How High Corporate Taxes Lost America The World’s Next Biggest Drug Company

How High Corporate Taxes Lost America The World’s Next Biggest Drug Company

By Guy Bentley

Pfizer and Allergan are preparing to merge in a $160 billion deal that will create the world’s largest drug company. But instead of being based in the U.S., the heart of medical innovation, the new company will headquarter in Ireland.
The historic deal will create a company with an operating cash flow of $25 billion per year. The merger will need to pass regulatory hurdles to avoid any anti-trust violations. The new company, Pfizer Plc, is expected to save $2 billion in the first three years.
Pfizer Plc is the latest in a string of high-profile companies to undertake what is known as a “tax inversion,” where a company domiciles in a foreign country with a corporate tax rate lower than the Ameriac’s 35 percent. Ireland has a corporate tax rate of just 12.5 percent, making it an extremely attractive proposition to many of the world’s leading companies.
President Barack Obama is a vocal critic of tax inversions, calling them “unpatriotic.” The administration has taken steps to clamp down on the practice.

But leading experts believe the Pfizer and Allergan inversion is just the symptom of the fundamental problems besetting America’s corporate tax system.
Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at Cato Institute, tells The Daily Caller News Foundation, “we [America] have an emergency situation with the corporate tax system,” and “we are shooting ourselves in the foot,” with excessively high tax rates.
“With a globalized economy you can’t trap your tax base,” he added. The U.S. is an outlier among developed economies in maintaining a punitively high corporate rate. “Even left of center governments in Europe and Canada have slashed their corporate tax rates. The trends are so obvious it’s remarkable we haven’t acted.”
Jared Meyer, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argued, “capital is mobile in this global economy, and US corporate taxes are uncompetitive. When average state corporate taxes are included, the top U.S. marginal rate tops 39 percent.

“This rate is much higher than the developed world’s average of 25 percent. Can anyone blame Pfizer for taking steps to help its shareholders and keep costs down for its customers?”
Meyer warns that “until there is corporate tax reform, more companies will follow Pfizer and leave America.” But beyond the high corporate tax rate American companies are expected to pay, there is another aspect to the system that puts them at a further disadvantage.
Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, says she isn’t at all surprised by Pfizer’s decision and says what “adds insult to injury” is that the U.S. corporate tax is a worldwide system. This means if an American company repatriates foreign earnings, they are still obligated to pay a tax on these earnings to the US government.
Aparna Mathur, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told TheDCNF, “I think the reason we are seeing a wave of inversions is precisely because the US corporate tax system is so out of line with that of the rest of the world.”
One of the reasons why there has been some reluctance to reform the system is that Democrats, in particular, believe “corporations are bad, that they’re dodging taxes and we need to hammer them,” says de Rugy.
But if anyone thinks corporate taxes just hit the wealthy they are sorely mistaken, says Edwards. “It is a consensus view that the corporate tax burden is shifted on labor.” A study of 65 countries finds increasing the corporate tax by 1 percent decreases wages by 0.5 percent. “Democrats need to bone up on their tax economics,” Edwards adds. There is little prospect of a large-scale cut in the corporate tax rate before a new administration enter the White House in 2016, according to Edwards.
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CLIMATISTAS: WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

CLIMATISTAS: WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN CLIMATE

We’ll be doing wall-to-wall coverage of the off-the-wall climate talks in Paris this week, but I can hardly do better in setting this up than to recall some of the testimony I presented to the House Foreign Affairs Committee back in 2011. Here are a couple of excerpts:

I will begin with my contentious conclusion, which is that the international diplomacy of climate change is the most implausible and unpromising initiative since the disarmament talks of the 1930s, and for many of the same reasons; that the Kyoto Protocol and its progeny are the climate diplomacy equivalent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that promised to end war (a treaty that is still on the books, by the way), and finally, that future historians are going to look back on this whole period as the climate policy equivalent of wage and price controls to fight inflation in the 1970s. . .

One of the problems of the sheer sprawling nature of climate change science and policy is that it became something of an all-purpose issue on which advocates could attach their pet ideas and concerns. The idea of climate adjustment assistance has revived at the UN an old idea from the 1970s—what was called then the “New International Economic Order.” The premise of the New International Economic Order, as explained at the time by West Germany’s Chancellor Willy Brandt, was that there needed to be “a large scale transfer of resources to developing countries.” This was back in the hey-day of post-colonial Western guilt, and it came to an abrupt end in the 1980s when President Reagan forcefully repudiated it at a UN summit in, coincidentally, Cancun.

But climate assistance has revived the old idea of requiring wealthy nations to indemnify poor nations. The German newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung observed shortly before the Cancun summit last year: “The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”   What prompted this conclusion was a candid admission from a UN official closely involved with the climate negotiations, German economist Ottmar Edenhoffer: “But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

I expect we’ll hear a lot of this kind of talk coming out of Paris, because these folks just can’t help themselves when they want to help themselves to your money.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/11/climatistas-well-always-have-paris.php

The Left’s Wrong Reactions to the Paris Terrorist Attack

The Left’s Wrong Reactions to the Paris Terrorist Attack

By Dennis Prager 

The Left’s reactions to the terrorist attack on Paris are in keeping with its tradition of getting almost everything wrong.

Take Bernie Sanders, for example. At the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, one day after the Paris attack, the Democratic/socialist candidate made this observation about al-Qaeda:

I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely, and led to the rise of al-Qaeda and to ISIS. 

That a U.S. senator, let alone a man running for president of the United States, believes that the American invasion of Iraq led to the rise of al-Qaeda should automatically disqualify him from serious consideration by voters. It is an example of how many on the left twist reality to force-fit it into their ideology.

For the benefit of those too young to recall 9/11 — and who probably haven’t been told in school that Muslims assaulted America in the name of Islam that day — it was al-Qaeda that attacked America. In other words, al-Qaeda, founded in 1988, preceded the American invasion of Iraq by 15 years.

Take President Obama’s statement on the attack:

This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people on France, but this is an attack on all humanity and the universal values we share. 

At best, this is classic left-wing naiveté; at worst, it is nonsense produced by left-wing thinking.

This was not an “attack on all humanity.” And it wasn’t an attack on “the universal values we share,” since there are in fact few universal values that humanity shares. It was an attack on Western liberal values. If humanity shared universal values, there wouldn’t be wars, or hundreds of millions of subjugated women, or theocratic and secular tyrannies.

The president offered another piece of left-wing foolishness:

We’re going to do whatever it takes to work with the French people and with nations around the world to bring these terrorists to justice. 

This notion of “bringing terrorists to justice” is in keeping with the left-wing denial that we are in a war — specifically a war on Islamist terrorism. In war you defeat your enemy (which usually involves killing). You don’t bring terrorists to justice; you bring domestic criminals to justice. But for the Left, all the world’s Islamist terrorists are isolated criminals who by amazing coincidence happen to be Muslim.

And then there was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.

In a column of breathtaking self-righteousness, Bruni wrote that he “felt sick” over the fact that people were saying anything about the Paris attack other than offering condolences to the French people.

“Can’t we wait until we’ve resolved the body count?” he asked.

One of the allegedly egregious examples he cited was that of former New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, who tweeted:

Now maybe the whining adolescents at our universities can concentrate on something other than their need for “safe” spaces . . . 

Her tweet was in fact entirely apt. She asked that the spoiled immature brats who complain about not having “safe spaces” at our schools for infants, a.k.a. universities, understand what real evil is and come to appreciate how incredibly lucky and safe they are.

But to Bruni, this was just an example of how “anything and everything becomes prompt for a plaint, a rant, a riff.”

“I felt sick,” he wrote. “For a few hours, even a few days, I’d like to focus on the pain of Parisians . . . ”

On January 8, 2011, in Tucson, Ariz., Jared Loughner murdered six people and gravely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That very day, based on nothing, Bruni’s New York Times colleague Paul Krugman wrote that the murders were a result of hate-filled rhetoric that saturates conservative and Republican life.

Did Bruni feel sick? He should have. Not only did Krugman not focus on the pain of the congresswoman and the murdered, but he lied about Republican rhetoric influencing the murderer.

Here’s another left-wing reaction to Paris.

British photographer Roger Hicks, author of 30 books on photography and a biography of the Dalai Lama, commenting in the New York Times on Bruni’s column, wrote:

What struck me was the hypocrisy of President Hollande who, if I heard correctly, described the attack as a “declaration of war on the French state,” which has been waging war against Islamic State for months . . . 

Get it? Hollande is a hypocrite for describing the attacks as a declaration of war on France, since France had already been warring on the Islamic State.

Morally profound, no?

And then there was the Iranian-American professor and bestselling author, Reza Aslan, on CNN:

Islam doesn’t promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion and like every religion in the world it depends on what you bring to it. If you’re a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism is going to be violent.

Another profundity from the Left. There is no difference between Islam and any other religion today in terms of producing violence. It’s just that murderers are more attracted to Islam than to any other religion.

Finally, let’s not forget what is perhaps the most important of the Left’s responses to Islamist terror: bringing millions of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa into Western countries. Thanks to Angela Merkel of Germany, Europe will be welcoming nearly a million Syrian refugees, and thanks to Barack Obama and John Kerry, America is bringing 10,000 into America next year. Regarding which Hillary Clinton said in her debate the day after the Paris atrocities:

The [Obama] administration originally said ten [thousand]. I said we should go to 65 [thousand] . . . 

And U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that America will accept 85,000 refugees next year, most of whom will be Syrians.

Just another week in the life of the Left. It is doing non-violently and internally what Islamist terrorism is seeking to do externally and violently — dismantle Western civilization.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code, was published by Regnery. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427178/left-response-paris-attacks

ISIS Is Barack Obama’s Creation

ISIS Is Barack Obama’s Creation

After he sold Iraq down the Euphrates, a resistance became inevitable.

By Mona Charen 

Throughout the last third of George W. Bush’s presidency, opinion leaders were obsessed with the question of mistakes. Among most members of the press and among Democratic office holders (even, or perhaps especially, those who had voted to approve the Iraq war), the appetite was strong to hold President Bush in a half-nelson until he admitted that the war had been a terrible mistake. When Jeb Bush entered the presidential race, he was quickly charged with fraternal guilt in the matter.

It isn’t unfair to ask policymakers to reflect on their misjudgments — or those of their predecessors — but there is a studied lack of interest in mistakes made by our current president.

Republicans have all been asked: “Knowing what we know now, was it a mistake to go into Iraq?” That’s an unserious way of putting the question. No decision is made with benefit of hindsight (“Knowing what you know now, Mrs. Lincoln, would you have attended the theater on April 14?”).

Perhaps President Bush was wrong to topple Saddam Hussein. I don’t think the verdict is clear. But excepting the original decision to invade, Mr. Bush’s errors were recognized and corrected before he left office. Barack Obama’s mistakes, by contrast, have been far more consequential and far more threatening to world order and American security than George W. Bush’s were. There is zero evidence that Mr. Obama even recognizes them, let alone that he plans to correct them. Nor have the Democratic candidates been asked about them.

The Iraq that President Obama inherited was, by his own reckoning, “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.” Obama used those words when announcing the complete American withdrawal of forces in 2011. He went on to say that Iraq had “a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Not quite. There was a free and fair election in 2010, in which a moderate Sunni alliance led by a secular Shiite received a plurality. But the loser, Nouri al-Maliki, hijacked the election and took power. President Obama looked the other way, perhaps because he wasn’t interested in Iraq’s fate, or more likely because Maliki was Tehran’s man, and President Obama has consistently leaned toward Iran’s interests in the Middle East.

Obama stuck to his determination to withdraw every American from Iraq, thereby radically diminishing U.S. influence in the most explosive part of the globe. He also failed on the diplomatic front. He and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had boasted so often that they would use “smart power” and “soft power” and wouldn’t “do stupid [stuff],” were guilty of something that looks a lot like stupidity in their handling of Maliki. As the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack told The Atlantic:

The message sent to Iraq’s people and politicians alike was that the United States under the new Obama administration was no longer going to enforce the rules of the democratic road. . . . [This] undermined the reform of Iraqi politics and resurrected the specter of the failed state and the civil war.

What came next was even worse. Acquiescing in the stolen election, Obama then backed Maliki even as Maliki brutalized Iraq’s Sunni minority. Jobs and salaries promised to Sunni groups who had cooperated against al-Qaeda when Bush was in office were never paid by Maliki. Dozens of Sunni leaders, many of them moderates, were driven from office, others were arrested, and some, including the staff of Iraq’s vice president, were tortured. Shiite militias were permitted free rein in Sunni regions of Iraq, committing rapes, murders, and arson. As one Sunni activist told the New York Times, he didn’t like ISIS, but “ISIS will be the only Sunni militia who can fight against the Shiites.”

All the while, President Obama could not bestir himself to utter a word of condemnation or warning to Maliki. On the contrary, he praised “Prime Minister Maliki’s commitment to . . . ensuring a strong, prosperous, inclusive, and democratic Iraq.”

Nor would Mr. Obama consider steps that would unseat Syria’s Bashar Assad — again, probably because Assad is Tehran’s man. And so ISIS has metastasized — a direct outgrowth of Obama’s decisions.

The Sunnis are key to defeating ISIS. They cooperated with the U.S. under President Bush. It was called the Sunni Awakening. Now they can read the signs — America is siding with the Shiites in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. That blunder has fed and nurtured ISIS to become something al-Qaeda could only dream about. If it weren’t for the Iran nuclear deal, we’d say it was Obama’s most catastrophic error.

— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Copyright © 2015 Creators.com. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427388/obama-iraq-errors-made-isis-sunni-alliance

Refugees and the Jihadist Fifth Column

Refugees and the Jihadist Fifth Column

By Andrew C. McCarthy 

It is patently obvious that the Syrian refugees (and, in fact, people from lots of other Middle East hot spots) cannot be vetted by our government. When FBI Director Jim Comey acknowledged this, he was simply saying aloud what we already know perfectly well.

Remember: specifically with respect to the Syrians, the Obama administration told us that our government is so adept at distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys that, if the it spent enough of our money, it could arm, train and churn out a “moderate rebel” army of about 5,000 per year. A year and a half-billion dollars later, Obama had to shut down the program in utter humiliation: We managed to train only 54 “rebels” (about one percent of what was promised for the first year). Many of those vetted trainees immediately gave the equipment we’d supplied them with to al-Nusra, the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate.

So that’s what happened with the Syrians our government said it had vetted, knew well, and had months of close contact with. How effective do you figure the vetting would be for thousands of Syrians our government doesn’t have a clue about – including about whether they’re actually Syrians.

But there is a more critical point here. Even if you are competent and have sufficient background information to do effective vetting, you have to know what you are vetting for.

That is the subject of my column on the home page: “France’s ‘No Go’ Zones: Assimilation-Resistant Muslims Are the Real Refugee Problem.” Listening to our Beltway solons – very much including Republicans – talk about this subject, you would think the only people we have to worry about are terrorists. Therefore, if you vet someone and determine he’s not a terrorist, it’s “mission accomplished” and you can give him asylum.

That’s not even half of the challenge. As we are seeing in France, and have seen elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East, jihadism thrives when it has a support system of sharia-adherent Muslims. In Europe this means – as it would mean here – enclaves of assimilation-resistant Muslims.

On that score, who does Washington say are our allies against the jihad?

There is Turkey, ruled by the authoritarian Islamist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. President Erdogan, a vigorous supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah (which is to say, of jihadists), is a huge part of the problem. It is he who encourages Muslim migration to Europe but then proclaims – while speaking in Germany – that pressuring Muslims in the West to assimilate is “a crime against humanity.”

Erdogan is a longtime confederate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which operates quite freely in Turkey. Among his partners is Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the influential sharia jurist who vows that Islam will “conquer Europe” and “conquer America” by dawa – the proselytism of Islamic law. Qaradawi is also a notorious proponent of jihad – by Hamas against Israel, and by any willing Muslim against Americans in Iraq.

Qaradawi is thus a master of the Islamist inside-outside strategy: “moderate” Islamists residing in non-Muslim countries exploit the atmosphere of violence created by jihadist terrorists in order to pressure governments to accommodate sharia. The purportedly moderate Islamists and the violentjihadists have the same objective: the creation of Islamic states governed by sharia. They work cooperatively to achieve this goal – even though, for the consumption of gullible Westerners, the “moderates” will occasionally condemn jihadist savagery and the jihadists will reciprocate by condemning “moderate Islamist” passivity.

Qaradawi is especially influential over the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The principal goal of this 57-government bloc is the promotion ofsharia. Yet, our government somehow considers the OIC to be its ally, – particularly important member states like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading propagator of Islamic supremacist ideology. As I explain in the column, a top agenda item of the OIC is to exhort Muslims in the West not to assimilate in the countries where they now reside. They are instructed that it is a religious duty to remain steadfastly sharia adherent. “Muslims,” theOIC proclaims, “should not be marginalized or attempted to be assimilated, but should be accommodated.”

Under these circumstantes, how are we possibly going to do refugee vetting that serves the national security interests of the United States?

It is patently obvious that our security challenge is not just jihadists; it is the combination of jihadists and their support network of assimilation-resistant Muslims. Indeed, even if we could vet for all the currently active jihadists, it is from the assimilation-resistance Islamic communities that future “homegrown” jihadists will emerge – and that is apart from the material and moral support jihadists get from like-minded Islamists in these communities.

We not only remain willfully blind to what our actual security threat is. We actually look for allies among the countries and Muslim Brotherhood operatives who campaign against Muslim assimilation while rationalizing jihadist terror as legitimate resistance.

If the United States government looks at Erdogan and sees a close ally, do we really think we can trust government officials to grasp the threat we face, much less vet it?

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/427349/print

Prominent Scientists Declare Climate Claims Ahead of UN Summit ‘Irrational’ – ‘Based On Nonsense’ – ‘Leading us down a false path’

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: 'Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial.' - 'When someone says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period.'

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer: 'Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. We are being led down a false path. To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?'

Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore: 'We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science.'

By: Marc Morano - Climate Depot

Note: CFACT’s new skeptical documentary, Climate Hustle, is set to rock the UN climate summit with red carpet’world premiere in Paris. 

#

From Left to Right: Dr. Will Happer, Dr. Richard Lindzen & Dr. Patrick Moore

AUSTIN, Texas – A team of prominent scientists gathered in Texas today at a climate summit to declare that fears of man-made global warming were “irrational” and “based on nonsense” that “had nothing to do with science.” They warned that “we are being led down a false path” by the upcoming UN climate summit in Paris.

The scientists appeared at a climate summit sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The summit in Austin was titled: “At the Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit.”

Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, derided what he termed climate “catastrophism.”

“Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial,” Lindzen said.

Lindzen cautioned: “The most important thing to keep in mind is – when you ask ‘is it warming, is it cooling’, etc.  — is that we are talking about something tiny (temperature changes) and that is the crucial point.”

Lindzen also challenged the oft-repeated UN IPCC claim that most of warming over past 50 years was due to mankind.

“People get excited over this. Is this statement alarming? No,” Lindzen stated.

“We are speaking of small changes 0.25 Celcius would be about 51% of the recent warming and that strongly suggests a low and inconsequential climate sensitivity – meaning no problem at all,” Lindzen explained.

“I urge you when looking at a graph, check the scales! The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree,” he noted.

“When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period. And they are arguing over hundredths of a degree when it is uncertain in tenths of a degree,” Lindzen said.

“And the proof that the uncertainty is tenths of a degree are the adjustments that are being made. If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree,” he said. (Also See: Scientists balk at ‘hottest year’ claims: Ignores Satellites showing 18 Year ‘Pause’ – ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’ – The ‘Pause’ continues)

“The UN IPCC wisely avoided making the claim that 51% of a small change in temperature constitutes a problem. They left this to the politicians and anyone who took the bait,” he said.

Lindzen noted that National Academy of Sciences president Dr. Ralph Cicerone has even admitted that there is no evidence for a catastrophic claims of man-made global warming. See: Backing away from climate alarm? NAS Pres. Ralph Cicerone says ‘we don’t have that kind of evidence’ to claim we are ‘going to fry’ from AGW

Lindzen also featured 2006 quotes from Scientist Dr. Miike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, admitting that claims of a climate catastrophe were not the “language of science.”

“The discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device,” Hulme wrote to the BBC in 2006. “The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science,” Hulme wrote.

“Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?” Hulme continued.

Lindzen singled out Secretary of State John Kerry for his ‘ignorance’ on science.

“John Kerry stands alone,” Lindzen said. “Kerry expresses his ignorance of what science is,” he added.

Lindzen also criticized EPA Chief Gina McCarthy’s education: “I don’t want to be snobbish, but U Mass Boston is not a very good school,” he said to laughter.

Lindzen concluded his talk by saying: “Learn how to identify claims that have no alarming implications and free to say ‘So what?’”

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers, called policies to reduce CO2 “based on nonsense.”

“Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. They are all based on computer models that do not work. We are being led down a false path.

“Our breath is not that different from a power plant,” he continued.

“To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?” he asked.

“Coal, formed from ancient CO2, is a benefit to the world. Coal is CO2 from ancient atmospheres. We are simply returning CO2 to the atmosphere from which it came when you burn coal. And it’s a good thing since it is at very low levels in the atmosphere. We are in a CO2 famine. It is very, very low,” Happer explained.

Happer continued: “CO2 will be beneficial and crop yields will increase.” “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture,” he added.

Happer then showed a picture of polluted air in China with the caption: “Real pollution in Shanghai.”

“If you can see it, it’s not CO2,” Happer said.

“If plants could vote, they would vote for coal,” Happer declared.

Happer also rebutted the alleged 97% consensus.

“97% of scientists have often been wrong on many things,” he said.

Ecologist and Greenpeace founding member Dr. Patrick Moore discussed the benefits of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Let’s celebrate CO2!” Moore declared.

“We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said.

“We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” he continued.

“The deserts are greening from rising CO2,” he added.

“Co2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years,” Moore said.

Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/19/scientists-declare-un-climate-summit-goals-irrational-based-on-nonsense-leading-us-down-a-false-path/#ixzz3s4EZ68vd

Media That Claimed Bush Chilled Speech Strangely Quiet Under Obama

• FREE EXPRESSION

Media That Claimed Bush Chilled Speech Strangely Quiet Under Obama

 By Mollie Hemingway

On September 30, 2001, Maureen Dowd published a column in The New York Times in which she lambasted the Bush administration for creating a climate where she said speech was restricted. A mere 19 days after Islamist terrorists had launched their most successful attack against the U.S., Dowd sounded the alarm.

Her primary example was actually not quite accurately conveyed. The real story is that Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer had critiqued a Republican congressman’s bigoted remarks against turban-wearers as well as comedian Bill Maher’s comments that the U.S. military was cowardly while terrorists had the virtue of bravery. Louisiana Rep. John Cooksey had said, “If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked.” Maher had said, “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, that’s not cowardly.”

Asked about those comments during a presser, Fleischer had called for prudence saying, “I’m aware of the press reports about what he’s said. I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself. But assuming the press reports are right, it’s a terrible thing to say. And it’s unfortunate. And that’s why there was an earlier question about, “Has the President said anything to people in his own party?” There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.”

Many people lost their minds. For years after that. Dowd’s column probably started it all, but even years later New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said Fleischer “ominously warned” Americans to “watch what they say, watch what they do.” He accused him of telling Americans “to accept the administration’s version of events, not ask awkward questions.”

A few years after that, then-New York Times columnist Frank Rich said Fleischer “condemned Bill Maher’s irreverent comic response to 9/11 by reminding ‘all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.’ Fear itself — the fear that ‘paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,’ as FDR had it — was already being wielded as a weapon against Americans by their own government.” These are just three examples of prominent columnists from one media establishment. Over at The Washington Post in 2009 (!), the imaginative Dana Milbanksaid of Fleischer’s remarks that they were “intended to be chilling” and that he “was basically telling people ‘we’re at war; shut your mouth.'”

Dissent, we were told time and time again during the Bush presidency, is the highest form of patriotism.

Fleischer, for his part, has said his words “could have been more carefully chosen,” but that “my remarks urged tolerance and openness and were addressed to those who made statements and threatened actions against Muslims or Sikhs in America.”

The media and various other progressives also were upset by Bush’s remarks from his September 20, 2001, address to Congress in which he bluntly said, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Dowd said, “Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practicing intolerance, signaling that anyone who challenges the leaders of an embattled America is cynical, political and — isn’t this the subtext? — unpatriotic.”

Dissent, we were told time and time again during the Bush presidency, is the highest form of patriotism.

Is Dissent Still Patriotic?

Cut to last week when Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) explained why he was one of the rare, unquestioning supporters of President Obama’s proposed Syrian refugee policy:

9NEWS Denver 

✔@9NEWS

Hickenlooper: "If your President decides something, you have to support it... if it's a matter of National Security" #copolitics

2:02 PM - 18 Nov 2015

 
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Which is nothing at all compared to what Obama said about how people opposed to his policy distractions needed to watch what they said and did because they were helping recruit terrorists. Really:

I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that’s coming out of here during the course of this debate.

This is years after both Hillary Clinton and Obama were featured in a video the Obama administration aired in Pakistan. In that video, which was a response to the incendiary, anti-Islam video made by an American, Obama claimed that in the U.S., “we reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” Clinton said of the U.S. government, “we absolutely reject its content and message.”

Except that our country doesn’t reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. In fact, we state quite clearly that we believe everyone has the right to denigrate the religious beliefs of anyone, from Mormon to Methodist to Muslim. And the U.S. government has no business weighing in on videos made by Americans and has no right to try to get Google to pull it down when people object to it.

Obama further “chilled” religious and political speech by saying before the U.N. that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

An Obama official just last week made ominous comments about critics of Islam when he said that the massacre of Charlie Hebdo employees had a “legitimacy” and certain “rationale” to it.

In these cases, Obama officials have gone far beyond admonitions to prudence and lobbed direct assaults against principles that underlie multiple aspects of the First Amendment. I’m sure I’ve missed Dowd, Krugman, and Rich’s columns sounding the alarm.

Photo Drop of Light / Shutterstock.com

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway

http://thefederalist.com/2015/11/25/media-that-claimed-bush-chilled-speech-strangely-quiet-under-obama/