The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin published a story September 30th on Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) “climate bill” which Eilperin reports:

aims to make deep cuts in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions in the near and long term while setting a limit on the cost of carbon allowances, according to several sources and a close-to-final version of the bill obtained by The Washington Post.

The bill, which is still being revised, would make it easier for businesses to compensate for their carbon pollution by expanding the available pool of domestic offsets by 40 percent compared with the House-passed climate bill

… Continue Reading

The September 28th Los Angeles Times’ has an article by David Savage on the Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing on two Florida juveniles who are challenging their juvenile life-without-parole sentences on Eighth Amendment grounds. Savage reports:

According to Amnesty International, “The United States is the only country in the world that does not comply with the norm against imposing life-without-parole sentences on juveniles.”

Nearly all of the estimated 2,500 U.S. prisoners serving life terms for juvenile crimes, the group said, were guilty either of murder or of participating in a crime that led to a homicide.

But as Heritage Foundation legal scholars Charles … Continue Reading

Several days before key Senators introduce that body’s version of controversial global warming “cap-and-trade” legislation, and several months after EPA whistle-blower Dr. Alan Carlin drew attention to the fact that the recent published scientific literature presents a decided tilt against prevailing “global warming” scientific wisdom, the New York Times has run a piece diminishing Dr. Carlin’s stature and findings. The September 24th John M. Broder article reads:

Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.

In June, however, he became a sudden celebrity with the

… Continue Reading

Covering the debate in Congress over whether a government-run health program should created under President Barack Obama’s health care plan, the Associated Press’ Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar asserts on September 25th:

The public option continues to enjoy broad support in opinion polls.

Alonso-Zaldivar then completely fails to actually cite any polling data to back up this claim. To better inform his readers, Alonso-Zaldivar ought to check out the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted Spetember 17-20 by Democrat Peter Hart and Republican Bill McInturff.

They asked 1,005 adults: “Would you favor or oppose creating a public health care plan administered by the federal … Continue Reading

The Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein published an article September 23rd, titled “NASA data: Greenland, Antarctic ice melt worsening.” The story opens, “New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode.”

Oddly, there is no mention of “runaway” in either the British Antarctic Survey’s press release or the research paper itself. Yet the lurid conclusion appears in the reporter’s first paragraph.

Although the paper at issue is already, as we see here, being spun as evidence of impending catastrophic sea level … Continue Reading

Reporting on President Barack Obama’s September 22nd address to the United Nations Climate Summit, USA Today’s Traci Watson writes:

The Earth isn’t waiting, scientists say.

If emissions keep increasing as they have, the planet’s average temperature will rise 3 to 7 degrees by 2100, according to the U.N. climate panel’s 2007 report.

But what Watson completely fails to tell her readers, is that the “3 to 7 degrees by 2100″ temperature increase is nothing but a estimate based on computer modeling. It does not reflect an actual observed rise in temperatures. Science is based on the collection observable evidence. And the … Continue Reading

In an otherwise fine September 22nd article on a new study showing that New York City students who win a lottery to enroll in charter schools outperform those who don’t win spots, John Hechinger and Ianthe Jeanne Gugan write in the Wall Street Journal:

Critics of charter schools have long argued that any higher test scores were not necessarily attributable to anything the schools were doing, but to the students themselves, on the premise that only the most motivated students and families elected charters. Ms. Hoxby’s study sought to address that argument by comparing students who attend charters directly with

… Continue Reading

McClatchy’s September 19th article, Teachers find Obama not the friend they had expected, by Rob Hotakainen contains a common mistake that undermines the public’s understanding of education reform. Hotakainen points out that both the California NAACP and local Hispanic groups — groups that are traditionally on the side of unions — have supported recent moves to increase state funding for privately operated schools and instituting merit pay for teachers. He then claims that this is causing “teachers” to feel beset by all sides, left and right.

The nation’s public school teachers are feeling the squeeze from all sides these days, and

… Continue Reading

Covering President Barack Obama’s decision to betray promises to Poland and the Czech Republic to build ground based missile defense installations on their countries, the Associated Press‘ Anne Gearan and Desmond Butler report in their September 17th lead paragraph:

President Barack Obama on Thursday shelved a Bush-era plan for an Eastern European missile defense shield that has been a major irritant in relations with Russia. He said a redesigned defensive system would be cheaper and more effective against the threat from Iranian missiles.

The rest of the Gearan Butler story is mostly fair but they never note existing independent evidence that … Continue Reading

Reporting on President Barack Obama’s decision to impose tariffs on tires made in China, Reuters‘ Matt Spetalnick and Jeremy Pelofsky reported on September 12th:

“This is simply about enforcing the rules of the road and creating a trade system that is based on those rules and is fair for everybody,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Air Force One as President Barack Obama traveled to talk about his health care initiative.
…
“For trade to work for everybody, it has to be based on fairness and rules,” Gibbs said. “We’re simply enforcing those rules and we expect the Chinese to

… Continue Reading

Andrew Romano, in Newsweek, argues that health-care reform ought to enable illegal immigrants to get coverage. The merits of his policy view aside, his article makes a number of errors.

Romano writes:

The line [Rep. Joe Wilson] objected to—”The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally”—is, in fact, not a “lie.” The current House bill makes it very clear that “individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States” will not be allowed to receive subsidies. To wrangle assistance, illegal aliens would have to commit identity fraud, something that rarely happens in our current public-health-care

… Continue Reading

The St. Petersburg Times PolitiFact posted a Truth-O-Meter feature on September 9th claiming “Joe Wilson of South Carolina said Obama lied, but he didn’t.” Justifying her conclusion, Angie Drobnic Holan wrote:

We read all 1,000-plus pages of the health care bill and were struck by the fact that it is largely silent on health care for illegal immigrants. … Most illegal immigrants are also now excluded from Medicaid, the government-run health care for the poor. We didn’t see anything that would change that.

What Holan completely fails to report, however, is that there is a specific program used by Medicaid … Continue Reading

A short report on CNN’s Political Ticker is interesting for what it doesn’t mention in the story as well as its admittedly misleading trumpeted headline that Obama got “double-digit post-speech jump” after his Sept, 9 health care speech to a joint session of Congress.

First the headline: “CNN Poll: Double-digit post-speech jump for Obama plan.”

Reading that headline would lead someone to believe, well, that there was a double-digit jump in Obama’s numbers. After all, that’s what is says. But at the tale of the story the CNN piece the last paragraph admits that these numbers are heavily skewed to … Continue Reading

John Fritze and Mimi Hall have an article in September 10th’s USA Today taking “a closer look” at what President barack Obama said in his Joint Session of Congress health care speech.They do a great job of noting how Congress has ignored spending triggers in the past, but on illegal immigration they write:

The statement: “There are those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false.”

The context: Some Republicans, including Rep. Steve King of Iowa, have charged that Obama’s plan would offer insurance to millions of illegal immigrants. The issue was raised repeatedly during

… Continue Reading

Providing “News Analysis” in the September 8th New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes under the header Despite Fears, Health Care Overhaul Is Moving Ahead:

While the month of August clearly knocked the White House back on its heels, as Congressional town hall-style meetings exposed Americans’ unease with an overhaul, the uproar does not seem to have greatly altered public opinion or substantially weakened Democrats’ resolve.
…
But even after weeks filled with seemingly ominous portents for Mr. Obama’s ambitions, there is evidence that public opinion remains basically supportive of him. Despite intense controversy over the “public option,” a government-backed insurance plan

… Continue Reading

In the context of Congress preparing topass controversial “cap-and-trade” legislation in the name of man-made global warming, the Washington Post ran a Juliet Eilperin September 4th article claiming “human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse a 2,000-year trend of cooling in the Arctic, prompting warmer average temperatures in the past decade that now rank higher than at any time since 1 B.C.”

Other news outlets ran similar, uncritical treatments of a paper appearing in the September 3, 2009 online version of the journal Science. The lead author was Northern Arizona University professor Darrell S. Kaufman.

Although the Post quotes activists … Continue Reading

The September 4th New York Times reports under the header Some Parents Oppose Obama School Speech that: “President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.” So far so good. Reporters James McKinley and Sam Dillon later add:

The White House has said the speech will emphasize the importance of education and hard work in school, both to the individual and to the

… Continue Reading

Newsweek’s Sharon Begley has an article in the September 7th edition of Newsweek titled: “The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate.” Two of the “lies” Begley identifies are issues we have already dealt with (Obamacare Will Enable Government to Ration Health Care and Obamacare Will Pay For Illegal Immigrant Health Care).A third “lie” that  Begley claims opponents of Obamacare are spreading is that “health-care reform will be financed through $500 billion in Medicare cuts.” Begley’s evidence that this claim is false: “This refers to proposed decreases in Medicare increases.” Does Begley employ this same logic … Continue Reading

The Washington Times published a story September 1st by Amanda DeBard under the header: “Climate Change Bill To Boost Nuclear Plants” which starts out good:

Nearly half of the nation’s nuclear power plants stand to earn a windfall if the climate-change bill passed by the House becomes law.

But then DeBard goes on to report:

The bill will cause an “increase in revenues to carbon-free power sources like nuclear, and this is exactly what is supposed to happen,” said John Shelk, president of the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA).
…
“The money isn’t really a ‘windfall profit,’ ” Mr. Shelk said. “Instead, it is

… Continue Reading