther and farther into it," Col. Cunningham (USMC, Ret.) tells MRCTV in an exclusive interview. "I found that not one of the claims that the alarmists were making out there had any bearings, whatsoever. And, so, it was kind of a no-brainer to come to...

Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres - NASA and NOAA - have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century "global warming". The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments.When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted - ie fabricated by computer models -  20th century 'global warming'...

The most amazing and costly scientific and financial fraud of all time is being exposed, bit by bit, and yet serious and intelligent people continue to cling to the fraudsters’ story. Writing in the UK Telegraph, Christopher Booker brings to light a starling discovery: that the world has actually been cooling since the 1930s, based on actual temperature observations. …another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration...

President Obama, in an address speech to UC Irvine graduates Saturday, took aim at congressional Republicans and others who dispute climate change, saying they posed a threat to the future.

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.