Former Eagle Great Tom Brookshier Dies

Former Eagle Great Tom Brookshier Dies

Posted: Saturday, 30 January 2010 11:51AM

by KYW's Peter Jaroff and Pat Toddy

One of the most popular players ever to wear a Philadelphia Eagles uniform -- Tom Brookshier -- has died.

According to a spokesperson for the Eagles, Brookshier died Friday night at the age of 78 after a long battle with cancer.

The former football star was a defensive back for the Eagles from 1953 to 1961 and made the Pro Bowl twice. The Eagles retired his number "40" in 1962.

After his football career, Brookshier became an award-winning broadcaster, doing color for CBS football broadcasts and teaming up with Pat Summerall for the telecasts of three Super Bowl games. Veteran broadcaster Bill Campbell says both men made the transition with ease:

"As far as players who made the jump, they were as good as anybody, no doubt about it. They made the accession into our business as seamlessly and as easy going as possible. They were backed up by the firm knowledge they had and they did a really good job."

Brookshier also worked for KYW Newsradio's sister station, WIP. Broadcaster Angelo Cataldi remembers his friend and colleague:

"I learned a lot of his methods in the two years I worked with him. This is a guy who already had his number retired with the Eagles. He’d come in an hour, an hour and a half before a show, do tons and tons of prep work, help to set up guests. His work ethic was phenomenal.""

Cataldi says there were two sides to 'Brookie' - a very warm, gregarious public personality and a quiet reserved private side.

No word on funeral arrangements.

Keep The Cuts

Source: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=519047

01/25/2010

Taxes: On the eve of President Obama's first State of the Union address, two Democratic congressmen are advising him to extend the Bush tax cuts instead of letting them expire. Now that's a stimulus.

We hear that the administration is considering taking a more populist tack as it sails the choppy political waters of 2010. Some of President Obama's plans reportedly include several tax tidbits for the "middle class," including a doubling of the child care tax credit for families below $85,000 in income, and $1.6 billion for child care and a cap on student loan payments.

Such transparent populism aside, if the recent bank-bashing is any sign, the ship of state is still being steered into the iceberg ahead.

This time, we sincerely hope the State of the Union will be distinguished by a cessation of Bush-bashing. We're glad to see two Democratic congressmen have said enough of this, and rather than bash Bush, urge the administration to copy him.

Reps. Bobby Bright, D-Ala., and Mike McMahon, D-N.Y., sent a "Dear Colleague" letter on Thursday asking their fellow congressmen to support extending the Bush tax cuts, passed in 2001 and 2003, at least for two years.

"Allowing these tax rates to expire during this recession runs the risk of curtailing economic expansion just when it begins to pick up and could lead to a 'double-dip' recession," says the letter.

We agree and suggest that keeping them might put jobs back into this jobless recovery. Businesses need certainty for long-term planning and risk-taking, not one-year, one-time tax credit gimmicks.

President Obama did propose during the 2008 campaign and in last year's budget plan extending the Bush tax cuts affecting the poor and middle class.

His plans also included, however, letting the top two tax rates of 33% and 35% rise to 36% and 39.6%, respectively, in 2011. The 15% rate on capital gains and dividends would also rise to 20%, for individuals with incomes above $200,000 and $250,000 for couples.

This would hit the class of entrepreneurs and professionals who are most productive in our society.

Apparently the administration is still worried more about the distribution of the golden eggs than the health of the goose. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire is a tax increase for everybody. Much of the burden will be borne by small businesses, which create most of the new jobs. No one has ever gotten a job from a poor person.

It is not surprising that in releasing the letter, Bright's office included this statement from the National Federation of Independent Businesses: "Small businesses are the engine of our economy, generating seven out of 10 new jobs and leading our economy out of past recessions. The NFIB thanks Rep. Bright for standing up for small-business owners, our job creators." So do we.

Scott Brown's stunning Senate victory in Massachusetts was driven by health care, but there was a strong undercurrent of a tax revolt as he reminded voters in an ad that a different Kennedy than Ted, his brother John, as president pushed his across-the-board tax cuts to get America moving again.

President Kennedy believed that the rising tide would raise all boats. Just a brief look at the economic successes of the mid-1960s shows that's true.

Other Democrats are hearing the patter of tea party footsteps. Rep. Henry Mitchell, D-Ariz., a second-term congressman who won reelection with just 53% of the vote in 2008, also wrote President Obama last week asking him to extend the lower capital gains, dividend and estate tax rates.

"Given the unique economic difficulties we face as a nation, this is the wrong time to raise these taxes. We need to retain these tax cuts that encourage investment that stimulates growth and job creation," Mitchell wrote.

There's rarely a good time to raise taxes. We like the Bright idea and would go even further. Let's make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and watch what America's businesses and workers do.

Climate Flimflam Flaming Out

Source: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=519049

01/25/2010

Environment: The United Nations makes a claim that can't be supported by science, and U.S. researchers ignore temperature data from frigid regions. The crack-up of the global warming fraud is picking up speed.

With so much of the science behind climate change coming under attack, especially among scientists, it's been a harsh winter for the global warming crowd:

• In late November, thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia were leaked to the public. The evidence strongly suggests that researchers colluded to prove the global warming scientific "consensus" by rigging, burying and destroying data that ran counter to their political agenda.

• Last week, the public learned that claims made by the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change were not based on science, but on speculation. Specifically, the IPCC's 2007 report said the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 due to man-made global warming.

The claim, used at the U.N. Copenhagen climate change conference in cold and snowy December to rush through a restrictive greenhouse-gas-emissions treaty, was not based on a scientific study. It was based on a telephone call that a reporter had with a scientist who was speculating.

The IPCC has withdrawn the claim. Murari Lal, the scientist who included the contention in the U.N. report, admitted that he knew it wasn't based on peer-reviewed scientific research.

• Also in the last week, it was revealed that U.S. researchers working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are excluding temperature data from cold regions for a database used by the U.N. in its global warming scare campaign.

Canwest News Service, a Canadian agency that also owns a chain of newspapers, reported Friday, "In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

"Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

"The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada."

Canwest also reports that Americans Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, say that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has "reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database" and has "cherry-picked" the stations.

The NASA agency uses data from "sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather."

In a paper published on the Science and Public Policy Institute Web site, D'Aleo and Smith say the "NOAA ... systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

"The thermometers, in a sense, marched toward the tropics, the sea and to airport tarmacs."

• Then, just last weekend, we find that same 2007 IPCC report included another phony claim: that "the rapidly rising costs" of natural disasters since the 1970s is linked to global warming.

British newspapers reported Sunday that that assertion was neither peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific paper when the IPCC report was issued. When the paper that the claim was based on was published in 2008, its authors said:

"We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Now the IPCC says it is "reassessing the evidence."

All threads of fiction unravel eventually, and the deterioration flies out of control as the end nears.

Is this what we are seeing with the contention that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the planet to overheat?

We can't see into the future, but this myth has taken so many hits from the truth that its survival is in doubt.