Wave of Debt Payments Facing US Government - General * US * News * Story - CNBC.com

The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true.

But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More...

EDITORIAL: Hiding evidence of global cooling - Washington Times

Junk science exposed among climate-change believers

Scientific progress depends on accurate and complete data. It also relies on replication. The past couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations about the baloney practices that pass as sound science about climate change.

It was announced Thursday afternoon that computer hackers had obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. Those e-mails involved communication among many scientific researchers and policy advocates with similar ideological positions all across the world. Those purported authorities were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global-warming claims.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and professor Michael E. Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate, have come under particular scrutiny. Among his e-mails, Mr. Jones talked to Mr. Mann about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]." More...

Inhofe Says He Will Call for Investigation on "Climategate" on Washington Times Americas Morning Show

"Today, I will discuss something else – scientific integrity and how to improve it. Specifically, I will discuss the systematic and documented abuse of the scientific process by an international body that claims it provides the most complete and objective scientific assessment in the world on the subject of climate change – the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. I will conclude with a series of recommendations as to the minimum changes the IPCC must make if it is to restore its credibility." More...

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’? – Telegraph Blogs

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. More:

A tiny Texas town braces for a flood of illegal immigrants

The Battle of Presidio or how Obama screwed Texas!
"‘You don’t have to hit us in the head with a baseball bat too many times,” says Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, “before we start to think you’re doing it on purpose.” And so Governor Perry has a question for the Obama administration: Why ship thousands and thousands of illegal aliens from places as far away as San Diego, Calif., and Nogales, Ariz., all the way down to the tiny little village of Presidio, Tex. — population 4,167 — to deport them?

The Obama administration says the answer to that question, or at least part of the answer, is the Chihuahuan Desert. Send illegals across the border at San Diego, immigration authorities have argued, and they’ll just hit a couple of happy hours in Tijuana before coming right back across to the United States. But get them on the other side of a vast and inhospitable desert, and the heat and the cactuses and the coachwhip snakes will do what the U.S. Border Patrol cannot: Keep Mexicans in Mexico." More...

'2009 first year of global governance'

In accepting his appointment as the first president of the European Union, Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy announced that "global governance" is the only way to address the crises that beset the planet.

"We're living through exceptionally difficult times – the financial crisis and its dramatic impact on employment and budgets, the climate crisis which threatens our very survival, a period of anxiety, uncertainty and lack of confidence," he said in his maiden press conference. "Yet these problems can be overcome through a joint effort between our countries. 2009 is also the first year of global governance with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet."



Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, previously warned the dangers of a U.N. treaty proposal promoted by President Obama would lead to world government. Now, the new leader of the EU has seemingly affirmed that as a goal.

The climate change conference in Copenhagen is scheduled to begin Dec. 7.

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Hacked e-mails reveal global-warming fraud?

Officials at a key global-warming research center in the United Kingdom have authenticated a series of e-mails and other documents apparently taken from their computer system by a hacker, but they cannot explain what scientists in internal exchanges meant by references to a "trick" that would "hide the decline" of global temperatures nor by instructions to delete contrary data.

Author James Delingpole writes in a London Telegraph column the most damaging revelations indicate climate-change scientists may have "manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause."

According to the Australian Investigate magazine, the 62-megabyte Zip file with documents, e-mail exchanges and other information from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit apparently was posted by an unidentified hacker on a Russian web server.

One e-mail said: "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 (sic) from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Another expressed internal doubts: "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 (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re (Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment – minor family crisis."

"And, perhaps most reprehensibly," Delingpole writes, "a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with (anthropogenic global warming) can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority."


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Analysis: Fed under fire as public anger mounts

Suddenly the Federal Reserve is everybody's punching bag.
Strip the Fed of its bank regulation powers, some in Congress are demanding. Get probing audits of its behind-the-scenes operations, others say.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is always fair game for criticism and second-guessing, usually over interest rate actions. But this year the criticism is much broader as Congress responds to widespread public anger that the Fed bailed out Wall Street but not ordinary Americans, and with unemployment in double digits.

Former Fed chairman William McChesney Martin Jr. famously said that the central bank's job was to yank away the punchbowl just when everybody is starting to party. And while Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has signalled the Fed will keep interest rates low for now, a round of higher rates inevitably will come.

The Fed finds itself both the punchbowl keeper and the punching bag. Imagine the outcry when it does begin to crank up rates—perhaps just ahead of next year's midterm elections.

Fireworks seem likely at Senate confirmation hearings early next month on President Barack Obama's nomination of Bernanke to a second four-year term as chairman.

Many economists and Fed watchers say congressional efforts to rein in the Fed's powers could interfere with the central bank's ability to help guide the fragile economy to recovery.

The Fed's very independence and its unique ability among U.S. institutions to create money out of thin air enabled it to act quickly to stabilize the nation's financial system after it froze up last September after the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment house, Fed backers say.

"It might have been the Fed's finest moment when it had to jump into the market," said David M. Jones, a former Fed economist and president of DMJ Advisors, a Denver-based consulting firm. "We still have to wait to see how effective the Fed is in its exit strategy and whether it can keep inflation in check. But this badgering by Congress, even if there is populist sentiment, is inappropriate."

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Watch scientists 'prove Darwin wrong'

Just in time for the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," a team of Christian scientists has traveled back in time to the birthplace of evolution to "prove Darwin wrong."

The scientists have embarked on a journey to the Galapagos Islands, the same island chain Darwin visited during the voyage of the HMS Beagle in 1835. Many scholars today agree that the animals and plants Darwin saw on those islands contributed greatly to his becoming an evolutionist.

Convinced that different species had evolved from common ancestors, Darwin began forming his theory of evolution within two years of the ship's return to England in 1836. His 1859 book "On the Origin of Species" became the impetus for persuading many members of the scientific community to accept evolution in the 1860s.

But upon returning to the very spot Charles Darwin arrived 174 years ago, the Christian scientists have examined the same unusual creatures Darwin saw – and they've documented their findings in a 90-minute Vision Forum Ministries film titled, "The Mysterious Islands: A Surprising Journey to Darwin's Eden." The documentary was shot and directed by award-winning Jon and Andy Erwin of Erwin Brothers Motion Pictures.

Their mission: Determine whether the Galapagos Islands, resting above vast tectonic plates, are a laboratory for evolution as Darwin believed – or a truly magnificent showcase of God's creation.

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The global warming fraud exposed

I have an old T-shirt that I used to wear from time to time during my techno days with Psykosonik. Eric Bloodaxe of the Legion of Doom created it in honor of the "Hacking for Jesus" tour, complete with a listing of ISP addresses that were supposedly hacked during the LOD's Internet World Tour of 1991. But last week, an anonymous hacker achieved a feat that will long be lionized by computer pirates, libertarians and genuine scientists alike, as he broke into the Climate Research Unit's computers, copied 172 megs of data, and then released it into the digital wild.

Information wants to be free. And this information desperately needed to be freed.

Upon perusing the searchable archive of the online data, most of which consists of e-mails being exchanged between a small coterie of climate-change charlatans who presume to call themselves "scientists," it soon becomes very clear why the anthropogenic global warming–climate-change industry has been so deeply and unscientifically secretive about the data they have used to reach their conclusions of imminent climate-based apocalypse. First, the data simply does not support their conclusions. Second, they know the data doesn't support their conclusions. Consider this amazing admission by Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Scientific Assessment of Climate Change:

"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 (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong."
More...