Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a front page article that claimed, “an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.”  The thesis of the article was that oil companies are the benefactors of enormous subsides, primarily through complicated maneuvering of offshore assets, “tax breaks,” and “loopholes.”

Unfortunately, the copy of the American tax code that The Times used to conduct their careful analysis appears to have been heavily edited by a cadre of left leaning groups, including ACORN President Maude Hurd, Citizens for Tax Justice, Center for American Progress and the Clean Energy Works campaign.

The smoking gun comes in the form of a leaked memo from CEW communications advisor and former Democratic congressional staffer David Di Martino just days after The New York Times ran it’s wildly misguided assessment of U.S. tax policy.

In the memo, Di Martino outlines a strategy to change America’s perception of increased taxes on energy producers as a tax on consumers by arguing “the American people already have a national energy tax — The Big Oil Welfare Tax — in the form of billions of dollars in subsidies to the wildly profitable big oil companies.”  The same day that Di Martino released his memo, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) released their own defective and dishonest hit piece, titled “What Oil and Gas Companies Extract from the American Public.”   The tax breaks referred to by Di Martino and the CTJ memo, in reality, are the same credits that every American company receives for taxes paid overseas to foreign governments on income earned abroad.

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“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

—Henry David Thoreau

God, I love fishing. I dig fishing almost as much as hunting (almost). I love it so much that I moved to a place that is one of the top angling spots in the world: Miami, Florida. And you know what? I milk these waters as much as a working man can.

My fishing roots extend back to Texas and my rowdy childhood when my dad used to take me and my brother fishing on the many lakes, ponds and rivers the Lone Star state has to offer.

Our stringer was typical of a freshwater 60s and 70s Texas catch: perch, crappie, black bass, white bass, channel cats, carp and gar. It was way cool for this little redneck. Yes indeed, Bob-Dawg, I dug it all.

For example, as a young punk I took insane pleasure in:

• Buying fishing gear. Very cool.
• Practicing my casting accuracy in my backyard (which still serves me well to this day)
• Reading Outdoor Life and getting pumped on its fishing lies … I mean … stories
• Experiencing the inability to sleep the night before getting up and declaring war on the fish
• Buying bait at freaky bait shops run by guys I swear worked as extras on the movie Deliverance
• Arriving at our strategic and wild location and having the privilege of watching and listening to that which is untamed waking up and beginning its tooth, fang and claw survival of the fittest exchange with Mother Nature. Life and death in its purest form, Nancy boys.
• Taking a crash course from my dad and other gents regarding different lures and the various ways to present them
• And then, of course, the entre, actually catching a fish and grappling with my gigantic aquatic monster which was, in all reality, a pound-and-a-half bass. (I didn’t care, though, because as far as I was concerned, I was Ernest-Frickin’-Hemingway’s character Santiago, and that little bass was my Marlin.)
• And lastly, basking in the great satisfaction later that evening of watching adults eat what this rugrat provided. I am iron man. Dun, dun. Dun na dun dunna dunna dunna dun dunna dun.

As a young squab, the whole fishing enchilada, from soup to nuts, represented what Bryan Adams called, “The best days of my life.”

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The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the last few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as originally claimed. This is on top of the recent mess regarding data, where the three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 assessment report still not been released. Other information indicates that data have been systematically biased to produce a rise in measured temperatures when actual temperatures were falling or flat.

Take some of the false claims in the 2007 IPCC report.

– The IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. The forecast was based on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999, and the Indian glaciologist who was interviewed, Syed Hasnain, says that he was misquoted, indeed he had provide no date. Professor Hasnain discovered the mistake in 2008 when he read the IPCC’s published report, but he said: “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report. . . . My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Even more disturbingly, Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s climate chief, first denied that he knew about the error before the Copenhagen global warming conference. He only admitted that he knew about it before the conference when a writer for the journal Science, Pallava Bagla, pointed to email correspondence that he had with Pachauri last fall.

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It is only a matter of time before Environmentalists and some scientists blame the Haiti earthquake and its massive death toll on Global Warming. They have already laid the groundwork with this Sept 2009 article in the UK Guardian newspaper. According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London an upcoming scientific conference would show how “global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.” Despite these claims the earthquake in Haiti was not caused by Global Warming.

And the death and destruction was not because Haitians had made a pact with the devil.

The reason so many people died in Haiti is because its people live in poorly built houses and have not benefited from development which brings with it cities and houses which can withstand earthquakes.

But guess who are the most active opponents of cities and modern concrete housing?

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