Cruz to CNN: Global Warming Not Supported by Data (+video)

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Photo Credit: APBy CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash and CNN Senior Congressional Producer Deirdre Walsh.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questions whether global warming is real, arguing that the “data are not supporting what the advocates are arguing.”

“The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened,” said Cruz.

Cruz spoke to CNN in an exclusive interview following an event here to promote his new energy plan, which he says he will formally introduce in the Senate next week.

When pressed about the fact that the arctic is melting, and whether that helps prove climate change is real, Cruz dismissed it.

“Other parts are going up. It is not – you know, you always have to be worried about something that is considered a so-called scientific theory that fits every scenario. Climate change, as they have defined it, can never be disproved, because whether it gets hotter or whether it gets colder, whatever happens, they’ll say, well, it’s changing, so it proves our theory,” argued Cruz.

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Photo Credit: SUSAN PFANNMULLERAl Gore brings climate change message to Kansas City

By Brian Burnes.

Al Gore has been known for his climate change warnings since the 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

But the former vice president, speaking Saturday in Kansas City, cited many more recent examples how heavy use of fossil fuels is contributing to extreme weather events and trends, in his view.

Gore filled a Westin Crown Center ballroom with a 90-minute presentation, using photos and videos to illustrate a litany of floods, wildfires, torrential rains, droughts, dust storms, rising sea levels and increasing world temperatures.

To those attending the Folk Alliance International conference, he noted examples of flooding in locations both remote and closer to home, such as in Manitou Springs, Colo., where high water barreled down mountain highways last year, carrying cars along with it.

“They had never seen anything like this in Manitou Springs,” Gore said.

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Video: After DHS Denial, Local Reporter Finds Evidence Terrorists Crossed the Border

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Photo Credit: YouTube As we reported last week, a local news station found Border Patrol documents that indicated that thousands of OTMs — “Other Than Mexicans” — have been caught crossing the Mexican border into the U.S., including some known terrorists.

But since that report, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has DENIED that there is any “credible evidence” that any terrorists have crossed over.

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Niall Ferguson: America’s Geopolitical Retreat

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesSince former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke uttered the word “taper” in June 2013, emerging-market stocks and currencies have taken a beating. It is not clear why talk of (thus far) modest reductions in the Fed’s large-scale asset-purchase program should have had such big repercussions outside the United States. The best economic explanation is that capital has been flowing out of emerging markets in anticipation of future rises in U.S. interest rates, of which the taper is a harbinger. While plausible, that cannot be the whole story.

For it is not only U.S. monetary policy that is being tapered. Even more significant is the “geopolitical taper.” By this I mean the fundamental shift we are witnessing in the national-security strategy of the U.S.—and like the Fed’s tapering, this one also means big repercussions for the world. To see the geopolitical taper at work, consider President Obama’s comment Wednesday on the horrific killings of protesters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The president said: “There will be consequences if people step over the line.”

No one took that warning seriously—Ukrainian government snipers kept on killing people in Independence Square regardless. The world remembers the red line that Mr. Obama once drew over the use of chemical weapons in Syria . . . and then ignored once the line had been crossed. The compromise deal reached on Friday in Ukraine calling for early elections and a coalition government may or may not spell the end of the crisis. In any case, the negotiations were conducted without concern for Mr. Obama.

The origins of America’s geopolitical taper as a strategy can be traced to the confused foreign-policy decisions of the president’s first term. The easy part to understand was that Mr. Obama wanted out of Iraq and to leave behind the minimum of U.S. commitments. Less easy to understand was his policy in Afghanistan. After an internal administration struggle, the result in 2009 was a classic bureaucratic compromise: There was a “surge” of additional troops, accompanied by a commitment to begin withdrawing before the last of these troops had even arrived.

Having passively watched when the Iranian people rose up against their theocratic rulers beginning in 2009, the president was caught off balance by the misnamed “Arab Spring.” The vague blandishments of his Cairo speech that year offered no hint of how he would respond when crowds thronged Tahrir Square in 2011 calling for the ouster of a longtime U.S. ally, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

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Court: The Right to Bear Arms Doesn’t Stop at the Front Door

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Photo Credit: APLast week, in a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a restriction on carrying concealed handguns. The court held that carrying a handgun “outside the home for the lawful purpose of self-defense, though subject to traditional restrictions, constitutes ‘bear[ing] Arms’ within the meaning of the Second Amendment.”

The question of whether the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends to the public is contentious. The 7th Circuit agrees with the 9th Circuit that carrying a gun outside the home is protected by the Constitution, but other courts (the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Circuits) are unsettled on the issue.

This issue should be a no-brainer.

Few people, if any, would dare suggest that any of the other Bill of Rights be limited to the privacy of one’s home.

Does free speech end in the home? No. Do Fourth Amendment privacy rights end in the home? No. So why should the right to bear arms end in the home?

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Are the Robots About to Rise? Google’s New Director of Engineering Thinks So…

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Photo Credit: Solent News/RexIt’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?

With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”). Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.

But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he’s been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.

And now? Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google’s director of engineering. The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularised of “the singularity” – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.

But it’s what came next that puts this into context. It’s since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.

Read more this story HERE.

Democratic and GOP Governors Face Off in Washington Over Minimum Wage Hike

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Photo Credit: REUTERSPresident Obama and fellow Democrats are trying to use the annual Washington meeting of governors to rally support for increasing the federal minimum wage, as their Republican counterparts argue the idea is a jobs killer.

“I’m not for increasing the minimum wage because I’m concerned it would destroy jobs, especially for small business owners,” said Oklahoma GOP Gov. Mary Fallin, chairman of the National Governors Association. “The market will take care of itself.”

The annual winter meeting officially began Saturday morning, but both sides were jockeying for position earlier, as the Democrat-controlled Senate prepares to debate the Obama-backed plan to incrementally increase the federal wage from to $7.25 to $10.10 an hour by 2016.

On Friday, Obama met with Democratic governors at the White House to build momentum for his effort.

“This is not just good policy. It also happens to be good politics,” he said. “Because the truth of the matter is the overwhelming majority of Americans think that raising the minimum wage is a good idea.”

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Young Libertarians Aim to Be Players in 2014 Elections

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Photo Credit: US News Get ready to meet the next generation of conservative political action committees.

Super PACs like Club for Growth Action and Senate Conservatives Action might be the grown-ups dominating the headlines today, giving the GOP establishment a headache and driving Republican Party squabbles. But now, a libertarian youth group is hoping to get in the midterm election game, attract a new generation of donors and contribute to the cause.

Young Americans for Liberty’s political action committee – Liberty Action Fund – bills itself as a youth-driven, grass-roots machine ready to harness enthusiasm for former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and leverage it into support for constitutionally focused and libertarian-minded congressional candidates. The PAC is an offshoot of Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian youth organization with 500 chapters and more than 125,000 participants, according to the YAL website.

The PAC, which claims to be the “voice of a new generation of political donors and activists,” has lofty ambitions. But according to campaign finance reports, they’ve got a long way to go before they can catch up to the big boy super PACs. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Liberty Action Fund has raised just more than $16,000 this election cycle. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to groups like Club for Growth, which spent more than $17 million on campaigns in 2012.

“We are just getting started,” says Jeff Frazee, Young Americans for Liberty’s executive director. “Our hope is to raise between $10,000 and $50,000 per candidate.”

Read more this story HERE.

Ukraine Crisis: Opposition Asserts Authority in Kiev

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Photo Credit: Reuters MPs have replace the parliamentary speaker and attorney general, appointed a new pro-opposition interior minister and voted to free jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.

Police appear to have abandoned their posts across the capital.

Protesters in Kiev have walked unchallenged into the president’s official and residential buildings.

President Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leaders signed a peace deal on Friday after several days of violence in which dozens of people died in a police crackdown on months of protest.

But the deal failed to end the protests and huge crowds remain in Independence Square, the Maidan.

Read more this story HERE.

California Farmers Won’t Get Federal Water; Threatens ‘Food Basket of America’

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Robert GalbraithWithout a lot more rain and snow, many California farmers caught in the state’s drought can expect to receive no irrigation water this year from a vast system of rivers, canals and reservoirs interlacing the state, federal officials announced Friday.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released its first outlook of the year, saying that the agency will continue to monitor rain and snow fall, but the grim levels so far prove that the state is in the throes of one of its driest periods in recorded history.

Farmers who rely on the federally run Central Valley Project received only 20 percent of their normal water allotment last year and were expecting this year’s bad news. Some communities and endangered wildlife that rely on the federal water source will also suffer deep cuts.

The state’s snowpack is at 29 percent of average for this time of year, which means that for farmers it’s going to be a hard year.

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FAA Risks Losing Drone War

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Photo Credit: APThe Washington Nationals used a drone to photograph spring training. Real estate agents use them to show off sprawling properties. Martin Scorsese hired one to film a scene in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

So where does this leave the Federal Aviation Administration, which insists that commercial drone use is illegal?

Way behind — and facing turbulence as drone use explodes.

Thanks to falling prices, spotty enforcement and the fact that it’s almost impossible to spot the devices being used, the FAA is often powerless to halt the growing drone swarm. Retailers freely sell the tiny planes, quadcopters and hexacopters for as little as a few hundred dollars, and entrepreneurs continually come up with creative uses like wedding photography and crop monitoring — along with delivering beer and dropping off dry-cleaning.

The result, observers and drone users warn, could be a Wild, Wild West in the nation’s skies. As small drone operators grow used to flying them without the FAA’s permission, they could become less inclined to obey any rules the agency puts in place. And with the cost of the technology continuing to drop, the drones could eventually become far too ubiquitous for the agency to police.

Read more this story HERE.