Andrew Breitbart and ACORN critics everywhere have been vindicated yet again.

That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court denied an ACORN appeal, effectively ruling that Congress was absolutely entitled to cut off federal taxpayer funding of ACORN. Earlier today the high court denied the petition for certiorari in ACORN et al. v. United States (docket 10-1068) without comment.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now had asked the high court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which found that the funding cutoff enacted in 2009 was not a “bill of attainder” forbidden by the Constitution. ACORN had advanced the novel, nonsensical argument that Congress had no power to stop funding the group unless it could prove it had done something wrong.

As I write in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, the ACORN network has taken in an astounding $79 million in federal funding, not just the $53 million figure previously reported.

At least 54 individuals associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. ACORN itself was convicted of felony voter registration fraud in Nevada in April, the book reports.

ACORN became well known nationwide in 2009 for its advocacy of brothels for pedophiles. Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe caught the group on undercover video offering advice on tax fraud and on importing underage illegal alien sex slaves from El Salvador.

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Featured (in order of appearance):

Andy Levy, Fox News’ Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld Gov. Gary Johnson, Our America Initiative

Roger Stone, Political Strategist, Blogger, The StoneZone

John Stagliano, Evil Angel Productions

Cyan Banister, CEO, Zivity.com

Robert Corn-Revere, Davis Wright Tremaine

Kevin D. Williamson, Deputy Managing Editor, National Review

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In August of 2005, Houston investment banker Matt Simmons predicted in a New York Times feature article that the price of oil, then $65/barrel, would soar.

Simmons, who had written a book arguing that the world is running out of oil, was predicting oil prices “in the high triple digits.”

After reading Simmons’ prediction, John Tierney, a libertarian, who was then an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, telephoned Simmons and called him on it.  He asked him if he’d be willing to put money on his prediction.

The two made a $10,000 bet.  If the average oil price five years hence in 2010, adjusted for inflation, exceeded $200, Simmons would win. If not, Tierney would pocket the ten grand.

We’re now into the second half of 2010, and the average oil price, in 2005 dollars, is $70.  Unless there is a remarkable explosion in the oil price for the remainder of 2010, driving it well above $300, Matt Simmons loses this bet.  It was not even close.

The point here is to try and learn something from this that is relevant to what is going on today.

Simmons is an energy specialist.  The company he founded advertises itself as “the only investment bank specializing in the entire spectrum of energy.”

It’s reasonable to assume that he knows a zillion times more about exploring for and producing oil than John Tierney.   But Tierney didn’t make the bet because he felt he knew more about drilling for oil.  He made the bet because he knows something about markets and change.

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By now you’ve likely forgotten the name of Josh Steiner, the Bill Clinton aide who feebly testified that he had lied to his own diary when recording events of the time. But you haven’t forgotten the pitifulness of the spectacle. I suggest we may have just passed that one in ClimateGate, with the following passage from John Tierney’s column in the New York Times, discussing “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”:

“In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of ‘grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,’ immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

‘No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.’

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word.”

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