From World Net Daily(not the tabloid site World News Daily), with h/t to Green Hell Blog, something that if proven is quite disturbing. Yet given the kind of treatment I’ve recently received at the hands of an eco-zealot who can’t tolerate my views on climate, I’m not surprised.
Some people have no scruples and no shame. – Anthony
Democrats attack Republican candidate’s children
By Art Robinson
In an effort to do my part in rescuing our country from the out-of-control Obama administration, last year I ran for Congress in Oregon’s 4th District against 12-term incumbent, far-left Democrat Peter DeFazio, co-founder of the House Progressive Caucus.
Although I won the nominations of the Republican, Independent and Constitution Parties and the endorsement of the Libertarian Party, a massive media smear campaign by DeFazio, paid for with money raised by MoveOn.org and from special interests favored by DeFazio in Washington, resulted in a 54.5 percent to 43.6 percent victory for DeFazio in a race that was expected to be much closer.
Although I had never run for public office before, I immediately announced my candidacy for Congress again in 2012.
However, when you take a stand for what’s right, sometimes there is retribution.On Nov. 4, 2010, as soon as the election results were in and they were sure their candidate had won, faculty administrators at Oregon State University gave new meaning to the term “political payback.”
They initiated an attack on my three children – Joshua, Bethany and Matthew – for the purpose of throwing them all out of the OSU graduate school, despite their outstanding academic and research accomplishments. OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon that received a reported $27 million in earmark funding from my opponent, Peter DeFazio, and his Democrat colleagues during the last legislative session.
Read full story here: Democrats attack Republican candidate’s children
UPDATE: I decided to pull the direct link to the website that hurled unspeakable insults to me by an eco-zealot, they don’t deserve the traffic WUWT will generate for them. Such things are best handled by other means. So, I used WebCite to permanently log the website, and you can view it here, scroll all the way to the bottom and note “corrections”: http://www.webcitation.org/5x0pgZdgl
UPDATE2: OSU has posted a statement which you can read here
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Scratch OSU off my kids grad school list
Does not pass sniff test from a quarter of a mile.
Even before we get to the crazy allegations against the school, we have a first-time congressional candidate, unknown to politics, who loses by 8 points to a veteran and says somehow this was a ‘bought’ election.
Actually, a first-timer losing by 8 points is a pretty good showing, usually.
ann r – “[WND] is one of the few sites where one can find actual news”
Uh huh. Like the President’s birth certificate? And that little mix up with Jones and Gore? And the John Kerry “intern scandal”? Or the Kerry-Fonda photo? Yup, gotta love that high quality reporting!
The list of their tabloid-level reporting errors and mistakes (to phrase it kindly) is longer than they would let through in comments. They’re a junk tabloid.
Re: Lady Life’s link to OSU’s news page with the response to Robinson’s claim.
It doesn’t say much, but they could be sued if they said much more. I expect Robinson will be shown to be making stuff up, or at best, wildly exaggerating things.
Ok, so that says that *someone* is lying to someone. Either Professor Higginbotham and the Congressman’s kids are all lying to the Congressman or the faculty members are lying.
But the bottom line is that someone here is lying.
Regarding OSU’s response or more accurately non response: I suspect there is much truth to the story.
World Net Daily isn’t a tabloid site?
Hahaha. Good one, Anthony. But you forgot the winky 😉 to note you were being sarcastic!
I mean, c’mon. I’m as conservative as the next guy, I cherish/practice Christian culture and values even though I’m agnostic about the mystic bits, and I really want to see Obama’s original birth certificate before I’d consider him a constitutionally legitimate POTUS and would just as soon haul him off to jail for fraud without it. But that said even I consider WND to be a tabloid. Maybe not as tabloid as the National Enquirer but in the same ballpark.
Lending credence to Art Robinson’s story, and doubt to OSU’s reply posted above, is the fact that the long time Oregon meterologist George Taylor was at OSU and was ousted, allegedly, for daring to believe that much of last century’s warming was due to natural variability.
There is a pattern of behavior at OSU.
“Dan Inesanto”
I find WND to be a news source to take with a grain of salt. That said, if I were in the situation of the Congressman, I would take whatever source would be willing to print it. Maybe he sent that letter to many news outlets and WND was just the first one to run it.
crosspatch – or, it might not be so cut and dried. It could be something being taken out of context, exaggerated, or dramatically misunderstood.
Based on the way this was announced – an opinion piece in a magazine of questionable attachment to things like accuracy – I am guessing it will turn out to be a lot of huffing and puffing by Robinson over something either completely misunderstood or blown out of context. Or, it might be Robinson trying to keep his kids from being evicted for something they really did.
If Robinson really was completely in the right, and OSU were lying through their teeth, then he would have taken a much more serious step than merely crying foul in a political tabloid magazine.
I follow WND and Art has been featured before… http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=216589
What a nice story, I see why slugs might want to tear him and his family down. Portions from WND article folllow… HOBO
Please bear with me for a moment while I tell you what kind of a man Art Robinson – whom I’ve known personally for many years – really is.
A Ph.D. research scientist of international stature, Robinson co-founded, with Nobel-winner Linus Pauling, the Linus Pauling Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. Then in 1980, with the help of his chemist wife Laurelee, Robinson founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. While carrying out influential research, Art and Laurelee also raised and homeschooled their six children on 350 idyllic acres in southern Oregon.
Then tragedy struck. In 1988, Lauralee died suddenly from hemorrhagic pancreatitis, leaving Art alone to care for all those children ranging from 18 months up to 12 years of age. What did he do in such a terrible, crushing circumstance?
Art restructured their homeschooling curriculum in such a way that his children could, to a considerable extent, teach themselves. He also eventually packaged the curriculum and offered it to the homeschooling world. “The Robinson Curriculum” apparently works pretty well, as today all six of Art’s children either have doctorate degrees or will shortly. One has a chemistry Ph.D., two have doctorates in veterinary medicine and the last three are all in the Oregon State University graduate program working toward their Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering.
Oh, and how’d they pay for all that expensive college and postgraduate schooling – six times? Sales of “The Robinson Curriculum,” which remains very popular among homeschoolers.
Talk about the American can-do spirit!
More important, at least as it pertains to the upcoming election, Art Robinson is a straight-shooting, problem-solving Reagan conservative who not only loves this country, he understands this country – what makes it work – and is willing to fight the good fight to restore it to greatness and prosperity.
One example of his can-do attitude: Robinson has single-handedly documented the utter lack of unanimity in the scientific community on manmade global warming through a petition he started – not an online petition, mind you, but an actual document physically signed – that to date has been signed by more than 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s. All 31,000 agree that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
“Although the story seems unbelievable, I have personally seen this kind of thing happen a few times in my community.”
Same here. More than a few times.
I’ve had some really talented professors and mentors… but there is no category of human being I distrust more than academics, particularly administrators. As a group, they’ve consistently shown that they have trouble making rational, ethical decisions. They’re too far invested into their own sense of importance and righteousness.
Regarding the Beast article, you really need to step up your game!! The rest of these guys have direct Big Oil financing and hired goons to do their dirty work. All you have is a tip jar and volunteer minions. And if you compare the number of people who read your site with the number who helped with the Surface Station project, I bet your casual follower-to-minion ratio is much worse than the other guys. Maybe you could increase our twisted loyalty by singling some of us out. Send special articles to us, invite us golfing or something.
Regarding the OSU students; sorry, I’m rather skeptical that is happened as portrayed. It would seem easier just to slowly beat them down with bad reviews of their work, accuse them of unoriginality or even plagiarism, delete files if they didn’t have a good backup routine, go to a naughty-naughty website on their computer when they leave for lunch, etc. Just throwing them out and stealing their work? Right after their wicked Republican father loses an election? It would be really hard to get away with that and you create a martyr instead of just bleeding someone dry.
I looked at the website attacking you before you removed the link.
I agree; they don’t deserve the traffic.
But there is one bright spot in their otherwise loathsome comment: You are on an enemies list that includes Freeman Dyson. Good company.
“If Robinson really was completely in the right, and OSU were lying through their teeth, then he would have taken a much more serious step than merely crying foul in a political tabloid magazine.”
As I thought I said before, maybe he did send that letter to many different news organizations and maybe WND was the first one to print it, I have no idea. If it were my kids, I would have sent that letter to practically every news outlet in the country.
Dan Inesanto,
Robinson is a pretty straight shooter. Give us a reason why he would write this article if there was no basis for it. Alternately, explain what three kids finishing their PhDs did to earn expulsion, as you intimated.
Naturally the administrators and professors will stonewall, and display wounded innocence. But after reading the comments here from numerous academics, it appears that water cooler politics is rampant in universities. Read Don B’s comment above about OSU.
Posting Robinson’s article on WUWT is probably sufficient to protect his children. Kudos to Anthony for doing the right thing.
These AGW clones are scum, plain and simple. And this also explains how so many “useful idiots” get degrees, and why so many so-called experts are just brain-dead lemmings.
On the bright side, this fiasco is bound to rock the boat and hopefully help.
Thanks for posting this Anthony. Now time to make this story go viral.
This could well be a pre-emptive strike by Robinson, Sr. A modest analogy:
If you hear someone walking around outside your home in the dark, would you turn on lights, make noise and dial 911, or would you lay low, in hopes they don’t break in and are not a homicidal maniac, and if they are, hope the police might solve the crime?
Read Dr. Robinson’s article from SPPI a little over a year ago and then ask yourself if there isn’t sufficient motivation to attack his family:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/how_govt_corrupts_sci.pdf
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine threatened liberal academics behaving badly.
This is truely some of the most disturbing stuff that I have read in quite some time… and the idiotic left always accuse the right of being spoon fed by oil companies… they claim that they are helping the ‘environment.’ One can look and see that they are just being spoon fed money by the green energy companies, which are currently gaining momentum due to the ‘green’ facism, and environmentalism.
Oh come on. I’m sure everyone can think of a dozen different possibilities that could be happening. Like I said, it doesn’t have to be lying, just a bit of hyperventilating.
Maybe one of the kids is being investigated for XYZ with a possible consequence of being expelled if found to have done whatever. Dad gets all cranked up, and the siblings come in to the defense as well. The school starts getting all snippy about things and some school administrator says something that the dad takes as threatening, whether it is or not.
Dad goes ballistic, writes a nastygram but realizes that things are slightly overblown, and so doesn’t send it to people who might look at it more closely, but rather sends it to a place where he knows it will get a favorable reception.
Toss a hundred different variants on just that scenario, or generate a dozen different scenarios where people are just getting all up in arms or are escalating something way out of proportion.
Anyone who writes a book titled Fighting Chance: Ten Feet to Survival about surviving nuclear war is obviously at home making “excited” statements! 😀
I just have to say that slagging down Ted Nugent (with enough firepower to equip a small army) shows serious lack of judgement and possible suicidal tendencies.
I just posted a link to this at judith curry’s site and I see it is already at ClimateDepot. Let’s all help spread this news! This kind of stuff really p*sses me off, and the only way to stop it is to expose it.
Now off to find more outlets.
You are not smart. And you’re a coward. And not smart.
[Note: this comment is from the blog that smeared Anthony. ~dbs, mod.]
Australia has more than its fair share of despicable tacticians in the public domain. One such is Clive Hamilton.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/leave_my_children_alone_hamilton/
Wow! I just found out that this is the Robinson of the “Robinson Curriculum”. No wonder the school want’s to get rid of his kids. The lefties hate the very existence of his children, and their achievement of PhD’s is intolerable.