Friends,

I'll be doing my own blogging stuff over at The Wrong Lizard , a Wordpress-based blog I just started.

There isn't much there, but keep an eye on it in case I say something particularly interesting. I'd be much obliged if an admin could add it to the "member blogs" area along with the others.

that caught my eye.

After looking it over I was less so, but still, The Carlyle Group is a very exclusive group. It functions like a limited partnership for it's very few members. The Bush family, the Saudi Royal family, James Baker to name a few. Very important and very saavay business folk.

But then I learned that the Carlyle Capitol Corp was kind of a spin off, not wholly owned by the Carlyle Group yesterday. Carlyle Capitol Corp had an IPO in the late spring last year so after that, the main Carlyle Group members diluted their holdings and liabilities.

Surprising none the less.

is becoming toxic.

The stuff about 9/11 was bad enough but the "god damn America" comment is just poison.

Obama has to do more than say they have different opinions. He has to leave that church.

Here is an interesting read on the media bias in favor of GW alarmism:

Lorne Gunter: The media snowjob on global warming

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors -- the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc. -- not human sources are behind global warming.

[...]

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year.

After
reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."

[...]

Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC's gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to "prove" that man is behind global warming -- not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC whom the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people -- many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment -- wrote the IPCC's "Summary for Policy-makers." That's the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.

The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.

Scientists doubt climate change :

More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says.

The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet.

[...]

Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report debunks Mr. Gore's claim that the "debate is over."

"The endless claims of a 'consensus' about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day," he said.

Climate debate far from over, claim senators:

More than 400 scientists have in the past year alone challenged claims that global warming is caused by man, according to a report published last week by some of President George W Bush's allies in the US Senate.

[...]

The report also cites sceptical views advanced by current and former members of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel Prize with Mr Gore.

Its authors say that they quote eight times as many scientists as the IPCC report published last year, which insisted there was a scientific consensus.

Panel member David Wojick, is quoted saying: "The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."

While physicist John Brosnahan, who works with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says: "I believe in global warming, and in global cooling - all part of the natural climate changes that the Earth has experienced for billions of years, caused primarily by cyclical variations in solar output."

Climate dissent grows hotter as chill deepens:

Last week, virtually unreported in Britain, the extraordinary winter weather of 2008 elsewhere in the world continued. In the USA, there were blizzards as far south as Texas and Arkansas, while in northern states and Canada what they are calling "the winter from hell" has continued to break records going back in some cases to 1873. Meanwhile in Asia more details emerged of the catastrophe caused by the northern hemisphere's greatest snow cover since 1966.

In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call "the Winter Snow Disaster" has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the "consensus" on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called "the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp", the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would "markedly diminish further prosperity" while having "no appreciable impact" on the Earth's warming.

IPCC's 'evil twin' launches climate change sceptic's creed:

A group of dissident scientists and climate researchers has affirmed that there is no convincing evidence that CO₂ emissions from modern industrial activity cause climate change, and has called on world leaders to abandon all efforts to reduce emissions "forthwith." Issued last week at the close of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York, the Manhattan Declaration challenged the notion that a scientific consensus on climate change exists, and claimed that efforts at emissions reduction would diminish prosperity while having no appreciable impact.

The Declaration stems from the work of the Nongovermental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which one might term the evil twin of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published a closely-argued report on the subject this month. The report takes the form of a critique of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, which last year helped win the organisation a joint Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

[...]

The report's arguments, however, probably deserve more than satirical remarks in response. The NIPCC, set up by a group of scientists at a workshop in Vienna last year, sets out to provide a "second opinion" on the data used by the IPCC and on its conclusions, factoring in 'inconvenient' research that it claims the IPCC has missed or ignored, and seeking to disrupt the widely-held global consensus that the questions surrounding climate change are settled. "The IPCC seems to be aware of... contrary evidence," says the report, "but has tried to ignore it or wish it away."

The report states that climate change has always happened and always will, and accepts that man-made CO₂ emissions are growing, but argues that the effect on climate is insignificant. Solar activity, which it says has been pretty much ignored as a possible factor by the IPCC, is in the NIPCC's view the most likely cause of climate change.

[...]

The NIPCC's conclusions so far are that the global warming trend is less significant than claimed, as is the case with sea level rises, that the models used by the IPCC do not establish human activity as the main cause, and that this is possibly explained by their failure to take into account negative feedback. Accordingly, efforts spent on tackling CO₂ emissions will have no significant effect on the 'problem', and will take resources away from more pressing issues.

So, the IPCC report is doing exactly what the liberals claim Bush did with the evidence leading up to the Iraq war: ignoring the inconvenient bits to support a pre-determined agenda. In that case they seem to call that lying.

Kind of makes you say, hmmm, eh?

In any event, the purported consensus continues to crumble. :(