Laurel700

As Sarah Palin's vice-presidential nomination continues to energize the religious right, the hypocrisy of right wing authoritarians becomes more apparent than ever.

According to psychologist Robert Altmeyer, authoritarian personalities are characterized by hierarchical submission to traditional authorities, aggression and conventionalism. Altmeyer has done extensive empirical research on the subject, which is summarized in his book, 'The Authoritarians'.

In the US, authoritarians gravitate towards politically conservative groups. The religious right movement is a natural fit for them as it holds socially conservative views of fundamentalist religions - the highest traditional authority one can imagine. This is why the religious right tends to support, or reject, a potential leader based on his/her personal decisions and position on matters of personal choice (such as a right to abortion).

Sarah Palin projects herself as a real person with solid values, a super-mom and a successful politician - the very picture of a female leader for the conservative electorate. However, almost immediately after she appeared on the political scene, the image began to crack. Revelations about her teen daughter's pregnancy made a splash, and unsettling facts of her own biography continue to emerge.

One would expect the religious right's support of Palin to falter. Surely, if it were Hillary Clinton's teenage daughter who got pregnant, or if it were Barack Obama who once was a member of a separatist party, the public outcry would have been tremendous, wouldn't it? But, exactly the opposite happened - religious conservative blogs and organizations rallied behind Palin more than ever.

From the page: "This is an excellent summary for policy makers on many of the technical issues surrounding �oeglobal warming”.

Those quotation marks are a reminder that the proponents of global warming have recently changed the term to �oeclimate change”. This change is largely driven by the fact that while CO2 is been increasing a few percent since 1998, global temperatures have not been increasing, and even declining since 2002.

This undermines their hypothesis that man-made CO2 �oecauses” global warming. It obviously doesn�t. Such a vague term has the added advantage of being invoked during periods of warming, cooling, floods, droughts, hurricanes, calms, heat waves, blizzards, etc. For the users of the term it conveniently explains all of our climate tragedies in terms of abuses from capitalist nations."

The global warming theory is going into the freezer, some climate experts say.

The first half of this year was the coolest in at least five years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). And the global warming that has taken place during the past 30 years is over, says geologist Don J. Easterbrook, a professor emeritus at Western Washington University.

Easterbrook, who has written eight books and 150 journal publications, predicts that temperatures will cool between 2065 and 2100 and that global temperatures at the end of the century will be less than 1 degree cooler than now. This is in contrast to other theories saying that temperatures will warm by as much as 10 degrees by 2100.

In March, Easterbrook said he was putting his "reputation on the line" by predicting global cooling.