Sullivan Calls Palin "a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother..."

Commentary's Jennifer Rubin can't help pointing out Andrew Sullivan's hysterics-in-print:

It was the most electrifying speech I have heard from a leader of the GOP since Reagan.

She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity – utterly fraudulent, of course – that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything. She is Coughlin with boobs – except with a foreign policy agenda to expand Israel and unite with it in a war against Islam.

Do not under-estimate the appeal of a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war.

Given his well-advertised preference for walking on the wild side, this goofy half-wit

is a man obsessed with Palin and her physique and who cannot resist the urge to degrade and reduce her to a sexual object...

as Rubin follows up because this creepy stalker-wannabe simply cannot control himself and keep his perversions off his page.

Shame on the Atlantic Monthly for "sullying" their pages with such an obvious perverted creepy-crawly sport-of-nature.

IRCC Crook & Liar Pachauri Lied About Glacier Melt to Get Millions!

Pachauri Caught in the Act?

Bernie Madoff has nothing on the crime syndicate led by Rajendra Pachauri and Lyin' ["The Science is Settled"] Al Gore. As the formerly AGW advocate Toronto Daily Mail finally notices:

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.

Pretty cozy little set-up for Pachauri, who got his degree in railroad engineering of all fields in North Carolina, making him obvious Nobel Prize recipient material for a five-woman panel who gives the Prize to the likes of Al Gore [highest science grade in college divinity school = D+] and a newly-sworn-in Obama.

The IRCC, Obama, the UN and other members of the international left want nothing more than to tax the very air affluent countries breathe. Thank you, PRC, for scuttling the ridiculous Copenhagen Summit las month which proves that an unabashed COMMUNIST government is to the right of the crime syndicate headed by Obama & various NGO chiefs like Pachauri---all aiming in a RICO scheme to deprive free men [and Europeans] of what little liberty they have left. The G & M continues in its 180-degree turn on the AGW issue:

Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they're bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain's Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri's resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

“I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed.” In his view, it's time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.

Hopeless moral lepers like Gore & cabalmeister Pachauri notwithstanding, it appears that Richard Feynman's great speech on Cargo Cult Science has prevailed over the Chicken Little panic attacks of frauds and "Sky is Falling" hoaxsters who hoped to pull a fast one while the gullible and undereducated [morally and ethically] leftish lumpenproletariat watched like those Germans gazed on the Holocaust during World War II.
UPDATE:
East Anglia Capi di Tutti Capiti Phil Jones, the head of the IRCC stat-magic cabal who skewed and cheated on the numbers, whines that he thought about suicide, then changed his so-called mind. "He fiercely defends the unit’s science — “I stand by it 100%” — but now accepts that he did not treat Freedom of Information (FoI) requests for the data as seriously as he should have done. Jones believes that the unit was maliciously targeted with multiple FoI requests by climate change sceptics determined to disrupt its work." Or, from another point of view, the FOI recipients might have outed the phony numbers and fake "science" embedded in hoaxer Jones' so-called output. Actually, he delayed on the FOI requests for over five years, so the protests that he was "maliciously targeted" can be stood on their head and made to say he "maliciously avoided" due diligence outside a small coterie of select cabal-members.
UPDATE 2Obama's complete loss of credibility on climate change issues was demonstrated at Copenhagen:

...on the last day of the talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India – but failed each time. The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport.

So Mr Obama must have felt something of a chump when he arrived for a last-minute meeting with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, only to find him already deep in negotiations with the leaders of none other than Brazil, South Africa and India. Symbolically, the leaders had to squeeze up to make space for the American president around the table.

There was more than symbolism at work. In Copenhagen, Brazil, South Africa and India decided that their status as developing nations was more important than their status as democracies. Like the Chinese, they argued that it is fundamentally unjust to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of poor countries at a lower level than the emissions of the US or the European Union; all the more so since the industrialised west is responsible for the great bulk of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

Obama's wishful-thinking projection of a kinder gentler USA has predictably been taken as a demonstration of weakness---countries new to democracy with brutal histories regard weakness as something to be exploited, not as a signal to play pattycake in a sandbox of globalization kumbayeh silliness.

Our Wonderful Democratic Majority Needs a Better American People

A Short Jewish Lisping Version of Patrick Kennedy, RI Drunk

Repulsive lisping ogre too degenerate to even be an msnbc talking head, Jacob Weisberg is picking up on the JournoList meme first propagated by Joe Klein of Time magazine and Anne Quindlen brought back from enforced retirement to spew the silly twaddle that the American people don't deserve a great thoughtful agenda such as Obama, Reid, and Pelosi have spelled out to save us from our poor ignorant selves.

First uttered in America by chain-smoking high-school dropout Peter Jennings in response to the '94 success of the Contract for America, the complaint is an old Communist meme reminding one of Bertholdt Brecht's famous observation when the German "Democratic" Republic's Chief Commissars & Stalinist Cupbearers complained after the 1953 Berlin Riots that the German People were undeserving of the delights of worker-paradise Communism. Brecht is supposed to have remarked, "Then why doesn't the GDR dissolve the German populace and choose a new people?"

Condescension from idiots who have never had a read job and being patronized by chattering class scribblers will certainly remind the American people to shape up, because there are leftist degenerates who believe the Constitution doesn't start "We the People of the United States of America...." as much as it should with the music of the Internationale.

I'm sure Zsa Zsa Huffington has a variant on this theme in the works. And we can bet that George Soros will order his galley-slave "Media Mutters" to inform the American people how backward they are for rejecting the idea of trillion dollar deficits and a socialist health plan.

The Appealing Lure of the Biggest Most Bodacious Kulturkampf---the War Between "Culture" & REALITY

Phoney Values? What would Holden Caulfield Say?

"Gatekeeper" is the term mental schlubditzes persist in calling the role of he/she who weeds out unacceptable truth when it conflicts with doctrines of "social justice" and apparatuses of "feel-good" Panglossian hallucinatory schlubditzthink. George Orwell and G.K. Chesterton are among the many outcasts who represented that Truth of an objective sort exists. But the gatekeepers serve as a sort of Dr. Mengele sorting out truth as it arrives in the marketplace of ideas and dispatching it immediately to obscurity/oblivion. What remains is the mirage of whatever lies over the rainbow, the elusive quest for what W.B. Yeats somewhere described the basis of metaphor: "the desire to be someone else somewhere else some other time." Andrew Klavan explains in a very cogent very short essay:

Culture in America is an enchanted place where the conservative facts of life are magically transformed into liberal fantasies. In movies, TV shows, novels, even comedy routines, our intellectuals, entertainers, and other fools are busily reshaping reality into works of art through their piercing insights into what will get them good reviews and awards, and through their rich and varied experience of the café in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

To illustrate, I’ll give you some examples. See if you can spot the difference between reality and American culture. In reality, President John F. Kennedy was a fierce Cold Warrior who twice tripled America’s military presence in the Vietnam War to try to stop the spread of Communism and risked nuclear disaster by standing up to the Soviet Union in Cuba. He was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, an America-hating leftist who had once defected to the USSR.

Now, the culture: in Oliver Stone’s film JFK—nominated for Best Picture Oscar in 1991—Kennedy is a peaceful lefty contemplating a withdrawal from Vietnam. He’s assassinated by a vast right-wing cabal that includes every single person in America except for Oliver Stone. Reality, culture. Can you spot the difference?

Here’s another: in reality, Terri Schiavo was a severely brain-damaged woman who was judicially starved to death in 2005 at the request of her husband, while evangelical Christian right-to-life groups unsuccessfully petitioned to keep her alive. In the culture, a 2005 episode of Law and Order entitled “Age of Innocence” depicted a severely brain-damaged woman whose husband tried to euthanize her—until he was murdered at the instigation of an evangelical Christian right-to-lifer. In reality, evangelical Christians try to keep people alive. In the culture, they murder people. That’s a subtle one, I know—but can you spot the difference?

Let’s try again. Isn’t this fun? In reality, anthropological studies have shown that primitive societies are even more violent than civilized ones. Primitive life is pretty miserable in general, with no protection against drought or famine, no medicine—so that even the simplest diseases can be deadly—and no equality for women, who have zero defense against pregnancy or oppression.

Now let’s look at the culture. In films such as Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and now Avatar—which are really all the same film—a civilized man enters primitive society and finds its values far superior to his own. The collectivist natives are peaceful, the women are treated with respect, and ancient forms of medicine work as well as modern ones.

Spot the difference? Right! In reality, it’s civilization, democracy, capitalism, and technology that give us greater health, equality, and happiness. So when you go to see Avatar and enjoy its special effects and 3-D imagery, just think to yourself, wow, we’d never have anything as cool as that if we lived like the Indians. I mean, they never even invented the wheel!

Hey, and speaking of Avatar, it not only celebrates being at one with the sacred Earth, but portrays U.S. soldiers as evil sadists out to destroy native peoples. Can you spot the difference between Avatar and, say, Haiti, where our old pal the sacred Earth slaughtered innocent people by the thousands and the U.S. military turned out in a massive rescue effort?

But in our culture, the U.S. military is always evil, housewives are always desperate, corporations are always corrupt, and poverty is always the fault of wealthy people’s greed. Can you spot the difference between those assumptions and reality?

If you can’t, you’re probably a liberal. And a knucklehead.

Thankfully, Superschlub Michael Moore wasn't mentioned, nor was the patron saint of schlubthink James Earl Carter.

But you can understand it best if you realize that the international left lives like in cloud-cuckoo land. Its doctrines such as AGW & the immanent goodness of humanity, though contradicted by facts, persist. Director John Ford, though a cultural conservative, summed up the sort of mentality required to succeed in a culture based on unreality---"when the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend."

So Michael Moore can preach the superiority of Cuban health care to America's, but the Canadian premier goes to the USA for treatment of his heart ailment. You can only take the pretense only so far. When it comes to life and death, the real world kicks in.

Ajami Article Stirs Uproar About Obama's Rapid Plunge in Polls

High-Flying Obama Singed by the Klieg Lights

Fouad Ajami follows up his article last week with an interesting five-minute interview by Wall Street Journal reporters.

Watch the YouTube interview, highlighted by the WSJ female reporter's wonder at the vitriolic hatred some mentally-challenged Democrats vented at Fouad, a gentle man whose giant mind is greater than any Dem concerned with foreign policy. In the years I knew Fouad, he always surprised me with the compassionate breadth of his POV concerning other cultures, which he combined with a straightforward assessment of these cultures' drawbacks and shortcomings. Born of a Shi'ite family in South Lebanon, Fouad has a deep understanding of the Sunni/Shi'a divide and his Persian heritage serves him well in assessing Iran's role in the Middle East as well.

Another interesting comment is Fouad's observation that it was a big mistake for Obama to accept the Nobel Peace Prize from a board of five Norwegian women [well, four women and a gender-confused whomever] after zero accomplishments in the US foreign policy area. This demonstrated that, unlike JFK, another wildly popular POTUS whose candidacy subsumed the hopes and dreams of many Americans, Obama may have the dangerous inclination to believe his own hyped-up reviews.

But the video of Fouad's Q&A reveals much about how a very wise and gifted man sees the Obama presidency as teetering on the brink of a plunge into one-term Carterhood.

Michael Barone on the True Meaning of Populism

Michael Barone

Michael Barone gives a magisterial short-course on populism, from Andrew Jackson to Obama. The punch line:

"...when Republicans either had majorities in Congress or held the White House, Americans did not have much occasion to think hard about "spread the wealth around" policies. But in 2009, with Mr. Obama as president and large Democratic majorities in Congress, they did.

The reaction to the stimulus package's vast increases in government spending and the health-care bills, with their redistributive taxes, has been unmistakably negative. If you have any doubts about this, check out the election returns in Massachusetts.

Why has the politics of economic redistribution had such limited success in America? One reason is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, tend to believe that there is a connection between effort and reward and that people can work their way up economically. If people do something to earn their benefits, like paying Social Security taxes, that's fine. But giving money to those who have not in some way earned it is a no-no. [my emph] Moreover, like Andrew Jackson, most Americans suspect that some of the income that is redistributed will end up in the hands not of the worthy but of the well-connected.

Last year Mr. Obama and his policy strategists seem to have assumed that the financial crisis and deep recession would make Americans look more favorably on big government programs. But it turns out that economic distress did not make us Western Europeans.

Now the president and his advisers seem to be assuming that populist attacks on the rich will rally the downtrodden masses to their side. History does not provide much hope for this audacity. William Jennings Bryan, whose oratorical skills outshined even Mr. Obama's, got lower percentages of the vote each time he ran."

NASA Loses $100 billion moon money; Goddard will keep its Weather Lying Money

Hansen Arrested for Fighting Jobs & Trying to Wreck US Economy

James Hansen is the equivalent of the East Anglia IRCC Climate Hoax liars, but less accountable and hopefully now that NASA is going to eventually lose any cachet it used to have, the Goddard Lying Center will disappear with it. The piece of lying shit that is Hansen lies again, and is dutifully quoted by the Ministry of Lies' chief spokesman, the New York Times:

The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.

James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. “When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability,” said Dr. Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, “we find global warming is continuing unabated.”

This fuckwit is a "climatologist?"

I think Richard Feynmann meant fuckwits like Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri when he gave his famous lecture at CalTech about "Cargo Cult Science" which predicted scammers and frauds and hucksters and shills like Hansen and Pachauri unless the scientific method were followed with no thought of desired outcome or cherry-picking data to achieve a predetermined result.

The IRCC and Gore Whores both got Nobel Prizes from five stupid Norwegian women for practicing Cargo Cult Science. I'm sure Hansen believes he lied and cheated enough on the data to deserve one himself.

Juvenile Kos KIddies Try to Arouse Fear of Repob "Extremists"

The American Thinker has a great piece up debunking the ridiculous Kos-sponsored poll with questions out of a fevered brain from the ultra-left.

And that's where the Daily Kos poll comes in. It was dreamed up, executed, and reported for the express purpose of scaring the GOP out of using campaigns stressing these very basic convictions. Seriously, would there be any benign reason why the Daily Kos would pay for a poll of Republican voters?

And the way they did it is really quite transparently infantile. They are using the preferred liberal method of creating straw men and changing the subject. Some of the questions were so childishly worded that even the Mensa Society could not look intelligent if they were polled in this manner. Consider:

Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?

Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?

Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates white people?

These kind of questions make it impossible to register displeasure with Obama's terror policies, ACORN, or the impact of Jeremiah Wright on the president without sounding juvenile. Mommy, mommy -- Bawack stole the ewection and he wants the tewowists to win over the whities. Waaaaah.

I can only wonder if the erudite David Brooks will have the mental dexterity to see through this brilliantly diabolical plot. I rather doubt it.

Brooks has long ago defected to some sort of middle of the hash-mark on the left side of the gridiron & keeps drifting toward the sidelines day by day in the hope of keeping his day job with the NYT---which hired Ross Douthat when Brooks lost any credibility with the people between the forty-yard line in the stands.

The idea was to hitch a scarlet letter of craziness and extremism to the Tea Party and conservative movements. Nobody at the Tea Parties made these an issue in their demonstrations. There were no posters proclaiming "bring the women home" or "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant."

This is a naked political psych warfare. We know that Robert Menendez -- the head of the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee -- has stated that he wants to drive a wedge between the GOP and the Tea Party. You can bet that this Daily Kos poll is the first wedge attempt. And The Politico -- a competitor of the Daily Kos who should be eager to point out that site's frivolity -- instead jumps right in and sums up the poll results this way:

The poll of 2,000 Republicans ... paints a picture of a base that's angry, disaffected and acutely hostile to President Barack Obama. 39% of Republicans polled think Obama should be impeached, 36% say he wasn't born in the United States and one in four say they aren't even sure he's a U.S. citizen. Another 63% labeled the president a "socialist."

The intended net result is to paint conservatives as infantile, religious zealots who are simply mad as hell and consumed with Obama's birthplace and a plethora of cultural issues. Why? To keep the GOP's party apparatus scared of and embarrassed over their own base voter.

The idea is to make it plain to the suits inside the Beltway that the party must not get too cozy with these crazies -- or they will never win another election. But consider their convoluted logic:

If Republicans want to leverage Scott Brown's Massachusetts victory into a November electoral avalanche, they'll need to keep their base riled up -- but not too riled up.


The party's greatest challenge, operatives and elected officials in both parties say, is keeping the conservative base energized without overshooting the mainstream and driving away the moderate "Brown independents" they'll need to take back Congress.

Moderate Brown independents? You mean the ones who wanted lower taxes, less government, more business, and harsher treatment of terrorists? Those Brown independents sound a lot like Reagan, or even Palin -- i.e., conservatives -- to me. Yet the intellectual disconnect drones on:

"This shows a huge vulnerability for Republicans," says Jef Pollock, a veteran pollster and Democratic strategist working for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa). Independents, who are particularly disinclined toward any kind of partisan rhetoric, are going to be turned off when they hear Republicans say stuff like this..." Pollock said.

And there you have it. Arlen Specter is the poster boy with all that is wrong with Republicans going moderate, and his brilliant strategist has just said that Brown's win -- plus this kooky poll -- shows a huge vulnerability for the GOP.

Oh yeah, Menendez, who did such a good job getting Corzine re-elected and Pollock, who is going to have trouble getting hair-plug Arlen the Dem nomination, let alone re-election which Toomey will almost certainly win.

I say just the opposite. Brown's win shows that the right basic convictions need only to be clearly stated in order to win. State clearly that you believe in limited government and lower taxes. Be proud of the free-market system. Be proud of the military, and be ready to treat enemies of this nation as they should be treated. And be proud to stand in the way of Obamacare.

That is the message that the Republican Party must take from Massachusetts as well as New Jersey and Virginia. If the beltway strategists of the feckless Arlen Specter, as well as The Politico and The Daily Kos, want to believe that the GOP is all in a dither over the birther movement and keeping women at home, then let them have at it. They will pay the price in November of 2010.

But for the record -- I do believe Obama is a socialist. Because, well, he is. So call me crazy, but perhaps you should ask Van Jones or Jeremiah Wright if I am all that far off first.

Yes, Obama, the Repubs aren't calling you a Bolshevik. A Menshevik will do, just for now.

Happiness is A Sports Fan Whose Team Wins It All!

Geaux, Equipe, Geaux!

Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal evokes what most of us inarticulate supporters of teams, baseball, football, basketball, soccer, or even cricket only feel deep within---the incredible rush that accompanies the victory of MY team in the championships.

Somewhere deep down inside, there has got to be a specific gene, not just parceled out to males, that is activated by a sporting or other competitive activity. And the untrammeled joy of victory is balanced withthe agony of defeat, as Bill Simmons categorized the fifteen most officially "tortured" franchises in major sports---[interesting footnote, with Cleveland owning three and Buffalo with the Bills and Sabres two, Lake Erie generates five tortured teams, with Detroit just a very short drive away to reach the Lions]. Like any New York pseudo-sophisticate, however, Dan cites Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" about the sadness of supporting the '50s Giants, but the flip side is the joy of seeing my own personal hero, Alan Ameche, score the Gigantic Touchdown in The Game in 1958, so one man's poison is another man's joyous choicest cuts of meat!

In 1966, the loathsome Cowboys froze in the Ice Bowl, surely one of the greatest entertainment spectacles of the twentieth century, in a small company town north of the Arctic Circle which gained the sobriquet, sorry, of TITLETOWN and immortalized Vince Lombardi as UeberCoach and Patron Saint of the NFL. I just found out one of my sister-in-law's sisters was at that fabled frozen tundra event, on a field that symbolized the NFL past and future so well, the day Bart Starr plunged that short yard into the end zone and into the Canton Hall of Fame and football immortality.

The reason the Super Bowl regenerates the Immortal Moments of the '58 "The Game" and the '66 "Ice Bowl" onto a yearly basis lies in the genius of Pete Rozelle, the long-ago NFL commissioner who shoehorned the AFC into the NFL with the NFC, making a replication of the Baseball World Series possible. But much more importantly, Pete discovered that equal monies present equal opportunity, which rather than complete equality, is the basis for the American Dream.

Long ago, then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle figured out this greatest of all human truths, that the only value most people have in common, other than life itself, is the desire for a competitive home team. Family members who would sink a dinner fork into each other over Barack Obama's health-care plan will do high fives in the living room later if the Cleveland Browns beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.Rozelle got the league's teams to distribute TV-broadcast revenue equally, so that no team would be permanently in the dumpster. Basketball and hockey did the same thing. Baseball has not, and it is well established that Chicago Cubs fans do not believe happiness exists.

Happiness has always fascinated thinkers, including America's Founding Fathers. But were the Founders to revisit us, it's not beyond imagining they would upgrade the Creator's inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of fan happiness.

Reading a book on the Revolutionary war by Thomas Fleming last year, i was struck by a vignette from Valley Forge. On March 1, 1778, the Marquis de Lafayette brought George Washington the startling much-hoped-for glorious news that France would put all her resources behind the tiny frozen remnants of the Continental Army. It was the very first day of warm weather after a legendarily tough winter and a bunch of the soldiers were out playing a precursor of baseball called wickets, with sticks for bases, but otherwise more like our National Pastime than cricket. An overjoyed George Washington, the stern immutable leader suddenly took up a stickbat and asked to join. For a few minutes, GW played ball with the guys. Washington was a renowned horseman and, just like his famous successor Abe Lincoln who was a champion wrestler-boxer with forearms as thick as adult men's thighs, anecdotally held to be exceptional in throwing or lifting objects. [This always doesn't work out for the best, as in his youth, Oliver Cromwell was held to be the best "football" player in both Anglia and Cambridgeshire]. But Dwight D. Eisenhower was an All-American in his sophomore year at Army before a crushing knee injury ended his playing days. Gerald Ford was a two-time All American center at U. of Michigan and JFK, RMN, and Ronald Reagan all played on their college football teams. George H.W. Bush was captain of Yale's baseball team. Recently, only LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and GWB didn't play on a college team, but Bush Jr. was famously a cheerleader! Obama played high school basketball in Hawaii.

I digress, but the point is that competitive sports are deep in the bone of the American project, if you will, and watching Obama do play-by-play at the Georgetown-Duke game last weekend reminded me that even if his policies are lame, his analysis of the two teams right then and there was excellent.

Similarly, when soccer-fanatic Henry Kissinger learned of RMN's obsessive interest in college and NFL football, Henry the K applied his superanalytical skills in dissecting the game and would sit next to Nixon during the Sunday games and predict three out of every four plays called by the coach or QB of whatever team in whichever game they were watching. And Kissinger became so impressed with Nixon's own analytical prowess, he credits Tricky Dick with imagining the famous trip to China where Kissinger arranged the tortuous logistics through Pakistan's good offices and Nixon finally shocked the world by going to Beijing in '72.

The extensive digression above is to underline one of the true strengths of American ability to be flexible and suspend disbelief in the impossibility of a given project. The comeraderie which athletic competition builds and sustains are a bedrock to much of the inherent stability of the American way of life.

As Wellington said long afterward "Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."

Now it is up to the Cubs whose last world championship [1908] was nearer in time to Waterloo than to today to figure out how to wing another World Series!

Don't Get in a Pissing Match with Mark Steyn!

The Great Steyn, Bane of Global Warming Hoaxers!

A schlub of a Canadian journalist babbles that Steyn and others are negligent:

Under prominent bylines I read that the emails exposed man-made climate change as (a partial list): “the biggest fraud in history” (David Warren, the Ottawa Citizen); “one of the biggest scientific scams of our time” (Charles Adler, blog); “the biggest scientific hoax in a generation” (Lorne Gunter, National Post); and a "racket" (Mark Steyn, National Review). Peter Worthington (Sun) cites approvingly Conrad Black’s verdict that, “global warming… is not, in fact, occurring at all.”

Steyn notes that the schlub quotes from his July 4th column of last year that since 1997, no global warming has occurred at all, and that since then both Phil Jones, the chief of the East Anglia Climate Hoax Gang, and a dude named Tim Flannery have both agreed with Steyn [though outlaw Jones characteristically concealed his agreement:

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998.

I wonder if Richard Feynman's ghost is looking down on the pitiful politicized runts who use a patina of fake "science" to pursue patently political goals and nodding, yes, Cargo Cult Science is alive and thriving under the tutelage of NASA and the spineless degenerates who push the Climate Change Hoax, including the Cap-and-Trade deformities pushed by ultra-left cliques in the US Congress. The Canadian schlub accuses Steyn of NOT yelling fire in a crowded theater as it fills with deadly fumes, but Mark comes down with the sh*thammer of God:

Oh, phooey. To take up your dreary analogy, we're staying in our seats enjoying the show while the environmental correspondents run for the exits shrieking ever more hysterically. If you want to flee in terror and roll around in the snow trying to put out imaginary flames, by all means take as long as you like, and then, when the fever passes, feel free to come back in dripping wet. But it's a bit of a stretch to call me a liar when you're the one insisting your pants are on fire.

Bravo, Mark, and thank you for preserving us from the tainted Great White North, freezing but finger-pointing in a pitiful effort to be relevant---to be honest, Canada's National Post is the best newspaper in the Western Hemisphere on the fallacies of the Great GW Hoax and has at leastfifty and perhaps as many as one hundred articles pointing out the ridiculous nature of the fake "science."

Geezer Power

G,.K. Chesterton

David Brooks has a somewhat thoughtful column in today's NYT advocating the usefulness and political power of the elderly. Alright, he basically admits that since the older segment of the population is getting social security and has learned to use levers of voter power and has the leisure to participate in internet-led movements, let's make the best of a fact that won't go away.

Anyway, Brooks somewhat unconvincingly makes a case that the two groundswell movements of the last two years---Obama & the Tea Party Movement, are largely due to geezers and their large amount of free time. Oh well, as a 67.6-year old, I do gym work at LA Fitness, a lot of discretionary reading, and from time to time I blog, mostly to ventilate but occasionally a shaft of light enters my mind and I try to explicate it.

As G.K. Chesterton once said "A thing worth doing is worth doing poorly."

Does Global Warming Freeze-Out and ObamaCare Collapse Augur End of Obama's Hallucinatory Grandiosity?

Ah, It's Good to be King [of the World]

The American Interest by Walter Russell Mead has a slamdown in diplomatic language of the absolute collapse of the Global Warming hoax, done in by crooked scientists and dishonest UN officials like IRCC Chief & Nobel Prize Winner along with Lyin' Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri. Indeed, AGW & Cap & Trade encapsulate in miniature the incredible crime spree that the Democrats have been waging against coming generations of Americans by piling up ridiculous taxation legislation, immense deficits, and demonstrating almost daily a complete and total disregard, even disrespect, for what the American people really want.

I can remember when Bill Clinton used to intone about the great collective wisdom of the American people after they re-elected him in 1996 in spite of a rejection of Democrats in both houses of Congress in 1994. Now that the American people have figured out that the elitist scam artists have been trying to foist a ruinous takeover by Big Government through Stealth legislation like the backroom healthcare fiasco, the elites claim the Americans are too stupid to deserve a great POTUS like Barry Soetero. Until recently, Walter Russell Mead had sided cautiously with the Democrats, but now like a true statesman, he has divined the mandate of heaven lies with the GOP in 2010 and now finds fault in the climate change fiasco that Barry was pushing on his second fruitless trip to Copenhagen [the first was the cockamamie Chicago Olympic bid which was rejected in the semi-finals despite Barry's self-esteem and certainty that he was nearly king of the world and could rise in the estimation of foreigners if he just bowed and scraped and sat through enough anti-American harangues by criminals like Chavez & Ortega without visibly flinching.

Berthold Brecht made a famous remark in 1953 after riots by workers made the GDR government observe that the German people did not deserve the wonderful Communist system the Soviets had installed. Brecht, a lifelong Communist, wrote a short poem calling on the GDR to "dissolve the German people and choose itself a new people to communize."

That's how stupid the left-wing elitists in the US MSM like Joe Klein and Keith Olbermann seem to be. Perhaps they can find a new people for Barry Soetero to drag into a super-bureaucrat slave state.

The American people, as they showed in MA, just aren't ready for the glorious future the Demo-cretins had planned.

Fouad Ajami Tells the Truth About Obama: No More Pixie Dust

From Washington to Kazakstan [Most Corrupt Country in the World]

Fouad Ajami remains one of the most insightful pundits in the world---his judgments are those of a man who deeply understands the long-term consequences of American deeds and how the era of Europe fails as a democracy. Most of all, he notes how America succumbed to Obama much like Argentina did to Peron, or Russia to Putin:

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

Fouad understands well how broken societies look to a savior, as France did to DeGaulle after first surrendering and silently cooperating with the Nazis during the Second World War. The international lefts incessant drumbeat of how evil America was for pursuing a democratic vision in the Middle East by GWB convinced the chattering classes of both Left Coasts of the USA that now that religion is gone, we need a secular Redeemer, and his name was Obama:

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural "cool" and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The Republicans demonstrated their dysfunction by nominating an aged war hero and left a competent businessman with technocratic skills and a large background in governing a blue state, Mitt Romney, in the wings, selecting a young and telegenic woman for Vice Presidential candidate. Although she was actually more experienced than any other of the national candidates in running a state and negotiating a large business deal for the state with an oil pipeline company, she was scorned most of all by the barren NARAL and NOW types whose screeching hysteria served as a signal to the Ultra-Left to trash the VP candidate. The NYT came out with a bogus story about McCain "seeing" a woman named Vicki Iseman [and ignored completely the vacuous John Edwards' dalliance with his in-house "video reporter" whom he inseminated during his crusade against the rich---a Marxist from South Carolina's dark satanic textile mills!?! Who managed as a "trial lawyer" to amass a fortune and become a N. Carolina Senator]. The New York Times is a bankrupt institution, both morally and fiscally, under the bizarrely incompetent duo of Pinch & Keller. The NYT, Teddy Kennedy, and the trendy MSM fell hard for the Man Without a Background, whose senior thesis at Columbia U. and complete set of State Senate campaign finance records had "disappeared" without a peep from the MSM so diligent in stalking Sarah Palin's family drama. But I digress. Fouad strikes home:

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama's campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people "clinging to their guns and religion," but they had forgiven him.

The working class was unaware that Obama was a Manchurian Candidate for Unions, NGO's like ACORN & other ultra-left parties and organizations, and Big Government almost without limits. When he won an election by majority, the first Democrat to do so since LBJ in 1964, the young tyro remained stylish, but somehow became enmeshed by grandiosity, caught himself in the narrative drama of his own improbable vertical ascent almost overnite to Superstardom. And as usual, this sort of overnight ascendancy doesn't end up well:

Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.

Mr. Obama's self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.

Americans don't deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

Now this man without limits is going to propose a $3.8 trillion budget that will further enlarge deficits by $1.6 trillion, indeed the budget will project $5.08 trillion in deficit spending over the next five years -- a 35 percent increase over what the administration projected a year ago. And if you believe that this is the final number, a declining dollar and rising inflation are sure to push the deficit closer to $10 trillion while Obama flails at the economy....

Perhaps Obama didn't notice that Scott Brown won his election on fiscal discipline and even the blue states will object. Pace Krugman and other Marxist commissars of a JournoList stripe who infest the media, Obama's further excesses aren't going to cure this economy overnight. And Obama's plunging poll numbers indicate that he is no JFK, the detached student of human tragedy who knew about limits and was himself subsumed in a horrific national tragedy:

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

Perhaps the Eurocentric bias of American thought and opinion give the Eurotards, who run oligarchic top-down non-federal states where media and corporations are under the control of technocratic statist elites, more credibility for being democrats than they actually deserve. The Europeans were saved by the US from Communism, but still regard themselves in some sort of 19th century hegemony, at least in moral terms, which is hardly deserved. They are simply creatures more or less of an international left of which the EU and UN are ancillary arms. Following their institutional shallowness and captious snobbery, as they fall economically behind the Far East, is chasing a false chimera.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.

It was the way in Paris and Berlin (not to forget Oslo of course) of rebuking all that played out in America since 9/11—the vigilance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that America's interests and ways were threatened by a vengeful Islamism. But while the Europeans and Muslim crowds hailed him, they damned his country all the same. For his part, Mr. Obama played along, and in Ankara, Cairo, Paris and Berlin he offered penance aplenty for American ways.

But bowing and scraping won't keep away a terrorist combine which relentlessly tries to duplicate 9/11, despite Obama's bleats that a new page has been turned and we're closing Guantanamo and giving terrorist civilian trials without thoroughly debriefing them because Miranda rights trump NATIONAL SECURITY. Obama is so naive and the American left so utterly parochial in its pseudo-sophistication that they believe acts of public contrition will actually affect foreign policy.

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The "bluest" of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard, who proclaimed his pride in his "army values" and was unapologetic in his assertion that it was more urgent to hunt down terrorists than to provide for their legal defense.

Then the close call on Christmas Day at the hands of the Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab demonstrated that the terrorist threat had not receded. The president did his best to recover: We are at war, he suddenly proclaimed. Nor were we in need of penance abroad. Rumors of our decline had been exaggerated. The generosity of the American response to Haiti, when compared to what India and China had provided, was a stark reminder that this remains an exceptional nation that needs no apologies in distant lands.

What America doesn't need is a Saddam or a Peron or a Castro or a Chavez to strip away democratic rights like First Amendment speech, as Obama did on his SOTU attack on the Supreme Court. This charmer has already been thrown into a check position on the chessboard by Scott Brown's victory, and Brown's polls began a rapid ascent on Dec. 28th, when the full import of giving the terrorist crotch-bomber his civil rights before being debriefed began to sink in. Brown rose from 20 points behind on Dec. 28th to five points ahead on January 19th, and it seems that Obama [and Holder] were repudiated by Massachusetts in that three-week period [which also saw a second-rate not-ready-for-prime-time candidate utterly self-immolate with stupid thoughtless off-the-cuff demonstrations of her evident entitlement to "the Kennedy seat." The entitlement ethos of the libtard left has been soundly repudiated in the most dramatic fashion, and if Obama thinks he can assuage Republicans by visiting their Baltimore seminar and whining that they act like he's a Bolshevik, he simply isn't ready for prime time himself. He will have to use reconciliation to pass the $4.3 trillion budget unless Boehner & McConnell lose their nerve, or if a dumb female Senator is peeled off by the Dems in the process.

A historical hallmark of "isms" and charismatic movements is to dig deeper when they falter—to insist that the "thing" itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.

The USA is an economy based on fiscal years and quarterly reports while its enemies like Al Qaeda and Iran think in terms of eras and millennia. The USA was ranked 19th least corrupt country in the world last year, far better than Kazakhstan, which is one of the TEN MOST CORRUPT. Democracy is a fragile system and the abuse by a "tyranny of the majority" has long been seen as one of its most dangerous contradictions. And tyrannies lead to corruption, as the ACORN saga began to reveal before the MSM "lost interest" and looked in other directions. Chicago-style machine corruption now rules the Democrat Party and it had better realize that the American people have already caught on.

Great change cannot be done overnight in democracies, yet in times of crisis, drastic measures are sometimes called for. But the wrong drastic measures can lead to catastrophe, as the lessons in many other countries can demonstrate over the 20th century. Massachusetts was a signal, or should have been, for Obama, the bloom is off the rose and he had better respect minority rights vis-a-vis political parties just as with human beings.

Otherwise, ridiculous vapid exhalations such as Tom Friedman's about "American instability" may actually become true, though he himself wouldn't have his wits about him to figure it out one way or another. Yeah, compared to Russia or China or the EU, which can't decide whether or not to eject its most delinquent member Greece or assist it on a corrupt road to fiscal sanity? Why does Friedman care more about what Eurotards and second-rate police states think about America? Scott Brown knows that the important goal is to achieve good results so that Americans are protected from terrorists and feel good themselves about this country.

Not what the vapid chattering classes and Left Coast elites think about America.

Tea Party Tsunami Capsizing Dem, Repub Luxury Yachts

CORRUPT is a nice word t0 describe the immense corporatist monster that the Dem Party has become, with the MSM, Hollyweird, and corrupt unions sluicing hundreds of millions into Dem elections while doing a PR protecting enfilade on the Dem flanks to keep citizens from bothering the RICO-style "legislating" going on.

A year ago, the Tea Party movement didn't exist. Today, it is arguably the most popular political entity in America. The movement is already more popular than the Republican or Democratic parties, according to a recent NBC / WSJ poll .
Even in blue-state California, three in 10 voters identify with the Tea Party movement.
And, of course, Scott Brown's come-from-behind blowout in Massachusetts occurred in no small part because of money and volunteers from the Tea Party movement around the nation.

Glenn Reynolds has more to say about the Dem/Repub hammerlock on our tax monies:

[The upsurge is evidenced by] the Brown victory in Massachusetts. A few Tea Party purists didn't want to support Brown, seeing him as insufficiently pure. But the vast majority made the entirely pragmatic determination that Brown, whatever his flaws, was vastly better than his Democratic opponent Martha Coakley, and just the guy to stop Obamacare in its tracks if elected.
They poured in donations and volunteers (millions of dollars and thousands of people), and helped Brown win, and were immediately proven right as Brown's victory did, in fact, derail Obamacare and produce a general Democratic flight from the whole hope and change agenda.
The Republican and Democratic hacks who were supposed to be worrying about this sort of thing, meanwhile, were asleep at the switch. Republican Party support to Brown was late in coming, appearing only after the Tea Party support raised his profile.
Democrats were even slower to recognize the threat and react, and their reaction -- a last-minute visit by President Obama -- probably hurt more than it helped, demonstrating their tone-deafness regarding public attitudes.

What are Tea Party protagonists for?

Tea Partiers seem quite clear on what they're for: A limited government, one that keeps its nose out of their business and focuses on things like protecting the country in preference to redistributing income.
As blogger Freeman Hunt wrote recently:"You want a big tent? It's fiscal conservatism. The people are overwhelmingly in favor of it.You offer that, you follow through on it, and you get the Republicans, the moderates, and a sizable chunk of disaffected Democrats."
Only to the likes of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is support for limited government a species of nihilism. But Tea Partiers are, in fact, working on a platform, which they've called the Contract From America . Though the name may remind some of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, this is something very different.
It's a set of ideas developed via an interactive Web site, where voting determines which elements are most important. And it's not a top-down contract consisting of promises made by leaders to the voters -- it's more in the nature of a contract of employment from the voters, which politicians may choose to accept, or look for alternative employment.
This is basically a crowd-sourced party platform, with the smoke-filled rooms and convention logrolling taken out of the picture. More dis-intermediation. I'm guessing that the political class won't like it much, either.
But whether the political class likes it or not, this sort of thing is probably here to stay. While 2009 was the year of denigrating and ignoring the tea parties, I suspect that in 2010, they'll be listened to quite closely. Those who fail to do so, are likely to find themselves out of a job.

Even if Contract From America has shortcomings, it's better than the daily trough-swill and hog's wallow of Capitol Hill and White House politics.
UPDATE
Libtards have their own little fantasy in the Mouse-That-Roared category. Last time a state/s tried to secede, there was more than a little hell to pay. If the fucktard dupe named Steele wants no war, he'd better not try to secede.

IRCC Liar-in-Chief Pachauri Knew Glacier Melt was False Claim

Rajendra Pachauri has again been shown to be a proven liar in helping to advance false claims at the Copenhagen Fiasco, which Clown-in-Chief Obama couldn't rescue from its hopeless deadlock.

Ridiculous scam artist is now shown to have used the error to win grants worth close to a million dollars.An interviewer from Science magazine:

asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.

“And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

This serial criminal has intimidated Indian journalists and scientists who previously reported that the glacier melt claim was spurous by accusing them of practicing "voodoo science."

When is someone going to fire this con man who is using his position on the IRCC to collect, a la Al Gore, millions of dollars in Global Warming Hoax scams.

Hamartia or the Tragic Flaw: Brett's NFC Championship

Brett Throws Another INT

Dorkwad ESPN Favre-hater Gregg Easterbrook doesn't mention that Brett had just had a coaching error move his team out of FG range with 12 men in a huddle---that would be honorable and as I mention Easterbrook, Fleming, and a few other phlegm-hawkers at ESPN are simply victims of a borderline personality disorder---obsessive-compulsive nattering.

When Easterbrook suggests Favre WANTS to be center of attention rather than win another Super Bowl, he is projecting his own lack of any productive skills onto a great Hall of Famer. I'm from Wisconsin and a lifelong Packer fan until Dickhead Ted Thompson and his tea-boy of a coach ditched Brett and then accused the Vikings of "tampering."

Interesting that both Brett & Peyton grew up as Saints fans and would have been playing against each other while NO sat out another Super Bowl. Yeah, Brett should have run a half-dozen yards and then hook-slid to make up for the dumb penalty his coaches inflicted on the team, but he was running on fumes by then and probably knew that another tough hit would ensue. The pass was a laser, but across the field is still a no-no. Like a one-iron in your golf bag, not even God can complete a cross-field pass from a roll-out right.

Bill Simmons has a great piece on the top 15 officially tortured franchises, with Cleveland achieving a trifecta of pain with the Cavs, Browns, and Indians. Buffalo with the Bills and Sabres makes Lake Erie a terrible vortex of tortured franchises.

Holder Under Fire On Terrorism Blunders; Yoo Exonerated on Waterboarding

Michael Isikoff
Eric Holder Jr. may finally be running out of string on the confidence of this POTUS who has picked a mediocre cabinet [Geithner, Janet N., Holder, and the creep who wants to teach gay values to First Graders over at "Education." But the chickens are coming home to roost:

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

Michael Isikoff, perhaps the only Newsweak reporter left whom I respect, goes on:

The report, which is still going through declassification, will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document. Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

A Justice official declined to explain why David Margolis softened the original finding, but noted that he is a highly respected career lawyer who acted without input from Holder. Yoo and Bybee (through his lawyer) declined requests for comment.

Given the absurd counter-reaction of Obama to read Miranda rights before debriefing the Detroit crotch bomber, Holder may have to be the fall-guy if another terrorist attempt isn't caught offshore because of the absurd no-fly cock-ups [along with Janet from another planet Napolitano]. If there is another attempt within weeks, Holder will have been held criminally malfeasant in not allowing the Detroit bomber to be extensively interrogated by DNI, CIA [the FBI unit for debriefing terrorists is in typical FBI eff-up style, still in the formation stage after its authorization last AUGUST!!]. Maybe Mueller might have to go because the FBI just ain't up to any job except playing dirty tricks on other USG agencies like the CIA or DNI.

Wolf Sheds Fleece: Chavez Undermines Constitution & Attempts Socialist Takeover

I'm Not As Dumb As I Look!

Chavez is in big trouble in Venezuela as his ridiculous splurging on freebies for the poor and his taking over opposition media [or banning them from the state airwaves] has begun to backfire as his witless economic policies drive the country into abject poverty [despite oil].

Venezuelans are due to vote for a new parliament in September. Last year Mr Chávez won a referendum he had called to abolish term limits for presidents and other senior elected officials. Now, opinion polls are showing unprecedented levels of discontent over crime, inflation, and power and water shortages. There were big anti-government protests in Caracas, the capital, after RCTV was shut off, which were countered by the government’s more modest rally.

These problems, and the resulting discontent, may well intensify in coming months. Even the president’s undoubted charisma has not rendered him immune. In one recent poll 66% said they did not want him to continue in office when his present term ends in three years.

If the September elections were run according to the constitution, which mandates proportional representation, Mr Chávez would surely lose his strong parliamentary majority. But a new electoral law allows the largest single group to sweep the board. The government-dominated electoral authority redrew constituency boundaries this month, with the effect of minimising potential opposition gains. The closure of RCTV, one of the main outlets for anti-Chávez voices, seems to follow the same logic.

In his annual address to Parliament, earlier this month, the president announced (to no one’s surprise) that he was now a Marxist. He no longer pays lip-service to the separation of powers, which in practice disappeared some time ago. The head of the Supreme Court, Luisa Estella Morales, said last month that such niceties merely “weaken the state”. A leading member of the ruling United Socialist Party, Aristóbulo Istúriz, called for the dismantling of local government, which Mr Chávez wants to replace with communes.

The Economist article outlines some of the ways in which Chavez has mouse-trapped himself with devious and deceptive and downright dishonest political moves---now he is hemorrhaging popularity and has to do a Gerrymandered system to keep a parliamentary majority in the September elections. He may try to finesse the whole problem by declaring a phony "national emergency" and postponing/cancelling the elections.

It looks like Chavez is doing to Venezuela what Peron did to Argentina---take a prosperous country and start behaving like a super-cacique until eventually, the economy falters as flight capital and reinvestment are paralyzed by a caudillo in love with the sound of his own voice.

Fidel Castro in miniature, Chavez wants to seize the rest of Venezuela's institutions and turn a once-wealthy country into just another third-world joke.

Non-Rookie of the Year Obama Touts Cap-and-Trade in SOTU---The Day After Another Colossal Lie is Revealed

Obama demonstrates almost daily now that he is a clueless ideological retard. Walter Russell Mead, who up to now has been in the closet vis-a-vis any objections to Obama's runaway statist socialist agenda, now reveals a conscience:

Although President Obama urged Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill in the State of the Union address, he seems to be flogging a dead horse. Inaccurate predictions and unethical behavior by some of the leading figures in the climate change movement have given skeptics enough ammunition to ensure that a nervous U.S. Congress will not pass a serious climate change bill in 2010. The news about East Anglia’s violations came the day after Britain’s chief science adviser spoke out publicly about the inadequate track record of some key figures in the global warming movement, warning in the words of the London Times that there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions.

Not mentioned by Mead is Rajendra Pachauri's completely false and tendentiously argued assertions about glacier reductions in the Himalayas. Why Pachauri stays on at the IRCC after being totally outed as an obnoxious fraud [who called his enemies much viler names than that for questioning his IRCC omniscience on the glacier statements, which were based on an author who had long since repudiated his original statement and had not been peer-reviewed] is probably a function of the large emoluments he accrues as being head of a UN agency, tax-free.

Even Mead himself is stuck in a halfway mode, saying that all these violations the UK is announcing mean that "the anti-climate change movement will not soon regain the credibility it has lost."

RWM surely must mean the "climate-change movement."

Lyin' Al Gore Sighted at Apple Ipad Rollout---No SOTU Invite?

Al Gore is watching the signature and crowning hoax of his career--- The Global Warming Cap-and-Trade Power Grab---dissolve as more of the IRCC report is revealed to be based on either biased or falsified information from "climatologists" sending in info that might trigger grant money in return.

Hillary Clinton was also absent and given Obama's current slow-plunge in national polls after the Massachusetts Massacre, the better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part, Hillary may still be thinking of '12. [Remember Teddy knocking over James Earl Peanut's re-run chances in 1980?]

Obamanation of Desolation? Bye, Bye, Separation of Powers &Miss American Hegemony, both Home & Abroad.

Alito Speaks Truth to Demagoguery, Via Lip Synch

Obama is a Foreign Policy Disaster and the UK
Daily Telegraph goes through the SOTU speech last night to see how the artful dodger avoided substance and exuded silly shallow rhetoric, an area where Obama excels, and demagogued issues he evidently hardly understands. The Telegraph notes that he gets an "F" for Foreign Policy, as he skated far away from real issues like Afghanistan, counterterrorism, Iranian nukes, and a myriad other areas where he & his feckless SecState are underperforming on the world state. His two Copenhagen visits, one for the City of Chicago to host the Olympics and one for a Busted Global Warming Hoax Masquerade symbolize this tyro's record of failure in foreign affairs---his record on substantive issues and symbolic ones is completely smudged by amateurish reaching out to our traditional adversaries, who thus far have taken our hostess gifts and then stuck a thumb in our collective eye. Not one foreign policy success after one year, though he did agree to two-thirds of a surge in Afghanistan. Urkel is simply not ready for prime time diplomacy.

The speech makes it very evident that the reckless and underinformed POTUS remains in his Oval Office Cocoon and it is clear that he has put on a game-face mask while flailing and looking for scapegoats---banks, GWB [again & again] and now the SCOTUS as the First-Clown-In-Chief had the witless effrontery to attack the Supreme Court's decision while the Nine sat in front of him. Here's G-Town U. Law Prof Randy Barnett:

To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

And the lying fool of an Obamanation of Desolation is either ignorant or demagogue or both when he said "foreign" interests could now contribute as a result of the SCOTUS ruling.

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case.

It gets sillier and even the socialism-inclined state-controlled NPR had to demur on Obama's slipshod notion that the SCOTUS ruled on direct contributions by corporations, rather than McCain/Feingold's over-the-top ban on ALL FORMS of contributions. And finally, the infamousLinda Greenhouse who has scribbled on the SCOTUS for thirty years wrote in the NYT opinionator calls Obama "imprecise:"

Indeed, Mr. Obama's description of the holding of the case was imprecise. He said the court had "reversed a century of law." The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries -- as opposed to their political action committees -- on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election.

:
We are now experiencing the consequences of electing an inexperienced rookie on both foreign and domestic policy, and one with a stubborn arrogant conviction that he is some sort of the Child of Destiny the febrile psychos on the Far Left believe he is---the true empty vessel which they can fill with their Marxist class warfare fantasies.

My guess is that this arrogant half-wit of a POTUS can talk a talk, but is a veritable cripple in actually walking anything except a moonwalk double-clutch shuffle on real policy.

MoDo in Love With Scott Brown,

MoDo A Capricorn, Fits with Fellow Earth Sign Scott Brown [Virgo]

It may or may not be the influence of the stars, but starstruck Maureen Dowd, who was described by former date Warren Beatty as "smokin' hot," in turn believes that Scott Brown may be, er, the New One.

He’s The One, all right.....The handsome, athletic pol with the comely wife and two lovely daughters who precipitously rose from the State Legislature to pull us all together.

The fresh face and disarming underdog America’s been waiting for, someone who suffered through his parents’ divorce, watched his mom go on welfare and survived some wayward youthful behavior to become disciplined and successful — a lawyer, a lawmaker and a devoted family guy who does dog duty. Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union? He’s the Epic One we want to hear from. All that inexperience can really be put to good use here.

Obama’s Oneness has been one-upped. Why settle for a faux populist when we can have a real one? Why settle for gloomy populism when we can have sunny populism? Why settle for Ivy League cool when we can have Cosmo hot? Why settle for a professor who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Democrats when we can have an Everyman who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Republicans? Why settle for a 48-year-old, 6-foot-1, organic arugula when we can have a 50-year-old, 6-foot-2, double waffle with bacon?

Sounds a bit infatuated, but knowing MoDo and her swift tacks and direction turns, Scott Brown will be out of favor in her "Bringing Sexy Back" category when the dust settles.

She may melt her heart cuz she's smokin' hot,

Obama Flails in Free Fall Trying to Catch a Liana Vine Like a Pirate in the Caribbean

Scott Brown Look-alike Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson unloads on Obama as his numbers head southward past Florida into Caribbean territory.

......a lot of DC-NY pundits ... mistakenly fell for the Emanuel/Axelrod thesis that popular outrage at Wall Street banditry, weariness with Iraq, and the lackluster McCain campaign would translate into populist support for a kinder, gentler socialism.

And now? On every issue — more bailouts, more stimuli, more deficits, higher taxes, statist health care, cap and trade, diplomatic apologetics, the shunning of natural gas, oil, and nuclear in favor of "millions of green jobs" subsidized by billions in federal "stimulus" — the Obama position polls 5-15 points below 50 percent.

After Van Jones, Anita Dunn, the Skip Gates mess, the "tea-bagger" slurs, the attacks on Fox News, the Copenhagen dashes, the bowing, the apologizing, the reordering of creditors, the NEA obsequiousness, the lackluster overseas-contingency-operation front, the deer-in-the-headlights pause on Afghanistan, the pseudo-deadlines on Iran, Guantanamo, and health care, the transparency and bipartisanship fraud, and dozens of other things, Obama simply does not have the popularity to carry unpopular legislation forward. Indeed, he is reaching a point where he may poll more negatively than his agenda does. "Let me be perfectly clear" and "make no mistake about it" are now caricatures.

So where are we at twelve months? Obama showed the country his vision of where he wanted us to go; he had both houses of Congress, a toady media, and enormous personal popularity — and he is getting nowhere. Why? Because most Americans are vehemently opposed to taking their country in the direction that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid would prefer.

Since Obama is both inexperienced and apparently a stubborn ideologue, I think all we will be left with when the novelty wears off is rhetoric and euphemism. Obama will grow the deficit even larger and call it fiscal sobriety; he will push for higher taxes and suggest the entrepreneurial class is the same as the super-rich who "made out like bandits under Bush"; he will declare that his outreach to Chávez, Assad, Putin, and Ahmadinejad has been successful, even as those leaders incrementally and insidiously readjust their respective regional maps; he will borrow far more money than Bush did and copy his homeland-security protocols, while continuing to blame Bush for America's problems — hoping that $2 trillion of annual borrowing, along with a recovering world economy and the resilience of U.S. business, will bring a half-hearted recovery by November 2010.

That's about all you have, when you bet your holdings on European-style socialism and it proved a losing hand.

The US is not yet a dependent society like many in "Old Europe," where living off the dole has become a generational way to roll. Unlike the Eurotard template, the US still has only about a 21% Liberal electorate while a huge slice of voters consider themselves politically and culturally conservative or independent. The US is still the most religious country by percentage if not public practice and its Second Amendment, First Amendment, and Fourteenth Amendment freedoms still prevail in the marketplace of ideas, despite a Stealth Attack on the Constitution by the noise machine on the Libtard Ultra-Left.

Back in the day, I was not only a Democrat, but worked for them in two national and many local campaigns as a National Staffer and local advance man/consultant. But that was before the Ultra-Left JournoListServ and Soros cabals took over the ideological compassion of the seventies/eighties and commandeered the Dems into a EuroMarxist slow-motion creeping socialism, marking old Norman Thomas's---g-dad of current Socialist M'ging Editor of Newsweak Evan--- famous prediction that "One day the USA will wake up as a socialist country without the word itself ever being employed" or words to that effect.

Just like the First Tea Party spurred the founding of a Revolutionary ethos, the second round of Tea Party activists were verbally abused by this feckless POTUS as "teabaggers," a sexual perverse act favored by ultra-lefties and their groupies of all genders and species.

POTUS Obama is about as politically sensitive as ol' George III back when the First Tea Party was followed by the First Boston Massacre.

History doesn't often repeat itself, but in this case it rhymes very closely.

Rubio Overtakes Crist in Poll, First Tea Party Senator?

And in This Corner, Top Contender for First Tea Party Senator, Marco Rubio

Marco Rubio has come out of contender status to a dead heat, with a tiny 47%-44% lead in a Quinnipiac Poll. Crist was a shoo-in for the Republican nomination until he endorsed Obama's stimulus package and gave Obambi a bromance hug at a function last year.

Crist is flailing trying to make his YouTube endorsement of the Porkulus Bill go away, as well as his momentary YouTube viral man-hug with Obama. Rubio, who calls Crist a RINO who cannot be trusted [just ask Mitt Romney who thought he had Crist's Florida primary endorsement in the bank in '08 until Charlie-boy did a 180 and endorsed McCain just before the bell] has been a tireless campaigner whose youth and Cuban background offset his sternly conservative credentials. He is a Tea Party favorite. And now he is a mainstream Republican fave. Of course, the national media played down the Republican takeover of the Statehouse and both legislative chambers in the early '00s, but nobody will play down the ascent of a 38-year old Cubano who hates Castro and loves America.

And it was the NYT, in a putdown back 3 weeks ago, before the Massachusetts Massacre, that dubbed him "The First Senator From the Tea Party?

Suddenly, the nasty "teabagger" insult pervs on the Left, including One-Term POTUS Obambi, leveled at the Tea Party movement are becoming fatally viral to the Democrats undergoing a thorough panic attack rather than their preferred Botox Makeover.

2010 is promising to be 1994 with even the Senate coming into play as Feingold and Boxer have become weak & Evan Bayh may get out-righted in Hoosierland. As a trifecta, Repubs may gain Reid's NV seat, Obama's IL seat, and Biden's DE seat. ND & PA will go Repub if hair-plug creep Specter is the Dem PA candidate!

Atlanticon Ambinder pooh poohs the possibiiity, but after the Boston Massacre/Tea Party on Jan. 19th, the unpopular Health Care and failing economy are both balls and chains for aspiring Dem candidates and incumbents. Plus POTUS In-Love-With-Himself is now around 48% overall approval, the biggest nose dive any POTUS has taken in his first term, according to Gallup. And he is the most-polarizing President ever, as he abandoned his campaign promises for a balanced budget and transparency to become the biggest spender in US history, running the humongous GWB deficit at 5.5 trillion to over $12.9 trillion and counting---ALL IN ONE YEAR.

The Wall Street Journal calls Obama's fervent narcissistic self-esteem "The Copenhagen Syndrome" And given the brain-dead allegiance of Dems on the Gallup poll, they already suffer from The Stockholm Syndrome of becoming enchanted with their kidnapper.

What the Democrats refuse in their delusional denial to comprehend and internalize is that the US is 20% liberal, 40% conservative and 40% independent. Both the conservatives and independents rarely register as Republicans, whereas the Dems have made it their goal to increase registration by hook or, as in Massachusetts, by crook. [MA cits who register as Dems to vote in a primary are not taken off the rolls unless they re-register, as is mandated in most states]. Ironically, it was the 22% of Dems who voted for Scott Brown who pushed him over the top of Martha Coakley. And there is a seismic shift of independents, 40% of the electorate, from Dem to Repub-leaning. Here is Bret Stephans on the Copenhagen Syndrome which has virtually neutered US foreign policy because of Obama's conviction that his karma is irresistible:

Mr. Obama's first year in office amounts to a long parade of rebuffs. His inaugural address famously offered the world's dictators an outstretched hand in exchange for an unclenched fist. From North Korea, he got missile and nuclear tests. From Iran, he got a contemptuous rejection of his extraordinary offer to enrich uranium for it. From Cuba, Fidel Castro said last month that "the empire's real intentions are obvious, this time beneath the kindly smile and African-American face of Barack Obama." From Venezuela, Hugo Chávez is now comparing Mr. Obama to the devil, a shtick he first tried out on George W. Bush back when liberals thought it was kind of funny.

Of course these are America's enemies, so we probably should not have expected better even if Mr. Obama seemed to believe we might. What about our (ostensible) non-enemies? The president pre-emptively conceded the Czech and Polish missile-defense bases to Russia in hopes of getting Moscow to take a tougher line on Tehran's nuclear programs. The Kremlin isn't biting. Neither is China, never mind Mr. Obama's gratuitous snub last year of the Dalai Lama.

As for the Muslim world that Mr. Obama has been at such pains to court (the Cairo and Ankara speeches, his opposition to Gitmo and the war in Iraq, etc.), the 2009 Pew Global Survey that measures opinions about the U.S. finds as follows: Turkey, 14% favorable views of the U.S.; Palestinian territories, 15%; Pakistan, 16%; Jordan, 25%; Egypt, 27%. Granted, this is up slightly from the last year of the Bush administration, but only by a couple of percentage points on average. So that's the great Obama perception dividend?

And then there are America's friends. Hondurans will not soon forgive the administration's efforts to shove ex-president Manuel Zelaya down their throats. Among Israelis suspicion of Mr. Obama is pervasive. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wonders aloud, "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?)

Now the same question is being asked in the U.S. in the wake of Scott Brown's Senate victory in Massachusetts. The president from Oprah Nation, says Newsweek, suffers from an "inspiration gap"; the prevailing wisdom is that he's too cool and detached for his own political good. Are they kidding? Should the president now take squealing lessons from Howard Dean?

Mr. Obama's real problems are of a different stripe. It's not as if he lacks for charisma. It's that he believes too much in the power of charisma itself and specifically too much in his own.

He seems to have come to office believing that America's problems abroad could mainly be put down to the rough-edged persona of his predecessor. Change the president, change the tone, give magnificent speeches, tinker with the policy, and the world would revert to some default mode of liking America and wanting to work with it. It doesn't work that way. Nor does it work in domestic policy, where personal salesmanship has failed to overcome the defects of legislation. Americans still generally like Mr. Obama, or at least they'd like to like him. It's the $12 trillion deficit and Rube Goldberg health schemes that rub them wrong.

So what's Copenhagen Syndrome? It is a belief in your own miracles. It is thinking that those who crowned you king actually knew what they were doing. It is buying into your own tulip bulb mania. It is the floating evanescent bubble of self. God help you when it bursts.

Obama's naive delusion that terrorists have civil rights rivals Coakley's delusion that "there are no terrorists in Afghanistan." And if he wants a "shovel-ready" project for his ridiculous pork-barrel stimulus package, try erecting an Israeli-type fence along the Mexican border's most porous precincts. Then maybe Janet-from-another-planet Napolitano might be able to handle ONE area of her responsibilities.

Atlanticon Ambinder complains about the "right-wing noise machine," a JournoListServ rubric for any deviation from the socialism-by-stealth roadway Obama thought he could sneak by the rest of America while we weren't looking!

Marco Rubio is much more than a target for the Ultra-Left's slime machine like NYT writer Marc Leibovich. He is more than the wake-up call Scott Brown's heroic campaigning gave the Dems in MA. Marco Rubio is the Ultra-Left's worst nightmare, a guy talented and charismatic enough to open the doors of the ganja-pungent Capitol backrooms where the Dem leadership concoct their most vile attacks on the Constitution and the American people.

Herr Joe Klein Believes Obama Too Good For American People

People's Commissar Joe Klein

Joe Klein emits a colossal brainfart in Time Mag, which recently has become a repository for cerebral methane:

It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don't make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you're a nation of dodos

.

First, this hilariously egregious solecism by Klein reminds me of the comment of Kurt Weill in 1953 after Stalin's death & the resulting Berlin riots eliciting a rebuke from the GDR Stalinist Commie Magnates of East Germany that "the Germans were unworthy of the gift of Communism." Longtime Party Member Weill was heard saying out loud "Perhaps the government should find itself another People."

Joe and his buddies inside the Beltway, of course, never got the memo. The American people are, as Bill Clinton would endlessly intone, very good at discerning the good stuff from the BS. The memo Joe never got is that Obama's gang of Keystone Kops simply can't keep blaming everything bad that happens on GWB or on ignorance about the true merits of a humongous dead-trees slaughterhouse of a bill.

The American people are coming to a preliminary judgment on Obama. And the judgment, judging from his Gallup numbers lower than anyone else's after 12 months as POTUS, is thumb's down. He may rebound as Bill Clinton did after 1994, but Billy Jeff ate a lot of crow and signed a welfare reform bill. Will this bantamweight law prof with a bad case of narcissism be able to perform acts of self abasement or at least admit that he done did us wrong?

Klein and his Time/Newsweak/Atlantic/NYT band of scribblers overlook the socialism or corporatist fascism and the deficit-busting booby traps inherent in the 2000-plus monstrosity of the ObamaCare. They are really mere touts and cheerleaders and tour guides to an enlightened policy nirvana, in their self-serving p.o.v.

Their mantra beats the drum for government ownership & control, and they're going to borrow the stimulus money and push it into "shovel-ready" projects? The only shovels being used are the ones carrying the BS that Klein and his buddies distribute by the truckload. One small business owner on a comment thread asked about that tax relief that Klein was talking about. It's not in his employees' paychecks and maybe Joe swallowed another fishbait from Rahm-bo hook, line, and sinker.

The actual political movers and shakers whose jobs and futures are on the line, Democrat politicians, are deciding, like Beau Biden, not to risk the mood of a populace enraged by condescending patronizing asshats like Klein and a remote, aloof Pharaoh gazing like a Sphinx above us mere "dodos." Or like Cong. Berry in AR, to retire without getting a thorough drubbing.

One man's "stimulus" is another man's "deficit" that is going to have to be paid off. Gypsy bandits like Klein and the rest of the parasitic elites on the ultra-left can have all the patronizing condescending hissy fits they want. The American people are walking away from them, their BS, and their BS POTUS Obama.

Scissors Rock Paper---Obama is the Scissors on New Gallup Poll

A Crocodile's Jaws are another metaphor for the way the 12% disapproval and the 70% approval Gallup's poll chart projects as both meet at around 47-48%.

Gallup helpfully notes that in a POTUS's SECOND year, his approval rating will typically drop another 5%. But as Obama begins his bank-busting crusade and blaming corporate greed rather than his OWN BIG HUMONGOUS BLOATED US GOVERNMENT and its aggrandizement at warp speed during his first year----running up an extra $2.6 TRILLION in deficits, let's hope that your average independent and centrist understands that this guy is out to ruin our collective future, with little to show for it.

FT: White House is "Seized With Political Panic"

How High's the Water, Mama?

"Obama erects a Maginot line" is the title of the Financial Times Saturday morning commentary on the President's sudden demagoguing of deposit banks and applying a "Volcker Rule" denying these banks the ability to make proprietary investments for profit or hedge their riskier portfolio "punts." The FT also points out putting the 7 foot Dr. Volcker front and center during the announcement while wee tiny Timmy the Tax Cheat Geithner was off to one side was a singular slap in the chops for the Sec. Treasury.

But Obama's ridiculous attack on the big banks makes even Chris Dodd, Senate Chair of the Banking and Finance Cte, cringe and demur. And now Ben Bernanke is under attack by financial genius Barbara Boxer, herself in a close Senate race for re-election this year against Carly Fiorina [nee Sneed].

A circus sideshow would have fewer amazing attractions and the only thing missing is li'l Rahm-bo Emanuel, who is hiding under his desk or perhaps emulating Gov. Sanford with a quick side-trip to Buenos Aires. The Financial Times sums up the whole debacle in no uncertain terms.

Being cut off from trading securities for their own book will not stop banks from putting insured deposits at risk. Their inventiveness in finding ways to lose money knows no bounds, and the most time-honoured money-loser of all – making bad loans – remains available. While it is bad to subsidise banks’ bets on mortgage-backed securities, is it worse than backing their bets on plain old mortgages?

So the “Volcker rule” will not end the subsidies for the (many more) risks deposit-taking banks remain authorised to take. If it also prevents them from hedging those risks, it may make the banking system less, not more stable......This “shadow banking system” was the epicentre of the financial crisis. In the Lehman Brothers and AIG meltdowns, the equivalent of bank runs afflicted money market funds, repo markets and securities lending: panicked lenders withdrew or refused to roll over the short-term funds that financed financial groups’ long-term assets.

FT ponts out that Obama ignored the step-by-step snail's pace of a regulatory reform program had been inching its way through the corridors of Congress.

For all its warts, a genuine effort at regulatory reform was wriggling its way through Congress – and at least a modicum of attention was being paid to co-ordinating such reforms at a global level. All this has now been blown out of the water by a White House seized by political panic. The result is that no one knows what will happen. A return to radical insecurity was the last thing we needed.

The untest young man voted in as POTUS in '08 appears to be living down to my personal expectations. And when crunch time comes and he loses a super-majority in the Senate [thank God for Al Franken bringing how crooked US elections are when they are thrown into courts!!] and he sees his Health Care [which exit polls in '08 election showed were the concern of less than 5% of the electorate] flounder, what does the Golden Boy and presumed Messiah do who was going to distribute his stash to all those "communities" he was organizing?

He reverts to the socialist/anarchist Saul Alinsky playbook and tries to demonize the enemy.

But the BIG Banks are not perceived by the American people as the Enemy, Barack-o!

You and your BIG GOVERNMENT socialist nonsense---that's the enemy of the American people!

UN IRCC Puts Out More Lies, Chief Pachauri Caught Lying About Climate

KNAVE OR FOOL? OR MERELY SIMPLE-MINDED BERNIE MADOFF OF CLIMATE?

The UN is a bad joke. Period. U.S. out of U.N. & Vice Versa!

I used to work in the State Department Bureau of International Organizations as the Middle East Officer. Then I was made Special Assistant to the Asst. Secretary of State and got to see a wide swath of at least the US and its relations with the United Nations. So I wasn't surprised when UN Climate Chief Rajendra Pachauri delivered a blistering rebuke to India's environment minister for casting doubt on the notion that global warming was causing the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers:

"We have a very clear idea of what is happening," the chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the Guardian newspaper. "I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement."

Then again, when it comes to unsubstantiated research it's hard to beat the IPCC, whose 2007 report insisted that the glaciers—which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia—were very likely to nearly disappear by the year 2035. "The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers," it wrote in its supposedly definitive report, "can be attributed primarily to the [sic] global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases."

Parsing IRCC Moron-in-Chief Pachauri and his own "arrogance" is child's play.

It turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain from 1999. Mr. Hasnian now says he was "misquoted." Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in 2006 by leading glaciologist Georg Kaser that the 2035 forecast was baseless. "This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," Mr. Kaser told the Agence France-Presse. "It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing."

Of course, the idiot-moron-sh*thead Pachauri cannot admit a mistake:

On Wednesday, the IPCC got around to acknowledging that the claim was "poorly substantiated," though Mr. Pachauri also suggested it amounted to little more than a scientific typo. Yet the error is of a piece with other glib, and now debunked, global warming alarms.

That's right, Anthropogenic Global Warming is an artifact created by a cabal of crooked scientists of the sort Richard Feynman warned us about long ago in his classically eternal truth, the essay entitled "Cargo Cult Science," a CalTech commencement which is a short example of prophecy among scientific geniuses. [Feynman also prophesied that a Shuttle would crash roughly every 50 launches, not the 100,000 the corrupt clowns, oops, scientific PhDs at NASA predicted. The corrupt clowns remaining at what is now the national embarassment of NASA hate Feynman because he saw them in the '80's as members of the politicized monster NASA has now become].

And the WSJ Journal goes on to repudiate the D+ student Al Gore's tedious collection of lies called, oxymoronically, An Inconvenient Truth.

Among them: that 1998 was the warmest year on record in the United States (it was 1934); that sea levels could soon rise by up to 20 feet and put Florida underwater (an 18-inch rise by the year 2100 is the more authoritative estimate); that polar bears are critically endangered by global warming (most polar bear populations appear to be stable or increasing); that—well, we could go on without even mentioning the climategate emails.

The WSJ omitted to mention the most recent lie coming out of James Hansen's Goddard BS Center---namely that global temps have gone up over the last 12 years---Hansen is a well known crackpot in cahoots with another fraud named Schneider at Stanford who calls himself a "climate scientist." Pace chronic liar Hansen, the world temp has remained roughly the same over the last decade as the sunspots have disappeared that indicate another Maunder Minimum [1650-1725] of very low sunspot activity might be at hand.

Discover Magazine's 100 top scientific finds of The Year in Science Mag has the story on p. 45, entitled "Sun's Changes Have Surprise Effects on Earth's Weather," an article on Gerald Meehl and an international team of climate scientists sponsored by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark says much the same thing, that intense sunspots shield the Earth from cosmic rays and generate a lot of cloud cover, raising global temps. No sunspots, as happened over the last decade, means that the cosmic rays disperse cloud cover, and lead to global cooling. Janet Fang wrote the rather clunky examination, but Discover ranks this as Number 31 in discoveries that are changing the world.
Another Discover article on sunspots on p.54 is ranked #50 and is entitled "Magnetic Mysteries of Sunspots Decoded" which

"could make it easier to predict violent "sace weather" before it affects Earth. Sunpots often spawn solar flares than can knock out radio communication, zap satellites, and zap power grids."

No mention of how one might connect with another and mags like Scientific American and Nature have long ago given up any pretense of scientific inquiry, so you have to dig out the nuggets yourself.
UPDATE
As if on cue, the feckless propanda tabloid Nature comes out with an editorial blaming a " small coterie of individuals who deny humanity's influence on climate will try to use any perceived flaw in the evidence to discredit the entire picture. So how can researchers honestly describe the uncertainty in their work without it being misconstrued?" while later in the SAME ridiculous howler piously intones:

Scientists should be careful not to disparage those on the other side of a debate: a respectful tone makes it easier for people to change their minds if they share something in common with that other side.

Looks like the East Anglian brainfarts who encouraged delusional lying and cheating about climate change have infected what used to be a respectable scientific news outlet which now deserves the bottom of a birdcage for its only useful and harmless purpose.

Obama to Float Like A Butterfly, then what?

David Plouffe Will Bail Out Sinking Democratic Titanic

The NYT has an article trumpeting the return of David Plouffe to solve all those little problems of image and positioning that somehow caused a "loss of momentum" among Democrats.

Let’s face it. Public relations and process tweaking are all the substance-less Dems can do, in light of the excesses of their opaque Health Care kickbacks, bribes, and payoffs, after Obama promised "transparency on C-Span."

Let me see. Obama-Lite is going to be rebrewed as Obama-Dark Beer? And it ain’t banks or the SCOTUS the voters are angry about! It’s broken promises of transparency, profligate spending and the takeover of government by crazed union bands of SEIU thugs. If he doesn’t get his health demands, Andy Stern will pout and refuse to donate much to his kept mistresses, the DNC & DSCC & other pet Dem causes. No tickee, no laundry.

And again. Rebranding by Obama is going to turn around what is now incredible buyer’s remorse among independents and Dems of a blue dog stripe? Float like a butterfly, sting like a gypsy moth.

The Dems don’t understand the distrust of BIG GOVERNMENT inherent among the center-right US majority, and have been the stupid party for a good three-plus years, ever since they grabbed the House and Senate in ‘06. In '08, Obama simply gave the machine its chief traffic cop. Now he's threatening to actually become the Chief of Staff. What a leadership move!!!

Now he will demagogue on banks, but he is really after corporations given free speech—he is preaching class warfare which is the default position of libtards like himself. Go knock yo’sef out, Barack! You don’t have a clue…..

Now the latest stupid move after Scott Brown upset the Dems' takeover of the US economy by means of strictly-controlled corporatist cartels and the Dems' plan to destroy small businesses apparently will be that Obama is going to come out in the SOTU next week demagoging Wall Street. And the SCOTUS parenthetically.....

Let’s face it. Public relations and process tweaking are all the substance-less Dems can do—Obama-Lite is going to be rebrewed as Obama-Dark Beer? And it ain’t banks the voters are angry about! It’s broken promises of transparency, profligate spending and the takeover of government by crazed union bands of SEIU thugs. If he doesn’t get his health demands, Andy Stern will pout and refuse to donate much to his kept mistresses, the DNC & DSCC.

Rebranding by Obama is going to turn around what is now incredible buyer’s remorse among independents and Dems of a blue dog stripe? Float like a butterfly, sting like a gypsy moth.

And for the first time, I think Obama is almost consciously going to turn a disaster into a catastrophe for the Dems—or else he is simply suicidally stupid to demagogue Wall Street when it’s Big Government the majority of voters is terrified about.

And Obama is too remote and delusional to realize that the communities he organized are a mere one/tenth of the entire USA. And that ACORN is not a corporate person....!

Chicago Style Politics Moves East to Cleveland, Maybe?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Sabrina Eaton sleuthed out that a very articulate writer identifying him/herself as "Ellie Light" has been writing letters to newspapers all over the country WITH A LOCAL ADDRESS ATTACHED TO EACH LETTER:

“It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.
A letter from Light in the Jan. 20 edition of the San Francisco Examiner concluded with an identical sentence, but with an address for Light all the way across the country in Daly City, California.
Variations of Light’s letter ran in Ohio’s Mansfield News Journal on Jan. 13, with Light claiming an address in Mansfield; in New Mexico’s Ruidoso News on Jan. 12, claiming an address in Three Rivers; in South Carolina’s The Sun News on Jan. 18, claiming an address in Myrtle Beach; and in the Daily News Leader of Staunton, Virginia on Jan. 15, claiming an address in Waynesboro. Her publications list includes other papers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and California, all claiming separate addresses.

Light – who e-mailed an identical missive to this reporter on Jan. 16 without listing a hometown – would not answer e-mailed questions about the address discrepancies in newspapers that ran her letter, or her identity, although she did say she wasn’t a former co-worker of this reporter’s who had a similar name.
“I do not write as a representative of any organization,” she said in an e-mail. “The letter I wrote was motivated by surprise and wonderment at the absence of any media support for our President, who won a record-breaking election by a landslide less than 18 months ago, and now, seems to be abandoned by all, supposedly for the infantile reason that he couldn’t make all of Bush’s errors disappear in one day.”

Any observer with a journalistic background knows that these "false flag" operations have a number of different M.O.'s. For instance, the JournoList All Stars project with their online and occasionally dead-tree offerings, all coordinated & activated by Soros-financed types like Alterman and other paid hacks and flacks. I remember a while back when GWBush's team had allegedly inserted a reporter into the press pool and one would think that the First Amendment was under attack the way the political commissars on the Ultra-Left spun it.

Now that the SCOTUS has ruled that corporations can act as persons, a rule that was true until the silly McCain-Feingold aberration in '02, the Ueber Left in one of their coordinated scrums dishonestly claims the SCOTUS has overthrown "over a hundred years of precedents" and doesn't mention that the SCOTUS slam-down of M-F supports the First Amendment. Even the corrupt NYT has now abandoned the First Amendment crusade it promoted when it threatened national security by publishing numerous "security leaks." I guess one of the reasons the Grey Lady is losing circulation lies in the dishonest hypocritical pivot left the NYT and other journals have taken in supporting Obama..

Obama's plan is to impose statist socialist nanny rule by Politically Correct second-raters like Janet Napolitano. She of the "dangerous tea party activists" who pay their taxes, have jobs and don't get gov't kickbacks like ACORN.

I doubt if the slugabeds at ACORN have the candlepower to pull off a feat like "Ellie Light" does. One blogger mentions that both "Ellie" and Light mean the same thing if you use a Greek language template. Perhaps those rumored phone chats every morning between Rahm-bo and George Stephanopoulos has resulted in this cute little scam, executed by eager-to-please go-fers at ABC News [which selected Michelle Obama Friday instead of Scott Brown as "Person of the Week."]

Or again, this may be Soros money doing its corrupt thing with the delusional Far Left amoral totalitarian wannabes driving the talking points of "Ellie's" little letters.

The Fall of the House of Kennedy: Rage Against "The Machine"

Daniel Henninger says Scott Brown is the MA voters' first real revolt against the public sector's takeover of the state's economy:

What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.

Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts—like New Jersey, like California, like New York—has been building toward this explosion for years.

According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years (1987 to 2007).

Public safety: up 139%; social services, 130%; education, 44%. And of course Medicaid Madness, up 163%, before MassCare kicked in more Medicaid obligations.

But here's the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.

Massachusetts' spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.

To a surprising degree, the voters perceived the Republicans as doing very much the same thing for their own constituencies in 2006 and kicked them out of power in the House and Senate and in 2008 from the White House. But the people didn't get what they were promised by Obama, who very soon took Republican fiscal hypocrisy and let the Dem majorities turn it into warp speed Weimar-type hyper-spending with a dollar losing all international credibility:

Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health-care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.

This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing. It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK enabled, "the machine," is hitting the wall.

The Democrats are being strangled like Laocoan in the famous statue by the enormous python called the public sector unions who along with their AFL-CIO & UAW & NEA & AFTA counterparts are beginning to strangle the US economy. Indeed, it was the sleazy corrupt deal that the Dems made with the unions over tax breaks on their Cadillac health care programs that sent Scott Brown's numbers soaring from 20 points BEHIND on Dec. 28th to 5 points AHEAD on January 19th. After the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback, the immense unprecedented kickback to the unions showed the total corruption of the Democrats and Scott Brown gained MORE THAN A POINT A DAY with completely disgusted Massachusetts voters sick and tired of being treated as tax serfs.

There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they'll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They'll also go to the same old "populist anger" well.

Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger. Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels and is now smothering the Democratic Party.

After watching an interview of Mitch McConnell by Greta van S. last night, I doubt that the old Minority Leader's nuanced laid-back logrolling will suffice to keep the Republicans rolling toward a takeover of the House and gaining seven seats in the Senate. Courtly and cunning is charming, but it takes the brilliant simple clarity of Scott Brown, who responded to Obama's airy dismissal of his pickup truck with characteristic intensity: "We should be in an economy where more people can afford to buy a flatbed."

As Larry Kudlow said of Scott elsewhere:

It is, in fact, an economic-growth message, the likes of which we haven't heard since Jack Kemp promoted it in the late 1970s. And the brilliance of Scott Brown was to use the JFK tax cuts -- an across-the-board reduction in marginal tax rates -- to attract Democrats and independents to his message.

An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. For the Ted Kennedy Democrats, that box has been a loser for decades. But for timid Republicans always on the defensive, now is the time to break out and adopt the Scott Brown theme.

This is what Reagan did. This is why the Gipper touted JFK's across-the-board tax cuts. Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts.

While Team Obama is fighting for more government employment, with trillions of dollars of spending, it is time for Republicans to fight for private free-enterprise employment by letting folks keep more of what they earn and by providing new incentives for the extra hour worked and the extra investment dollar put at risk.

This is where the GOP must go. Republicans should not let another day pass without unleashing a fusillade of new tax-cutting proposals to get America moving again.

Listening to Scott Brown's Brilliant Simple Clarity

A Man Who Listens to People

Larry Kudlow points out the sheer hedgehog brilliance of Scott Brown [versus Obama's Fox] in an article called "Are Republicans Listening to the Scott Brown Message?"

Obama's tax hikes and spending explosion are what caused the populist tea-party revolt that was punctuated by Brown's extraordinary victory. And that leads to the next question. Are the Republicans listening? Do they really understand why Brown was victorious? If they do, why aren't members of the Republican leadership loudly campaigning for an end to tax hikes, just like Scott Brown?

The cornucopia of tax hikes currently on the table includes higher levies on capital gains, top earners, dividends, investment (via the payroll tax), carbon, millionaires, banks, stock transactions and estates (via the death tax). It's a long Democratic wish list of anti-growth policies, and Scott Brown's triumph should signal the end of it. But it won't happen unless GOP congressional leaders make a bid deal about it.

For example, some Blue Dog Democrats want to extend the Bush tax cuts, rather than letting them expire next year. Republican leaders should be making a big deal about this. They need to get it front and center, making expiration a condition to any new legislation.

Remember that Brown ran on a JFK/Ronald Reagan platform of across-the-board tax cuts to promote economic growth. Take a look at what the senator-elect had to say during his victory speech Tuesday night:

"This (health care) bill is not being debated openly and fairly. It will raise taxes, it will hurt Medicare, it will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper into debt. ... I will work in the Senate to put the government back on the side of people who create jobs and the millions of people who need jobs. And remember, as President John F. Kennedy stated, that starts with across-the-board tax cuts for businesses and families to create jobs, put more money in people's pockets and stimulate the economy. It's that simple."

There you have it. Scott Brown could not have been any clearer. That's the great thing about his message -- its breathtaking clarity. Across-the-board tax cuts and a revival of free-market capitalism on the supply-side.

And recall that when President Obama mocked Scott Brown for driving a pickup truck, Brown quickly responded that unfortunately, in this economy, not everyone can buy a pickup. "My goal is to change that," he said on the eve of the election, "by cutting spending, lowering taxes and letting people keep more of their own money." Right on message.

And during that campaign, Brown argued that health care reform is a tax hike and that cap-and-trade is a tax hike. This should become the Republican message, too. It's about taxes, as well as spending.

A recent Washington Post poll showed that by 58 percent to 38 percent, voters want smaller government and fewer government services. This, too, should be the Republican congressional message.

It is, in fact, an economic-growth message, the likes of which we haven't heard since Jack Kemp promoted it in the late 1970s. And the brilliance of Scott Brown was to use the JFK tax cuts -- an across-the-board reduction in marginal tax rates -- to attract Democrats and independents to his message.

Scott Brown, as Kudlow ends his piece, has a certain Reagan quality---a charisma that JFK also had---of keeping his eye on one big ball.

As Sir Isaiah Berlin says in his famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, the Fox knows many things [Obama is a policy wonk] but the Hedgehog knows ONE BIG THING.

What Scott Brown knows is that money in people's pockets from jobs is much more important than government nanny care. And taxes destroiy jobs and take money from people's pockets.

Leaving them unable, in his brilliant rejoinder to Obama's condescending attitude toward his truck, free to buy a pickup.

Rove Points Out How Axelrod Lies, Emanuel Lies & Obama is the Father of Lies

Caught in the Act!

Karl Rove responds to David Axelrod's intemperate clumsy attempts to defend Obama by finger-pointing blame back at George W. Bush:

Mr. Axelrod wrote that no one is entitled to his own facts, even as he argued that George W. Bush is responsible for Barack Obama's deficits. He argued that Mr. Bush forced the hand of this administration by leaving office in the midst of a sharp recession.

Axelrod fails to point out, of course, that the housing market collapse which led to the sharp recession was engendered by the Community Readjustment Act put in full strength by Clinton and A. Cuomo in 1995. This act, enforced by quasi-government enforcement activists like ACORN, eventually forced banks to make risky loans to Dem constituents without jobs or the work ethic to pursue jobs. When GWB and McCain recognized the long-term danger of CRA's risky loans, they were adamantly opposed by Democrats like Barney Frank and latterly Barack Obama, elected in 2004. As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became overwhelmed by the bad loans defaulting, loans forced on bank by CRA activists like ACORN which threatened litigation, financial markets crashed and GWB was left with a housing market and Wall Street in smoldering ruins. Liars like David Axelrod blame GWB, not Frank, Obama, Clinton, Cuomo, Janet from another planet Reno who threatened lawsuits and other Dem culprits. Rove:

That argument won't fly for two reasons. First, at some point this administration has to take responsibility for itself. It's also not even close to accurate. Consider that from Jan. 20, 2001, to Jan. 20, 2009, the debt held by the public grew $3 trillion under Mr. Bush—to $6.3 trillion from $3.3 trillion at a time when the national economy grew as well.

By comparison, from the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years.

Obama's boundless recklessness was noticed in MA by lifelong Dems like "Marlene Connolly is a 73-year-old Massachusetts Democrat who cast her first vote for a Republican in supporting Scott Brown"...saying: "If Massachusetts puts Brown in, it's a message of 'that's enough.' Let's stop the giveaways and let's get jobs going," as quoted in the New York Times.

Mr. Obama's spending plan approved by Congress last February calls for doubling the national debt in five years and nearly tripling it in 10.

Mr. Bush's deficits ran an average of 3.2% of GDP, slightly above the post World War II average of 2.7%. Mr. Obama's plan calls for deficits that will average 4.2% over the next decade.

Team Obama has been on history's biggest spending spree, which has included a $787 billion stimulus, a $30 billion expansion of a child health-care program, and a $410 billion federal spending bill that increased nondefense discretionary spending 10% for the last half of fiscal year 2009. Mr. Obama also hiked nondefense discretionary spending another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

In contrast to the sneaky underhanded attempt by Obama and his dishonest colleagues Axelrod and Emanuel to undertake a government takeover of the economy by stealth and a Health Care debacle crafted in opaque backroom deals directly contradicting serial liar Obama's eight campaign promises for "negotiations conducted on C-Span," GWB had transparency:

Mr. Bush did move to give voters more control over their tax dollars. Both his Social Security reform ideas and the drug program he created offered templates for driving federal spending curves in the right direction, counter to what Democrats wanted to do.

Democrats, for example, proposed creating a prescription drug program as an alternative to the one Mr. Bush proposed that would have cost a projected $800 billion over 10 years. The Bush drug benefit was originally expected to cost half that amount and today costs a third less than what it was initially expected to cost because it uses market forces to drive prices down.

Using market forces is directly contradictory to the Democrats' drive to socialize and appropriate much of the economy, with corporatist Fascist-type deals with big corporate sectors emulating Mussolini and Hitler. Besides their long-term goal of marginalizing and eventually minimalizing the U.S. Constitution aimed at by Constitutional "Adjunct" Professor Obama, the Democrats' short term economic claims are subject to preliminary examination as completely inept and an abject failure:

Mr. Axelrod claims the pork-laden stimulus package has been a success. But Mr. Obama told Americans that if it were passed, unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%. It is now 10%. The president also said it would create 3.7 million jobs, 90% of which would be in the private sector. By Mr. Obama's standards, the stimulus failed miserably.

in contrast, GWB's TARP has already generated profits:

Mr. Bush did sign the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) into law and loaned $240 billion to banks. But those loans are being returned at a profit to the Treasury.

But Obama has reacted to the rejection of his administration's inept dishonest hyper-spending as described by Ms. Connelly above with a predictable seizure of the TARP profits to use as a political slush fund to his favorite constituencies:

Rather than using those funds to pay down the deficit, Mr. Obama wants to use them for new spending. What's more, he has lavished some $320 billion from TARP on car companies, union allies, and pet causes that will never be fully returned.

The final blow to Obama's serial political tomfoolery, double-dealing, and Chicago-style lies and exaggerations and deceptions came when, in a fit of what can only be called complete delusional thinking:

Mr. Axelrod boasts Mr. Obama's proposed health reforms will "not add to the federal deficit." But if that turns out to be true, it will only be because Massachusetts voters just elected a senator who promises to vote against those reforms.

The witless Axelrod may now be unable to continue the RICO-style Bernie Madoff looting of the American economy by the Chicago-style Ponzi apparatus called the Obama wing of the Democrat Party. Rove finishes Axelrod off with a coup de grace:

In going after Mr. Bush's fiscal record, Mr. Axelrod unwittingly revealed why Democrats are losing. Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats have made a mess of the nation's finances and are desperate to pin the blame on someone else. It's not likely to work.

Even in deep blue Massachusetts, voters aren't standing idly by while the administration puts the nation on a dangerous trajectory. When Democrats lose a state they carried by 26 points a little more than a year ago, very little is safe for Mr. Obama's party this fall.

Axelrod and Obama and their tiny obscene strawboss Rahm-bo Emanuel may just have had their private parts exposed in the Massachusetts slamdown of their reckless feckless dishonest midnight raids on the U.S. economy. Hopefully in November, the rest of the nation will listen to Scott Brown's victory speech calling for them to hack the exposed parts off and remove the cabal in the House and Senate which tried to turn Obama's assault on the Constitution into law.

Or as Peggy Noonan says in her take onMA and Scott Brown in her interesting editorial piece today:

For Mr. Brown now, everything depends on execution. He made the Olympics. Now he has to do the swan dive, with a billion people watching. And then he has to do it again....[Obama's Inauguration] feels like another era. Because America keeps moving, the plates keep shifting, and execution is everything. Everything.

Air America Dies a [Very] Timely Death

Franken-STEIN

The SCOTUS repudiation of much of McCain/Feingold and Nancy Botox's declaration that Health Care will have to wait a while because the Progressive [i.e., Marxist] wing of the Dems again proves Will Rogers' old adage is still correct is joyously accompanied to my Center-Right Independent ears with the demise of the late unloved and unlistened-to Air America.

May this AA dissolution be the overture to scaling back cable TV MSNBC's vitriolic espousals of class hatred and plain & simple prevarication by the likes of Keith Olbermann and former AA DJ Maddow. Because all she does is spin & all KO does is lie out of both sides of his mouth when he isn't BSing straight ahead. His "Special Comments" rank as verbal fecal material when he isn't simply telling lies. A potty mouth smartass who loses viewers daily to those he condescendingly considers his inferiors. One word describes such a specimen: "delusional."

It's a little off-topic, but here's the way the cable commentary shows shook out Tuesday on MA election night:

FOXNEWS HANNITY 6,809,000, FOXNEWS GRETA 6,399,000, FOXNEWS O'REILLY 5,228,000, FOXNEWS BECK 3,446,000, FOXNEWS BAIER 3,338,000, FOXNEWS SHEP 3,241,000, CNN KING 1,681,000,
CNN COOPER 1,508,000, CNN BROWN 1,308,000 and down in the shitter are the four stooges
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,274,000, MSNBC MADDOW 1,236,000, CNN BLITZER 1,135,000

Tweety-bird Matthews is down there at around 700K, which could possibly simply be just sets without viewers, left on to keep the household pets from feeling lonely.....! Much of Matthews' raucous and haranguing commentary is comprehensible only as talking to animals, animals who are hard of hearing and respond only to repeated loud imprecations.

Matthews suffers the ignominy of being outviewed by "The View's" voluptuous intellectual Joy Behar!!! MSNBC has a full array of infrastructure bringing in the lowest subbasement of primetime cable viewing. And for all this, Zucker is re-upped and Conan is fired???

Beck Disses Scott Brown for teasing his daughters.

I was giving this fellow the benefit of the doubt. Then when he dissed Brown for teasing his gorgeous daughters, Beck became an attention whore, a sort of Paris Hilton with a political bent, or perhaps being twisted, to the right.

I expect any day he'll do a Charles Johnson or a John Cole of Balloon Juice and weepingly do an on-air conversion to Obama and all his works.

Levin is prickly, but about a dozen levels above Beck. Levin reminds me of Yale professor Harold Bloom, a polymath in law as Bloom is in literature. Beck is sort of a TA at a college teaching introductory poli sci or econ. Maybe Beck let his inner Peres Hilton out when he slammed Brown, whose shoes he isn't fit to polish.

As Dennis Miller would put it, he should go for a twilight fish-troll with Fredo.

Beck could never approach Keith Odorboy in prime time because KO has a solid million-plus certifiable America-hating psychos whom he plays Goebbels to every evening. But crashing and burning like the Hindenburg is a good metaphor---I occasionally watch Odorboy to see if suddenly he gets a metaphorical grand mal seizure on-air, as he has the last two nights concerning Scott Brown. KO wishes he was Brown, a REAL man instead of an over-medicated sexually inadequate whack job. Dennis Hopper bereft of any real talent. KO is just a wordy version of Beck, only malicious instead of having Beck's schlumperei.

Michael Barone on the Meaning of the MA Massacre

Michael Barone is to American politics what the Encyclopedia Brittanica used to be to scholarship: the ultimate definitive reference. Here's his take on the AWESOME FREAKIN' ascent of Scott Brown of 25 points in twenty-two days. If Ted Kennedy was "the Liberal Lion," Scott Brown is the "Slayer of Liberals."

Twenty-four days ago, on Dec. 28, state Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican nominee in the Massachusetts Senate election, promised he would be the 41st vote against the Democratic health-care bill. Almost no one noticed. Mr. Brown was trailing Democrat Martha Coakley by 20 points, and she was still on her six-day Christmas break from campaigning.

Twenty-two days made a difference. On Tuesday night, Mr. Brown strode to the platform at the Park Plaza Hotel and delivered his victory speech. While Washington reporters were busy speculating on whether President Obama would use his State of the Union speech to prod Democrats into jamming through their health-care bill before Mr. Brown is seated, the new Massachusetts senator delivered what amounted to a State of the Union speech himself.

Interim Sen. Paul Kirk, he announced, had completed his work in Washington. There would be no 60th vote for a health-care bill. The president was always welcome in Massachusetts, he said. And then Mr. Brown channeled Franklin Delano Roosevelt's riposte to the attacks on his dog Fala by saying that he resented Mr. Obama's attacks on his truck.

The senator-elect didn't just hit the president on health care. "In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them," he said.

Scott Brown's 52% victory over Ms. Coakley's 47%, in the state that in the last four presidential elections voted more Democratic than any other, is the harshest repudiation of a president since Democrat Richard Vander Veen won Gerald Ford's House seat in Michigan in 1974 by a 51%-44% margin.

That Democratic victory in the historical Republican heartland of Michigan signaled that Americans were repelled by the Watergate scandal and had had enough of Richard Nixon. He resigned from office six months later.

The Republican victory in the current Democratic heartland of Massachusetts sends the message that Americans are repelled by Barack Obama's big-government programs, backroom deals and oversolicitude for those who want to destroy us.

On Tuesday night Scott Brown took command and sent a clear message: The president must change course. Barack Obama, who was a state senator himself not so long ago, needs to listen.

Yes, Barone is from Michigan & I went to U of Mich at Ann Arbor back in the sixties, but I think you have to refer back to Truman's amazing upset of Dewey in '48 for a real analogy.

And since direct elections to the Senate were established just over 100 years ago by Teddy Rooseveldt's progressives, there has never been a greater comeback: From 20 points down in the polls on Dec. 28th to FIVE POINTS UP twenty-two days later.
A tsunami or a Krakatoa.

Of course, Dec. 28th is when the country began to consider the implications of the Christmas Eve Health Care Debacle being signed. The monstrous whore Mary of LA's Louisiana Purchase and her pimp counterpart Ben Nelson of the Cornhusker Kickback were just the appetizers. Then a bunch of union thugs coerced Obambi to give them tax-free Cadillac health coverage as a special privilege. That is when the Great Wave off the north shore of Oahu began to build. And from then on, Brown hopped on and skillfully rode the Pipeline perfectly and surfed into history with a stunning, breath-taking crushing victory.

Now Choakley will be blamed by the libtards, and they will insist on ramming and jamming this dildo of an ObamaCare debacle up America's butt with parliamentary legerdemain.

Lotsa luck, soon-to-be-crushed libtard Nancy and Harry and Bobo Boxer!

Conan To Start Talks With Fox Next Thursday?

Conan's NBC Final Days

THR has the story as Conan continues to more than double Letterboy's numbers and making himself irresistible to Fox if they want to pivot youthward. And in the meantime, Zucker continues a**hole haggling over severance for Conan's staff, many of whom relocated:

The fine print in question continues to be severance protection for the "Tonight" staff.
Meanwhile, the imminent departure agrees very well with O'Brien. The pressure to adapt his quirky persona to the broader "Tonight" and to improve the show's ratings is gone. He is fearless, his jokes are sharper, and his ratings are through the roof.
In the local market overnights for Tuesday night, he scored a 1.9 rating in adults 18-49, crushing CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman" (0.7)

And in his opening monologue Wednesday night, he lobbed such zingers as "I should have known something was up when NBC sent me that 2010 calendar that only went up to January." Talk about a great audition for the young-skewing Fox, whose brass are getting higher and higher on launching an O'Brien-fronted daily talk show in the fall.It looks like they could finally open formal talks on Thursday.

I for one enjoyed Conan's short, but snappy run and hope he keeps Andy Richter, whom I enjoy very much. I'd stay up to watch him on Fox, where he doesn't have the human rubbish NBC corporates lurking and loitering around scaring sane people.

Moronic Barney Shoots Self in Left Foot

Talking Out of Both Sides of His Mouth

Barney Frank recanted his momentary lucidity last night and now displays the equal parts of ignorance and arrogance that go with being a Dem politician. Here's some Barney prattle, with the Elmer Fudd w's not inserted:
"

You have to pass the Senate bill as is and the President signs it. Then people have to be assured that you can get the amendments through the House and the Senate," Frank said. "Because then the argument would be, 'Look, the bills already passed so now the question is whether you're willing to amend it or not.'"

One way to do that would be through the filibuster proof budget reconciliation process. "The alternative would be, people are talking about using reconciliation: 51 votes to get the agreed on amendments in the Senate."

The problem, Frank noted, is that reconciliation can only be used for some measures--revenue and spending measures, with implications for the federal budget--and not others. Some elements of the fix, then, could be passed through reconciliation, requiring only a simple majority in the Senate. The trick would be to get the other contentious measures--abortion, immigration--fixed through the regular order.

Being a denizen of the House, Barney may be more than a bit fuzzy about reconciliation, which is to be used only on tax and budget laws [The Byrd Rule]. In reconciliation, every SENTENCE in the 1000-plus pages of the Senate bill would have to be examined for tax and budgetary versus policy implications. If one Senator says the sentence must be voted on because it is a policy rather than fiscal or tax issue, the rule is that 60 [sixty] votes have to affirm the sentence as subject to reconciliation, which can be passed with 51 votes. Sen. Gregg explained this to Greta van S.

Frank went on to try to buffalo Olympia Snowe as the 60th vote, which shows us how silly and really shallow this mile-a-minute madman can be when he finds himself being torqued leftward!

Huit Clos: Pelosi Delusional or Merely Pig-Headed?

Nutcracker Not So Sweet

TPM indicates that the House Dem Leadership is losing many of its 200-plus foot soldiers who are either with Stupak in the anti-abortion cohort MOR Midwesterners and religious Dems or conversely, the Marxist froth-at-the-mouth fringe from NYC, MA, or CA. Stupak and Co. are somewhat ready to buy into the sort of end-around compromise with the Republicans which would accord with Congressional tradition on both sides of the aisle---though the Stupak-crew bolus might simply form an irreducible thirty-plus rump of Blue Dog intransigents determined to be re-elected next Fall.

The Anarcho/Marxist "Ultras" led by Weiner and Lynch could simply lie in front of the Pelosi Express daring her to alienate still another segment of the many detachable parts which comprise the Dems, who still conform to Will Rogers' famous dictum. Things could get so deracine for these ersatz-Europaisch rootless cosmopolitans that despite their allies in the blogosphere, they could become quickly gelded politically in a less-frenetic perfervid MSM zone.

All of Pelosi's pseudo-Medici conniving will not surmount the will of the people and just as LBJ crushed the Rules Committee barons to get his legislation passed, Pelosi and Reid will be road kill ten months from now if they persist in trying to bypass the manifest will of a growing majority of the American people.

The Second Boston Tea Party: "Liberal Lions" Overboard & Ayla Her Daddy's Power Forward!!!!

American Idol

Ayla Brown

Scott Brown just pulled off the biggest political tsunami since direct voting for the U.S. Senate began in the early 1900s. The last Republican to hold this particular seat was Henry Cabot Lodge, who was surprisingly defeated in a monumental upset in 1952 by John F. Kennedy. The other Senate seat most recently occupied by a Republican was held by Edward Brooke, an African-American who held it from 1966-1978.

And despite the opinion of political commissars at the NYT, the voters didn't want additional taxes on HEALTH CARE, Yahoo News honestly admits:

Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley in a U.S. Senate election Tuesday that left President Barack Obama's health care overhaul in doubt and marred the end of his first year in office.

The libtard left and its acolytes in the MSM will all chant in unison that the loss was the fault of Martha Coakley, that Obambi and his retarded obsessions had nothing to do with her electoral disaster, and that since MA health care is almost identical to that sought by Pelosi/Reid/Obama in their backroom cabals, personality and not issues were the by-election's main theme.

Personality did play a part and Brown's acceptance speech displayed a charismatic independent streak which the MA voters obviously found attractive. Coakley, who was the "entitlement candidate," played the lace curtain Irish princess during the campaign and was loathe to soil her hand shaking it with the great unwashed constituency of the Massachusetts lumpenproletariat and union thuggery.

However, sports-of-nature Rachel Maddow and Joan Walsh on MSNBC acidly remarked that sexism was behind much of Brown's victory margin. Supercilious elitist bitch Walsh, she of Salon fame, made a silly remark that Brown "offered up his daughters to the crowd," when this loathsome crone took umbrage at Brown's folksy remark that his drop-dead stunning daughter Ayla, a six-foot plus Amazon on Boston College's basketball team who also was a semi-finalist for American Idol in 2007, was "available," a joke much funnier than Coakley's gaffe concerning Curt Schilling's being a Yankee fan. Indeed, Brown joked that on a phone call to Obama that he had offered to play two-on-two at the White House if he could have Ayla on his team, with Obama picking a partner of his choice! Scott played college hoops and Ayla is a forward on her BC Lady Eagles squad.

It was fun to watch Keith Overachiever and Chris Matthews interview their suck-up choirs on MSNBC who all zeroed in on process. They even brought lil Ezra Klein in his swaddling clothes to soil himself with adamant invocations to push the defective monstrosity through Congress by any means possible, "because it can be done." Another process whore. I swear Ezra and Ben Smith, trying to find a contact lens in Chris Matthews' lap in Doyle's Bar in Jamaica Plain, both would attempt to commit anatomically impossible acts simply because---process-wise---IT [perhaps] CAN BE DONE!

Steve Kornacki was also in that bar, making less a fool of self, but Larry King actually had better and saner guests on CNN. The grown-ups [and Tweety-bird is not one of them, despite being hoary with age] such as Gergen, Borger, and Carpenter, presented the awful choices that Obama must make in order to keep his party from being annihilated in the 2010 November elections.

Finally, Maddow and Overbite could not reconcile Barney Frank's reality-based judgment that the Repubs should now be allowed to participate---Rachel & Keith have totalitarian instincts too strong to overcome by mere rationality. And Sen Jim Webb's call to seat Scott Brown ASAP was marginalized because of Overbite's condescendingly ridiculous remark that Webb was once "Reagan's Sec'y of the Navy."

Overbite should try getting a real job and/or do the sports gig at ESPN, where he is rumored to be banished for life because of his personality/ethics/integrity/affability deficiencies. Better yet, lock Keith and Dan Patrick in a death cage for a month and see which rodent emerges alive!

UPDATE

Don't misunderstand me on Frank, who is singularly responsible for the FanFred meltdown. Frank, Clinton and A Cuomo were largely responsible for the home mortgage meltdown, when they instituted the 7/1/95 regulations to CRA that then REQUIRED banks and S&Ls; to give huge fractions of their loans to very poor people! And these bad credit risks defaulted. Who wouldda thunkit? GWB, among others, as Brit Hume explains here. But GWB was left holding the blame bag, as he was with fifty years of Dem shenanigans on the levee system around New Orleans which left the city vulnerable to Katrina. The Dems control the media and the Marxists control the Dems.

More on Just What to Do

The WSJ has a good editorial on the MA miracle. My fear is that if Coakley wins a squeaker or if the MA SecState delays seating Brown because he is within range of absentee and military [which would mostly go his way], the Dems will continue their thoughtless, machine-politics, big-city ward boss type of running up an unpayable deficit, a tab which even China, Japan, and other enablers overseas won't bother to touch.

Then the dollar loses its status as the world's reserve currency to the Euro, we become a second-tier power with a first-tier military, and the agenda Obama's handlers envisioned will begin to eventuate. Here's what one HappyGOPer at 538 opines about Mr. Silver's ideas about Obambi's "high-speed ping-pong" plan to jam the Health Care down the country's throat after his SOTU speech on Jan. 27th:

This is utter nonsense. Let's get this straight. Obama, while no doubt a committed leftwing ideologue, is a rookie. His Royal Blackness was able to coax lots of people to vote for someone with zero qualifications over someone who (even though I don't support) could actually do the job in Hillary Clinton...because gee, wouldn't it be nice to have the black guy after so many past sins....qualifications be damned???

So Obama gets propped up by a fawning media only too eager to do his bidding. Obama acts like a certain portion of the female anatomy and becomes Nancy Pelosi's cuckold. He goes completely tone-deaf and wastes an entire year on a health care plan he can't sell - despite his supposed abilty for charismatic charm. His numbers tank into the shitter, Independents become virtual Republicans and he loses TED KENNEY'S SEAT IN FREAKIN' MASSACHUSETTS (and it ain't just Coakley. There are two things that Virginia, New Jersey and Mass. have in common. One in health care and the other is OBAMA).

NOW - NOW - NOW...Urkel has grown some balls and he is to be feared? .... You guys lose this seat and you'll see just how many blue dogs fear his ugly face.

and GOPer has more on the jackass thinking of the Donkey Party:

I just don't understand. This goes to show the depths Democrats will go to in being self-defeatingly stubborn.

It's plain for all to see that this issue has been an unmitigated disaster for the left. Completely and objectively...a DISASTER.

Yet here we are. After a wasting a year, Obama wants to dig in more. Here is a guy that just doesn't know his place (and no, panting liberals...that has nothing to do with race). He's so used to getting his way all the time that being told or shown through electoral loss after electoral loss, that his way is the road to failure just doesn't compute.

Obama doesn't deserve the office he holds. He got graded on a curve for his entire life (Seriously. He never even ran a lemonade stand, let alone a big business or a state...and he is supposed to be our national leader?).

He has no idea what he's up against. He came from a liberal black state senate district in Chicago where everyone's politics are exactly the same. Has this guy ever even spoken with a Republican before 2008? He's just so deficient in so many ways.

I agree that Obama is now bluffing an utterly busted flush draw. His one-term prospects are growing larger daily. Welcome back, Carter!
UPDATE
Another 538 article by Tom Schaller entitled "Martha Choakley tries to blame her personality defects and lack of charisma/wit. This will be the prevailing trope from the Dem left, which can't admit that a Health Care monstrosity is so unpopular that it killed Fat Teddy's "legacy" at one swell foop [sic].

538 Gives Brown Almost 3/4's Edge

Scott Brown

Nate Silver called all 35 Senate races last year correctly. So when he says Scott Brown has a 74% shot at victory today, well, people should listen. And if the GOP weather front makes the polls less accessible, there might be a landslide. Silver says:

Coakley's odds are substantially worse than they appeared to be 24 hours ago, when there were fewer credible polls to evaluate and there appeared to be some chance that her numbers were bottoming out and perhaps reversing. However, the ARG and Research 2000 polls both show clear and recent trends against her. Indeed the model, which was optimized for regular rather than special elections, may be too slow to incorporate new information and may understate the magnitude of the trend toward Brown.

But Silver doesn't seem to understand that "likely voters" or the better off voters, the responsible citizens, are really in an ugly mood concerning a POTUS who blithely promised 8 times last year to be the "most transparent" president and to broadcast deliberations on Health Care on C-Span and now completely renege, showing himself to be a liar or bereft of any apparent leadership skills vis-a-vis a mentally-ill Speaker of the House and a doddering old fool of a Senate Majority Leader:

Some of the pollsters' findings, like a mid-40s approval rating for Obama among 'likely' voters, are hard to reconcile with the turnouts in New Jersey or Virginia, with evidence from national polling trends, or with anecdotal reports of potentially very high turnout. A variety of factors, ranging from the increasing use of IVR polls and short sampling periods, to the unusual partisan composition of the Massachusetts electorate (which is plurality independent), to the generally inexperienced polling firms which have surveyed the state, could make these effects more likely.

It's been a while since Virginia and New Jersey, both Dem defeats, and the educated tax-paying public is becoming aware of a humongous debacle on tripling or quadrupling the national deficit in the next three years if this careless silly little tyro is not severely disciplined by the ballot box revolt that "likely voters" can engineer. I had a libtard houseguest a couple of weeks ago say "I hope you don't like those tea party people." I said they were exercising their constitutional rights. More Silver:
I

n addition, there is a small chance that movement toward Coakley could occur after the pollsters have left the field. Until very recently, most voters assumed that Coakley would win; the fact that her chances are now imperiled could motivate more of them to vote, or to avoid casting a "protest vote" against her for one of her opponents. However, the chances are perhaps just as good that her voters become too despondent to turn out, which could produce a fairly substantial victory for Brown.

Silver in his last paragraphs hedges a bit, but seems to hint that Coakley's 3-1 advantage in registered party voters doesn't mean much when the Dem base appears apathetic, the weather seems bad, and over 50% of the voters are independents strongly leaning toward Brown.

In the last two weeks, an historic turnaround caused by a number of missteps by the lace-curtain matron of entitlement has brought her essential mediocrity front and center. Coakley is not the hard-working civil servant the New York Times makes her out to be, but a slovenly amoral in cases which scream out to God for justice, such as a Somerville cop's rape of his niece with a hot curling iron that Coakley studiously ignored and the terrible Amirault family debacle. When these skeletons fell out of her closet, the electorate began to perceive an arrogant self-righteous bitch with a tendency to make horrendous misjudgments. Who thought she was entitled to a Senate seat by some sort of Dem seniority system. And ridiculed Brown for campaigning outside Fenway on the New Year's Flyers-Bruins game. And ridiculed Red Sox hero Curt Schilling for being "a Yankee's fan." She's too stupid and out of touch to be a Senator.

Scott Brown opened up the breakout in the debate that Coakley tried to avoid when he answered pompous serial-oaf David Gergen's "Ted Kennedy's seat" question: "with all due respect, it's the people's seat" which both exposed his own readiness not to compromise and cut corners and the smug complacency of the rotten-borough Dems in MA. A former Army colonel, he will be much better than corrupt AG Coakley as Senator. And driving an old truck is a slap in the face of limo-boy Obambi whose ridicule of small truck drivers Sunday will not be forgotten.

If Brown wins the election, it'll be a political earthquake that will match the seismic quake in Haiti.

And like the quake in Haiti, it will reveal the utterly corrupt state of the ruling authorities, in the political case in the US, the rotten-borough Democrats and their ridiculous leadership.

Nancy Pelosi can pass a health bill, but the SCOTUS can declare it unconstitutional, and will if November 2010 is a GOP replication of Scott Brown's amazing ascent.

John Fund on Clueless Cypher "Croakley"

John Fund has a WSJ piece on "Croakley," a lace curtain Irish matron too uppity to mix with the hoi polloi---she even dissed Red Sox fans.

Democratic candidate Martha Coakley has run such a clueless race for Senate in Massachusetts that Democrats are already comparing her to Creigh Deeds, their hapless nominee for governor of Virginia who lost last year in a landslide.

But other comparisons are even more cutting. Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of Americans Politics, wrote yesterday: "If Republican Scott Brown wins this election -- and every day his chances look better -- Democrats might conclude that Martha Coakley was a Republican plant, a Manchurian candidate inserted into the race in order to deprive Democrats of their 60th vote in the Senate."

How bad has Ms. Coakley's effort been? This week she took time off from her desultory campaigning to go to a Washington, D.C. wine bar and collect $10,000 in checks from health care lobbyists. Afterwards, an aide shoved a reporter to the ground for trying to ask the candidate a question (an action the aide has now apologized for). The Weekly Standard reporter had been trying to ask Ms. Coakley about her incredible statement in a debate this week that there were no longer any terrorists in Afghanistan.

But perhaps her worst error was appearing to have dissed baseball fans who congregate at Boston's Fenway Park, a Massachusetts shrine even in the off-season. Asked to answer charges that she wasn't campaigning hard enough, she fired back: "As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?" (An ad for her GOP opponent Mr. Brown showed him shaking hands in front of the ballpark.)

The crack drew an instant response from former Red Sox star Curt Schilling, who attacked Ms. Coakley for being one of those pols who are "so far out of touch with their constituents it's laughable and pathetic."

Ms. Coakley's campaign has indeed been a disaster, and that's certainly what Democrats will emphasize should she lose. Democrats will studiously ignore the fact that her cookie-cutter liberal ideas were viewed by many independents as out-of-date and conventional. Her inability to talk about issues such as jobs that are a pressing concern to voters will be every bit as much to blame as her innumerable tactical missteps.

Fund is right, jobs are job one. But the badly briefed and overall incompetent Croakley may cost ObamaCare its sixtieth vote and the Pickininny Kid might have to live up to some of his BS promises during the campaign last year about transparency.

Pat Kennedy a Chip off the Old Carcass of Fat Teddy

The National Journal reports on the Demo-rat compulsion to blame George Bush for everything, with an interview of Teddy K's silly little boy Patrick, best known for driving DUI on Capitol Hill after midnight. The Dems are famous for backing something today and then changing their mind tomorrow. That's why women like the Dem style so much, no accountability after impulse buying.

Bush tried for five years to get Congress to reform the excesses that under Clintoon and the whack-a-doodle CRA produced gigantic risk factors financy the housing market by forcing banks to underwrite loans for Demo-rat constituents without adequate means of income. This is a matter of public record and the MSM have unanimously refused to cover the Demo-rat responsibility for the Home Finance collapse, engineered by MA lunatic-in-chief Barney Frank. Finally GWB threw in the towel on the Demo-rat RICO scheme very much similar to Bernie Madoff that
Barney Frank and earlier racketeers in Congress had built on the CRA.

Bush was outmanouvered by Demo-rats and a few crooked Repubs in on the cabal whenever he tried to get congress to put the brakes on Freddie and Fannie as well as laying off forcing banks to underwrite bad loans. GWB wasn't a schemer or an ignorant drunk like Pat Kennedy, who has inherited his father's many odious traits and been passed by with the scanty positive genetic donation from Fat Teddy. As Gore Vidal, a lefty if there ever was one, said of Fat Teddy: "he has all the charm of 300 lbs of condemned veal."

Dog of an Arab Hasan Showed Many Signs of Treason

Traitor Dog of an Arab

The human piece of sh*t called bowwow Hasan who killed 13 soldiers in Ft. Hood was the subject of

A Pentagon review released Friday portrayed a systemic breakdown within the military that permitted an Army psychiatrist, now charged with killing 13 people, to advance through the ranks despite concerns from his superiors about his behavior.

The review, the first into the Nov. 5 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., concluded that the Department of Defense was poorly prepared to defend itself from internal threats well beyond the single case of the military doctor accused of the killings, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

The review’s findings, although they were focused only on the military and not on other agencies, are the latest signal that the government has not achieved the smooth communications and agility among intelligence agencies that has been sought since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in comments about the review at a Pentagon news conference on Friday, said the Defense Department was still focused on fighting external threats and previous conflicts and had not paid enough attention to workplace violence and any “self-radicalization” within its ranks.

Sort of like when Janet from another Planet Napolitano said that everything had gone "smoothly" and that the system worked---is the Army as stupid and arrogant as Janet the Mutant? But wait, there's more!

A senior administration official, briefing reporters in a telephone conference call after the release of the report, described the shooting rampage as “an act of terrorism,” although the official provided no details and stopped short of saying that Major Hasan had been directed or inspired to act by any overseas militant groups. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under the ground rules of the telephone call.

Starting in late 2008, American officials have said that Major Hasan wrote about 20 e-mail messages to a radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, asking for guidance on religious obligations, including whether it would be justified for a Muslim American soldier to kill fellow soldiers.

A few of the e-mail messages, but not all, were intercepted and passed on to a Joint Terrorism Task Force, officials have said. But a Defense Department analyst examined them and decided the queries were part of Major Hasan’s research and warranted no further investigation.

What a wonderfully intuitive decision! I wonder if this analyst was a stupid female like Janet or Martha Coakley who knows better because, well, just because. Why not call this dog of an Arab in to ask him about the suspicious e-mails---20 are a lot and if this "analyst" had known who Awlaki was, implicated with two of the 9/11 bomber-dogs of Arab pedigree, perhaps he/she might have had a second thought, or even a first one. In fact,

Mr. Awlaki, who was born in the United States but now is in hiding in Yemen, has become an influential figure whose sermons, distributed from his popular Web site, encouraged violence to defend against what he described as attacks on Muslims. While he has not been charged for participating in any attack, his recordings and writings have been found in a dozen terrorism investigations in the United States, Canada and Britain. American intelligence officials believe he was in contact with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

In the months before the Fort Hood shootings, Major Hasan, 39, alarmed some colleagues by becoming increasingly outspoken against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose traumatized and injured veterans he was counseling. He became preoccupied with the conflict between the religious obligations of Muslims and the American military’s role in fighting in Muslim countries, but supervisors minimized the concerns

.
Maybe next time these lifer nitwits in the Green Machine come across e-mails from Awlaki to US officers, they'll pay more attention. Or maybe those all-knowing "supervisors," now promoted to general officers [although I doubt it with G2 types] might agree with drunken Irish a**hole General Casey and be soooo scared that perhaps the US Army might succumb to a lesser amount of "diversity." Every army needs a few traitors, eh Casey, you rubbish brain!

“The challenge for the Department of Defense is to prepare more effectively for a constantly changing environment,” the report said. “The department’s security posture for tomorrow must be more agile and adaptive.”

The report recommends that the Pentagon work more closely with the F.B.I., which runs a terrorism task force jointly with other agencies. The task force uses investigators, analysts, linguists and others to review intelligence reports about possible links between troops and terrorist or extremist groups.

The report recommended that the Defense Department should devote the same commitment to protecting its personnel from internal threats as it does to protecting them from external dangers; develop guidance and awareness programs so that commanders can better identify risky behavior within the ranks; share information about potential internal threats across the military bureaucracy; and develop more sophisticated and agile responses to emergencies like the shooting at Fort Hood, in which 30 people were injured.......Mr. Gates said he was particularly concerned that the military does not seem to be alert to signs of radicalization in its own ranks, to be able to detect its symptoms or to understand its causes. Major Hasan’s commanders and supervisors, he suggested, may have lacked the clear authority or explicit channels for reporting any doubts they had about him. Indeed, troubling information about individuals is often withheld or filed discreetly away instead of being shared, he said.

Hasan was of Palestinian descent. One reason I no longer contribute to Middle East charities, although I speak and read Arabic at a high level, is that the Palestinians [Sirhan Sirhan] are a bunch of psychotic canines and rabid dogs. Especially the ones in Gaza.

Dalrymple on "The Best Nightmare on Earth."

After the Disaster

Haiti is a place, like many around the planet, that Dr. D knows rather well. He was a "Doctor Without Borders" before that organization came into existence for a UN organization and has seen humanity's nether parts from far too close.

By now it is a commonplace, a piece of received wisdom in every country, that the devastating consequences of the Haitian earthquake are not those of a natural disaster alone, but of a natural event interacting with extreme poverty. The causes of the poverty itself are a matter of deep ideological contention. What is beyond dispute is that so many buildings collapsed because they were so flimsily constructed in the first place.

That Haiti was a slow-moving disaster even before the earthquake was visible—obvious, in fact—from a height of 35,000 feet. When you flew from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince, the border was as clearly visible as on any map, a straight line drawn on the earth’s surface: on the Dominican side, verdant, on the Haitian side, brown, bare as a desert. It’s difficult to imagine now, but Haiti was once deeply forested; but 98 percent of the tree cover is gone, leaving eroded hillsides with gullies down which the rain torrentially washes whatever soil is left.

I watched a do-gooder falsification of history on PBS, where else?, last night which suggests that what happened to the Haitians since their 1804 independence was everybody else's fault, especially of course, the USA's. This is the standard Marxist trope propagated at the failing system of public institutions politely called "higher education" in this country, really a bunch of union and tenured crony-communists who never had a real job and who hope to seize more power to assuage their current impotence.

A Nigerian journalist once said of his country, “No known system of government works in Nigeria.” This is even truer of Haiti. It’s often claimed that Haiti’s desperate situation is the consequence of outside interference—principally American, of course—plus recurrent, often bizarre, dictatorship. But Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, has suffered similar disadvantages; yet it prospers. Moreover, descriptions of Haiti after the American occupation of 1915 make clear that the country received many benefits from it, whatever the attendant humiliations. As with other forms of external help, however, the occupation’s benefits proved temporary and ultimately fruitless.

Nor does voluntary assistance seem to do much better. It’s estimated that 10,000 voluntary organizations operate in Haiti—one for every 800 residents—but the effect, globally speaking, has been minimal, whatever good work each organization does individually. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Disaster relief is, of course, something completely different. No one can remain unmoved by the pictures of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake (the situation outside the capital remains unknown, but one can imagine). Everything that can be done should be done: the financial resources necessary are, comparatively speaking, tiny.

But because of the very problems that contributed so much to the disaster in the first place—appalling infrastructure, absent administration—such relief will be difficult to provide efficiently, without the absurdities of supplies accumulating where they are not useful, and not reaching the places where they’re desperately needed. Terrible as the Haitian army was, and often harmful as its role was, its deliberate and total dissolution in 1994 may now be a severe handicap, an unintended consequence of a good intention.

And after the immediate crisis has passed, what? International administration? Restoration of national sovereignty under a government incapable of governing? More aid that results in little but corruption and infighting? Laissez-faire? The mind reels.

Dr. D has no solution because in the end, the only solution must come from the Haitians themselves. Their own society is the third most corrupt on the planet---the other two more corrupt are in sub-Saharan Africa---and it appears that the self-destructive system of "controle" only pauperizes the population even more tha before, if that is possible.

How Unions Run This ObamaCare Package of Bribes and Kickbacks

Rich Lowry writes an excellent description of the ultra-opaque goings-on behind Demo-rat doors as they craft a monstrosity that is 90% political and maybe 5% health specific, with 5% being reserved for Marxist theory put into practice.

The excise tax is supposed to be paid by evil insurers and employers. Except in this one case affecting their self-interest directly, the unions see through the fiction and understand that the tax will trickle down onto them. How disorienting to hear unions implicitly recognize that corporations ultimately don't pay taxes, their customers and employees do.

"While the excise tax is slated to be imposed on the insurers on so-called high cost plans, the tax will be passed on to enrollees in the form of higher premiums, co-pays or reduced benefits," a coalition of public-employee unions wrote congressional leaders. "Characterizing this tax proposal as a ‘Cadillac tax' is a misnomer. It hits the average blue collar and white collar employee."

The unions also bristled at a fairly typical trick of liberal taxation - bracket creep. The Cadillac tax affects few people when it begins in 2013. Since it's not indexed to account for the ever-rising expense of health care, though, it will catch more and more people over time.

This is why New York Times columnist Bob Herbert called it "a middle-class tax time bomb," and Nancy Pelosi made an oblique reference to Pres. Barack Obama breaking his promise not to increase taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year. Obama's support for the Cadillac tax not only violates that forlorn pledge, but directly contradicts one of his chief lines of attack against John McCain in the 2008 campaign.

McCain wanted to end the tax exemption for employer-provided insurance coverage and compensate people with a tax credit to buy their own plans, a systematic approach to controlling costs and increasing choice. Obama's plan will increase costs and reduce choice, but he needs $150 billion in revenue over ten years to try to make it look deficit-neutral, so he's - as he put it in his unrelenting anti-McCain ads - "taxing health benefits for the first time in history."

But pressure from the unions has now forced the White House to agree to raise the $23,000-per-household threshold of the tax slightly and - more importantly - exempt insurance plans that are the product of collective-bargaining agreements until 2018. This Labor Loophole stands in the finest tradition of the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback. With no possible public-policy justification, it puts the awesome power to tax and spend at the service of nakedly political ends.

We know that Louisiana is a political swamp, a sort of Haiti with white people and the hooker masqerading as Senator will be re-elected. Nebraska is a different matter, and the loathesome hypocrite Ben Nelson will be sent packing in '12 when his inglorious term comes up for re-election.

But the Labor Unions have become an enormous RICO-style crime syndicate, along the lines of ACORN only with a hammerlock on the paychecks of the human robots who do the large corporate heavy lifting every day on assembly lines and long-haul distribution systems. They are the true suckers, because they can vote one way, but see their dues support invariably the Marxist candidate on the ticket.

Slow-boil Communism with a mission-creep long-term agenda---very insidious in a country built on fiscal years and quarterly reports, on which its prosperity rises or falls. Lowry closes the argument he makes with pungent force.

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that taxes are the price of civilization. In this case, taxes are the price of not belonging to a group that pours countless millions of dollars into the Democratic coffers. Under the Cadillac tax, there's one set of rules for the Service Employees International Union and another for everyone else.

Obama is currently haranguing the banks so he doesn't get pegged as a "Wall Street Liberal." The more dangerous rubric for him is a "Washington Liberal," a politician knee-deep in the special-interest politics of the Beltway as he pushes an unpopular agenda of rapid government expansion. Obama's style of politics has gone from inspiring to revolting in the space of a year.

Obama's revolution is truly revolting, in the great Victorian sense of that word, and even a ditz like Ruth Marcus, resident political commissar at the Washington Post, recognizes that as long as we have a free ballot, the pickininny kid is wading into areas far beyond his limited professorial skill set.

The CIA Has to Raise Its Game in Afghanistan, Pakistan

David Ignatius

The suicide-bomber catastrophe at Khost five days after the Christmas attempt on Detroit reminds us that a war based halfway around the world is inching closer to stateside. Triple Agent Dr. Balawi pulled off a horrific coup when he 'sploded himself and seven Americans plus his Jordanian Royal Family Intelligence minder in a gruesome masterpiece demonstrating the "Religion of Peace's" loathesome doctrines. Alzheimer-senile Helen Thomas keeps asking why the Al Qaeda and Taliban attack America. Maybe they are as crazy as she is demented. Or as David Ignatius would reply:

In terms of loss of life, the bombing of the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, may be the most costly mistake in the agency's history. So it's important to look carefully for clues about how it happened, and lessons for the future.
CIA veterans cite a series of warning signs that the agency wasn't paying enough attention to the counterintelligence threat posed by al-Qaeda. These danger signals weren't addressed because the agency underestimated its adversary, and overestimated its own skills and those of its allies. The time to fix these problems is now -- not with a spasm of second-guessing that will further weaken the CIA but through the agency's own adaptation to this war zone. As the Khost attack made painfully clear, the CIA needs better tradecraft for this conflict.

By getting a suicide bomber inside a CIA base, the al-Qaeda network showed that it remains a sophisticated adversary, despite intense pressure from CIA Predator attacks. "They didn't get lucky, they got good, and we got sloppy all over Afghanistan," says one agency counterterrorism veteran

.
As Ignatius notes in detail, the CIA's reorganization in 2004 added more suet and lard, and put LESS career incentives in learning local and regional languages and dialects. For example, Robert Baer just came back from a visit to Kabul and environs and found that only two CIA officers spoke a local language, Dari, while NONE speaks or understands Pushtun, the language of most of the Al Qaeda Pathan in Afghanistan and their Taliban Punjabi brothers in Pakistan and Baluchi Taliban in Quetta converse in.

Baer said this dependence on translators makes intelligence penetration of CIA operations child's play, and the sophistication of the Al Qaeda/Taliban counterintelligence now surpasses that of the smug, self-satisfied Langley crews.

Much of the damage done to the CIA has been done stateside by Fifth Column bloggers whining that the CIA still employs Blackwater as security. Maybe the candy-ass libtards should volunteer for security duty===oops, forgot they're craven cowards. Nancy Pelosi did a bit of damage when she was Minority Chief on the Special Committee on Intelligence. And continued her damage by not giving Jane Harman, a Harvard grad with an iQ at least fifty points higher than Botox Nancy's, the job when she became Speaker. Instead she appointed an illiterate ESL who didn't know the difference between Shi'ites and Sunnis [from Texas border country, where reading isn't necessary to get through life]. Despite the disloyal leadership in this country, Ignatius notes that the Agency should save itself:

Muslim extremists are using increasingly sophisticated tools -- sometimes the very techniques that have been deployed against them. One example is the software used by Hezbollah to analyze patterns of cell-phone calling and expose an Israeli spy network in Lebanon last year. Iran, too, uses sophisticated pattern analysis to study which of its nuclear scientists might have been recruited by the West.

Despite this growing threat, the CIA has devoted only limited resources to defending itself. Within its large Kabul station, the CIA is said to have just two officers working full time on counterintelligence. There's a similar lack of resources devoted to Pakistani operations against the agency.

The 2004 intelligence reorganization added more layering and bureaucracy but not more muscle. It created a new National Counterintelligence Executive, but this group has focused on traditional targets, such as Russia and China, rather than new ones. "What good is it?" asks one CIA counterterrorism veteran. "It's overhead. It contributes little, other than additional tasking and more meetings."

The CIA's career track is another troubling part of the problem. The complex penetration and deception operations that could counter al-Qaeda take time and patience. But agency operations mirror the short, two-year tours of assignment -- or the even shorter deployments to war zones. "We live in two-year cycles," says one insider. The rational careerist looks at a penetration or deception plan and concludes: "It's too time-consuming, it won't get me promoted."

What's most troubling is that over the past year, the CIA has had what this source calls "egregious lapses of counterintelligence and security at the bases in Afghanistan."

Evidence of sloppy procedures is said to have surfaced last fall at one of the agency's bases in southern Afghanistan. One of its vehicles was stolen, but headquarters wasn't notified for several weeks. Someone was caught photographing the entry gate to the base, but he was turned over to the Afghan police initially, rather than agency operatives. An Afghan guard failed a polygraph, raising worries that he might be a double agent. Yet aggressive countermeasures weren't taken.

A final obvious problem is training. Case officers need more preparation for high-threat meetings and paramilitary challenges than they're getting now.

After any calamity, there are always haunting "what ifs." But looking in the rearview mirror isn't going to make the CIA any stronger or better. The Khost attack shows that the al-Qaeda network, though badly wounded, remains a wily and resourceful foe. The inescapable conclusion is that the CIA and its allies need to lift their game.

Now we have another disloyal coming back from the UK to replace George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings on ABC. A senile fool named Koppel insists that the media exaggerated the importance of the crotch bomber and shouldn't be making such a fuss, as it throws Obama off his perfect equilibrium.

Just when I was hoping the country was shedding Helen Thomas-type dementia victims, another comes to pollute ABC News.

Beginning of a mini-30 Year Ice Age At Hand?

The Daily Mail and the Telegraph and London Times are all much more Global Warming Skeptics than the politicized broadsheets like The Independent, The Guardian, and the laughing-stock BBC. These last resemble the clueless witless brain-dead US thundering herds of low-IQ, highly lazy "journalists" who remind me of the old Dylan song, "you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."

The Mail is full of actual practicing journalists, some of whom are reading one of

the most prominent of the scientists ... Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.
Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.
Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.
The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view. On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.
Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.
As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

A composite photograph released last year to highlight the issue of melting ice and global warming
However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).
For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.
But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.
'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.
'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’
Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970
But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.
Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.
For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

I personally remember the stories in the seventies that the advent of a new ice age was beginning and the last year i lived through a winter in Milwaukee WI, there was an accumulation of over 110 inches of snow, a new city record, back in the late sixties!

Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.
‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’
He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.
For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’
Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’
Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'
But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.
'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’
Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.
He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’
He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

Sounds like on climate issues and their associated taxation implications, it is almost impossible to please ANYBODY!

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?
Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.
Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.
William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

Dr David Viner stands by his claim that snow will become an 'increasingly rare event'
According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’
But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.
In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.
'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’
The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.

Anyone familiar with the British Council knows that it is a formerly highly-respected overseas agency fallen into the hands of disreputable leftist agitprop groups. The Voodoo Doctor Viner will be preaching the sort of sci fi gibberish that characterizes New Age looniness---something like Deepak Chopra blaming the USA for the Muslim terrorist attacks on hotels in Mumbai.

Al Gore got a D+ in the Divinity School science course he took---although a Harvard undergrad, this mentally-challenged hysteric couldn't get into Law School, although his daddy was a sitting US Senator! He is a fit leader for a scam that aims to tax us all for breathing.

NBC Zucks Up Its Late Night

Fatboy Zucker AKA Humpty Dumpty has ruined the Evening half of the Crown Jewels of NBC. Can the Today Show be far behind?

The network has a plan in the works to restore Jay Leno to his old spot at 11:35 each weeknight for a half-hour, while pushing the man who replaced him, Conan O’Brien, to a starting time of 12:05 a.m. Mr. O’Brien would then have a full hour.

NBC executives held extensive discussions with both Mr. Leno and Mr. O’Brien on Thursday about the future of the network’s late-night lineup. One senior executive, who declined to be identified because of the continuing talks, said that the moves were still being thrashed out by the representatives of each of the stars, but that an agreement was essentially in place. There is no timetable yet to issue a final announcement of the plan because contractual details remain to be worked out.

The change, if completed, would represent a retreat from the network’s strategy of replacing Mr. Leno, who drove “The Tonight Show” to the top of the late-night ratings, with the younger, hipper Mr. O’Brien, then trying to save money in prime time by replacing expensive dramas with Mr. Leno’s show at 10 p.m.

The moves are being driven by pressure from NBC’s affiliated stations, which have seen ratings for their late-night local newscasts plummet since September. That was when NBC began “The Jay Leno Show,” a prime-time version of Mr. Leno’s old late-night show. Mr. O’Brien succeeded Mr. Leno as host of “The Tonight Show” in June.

Zucker was the architect of this train wreck of a business model, if a terribly mixed metaphor can be used to describe a terrible network which is slowly destroying itself through Zucker's last decade of incompetent blundering eff-ups. Humpty Dumpty will probably convey over to Comcast which is such a monstrosity itself on the business side that he could conceivably stand out as above average. Over at GE, Zucker and Immelt compete in a race to the bottom in their respective industries.
As for NBC's Late Night blunders,

[b]oth experiments were being keenly watched by an industry struggling with demographic shifts, declining audiences and escalating costs. A deal was struck last month to sell NBC Universal, the parent of NBC, to Comcast, and one person with knowledge of the negotiations said that NBC’s poor performance — it languishes in last place in prime time — was a driving reason for the sale.

Mr. Leno addressed the developments on his show Thursday night. “I don’t think there is any truth to the rumors,” he said during his monologue. “See, it’s always been my experience that NBC only cancels you when you’re in first place.”

Self-destructive or suicidal, NBC remains in the death-grip of Humpty-Dumpty Zucker, an unparalleled unprecedented fuck-up in an industry riddled with mediocre third-rate fucktards, losers, and general all-round ne'er-do-wells.