Recently, Judge Ellis decided that Jefferson is not a flight risk and may remain free pending appeal, a process that may take a year or more. During that time, Jefferson must wear a monitor and may not travel without prior court approval.

Today, Judge Ellis agreed that Jefferson’s legal expenses will be covered by the court during his appeal. Jefferson and his wife recently filed for bankruptcy, due in large part to the legal bills incurred during his trial.

Admittedly, Jefferson might have problems paying for new legal bills out of his Congressional pension, estimated to be $40,000 to $55,000 per year. Then again, once he’s incarcerated, he won’t be shelling out a lot on food, clothing or shelter.

William Jefferson’s legal bills to be paid by taxpayers during appeal

Trial Judge T.S. Ellis III Friday OK’d the appointment of Robert Trout and Amy Jackson, two of the three attorneys who represented Jefferson almost from the first day the federal investigation of the nine-term New Orleans Democrat became known on Aug. 3, 2005, with raids of the then congressman’s Washington and New Orleans homes.

Their fees will be covered by the court, though the rates will be similar to those provided public defenders and far less than the prominent white collar attorneys generally charge.

Ellis also said that a transcript of the eight-week trial, which the court reporter estimated would cost $26,000, will be paid for by the court.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The official 2012 web site has a synopsis so it’s worth quoting if only to get the minimal divorced-daddy-who-still-secretly-loves-his-wife-and-kids-saves-them-against-all-the-laws-of-physics-and-current-boyfriend-of-ex-wife-and-lives-happily-ever-after human interest subplot. To wit: Never before has a date in history been so significant to so many cultures, so many religions, scientists and governments. “2012″ is an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors.

Okaaaaaaaaaay…So are we all supposed to be making out our Last Will and Testament because some Mayans constructed their celestial calendar to poop out centuries after their own civilization did? Even Nostradamus gave up his predictions at 2005 but we’re still here. I personally think that the day after D-for-Disaster-Day, December 21, 2012. I am going to wake up wondering, “Oatmeal or English muffins?” and “Only 3 more days until Christmas!”

Evidently director Roland Emmerich thinks otherwise. For him it’s a darn magnetic pole shift set in motion by neutron’s heating up the Earth’s core thanks to massive solar flares which disrupts the continental crust thereby getting all of California sliding into the Pacific, massive tidal waves inundating all coastlines, even those without the necessary coastal rise to generate the energy necessary for 1500 foot walls of water, the Yellowstone giant caldera going ka-blooey and unremitting earthquakes toppling every Christian and Buddhist landmark existing world wide but curiously leaving Mecca untouched. I mean, who knew earthquakes would make such dhimmitudinal distinctions?

For those of us, who grew up last century watching such films as Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure there was a saying that, “If it was an Irwin Allen flick, it was a disaster.” Now here we are in the 21^st Century and it looks like Emmerich is picking up where Allen left off. Responsible for such films as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, Emmerich doesn’t leave much standing in his wake. At least Allen only killed off the immediate cast. Emmerich goes for such wholesale human slaughter that he’s probably getting fan mail from Dr. Eric “The Lizard Man” Pianka.

2012 stars John Cusak as Jackson Curtis (probably the luckiest man in the 2012 universe what with his incredible driving, sprinting and diving skills and ability to avoid lava bombs), Amanda Peet as his confused ex, Kate Curtis, Chiwetel Ejiofor (now there’s a mouthful!) as geologist-cum-squishy-humanitarian, Adrian Helmsley, and Thomas McCarthy as the really squishy Dr. Gordon Silberman, who specializes in boob jobs for girlfriends of Russian sugar daddies. The 2012 supporting cast features the scrawny and leaden Thandie Newton as Laura Wilson, daughter of the self-sacrificing US President, Thomas Wilson, played by a very unhappy Danny Glover and can you imagine President Obama selflessly staying behind in an evacuation?

In fact, the only people who don’t really get left behind, the very people, who claim that they’re the ones, who should go forth and repopulate the world, are the exact same ones who need to be buried under ninety feet of silt after the flood waters recede. I’m talking about the US government and all the other world leaders and their cabinets right up to QE II and her nasty little corgis, whom she has stated that she prefers to her subjects. Yes, that’s right: the people may perish but the government goes on and what the heck is it going to take to kill the IRS off anyway?

Speaking of slimy politicians, Oliver Platt as Oval Office head honcho, Carl Anheuser, does a credible imitation of Bill Richardson and bulldog Zlatko Buric as Russian billionaire, Yuri Karpov, pushes everyone around as he and his sons, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, fight for their prepaid seats on the US version of Noah’s Ark. Cusak’s kids are pretty much run-of-the-mill child actors and, quite frankly, all of the yelling that substitutes for acting is the same by everyone except the crazy-as-a-loon character, Charlie Frost, who is played by Woody Harrleson with all the insane wisdom of one, who has listened to one too many editions of George Noory’s Coast To Coast radio show and really, really, really knows the end is near.

If you are shaking your head about now and wondering what type of people would believe this end of the world nonsense, just think of Al Gore, who recently stated that the center of the Earth was as hot as the Sun. Maybe now all this rush, rush, rush by the Democrats and the Obama Administration to tank the US economy and force us into the grinding misery of socialism while they pork out at the taxpayer funded trough suddenly makes sense. Considering how the liberals have destroyed education in this country and plunged us into a politically correct Dark Ages reflective of their own mindset, is it any wonder then that they are acting like time is not on their side? Maybe they really do think the clock runs out for them in 2012 and I am here to tell you right now that they are wrong.

The clock doesn’t run out for the Democrats in 2012. It runs out for them in 2010.

If the preliminary indications of the take from this hack - which might actually be an inside job more akin to whistleblowing than a run-of-the-mill smash-and-grab - pan out into the real thing, we really ought to be looking at the end of the global warming movement. Because among the 160 megabytes of data (original raw file in zip format can be found here) blasted out over the internet are e-mails and files from some of the heaviest hitters in the global warming advocacy movement which expose the “science” behind man-made global warming as a complete fraud.

It’s the type of revelation that would appear to be too good to be true, but Hadley CRU head Phil Jones has confirmed that his outfit was indeed hacked and the data dump is real.

Some of the juicier elements coming out of this disclosure are e-mails between prominent scientists within the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) advocacy movement. They prove four patterns of behavior within the top ranks of that movement:

1. Rigging the scientific peer review process in favor of AGW advocacy;
2. Circumventing Freedom Of Information Act laws in Britain;
3. Fudging inconvenient data in an effort to support AGW as a viable theory; and
4. Engaging in efforts to mislead and intimidate scientific and environmental journalists.

Here’s a small sample of the take:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH [northern hemisphere] land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich

This first e-mail between Jones, Michael Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn, all of whom have participated in generating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports purporting to establish a factual basis for man-made global warming theory, contains a good bit of scientific gobbledygook. But two phrases stand out -”Mike’s nature trick” and “hide the decline.” Those refer to Mann, who was the originator of the infamous Hockey Stick Graph which Al Gore used in his propaganda film of a few years back, and indicate that Mann’s work is the product of lies and obfuscations. Damning stuff, indeed.

Another:

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

Kevin Trenberth is another IPCC researcher and in fact one of the most strident of the AGW advocates in fingering fossil fuels as a culprit in climate change. He also has blown the horn about hurricanes supposedly rising in severity and frequency as a result of global warning; that hasn’t occurred. And in this e-mail he basically throws in the towel and admits his and his cohorts’ computer models predicting warming are trash.

The recipients of the e-mail are an august bunch. Schneider, a former global-cooling prophet, was once quoted in Discover Magazine as saying:

“So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Allen is another IPCC contributor and AGW advocate, as is Stott. Santer was one of the original authors of the 1995 IPCC study “establishing” global warming as a phenomenon; he was accused of doctoring the final language in that study to delete statements in previous drafts so as to “deceive policy makers and the public into believing that the scientific evidence shows human activities are causing global warming.” He has since accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to study human effects on global warming. Wigley has been quoted as saying in touting AGW that “the human-induced changes that are expected over the next 100 years are much, much greater than any changes that societies experienced in the past.” Karl heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center and another AGW mouthpiece. Schmidt is a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies along with Hansen, who heads GISS - a controversy erupted surrounding Hansen, a confidant of Al Gore’s, when it was found that his outfit had falsified temperature data last October in an effort to show that the 10-year trend toward global cooling had reportedly ended. Oppenheimer is best known for his palling around with Leonardo DiCaprio and making propaganda TV programs on global warming with Tom Brokaw.

Want another e-mail? How about this one:

From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones
Subject: LAND vs OCEAN
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:36:15 -0700

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

See attached note.

Comments?

Tom

In case you’re not familiar with the Urban Heat Island effect, it essentially describes the phenomenon that cities full of pavement, cars, industry and all other manners of modern convenience tend to be warmer than wilderness, and the more urbanized an area is the more likely that thermometers making temperature readings will show a warming trend over time. Wigley here is basically conceding the AGW position has major problems in this regard.

Another:

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

It might be mentioned that since the Hadley CRU is a government-funded institution, it is subject to the British Freedom Of Information Act and to destroy its documents and correspondence is a crime. “Keith” in this case is Keith Briffa, who with Jones works at Hadley.

More:

From: Tom Wigley [...]
To: Phil Jones [...]
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer [...]
Phil,
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that theland also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean – but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips—higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.
Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH—just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols.
The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note – from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not)—but not really enough.
So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.)
This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have.
Tom.

Obviously there’s a good deal of jargon here, but it’s clear Wigley is talking about massaging his data to make a prettier picture.

There is a great deal more, and it’s all very damaging. The reaction has been strikingly similar to that of ACORN after James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles aired evidence of criminal conspiracies within its offices - castigate the whistle-blower. Mann pretty much channels Bertha Lewis:

“I’m not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained e-mails,” says Mann. “However, their theft constitutes serious criminal activity. I’m hoping that the perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows.” Jones declined to comment on the matter.

With less than three weeks to go until the start of the United Nations’ climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Mann doubts that the timing of the attack is a coincidence. “The deniers will probably do anything they can to distract the public from the reality of the problem [of climate change], and the threat that it poses,” he says. “Cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes, stolen from private e-mails, is the best they’ve got.”

Meanwhile, Trenberth and Schmidt are quoted basically saying that while the material is genuine, the skeptics ain’t-got-nuttin-on-us. The global warming mouthpiece site RealClimate.org, to which several of these individuals are contributors, exults in the disclosure by declaiming:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

One wonders whether the quote above represents a catalog of AGW skeptic criticisms per se, or if it really means what it says - it’s interesting that none of the above were broken open by this disclosure. If there is any indication of the latter and this thing plays out along the lines of the O’Keefe/Giles/ACORN exposes, the RealClimate gang might well regret that paragraph.

So - what’s the ultimate effect of all this? Well, if the credibility of the AGW advocates gets trashed to such an extent as a result of this that it affects public policy, it’s the end of the rationale for a whole host of awful initiatives and political positions which have been destructive to America’s economy. And if those were ever to melt away, this nation would then have the ability and motivation to use its staggering domestic energy reserves to create an economic groundswell which lifts us out of this recession and eliminates the vast majority of our trade deficit.

The chance alone that these disclosures might allow the scales to fall from the eyes of those people of good will who have been suckered by global warming propaganda and create a consensus in favor of rational, sensible economic and energy policies is one worth getting excited about. Particularly in this environment of non-stop bad news. If the global warming movement is to go the way of ACORN, it’s a victory over tyranny. And that’s worth celebrating this weekend.

Cross-posted at TheHayride.com

Sunday morning round table expertise boiled the entire ongoing Palin phenomenon to these three simple words on last week’s Stephanopoulos show.  There may have been some (light hearted enough to barely contain the condescension) bantering and mild dissent but the tone I was getting all around seemed to indicate that the whole table thought it beneath them even to discuss her.

I don’t happen to be a Sarah Palin hyper-fanatic by any means but she does interest me.  Through a long line of events, some well beyond her control, she now effectively combines a certain natural magnetism…an infectious attraction…with the large stage she was initially given only controlled access to and has since cultivated into something real…for the moment.  She now undeniably commands a rather large spotlight on the nightly off-year, cable political programming schedule.  She has a voice in current political discussions and it is real…especially with a large and growing segment of the American electorate.  Many of our prized elitist national opinion makers on both sides of the aisle cannot seem to grasp this…those pigs are obviously better, smarter, and more equal than the rest of us animals.

This may be only a flash or it may prove a lasting appeal.  I certainly don’t know and, given my growing cynicism regarding this snobby Washington talking head class over the last several years, I have no confidence they do either.  I suspect more than one of their types similarly derided citizen Reagan back in ’64 and Governor Reagan in ’77.

Fools write off any national political future for her in November 2009.

I guess I should embrace this new era of ultra-bluntness ushered in the Mr. Brooks.  Maybe George S. could add a “[Blank]’s a Joke” segment every week.  Stripped down to raw job performance, leadership, and competence while applying governance standards and expectations consistent with any public high school student council, I will submit to nomination a three way tie this week for President Obama, AG Holder, and Sec. Clinton.

Unfortunately, that joke is on us.

Ntrepid

Proud Member for 5 years 3 months

Still, one notable e-mail from the hacked (Hadley CRU) files clearly describes how to squeeze dissenting scientists from the peer review process:

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

I wonder who came first - Anita Dunn, or the author of this e-mail? Or perhaps Anita Dunn is the author of this e-mail…at any rate, the abject panic the left experiences when the thought of actually defending their ideas or research comes to mind is telling. I pray that the Wizard of Oz taught Americans all we need to know about men (and women) who hide behind curtains.

UPDATE: Near as I can tell, the logo at the bottom appears to reference this site.

5.5 million — Number of jobs that could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage, according to a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer

$729.5 billion — Total new taxes on small businesses, individuals who cannot afford health coverage, and employers who cannot afford to provide coverage that meet federal bureaucrats’ standards

$1.055 trillion — New federal spending on expanded health insurance coverage over the next ten years, according to a Congressional Budget Office preliminary score of the bill

0.7% — Percentage of all that new spending occurring in the bill’s first three years-representing a debt and tax “time bomb” in the program’s later years set to explode on future generations

$88,200 — Definition of “low-income” family of four for purposes of health insurance subsidies

114 million — Number of individuals who could lose their current coverage under the bill’s government-run health plan, according to non-partisan actuaries at the Lewin Group

43 — Entitlement programs the bill creates, expands, or extends-an increase from H.R. 3200

111 — Additional offices, bureaus, commissions, programs, and bureaucracies the bill creates over and above the entitlement expansions-more than double the number in H.R. 3200

3,425 — Uses of the word “shall,” representing new duties for bureaucrats and mandates on individuals, businesses, and States-also more than double the number in H.R. 3200

$60 billion — Loss sustained by taxpayers every year due to Medicare fraud, according to a recent 60 Minutes expose; the government-run health plan does not reform the ineffective anti-fraud statutes and procedures that have kept Medicare on the Government Accountability Office’s list of high-risk programs for two decades

Zero — Prohibitions on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid from using cost-effectiveness research to impose delays to or denials for access to life-saving treatments

$634 Billion — Amount that could be saved by denying individuals access to treatments that are not “cost-effective,” according to a report by the liberal Commonwealth Fund; Section 1160 of the bill gives bureaucrats in the Obama Administration virtual free rein to develop a new “high-value” reimbursement system for Medicare by May 2012

2017 — Year Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted-an entitlement crisis exacerbated by the bill, which according to the Congressional Budget Office will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care by $598 billion in its first ten years alone

$2,500 — Promised savings for each American family from health reform, according to then-Senator Obama’s campaign pledge-savings which the Administration’s own actuaries have confirmed will not materialize, as the Pelosi health care bill would increase the growth of health care costs

This way of thinking should also apply to interpreting how to view the prosecution of terrorist KSM.

Since I am not an attorney — and have little knowledge of military law — I have important questions to ask related to the KSM prosecution, the answers to which will craft my opinion on his prosecution process.  These are not leading questions…I really don’t know the answers.  I hope my Redstate colleagues will be able to respond with facts.  We cannot let patriotic emotion cloud reasoned judgment based on the applicable law.

Question:  From a legal standpoint, were the attacks on 9/11 an “act of war” or a criminal action?  The targets were both civilian and military, but since the perpetrators did not represent the government of another country, can such an act of terrorism legally be considered an “act of war”?

Question:  Can the U.S. “declare war” on a “group” rather than a “country”?

Question:  In a military action (such as in Iraq or Afghanistan) is it possible to capture and/or detain individuals who are known accused “criminals”?  I suspect the answer is “yes.”  Hypothetical example:  if Al Capone had been captured by the U.S. military during World War II in Germany, could our forces have detained him and transported him to the U.S. for criminal prosecution?

The legal responses to these questions are paramount in determining the appropriate legal approach to KSM’s prosecution.  My heart agrees with those demanding a military trial, but I’m not sure my “head” is there yet.

Depending on the legal responses to the above questions, one may be able to make a case that because KSM did not act on behalf of a government, his actions were not an “act of war.”  Therefore his actions were criminal in nature.  As a criminal, his capture by U.S. military forces is irrelevant to his legal status.  Therefore his prosecution should be handled in the same fashion as any other non-U.S. citizen who commits crimes within the borders of the U.S. and is captured and returned to the U.S.

Have I analyzed this correctly?  If not, where are the flaws in this logic?