Published May 30, 2010 | FOXNews.com

Friday: Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa. speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill. (AP)

A California congressman who called it an “impeachable” offense for the administration to offer Rep. Joe Sestak a job in exchange for his quitting a Senate bid said Sunday the cover-up, as usual, appears worse than the crime.

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa said the explanation for the Sestak affair — that former President Bill Clinton offered the Democratic congressman an unpaid position on an advisory board if he would drop his challenge against party-switching Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter — is not plausible because as a sitting congressman Sestak couldn’t have served on a presidential commission.

“It’s a crime because they’ve admitted that they offered this position … So that begs the real question. Do we believe this is a further cover-up because he’s — they’re now talking about a job that President Clinton himself should have known Sestak couldn’t take? ” he said.

“They’re now coming up with a nonplausible answer,” Issa said.

On Friday, the White House revealed that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had asked Clinton to talk to Sestak about a presidential appointment if Sestak would suspend his bid for the Democratic Senate nomination.

Sestak has said repeatedly since February that he was offered a job to drop out of the race, but he declined. He would not reveal the nature of the conversation until after the White House issued its report on Friday.

“If it’s not a crime — and I believe it is — it certainly is business as usual, politics of corruption. The fact is once you’re in power, if you can use our appointments, you can corrupt the process,” Issa said.

Appearing with Issa on Sunday, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Obama has cleaned up Washington, but he didn’t say “he was going to change every aspect of everything we’ve done.”

“I think Barack Obama has brought a new level of ethical standards to Washington. Has he changed some basic hard-knuckle politics? No. You need hard-knuckle politics to succeed,” Rendell said. “But he’s not perfect. And there are certain things that have to go on to make things work, and this is one of them.”

Rendell said offers of jobs for political cooperation have happened “for time immemorial.”

“I did the same thing in 2006 to ask a former congressman, Joe Hoeffel, to drop out of the race against Bob Casey in the primary,” Rendell said. “I said come back and see me if you do it. He came back and saw me, and he was out of public service. I appointed him as a deputy secretary of commerce. He did a great job.”

Issa said the difference between Rendell’s scenario and the White House action is that Rendell didn’t have a specific offer in exchange in the deal, so therefore did not violate the U.S. law signed by then-President Clinton.

“Ed Rendell is saying this happens all the time. Sure, it happens all the time, things like this. But it’s usually carefully crafted so it doesn’t fall under this kind of quid pro quo,” Issa said.

Issa said Sunday candidate Obama pledged to conduct a transparent administration so he should submit to an FBI review.

“The question is, has this been transparent? No. Has there been stalling? Yes. Is there a possibility that what we’re being told now is not true because it’s not so plausible? Yes. Should there be independent investigation so we can move on? Yes,” Issa told “Fox News Sunday.”

“I don’t want to be investigating this. I don’t want the White House investigating itself. The FBI or the attorney general should see that it’s investigated so the American people can feel they can put this behind them,” he said.

Issa added he would accept the result if an FBI investigation exonerates the White House of an illegal bribe.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sestak vs. al-Awlaki (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Clinton Acted as White House Intermediary With Sestak (Update3) (businessweek.com)
• Did Joe Sestak/Bill Clinton Chat Break the Law? (cbsnews.com)
• Joe Sestak White House Job Offer: Congressman Speaks Out On Allegations (huffingtonpost.com)
• White House, Sestak Confirm Clinton’s Role In “Job Offer” (outsidethebeltway.com)

Related posts:

1. PENN AG TOM CORBETT SHOULD EMPANEL GRAND JURY IN SESTAK AFFAIR
2. Hey, Stupid! Have We Got a Deal for You
3. John F. Kennedy’s Crime

With a lot of journalists, plus delegates and advocates heading for the big meet up there, Copenhagen is being billed as the Earth’s last chance to curb the carbon footprint we humans are accused of exacerbating everyday by using of common everyday conveniences and conveyances like cheap coal-generated electricity and gasoline- and diesel-fueled cars and trucks.

The organizers of this extravagant outing to Copenhagen hope to produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanage everyone’s choices of almost everything; and what they forget to micromanage this time, they will surely not overlook at next opportunity.

Just to give you a hint of how the players are lining up to help, here is what the top two players on the world stage have in mind. China will give a tiny bit by promising to reduce its carbon footprint, which means in effect its emissions will continue to rise; while, on the other hand, our lord-high, ultraliberal ruler, B. Hussein Obama, understanding well the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If that happens, it will mean 2050 emissions will be equal to those of 1910, when there were about 92 million Americans. But there will be closer to 420 million American in 2050, which means that for Obama’s promise to be fulfilled per capita emissions then will have to be about what they were in 1875. Folks. That. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen. So why will B. Hussein promise that? Well, that’s just the measure of man; that’s why

Newly discovered emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain—a collaborator with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—reveals some scientists’ willingness to deliberately exclude or knead data and manipulate the peer-review process and publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials reveal how their paranoid scientists believe that in trying to engineer a consensus about global warming, they are a brave and persecuted minority. This is without a doubt the first time in peacetime history that the government-media-academic complex has been in such an enduring propaganda-mongering lockstep about any subject.

An odd lesson is to be found in the CRU materials: Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them.” Do you think these scientists overstated and censored because they were “goaded” by skepticism?

If their science as undisputable as they insist it is, and if the consensus among scientists is as broad as they say it is, and if they were brave as they claim to be, they would not be “goaded” into such intellectual depravity. Nor would they gaudily bandy the word “deniers” to decry skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From time immemorial down to the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and ever since, climate change has always been a certainty. Skeptics doubt that scientists’ models, which cannot explain the present, can infallibly map the distant future.

In a peculiar response to the CRU materials, The Financial Times wrote: The scientific case for alarm about global warming “is growing more rather than less compelling.” Meanwhile the CRU wrote in an email that: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”—this “moment” is in its second decade—”and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models that are partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. It is on such models they want us to wager trillions of dollars—and a substantially diminished freedom.

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes; supposing themselves a small intelligentsia entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. That being the case, some of them consider it virtuous to embellish facts, exaggerate certainties, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.

Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments’ attempts to manipulate Earth’s temperature now comprise one of the world’s largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial, academic, and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (claimed) consensus that is driving the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of repelling global warming.

Copenhagen is the culmination of all the prior maneuvering by people determined to fix the world’s climate by breaking the world’s—and especially America’s—resistance to the ever-more-minute supervision by governments. It is not as if Copenhagen will be the last chance of the climate-change crowd; Copenhagen is meant to be a prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth’s last chance, until the next one.

Folk, do you suspect a one-world collectivist government is the real endgame being played out by the liberals in this government-media-academic complex, which hopes to deliver binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanage everyone’s choices of almost everything? All of a sudden there appears to be an international consensus gaining momentum that believes this is the endgame of all this climate-change hysteria that has been espoused by such liberals as, former V.P. Albert Gore.

Think about it; it is true that almost to a man, everyone involved in this government-media-academic complex has a liberal bias, and it is true that liberals—like Obama, Albert Gore, and, don’t forget, Jimmie Carter and Bill Clinton—always think that government is the answer to all our ills, and they are sure we can not survive, much less flourish, without their help and guidance.

It would appear that “Climate-change” or “Global Warming,” as it is frequently known has now been shown for “The Great Mockery” it is and quite possibly the greatest mockery the world has ever known.

I have an idea that this farce is far from over. Let us hope though that its defeat is in the offing.

Background: The climate-change travesty by George F. Will

Related articles by Zemanta

• ‘Climate change’ group think and the heretics (tech.bl0x.info)
• Climate research chief Phil Jones stands down pending inquiry into leaked emails at East Anglia university (guardian.co.uk)
• Obama Adviser Pushes Climate Action (online.wsj.com)
• Scientists Respond to “Climategate” E-Mail Controversy (scientificamerican.com)
• University in climate flap details inquiry (msnbc.msn.com)
• ClimateGate III: The Mystery of the Missing Data (meganmcardle.theatlantic.com)
• United Nations to probe climate e-mail leak (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Deniers in denial over climate information (openparachute.wordpress.com)
• The Guardian’s carbon calculator: this is how we did the maths (guardian.co.uk)
• This week: slippery surfaces, greenhouse heaters and house plant care (telegraph.co.uk)
• Obama shifts visit to climate summit (msnbc.msn.com)

No related posts.