Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Joins Other Conservatives in Their Latest Scheme to Shaft The Poor and Middle-Class
A lot of House Republicans are walking away from the Ryan GOP shadow budget. But not Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). She supports privatizing Social Security and abolishing Medicare in favor of a system of insurance vouchers for the elderly, as advocated in the Ryan budget proposal.That's right, let's let the health-care corporations handle our health care the same way Goldman-Sachs and AIG handled our finances, and Enron handled our energy.
"Independent" Hockey Stick analysis (of climate change) revealed as Republican set-up
The purportedly independent report that Dr. Edward Wegman prepared in 2006 for the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce was actually a partisan set-up, according to information revealed today.
Wegman, who had presented himself as an impartial "referee" between two "teams" debating the quality of the so-called Hockey Stick graph was, in fact, coached throughout his review by Republican staffer Peter Spencer. Wegman and his colleagues also worked closely with one of the teams (and especially with retired mining stock promoter Stephen McIntyre) to try to replicate criticism of the Hockey Stick graph, while at the same time foregoing contact with the actual authors of the seminal climate reconstruction.
The Hockey Stick refers to a graph (by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes) that became a defining image of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It also became a target for Steve McIntyre and the Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick, who since 2002, at least, has been a paid spokesperson for ExxonMobil-backed think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Fraser Institute.
