WJR-AM radio host Frank Beckmann took his act -- and his conservative views -- on the road last week to the Los Angeles Auto Show.
On Thursday, he railed at Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s executive order creating the Michigan Climate Action Council to develop a comprehensive climate action plan for the state. Beckmann is well known for claiming climate change and global warming is a huge conspiracy and hoax thought up by liberals.
While the world’s most prominent scientists tell us the debate now should be about how best to combat the problem of climate change, not whether it is or isn't occurring, Beckmann thinks he has all the answers.
Beckmann complained that there were no scientists on the new council, which is still being formed, but he said the “… wackos will be represented.” His comments came just a couple of days before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international scientific body, issued its fourth assessment, which said “warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” I’m sure very soon Beckmann will use his daily show to prove the world’s best scientists wrong.
Beckmann joked that the high Michigan unemployment rate should help reduce the world’s reliance on energy, which contributes to warming. It may have been funny to him, but for the worker who saw his or her job outsourced, it may not be so hilarious. I wonder where Beckmann was in the ‘70s when the unemployment rate in Michigan was in double digits and gas stations were running out of gas and closing. That stretch of driving less didn’t seem to relieve the country's reliance on foreign oil much.
Beckmann, who came in second in an informal Michigan Messenger poll of the most biased commentators, has demonstrated one thing in recent years: If you want to get on his show, all you really need to do is find fault with the governor. He had Livonia Mayor Jack Kirksey on his show on Thursday to talk about the decision by online mortgage broker Quicken Loans to move from its Livonia headquarters to Detroit. Who do you think Kirksey was upset with over the move -- Quicken? Or perhaps Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick? No, he was upset with the governor for her role in the decision to move. Instead of complaining that 4,000 jobs are going from Livonia to Detroit, he should be celebrating that 4,000 jobs stayed in Michigan.
But Beckmann’s take was that Granholm aided the Quicken deal because she owed a debt to the city and Kilpatrick for helping get her re-elected last November. With her landslide win, garnering almost 60 percent of the vote, I don’t think she’s beholden to anyone.
As an online company, I would guess Quicken could have moved its headquarters anywhere in the world. I’m reading a good book called “The World is Flat,” by Thomas Friedman, in which he talks about jobs being outsourced to India and other developing countries. Quicken not only had the governors of 49 other states throwing money and incentives at it, I’m sure many other countries were making offers. It would have been incompetence for Granholm not to become involved, and I can guarantee Beckmann would have hammered the governor if those 4,000 jobs had gone out of state.
Kirksey called it job raiding, but it should be called job retention and expansion. I wonder how many companies fled from Detroit to the suburbs since 1967? How many people who work at Quicken actually live in Livonia?
The rest of the week brought more examples of Beckmann’s consistent bias, which includes primarily booking conservative guests on any issue and getting his own opinion in even when asking questions of the few non-conservatives be books.
A perfect example was William Cohen, who was on the show Thursday. Cohen, a former Republican congressman and U.S. senator, was secretary of defense from 1997-2001 under President Clinton. Beckmann tried to blame the draw-down and the “wrecking of the military” after the end of the Cold War on Clinton, but Cohen pointed out that it occurred during the senior George Bush's presidency, when he cut the military by one-third.
Cohen told Beckmann that Clinton actually increased military spending. Instead of admitting his obvious mistake, Beckmann's response was “… that was the Gingrich Congress.”
2 comments:
You need to read some facts, were can you prove that global warming is a direct cause of man. Kevin do you ride a bike? Do you hang your clothes outside?
In "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore says that "sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet.” But the group that shared Gores Nobel Prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says in a hundred years, the oceans might rise 7 to 24 inches. Al Gore refuses to debate the merits of his case, Steven Malloy of JunkScience.Com's offer of $125,000 to anyone who can prove man is the cause of Global warming has gone unanswered for almost 3 months.
Reid A. Bryson who holds the 30th Ph.D. in meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology, now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor, created, the U.N. says, to recognize "outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment."
He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.
Says Bryson, "Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past," he told us in an interview this past winter. "Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, 2 million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing . . ."
"All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd — of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the little ice age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air." He asks, "What is normal?" Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the "greenhouse effect," various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.
Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor.
"And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of 1 percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide." Dr. Bryson does not believe that the earth is flat.
Yes I do ride a bike, and yes I do you hang my clothes outside. Do you, hate the USA? You are 100 percent right. I should believe you and Frank Beckmann over the world’s most respected scientists. After all, how can pumping tons of a gas into the atmosphere that will kill me if I leave my car running in an enclosed space possibly harm anything?
Thank God for geniuses like you and Beckmann to set the international community straight.
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