Scientists now say the world stopped heating up in 1998. The BBC reported:

Scientists say the recent downturn in the rate of global warming will lead to lower temperature rises in the short-term.

Since 1998, there has been an unexplained “standstill” in the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Writing in Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this will reduce predicted warming in the coming decades.

But long-term, the expected temperature rises will not alter significantly.

The slowdown in the expected rate of global warming has been studied for several years now. Earlier this year, the UK Met Office lowered their five-year temperature forecast.

But this new paper gives the clearest picture yet of how any slowdown is likely to affect temperatures in both the short-term and long-term.

An international team of researchers looked at how the last decade would impact long-term, equilibrium climate sensitivity and the shorter term climate response.

h/t Gateway Pundit

While many Americans were tuned into news coverage of the massive damage from tornadoes ravaging the state of Oklahoma, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor to rail against his Republican colleagues for denying the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Whitehouse spent 15 minutes chastising GOP senators and justified his remarks by alluding to states that seek federal assistance in the wake of natural disasters.

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together.”

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The scandals of the Obama administration seem to be hurting not just the White House but MSNBC as well while Fox News Channel scored its second-best week of the year. After double-digit gains during last year’s presidential election, May 13-17 saw the progressive-aligned “Lean Forward” news network hit new lows as the IRS scandal erupted and revelations that the Justice Department secretly obtained AP records became public. With 350,000 viewers on average and 94,000 among the adults 25-54 demo, MSNBC had its least-watched and lowest-rated total-day results of the year last week. That was also the lowest total-day demo result the network has had since the week of June 26-July 2, 2006,

Last week’s total day results were down 17% in viewers and 22% among the demo from the comparable May 14 to May 18 week of last year. In primetime, the numbers were even worse for MSNBC as a steady decline from the beginning of the year continued. The network had 570,000 total viewers and 159,000 in the demo from 8 PM to 11 PM from May 13 to May 17, 2013. That’s the lowest rated week of the year so far for MSNBC in terms of viewers and the third lowest of 2013 in the demo. The week of May 6 to May 12 was worst in the demo with 148,000 viewers when the network had 604,000 viewers on average. These latest results come as the news network’s recently launched and struggling All In With Chris Hayes hit a new viewership of 396,000 and its second lowest demo audience of just 88,000 on May 14. It also comes on the heels of MSNBC falling in April ratings from its second place ranking of the year before.

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With new reports today that the Obama Department of Justice leaked documents intended to smear a whistleblower in the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, it is now more obvious than ever that this administration has, in the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) created a “culture of intimidation” that stretches from the White House down to myriad agencies of the executive branch.

President Obama: From his language suggesting targeting of enemies to his officials’ attempts to castigate Tea Partiers as economic terrorists, President Obama has presided over an administration that sees his political opponents as unworthy and nasty. Early in his administration, Obama threatened CEOs of banks, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” Whether he’s urging supporters to bring guns to a fight or suggesting that his enemies are in thrall to the gun lobby at the expense of children, President Obama’s tactics of intimidation have become commonplace. The Obama campaign singled out Mitt Romney donors for special censure, suggesting that they were lawbreakers. Not coincidentally, many of those donors ended up on the wrong end of Obama administration legal scrutiny, including megadonors like Frank Vandersloot.

Department of Justice: Today’s report from the Department of Justice Inspector General, showing that former US Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked documents intended to smear a whistleblower in Fast and Furious, are only the latest revelation on misconduct from DOJ. The DOJ has also targeted Fox News reporter James Rosen over leaks from State Department employee Stephen Jin-Woo Kim; according to Megyn Kelly, two other Fox News staffers; the Associated Press, over a story regarding CIA investigations into al-Qaeda; Gallup, shortly after the polling firm showed Mitt Romney with a substantial lead over Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race; and True the Vote, an organization dedicated to stopping voter fraud. The Eric Holder Department of Justice has been the lead enforcement arm of the Obama agenda, going after Arizona’s immigration law and refusing to go after New Black Panther voter intimidation. The DOJ reportedly uses the non-profit group Media Matters to disseminate its talking points.

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Remember Obama and Eric Holder’s attack on Gibson Guitars? Back in 2009 the Obama regime raided Gibson Guitars and demanded that its woodwork labor be done overseas. The original excuse by the Obama regime for their raid on Gibson Guitars was ‘environmental concerns.’ Court documents however, revealed that the raid and legal hassles were from a non-environmental question — which country is working on the wood?

That’s right, the Obama regime wanted the ‘fingerboards’ produced outside the U.S. In something that was overlooked at the time but makes a lot more sense now, the Gibson Guitars CEO Henry E. Juszkiewicz is a Republican donor.

When the BS about the ‘wood’ came up as an excuse from the Obama regime to attack Gibson Guitars, the corrupt media never mentioned that Gibson’s competitors used the exact same wood and faced no problems from the government.

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A shocking story is coming out of Everson, Washington, where a pre-teen was raped, impregnated and coerced into aborting her child.

The girl’s attacker brought her to Planned Parenthood, where she lied about how she was impregnated and subsequently had an abortion.

It was August 2012 when the preteen told clinic workers that her 14-year-old boyfriend was the baby’s father — a lie that was apparently told to protect the adult male who had perpetrated the crime.

It wasn’t until six weeks later that she told authorities what really happened. As a result, in April, Luis Gonztalez-Jose, 31, pleaded guilty to second-degree rape of a child.

The horrific incident apparently occurred at a home in Whatcom County, while her mother was in the shower, reports The Bellingham Herald. Gonzalez-Jose will serve nearly seven years in prison as a result of the crime and will be deported upon release.

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He’s compared himself to Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, evoked nostalgia for John F. Kennedy, sought to emulate Ronald Reagan, (belatedly) praised George W. Bush, and enlisted the assistance of Bill Clinton in his 2012 re-election effort, but as his second term stumbles along, the president with whom Barack Obama finds himself being compared is Richard M. Nixon.

My father, Lou Cannon, covered the White House with distinction for the Washington Post for many years, beginning in the Nixon administration. He employed an easy rule of thumb when fielding phone calls from anonymous tipsters:

If the caller said, “I have a story that will make Watergate look like a picnic,” Dad would hang up on him.

In the past week, Nixon’s name has been invoked often, and not in a way that pleases the current president or his loyalists. Unless it’s a reference to his dramatic 1972 visit to China, Nixon is not the president any of his successors enjoy being likened to — especially when the suffix “gate” is attached to it.

Barack Obama was only 13 years old when Nixon resigned from office one step ahead of the posse. This is old enough to know that correlations between himself and the 37th president should be contested, which Obama has done.

“I’ll let you guys engage in those comparisons,” he replied when asked at a rainy Rose Garden appearance Thursday how he felt about the Nixon parallel. “You can go ahead and read the history, I think, and draw your own conclusions.”

This response echoed language employed earlier in the week by Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney. “I can tell you,” the White House press secretary told reporters, “that the people who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history.”

A new poll found that Americans by a large margin believe that Congress is not overreacting to the burgeoning scandals plaguing the Obama administration.

A CNN/ORC poll found that 54 percent of Americans don’t believe that Congress is overreacting to the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups, while 42 percent said that it is. By an even larger margin, 59 percent to 37 percent, respondents said Congress is making the right moves on the administration’s actions regarding the Benghazi terror attack.

The poll came as White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer made the round of Sunday talk shows, defending President Barack Obama against charges that he was unaware of the IRS scandal until hearing press reports.

“Here’s the cardinal rule … for all White Houses,” Pfeiffer said. “You do not interfere in an independent investigation, and you do not do anything to give off the appearance of interference in an independent investigation.”

Pfeiffer said Obama learned about the IRS scandal on May 10, the same day as the public, even though Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, were aware of the probe earlier and alert the White House about it while the investigation was ongoing.

The White House might not have ordered Internal Revenue agents to target conservative groups, but a “culture of intimidation throughout the administration” made them think it was acceptable, says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.