George Will: Republican Defeat Inevitable?

George Will trots out a lot of poll data which demonstrates that the Republicans will probably lose in '08. Or they will squeak through with McCain. Here's George Will on the Canadian government of Michigan [oops! I meant the Canadian governor!]:

Tuesday's Republican primary is in one of the nation's worst-governed states. Under a Democratic governor, Michigan has been taxed into a one-state recession. Native son Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who best understands how wealth is created, might revive his campaign by asking: Whom do you want to be president in 2010 when the Bush tax cuts, which McCain opposed, expire? Can automakers endure more regulations such as the fuel efficiency mandates that climate-fixers such as McCain favor? Do you want a president (Mike Huckabee, proponent of a national sales tax of at least 30 percent) pledged to radically increase the proportion of federal taxes paid by the middle class?

At 7AM this morning, CNN [Clinton News Network] had Mike Huckabee on being interviewed in a friendly fashion. At 7:15 AM Monday morning, Mikey was being
interviewed by a gushing Ms Brzezinski, who cannot dissemble her enthusiasm for Highlarious Hillary and her latest Hitman BET Chief Robert Johnson, who repeated Shaheen's NH gambit of accusing Obama of drug use. Talk about black-on-black racism!

Huckabee is the two Hillary cable outlets [pace Chris Matthews] favorite in the Repub category because this tax-raising, Willie Horton-loving, foreign policy dimwit is perhaps the easiest Republican to defeat in November. Perhaps the only Repub Hillary could defeat. Too bad Thompson gets rebuffed by the Democrat cable TV monsters, but it looks like the Dems might settle for John McCain, a RINO who's strong on national security, but weak on immigration.

Fox, of course, is closely following Britney Spears' court appearance today, and breathlessly doing a Golden Globe follow-up.

Mark Steyn Humbles Canadian GroupThink "Thought Police"

Mark Steyn is peerless at describing the mindless Orwellian dungeon which our neighbor to the North has imprisoned itself:

Then come two sections - one in which "human rights agent" Shirlene McGovern quizzes him on his intent in publishing the cartoons, and another in which she raises the fear that his publishing them could lead to violence against Muslims “particularly in today’s world post-9/ 11 that has made a number of Muslims more vulnerable to hatred and contempt”.Ezra's answer speaks for itself, but Ms McGovern's question reminds me of a passage from Melanie Phillips' book Londonistan:

Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.

Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of Muslim youths turned up at their children's grade schools, and Muslim rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them, and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them. Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an explicitly infidelophobic academy and who's publicly called for the introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any actual backlash against anybody else.

Thus the unending valse macabre of our times, as the supposedly progressive forces of tolerance are whirled around the floor by the avowedly intolerant. Ezra is rightly contemptuous of these "human rights commissions". Canadians should be ashamed of this show trial.

Of course, shame is a function of intelligence and moral conscience, so we won't be expecting an outbreak of compunction North of the border any time soon.

Samizdata
has a link which shows Eric Levant eloquently depantsing and spanking the preposterous moronic twaddle-twit responsible for putting him in front of an inquisition called The Alberta Human Rights Commission for daring to publish the Danish cartoons of Muhammed.

Canadian comedy is nothing so hilarious as its governmental functionaries pursuing some sort of Guinness cup of cretinism.

Brett Favre, Tom Brady Approach Football Canonization

Brett did what he does best yesterday and Tom Brady pulled out a record-breaking near-perfect performance against a well-prepared and fired-up Jacksonville Jaguar eleven with Coach Del Rio almost having his kids pull off a huge upset.

Favre broke another record [his own] by tossing a touchdown pass in his 17th straight playoff game. Favre had fun & NFL.com summed up the game a bit facetiously:

Ryan Grant recovered from two fumbles that put the Packers down 14-0 after only four minutes. He set a team postseason record by running for 201 yards, and scored three times. After its early slips, Green Bay scored touchdowns on six straight possessions.

"I appreciate everyone sticking with it, staying with me," Grant said.

The Packers reached the NFC title game for the first time since the 1997 season, and the largest crowd ever at Lambeau partied. Favre and Driver started the celebration early, tossing snowballs at each other.
Most consecutive playoff games with a TD pass
Player Years Games
Brett Favre 1995-present 17
Dan Marino 1983-95 13
Tom Brady 2002-present 13
Ken Stabler 1973-78 10
Joe Montana 1989-94 10

"When I kind of packed it up and threw it, it got kind of hard, like a golf ball. So I kind of threw it at his back or his butt or something. I'm thinking, 'You don't want to puncture an eye or something,'" Favre said.

"He turns around, packs one and hits me in the face. Good thing it hit my face mask, it might have hit my tooth or something," he said.

Earlier, Favre made another playful toss. He somehow spun free from the Seahawks' clutches and stumbled ahead in the snow. Ever the gambler, he flipped a wobbly, underhanded pass that he had no business trying, let alone completing.

"That's right!" he shouted.

Favre tied his personal best for TD strikes in a postseason game, twice hitting Greg Jennings.

Notice that Tom Brady is right on Brett's tail for consecutive playoff touchdown games.

The Pats/Jag game was even more exciting than the GB/Seattle contest.

Brady went the entire first half without an incompletion, going 12-of-12 for 120 yards. His first incompletion didn't come until his 17th pass. Garrard wasn't much worse, going 12-of-14 for 149 yards in the first half. ... Harrison has recorded an interception in four straight postseason games [tying record with Aeneas Williams my note]. ... Randy Moss recorded a season-low 14 yards on just one reception. ... The Patriots' home win was their tenth straight in the postseason, the second longest streak in NFL history.

Laurance Maroney almost doubled the rushing yards of Jones-Drew and Taylor, rendering the Jag's vaunted running game inconsequential.

My fondest wish would be to have these two quarterbacks oppose each other in the Super Bowl, which could happen if the Giants pull off an upset in Dallas tomorrow. Otherwise, Favre would face the guy who decided to become a quarterback when he saw Brett in Milwaukee County Stadium fifteen years ago, so Tony Romo claims.

Even though my Catholic priest uncle, who was pastor in Burlington WI the year Tony Romo was born and almost certainly baptized a Catholic, may have poured the sacramental water, I'd love to see the young whippersnapper humbled by All-Time Great Brett, who I devoutly pray will remain next year to keep the Pack on the way back.

But a Brady/Favre Super Bowl face-off would be one of those great sports events that come only once or twice a decade.
b

Charles Manson of Politics Arrested DWI Helping Clinton in NH

Sidney Blumenthal is easily one of the most despised, detested human wrecks in US politics. He took on Christopher Hitchens when CH caught Sid [Vicious] Blumenthal trying to destroy Monica Lewitzsky & ratted the monster out. Blumenthal has descended to the point of being an "unpaid adviser" to Clinton Inc., meaning they want to see his back yesterday, but can't ditch the tin-can tied to their tail.

“He’s going to pursue all legal defenses in court, and we’re going to deal with the case in court and not in the media.” (The Clinton campaign declined comment on the arrest and whether it would affect Blumenthal's status as an adviser.)

He has to serve three days in jail in Nashua as a mandatory sentence, and I would love to be a cell-mate working over this robo-weasel as long as he stays conscious.

Hillary Haaates Men? Or is She Walking on the Wild Side?

Carl Bernstein has an excellent biography of Hillary Clinton called Woman in Charge. I had the chance to read the first chapter, entitled "Formative Years," which is an revealing excursion throught the Rodham/Howell marriage of her Welsh Methodist parents, her father only being a second-generation American.

Her father Hugh and her two younger brothers were all afflicted with some sort of hereditary depression. Hillary's uncle Russell was a medical doctor who flamed out into an alcoholic suicidal tailspin that ended his life prematurely as a Chicago bartender.

But both sides of the family had prolific begetting skills, with 9 siblings on her mother's side and 11 on her father's, making her book It Takes a Village perhaps a subtext on the extended family Hillary possessed.

Hillary's closest childhood relationship, according to the Bernstein chapter, was her mother's protective psychic and physical umbrella when her father---a former Naval Petty Officer---went from being a martinet to a physical one-man goon-squad. As Daddy's girl, Hillary was exempt from the physical beatings, but she saw her high-school QB brother berated because he only had ten completions out of eleven passes---you get the picture of a complete dictatorial perfectionist. Her brothers didn't measure up to these impossible standards and Hillary evidently regards male parenting as defective---at least from her first-hand experience.

There has to be a reason for her scofflaw statement that "There is no such thing as a woman illegal." Despite her efforts to spin it as a compassionate attempt to sympathize with a fellow human being, giving women some sort of legal immunity is simply absurd---or is this some sort of Oprahfication of her candidacy which will devolve into victimhood if Obama continues his remarkable campaign---one of unity and idealism rather than the class warfare of Edwards or the identity politics of Hillary?

I worked on the national staff of two Democratic and one Republican/Independent [John Anderson in '80]. I have seen the Democrats try to satisfy their constituencies in absurdly conflicting manners [blacks, unions, Hispanics, women, gender, anti-religious, & voting rights for convicted felons] to get any edge any way and anyhow in various contexts.

If Hillary begins down that road, she will go into the tailspin of other Dem candidates of the past and simply flame out.

As the Bernstein book demonstrates, she was a decent human being before Wellesley and Law School deformed her thinking and her spouse deformed her view of men permanently.

Will Clinton Inc. survive a couple more absurd remarks like "no such thing as....?"

Edwards Has Shot His Wad and Missed

Obsequious suck-up nerd on 'roids Balz gives his slack-jawed analysis in the WaPo this morning. Dandy Dan forgets to mention Edward' many 40,000 sq.ft. mansion closets full of skeletons, not to mention gestating Rielle sequestered in a gated community in his adopted state of N. Carolina. His native state, Danny Boy [No] Balz forgets to mention, is South Carolina.

Dan has to forget a lot and curtsey & kowtow even more to keep his slot as Chief Eunuch at the Post editorial/analysis desk.

Dubai and The Ports Deal

US Congress was spooked by a bunch of Arab haters in the Dubai Ports Deal a while back. The above article demonstrates why Congress is a band of rabid dogs, just like the mainstream media, whenever an apex predator in the pack starts to howl.

Edward O. Wilson on "Selfish Genes" and Helena Cronin on Male Diversity

Edward O. Wilson keeps on writing thoughtful books on altruism as an evolutionary function of primate development. Wilson's book on Sociobiology & his book Consilience are out-of-the-box explorations of human development.


Meanwhile, The Ant and the Peacock author Helena Cronin has changed her mind in the Edge end-of-the-year "What have you changed your mind about?" ANNUAL QUESTION [h/t: Steve Sailer]:

More dumbbells but more Nobels: Why men are at the top
What gives rise to the most salient, contested and misunderstood of sex differences… differences that see men persistently walk off with the top positions and prizes, whether influence or income, whether heads of state or CEOs… differences that infuriate feminists, preoccupy policy-makers, galvanize legislators and spawn 'diversity' committees and degrees in gender studies?

I used to think that these patterns of sex differences resulted mainly from average differences between men and women in innate talents, tastes and temperaments. After all, in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so. And therefore, even where such differences are modest, the distribution of these 3 Ts among males will necessarily be different from that among females — and so will give rise to notable differences between the two groups. Add to this some bias and barriers — a sexist attitude here, a lack of child-care there. And the sex differences are explained. Or so I thought.

But I have now changed my mind. Talents, tastes and temperaments play fundamental roles. But they alone don't fully explain the differences. It is a fourth T that most decisively shapes the distinctive structure of male — female differences. That T is Tails — the tails of these statistical distributions. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But, among males, the variance — the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst — can be vast. So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top. I think of this as 'more dumbbells but more Nobels'.

Consider the mathematics sections in the USA's National Academy of Sciences: 95% male. Which contributes most to this predominance — higher means or larger variance? One calculation yields the following answer. If the sex difference between the means was obliterated but the variance was left intact, male membership would drop modestly to 91%. But if the means were left intact but the difference in the variance was obliterated, male membership would plummet to 64%. The overwhelming male predominance stems largely from greater variance.

Similarly, consider the most intellectually gifted of the USA population, an elite 1%. The difference between their bottom and top quartiles is so wide that it encompasses one-third of the entire ability range in the American population, from IQs above 137 to IQs beyond 200. And who's overwhelmingly in the top quartile? Males. Look, for instance, at the boy:girl ratios among adolescents for scores in mathematical-reasoning tests: scores of at least 500, 2:1; scores of at least 600, 4:1; scores of at least 700, 13.1.

Admittedly, those examples are writ large — exceptionally high aptitude and a talent that strongly favours males and with a notably long right-hand tail. Nevertheless, the same combined causes — the forces of natural selection and the facts of statistical distribution — ensure that this is the default template for male-female differences.

Let's look at those causes. The legacy of natural selection is twofold: mean differences in the 3 Ts and males generally being more variable; these two features hold for most sex differences in our species and, as Darwin noted, greater male variance is ubiquitous across the entire animal kingdom. As to the facts of statistical distribution, they are three-fold … and watch what happens at the end of the right tail: first, for overlapping bell-curves, even with only a small difference in the means, the ratios become more inflated as one goes further out along the tail; second, where there's greater variance, there's likely to be a dumbbells-and-Nobels effect; and third, when one group has both greater mean and greater variance, that group becomes even more over-represented at the far end of the right tail.

The upshot? When we're dealing with evolved sex differences, we should expect that the further out we go along the right curve, the more we will find men predominating. So there we are: whether or not there are more male dumbbells, there will certainly be — both figuratively and actually — more male Nobels.

Unfortunately, however, this is not the prevailing perspective in current debates, particularly where policy is concerned. On the contrary, discussions standardly zoom in on the means and blithely ignore the tails. So sex differences are judged to be small. And thus it seems that there's a gaping discrepancy: if women are as good on average as men, why are men overwhelmingly at the top? The answer must be systematic unfairness — bias and barriers. Therefore, so the argument runs, it is to bias and barriers that policy should be directed. And so the results of straightforward facts of statistical distribution get treated as political problems — as 'evidence' of bias and barriers that keep women back and sweep men to the top. (Though how this explains the men at the bottom is an unacknowledged mystery.)

But science has given us biological insights, statistical rules and empirical findings … surely sufficient reason to change one's mind about men at the top.

Robert Sheldrake is another quirky thinker worthy of inclusion on the Edge list of "annual question" ponderers. His nervy queries about animal behavior are so interesting that he fits almost in his own little niche of brainiacs pushing the edge of the envelope.

The Marblehead Regiment Marches to Save Long Island and the Nation

My New Marblehead Regiment Blog can be seen supporting Fred Thompson in his quest for the Republican nomination.

Lancet Study Hoax Financed by Soros-cidal Maniacs

Lancet famously came out with a preposterous "study" in October, 2006, stating that deaths in Iraq resulting from the military overthrow of the Saddam regime resulted in about <665,000 Iraqi deaths, over ten times as much as the estimates of ALL other international and US investigations. Immediately, moronic turnip-truck refugees like Rosie O'Dodo and the usual leftist anvil chorus chimed in jumping up and down, holding their breath, and making smoke come out of their ears. Here is the Spectator asking the inevitable question at the end:

A story in the Wall Street Journal highlights a remarkable article in theNational Journal, which reveals startling information about the infamous 2006 Lancet ‘study’ which purported to show that Iraqi casualties had totalled more than 650,000 in the three years since the fall of Saddam in 2003. The figure was clearly absurd. The NJ authors say they have now learned that this ‘research’ was funded by George Soros, the financier who has spent millions of dollars trying to destroy George W Bush. They also discovered that the person responsible for collecting the data for the study, Riyadh Lafta, was hardly an objective or reliable source.

Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In 2000, Lafta authored at least two brief articles contending that U.N. sanctions had caused many deaths by starvation among Iraqi children. In one article, he identified malnutrition as the main contributor to 53 percent of deaths among hospitalized children younger than 2, during a 1997 survey carried out at Saddam Central Teaching Hospital. The article cited no health data from before the sanctions, yet it asserted, ‘We can conclude from results that the most important and widespread underlying cause of the deterioration of child-health standards in Iraq is the long-term impact of the non-humanized economic sanction imposed through United Nations resolutions.’

In other words, the Lancet relied for its data upon assertions made by one of Saddam’s apologists, who had previously manipulated information in order to evade UN sanctions, about the alleged effects of the toppling of Saddam. This in a medical journal which hitherto was regarded as utterly authoritative — and which, because it played to the anti-war narrative, was swallowed uncritically by the ‘Bush lied people died’ crowd and was treated as holy writ.

Whatever happened to peer review? Who can take the Lancet seriously ever again?

The traitors on the ultra left will stop at no amount of garbage and lies to effect an American defeat, replaying the Democrat Party's treason on Vietnam thirty-four years ago. The Democrat Left is a Fifth Column trying to suborn the US Constitution and submit the US to the authority of the UN and other international bodies.
UPDATE: The Times On-Line has more information on how a respected British medical journal allowed itself to be duped by a spurious "survey," and adds the following interesting coda, mysteriously never reported widely by the US media which had trumpeted the fake Lancet "study" for days on end:

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

MIT and Columbia U. were also implicated in the hoax perpetrated by Lancet.

Hillary Bashed by Camille on 'roids!

Camille Paglia along with Tammy Bruce are my two favorite female commentators, even though their sexuality is moot [actually Laura Ingraham, also unmarried but straight, also is in my mini-pantheon of feline female hotties with brains].

Camille is in a state of high dudgeon over the phony man-hating Hillary:

Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

It's no coincidence that Hillary's staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary's rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let's not forget Hillary, the governor's wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock.

Not only does Hillary hate men [because of her loutish brothers & nasty Welsh dad], but she LOVES the Gloria Steinem childless crones of the ultra-left:

Hillary's disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem's fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.

This will surely activate the hornet's nest of livid crones who live on their man-hating fantasies of revenge. Look for Naomi Wolf & Naomi Klein to pile on Camille along with the elderly Boniva crowd. Camille continues:

How does all this affect the prospect of a Hillary presidency? With her eyes on the White House, Hillary as senator has made concerted and generally successful efforts to improve her knowledge of and relationship to the military -- crucial for any commander-in-chief but especially for the first female one. However, I remain concerned about her future conduct of high-level diplomacy. Contemptuous condescension seems to be Hillary's default mode with any male who criticizes her or stands in her way. It's a Nixonian reflex steeped in toxic gender bias. How will that play in the Muslim world?

Hillary can hide her venomous Medea gene only so long, as she has to open up on the campaign while Barack inhabits the sunny uplands of the American psyche. She is bound to hiss and spit somewhere along the line, in contrast to her tearing up. Is she ready to campaign til she drops?

The Clintons live to campaign. It's what holds them together and gives them a glowing sense of meaning and value. Their actual political accomplishments are fairly slight. The obsessive need to keep campaigning may mean a president Hillary would go right on spewing the bitterly partisan rhetoric that has already paralyzed Washington. Even if Hillary could be elected (which I'm skeptical about), how in tarnation could she ever govern?

Yes, Camille, with that ginormous egomaniac constantly looking over her shoulder and himself sucking the oxygen out of the White House mansion, how could she maintain some sense of bi-partisan workable get-along-to-go-along foreign policy and domestic tranquillity? Barack is an immense obstacle to even achieving a Billy Jeff/Hillarious Clinton Inc. dynasty:

The current wave of support for Barack Obama from Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans is partly based on his vision of a new political discourse that breaks with the petty, destructive polarization of the past 20 years. Whether Obama can build up his foreign policy credentials sufficiently to reassure an anxious general electorate remains to be seen.

Camille sees the Clinton Inc crowd as an irredentist revanchist "Back to the Past [Future]." Barack is getting her vote. She will vote for Hillary if she is the Dem nominee only for strategic SCOTUS reasons. But Camille doesn't bring up the seamy underside of this manipulative non-mother [a friend's daughter at Sidwell Friends said Chelsea told her in ballet class that she was sick so often from spoiled food in the White House kitchen, as the staff hated Hillary so much they gave her daughter spoiled milk and other tainted treats.] Camille sums up:

But Hillary herself, with her thin, spotty record, tangled psychological baggage, and maundering blowhard of a husband, is also a mighty big roll of the dice. She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark ("Cue the tears!"). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary's real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same.

A few final questions:

She’s never been exonerated about the cattle futures windfalls, since there was never full disclosure.

She’s never been exonerated about having her so-called health care task force operate in secret in direct violation of the laws. In fact, that was confirmed.

She’s never been exonerated about any of the Castle Grande lies and overbillings - or how the missing Rose Law billing records just happened to show up near her office, conveniently, right after the statute of limitations expired.

She’s never been exonerated for her role in the Whitewater development…but hey, that was only a simple resort scam designed to fleece seniors.

She’s never been exonerated about her role in the disgraceful Travel Office scandal, where nonpartisan career government employees all lost their jobs to make room for her friends, nor for trying to cover it up with a fraudulent IRS audit and criminal charges against Billy Dale - charges which took a jury only minutes to laugh out of court.

How about the FBI files on her political opponents, which were illegally obtained by her chosen aide, Craig Livingstone? How much of that information did she copy? How much does she still have and plan to use? Exonerated? I don’t think so.

As I recall, one of the deputy independent counsels during Whitewater even prepared a draft indictment of her for perjury, which Janet Reno quashed. That’s not exoneration either. Not in this universe.

Of course, the blowhard philanderer keeps yawping about her "exoneration" until an Orwellian Memory Hole in the press final occurs.

But she ain't "exonerated" in the minds of a ginormous number of Americans, including many Democrats. And no one wants Hillary to appoint girl-friend Jamie Gorelick as Attorney General, as she allowed 9/11 to occur with her "firewall" fervor.

Richardson Flames Out

Bill Richardson claimed to have dated my wife at Tufts, he was a generous man who has had a wonderful career who incidentally helped my wife and myself in the '80s in between jobs. We gave a fund-raiser cocktail for him back then in our home in NW DC, and he & I talked late into the nite as his lovely wife talked to my wife after the shindig.

He told me the greatest national security crisis facing the US [and this was while the USSR was still our antagonist] was illegal immigration. Hmm....seems that an election campaign on the national level can sort of change one's approach to issues.

In Bill's case, the gentle humorous fellow I know turned into a strident pro-immigration anti-war candidate trying to outnut the nutty ultra-left defeatists. Who was his campaign adviser and why didn't Bill tell the guy/gal to butt out?

He must be lonely out in Santa Fe and hankering after DC with a dose of Potomac Fever. It's ruined other men & his campaign was not distinguished by the thoughtful and diplomatic discourse he is capable of. Back to Sante Fe, I guess.

His VP chances are probably diminished, but identity politics is the Democrat's biggest vice and as an Hispanic, he might benefit from their addiction to ethnic & gender biases.

Rush Limbaugh Gets NH Polling Errors Right---Per Usual

Rush takes this link to task for hemming and hawing when the real truth stares everyone in the face---people lie to pollsters. Especially other-directed emo-Democrat people.

As a preamble, we should consider the well-known fact that Political Correctness and Orwellian Groupthink do infect Democrats to a greater degree than Independents and Republicans. I worked as a Democrat in three national elections over twenty years and looking back from my independent stance at the moment, I'd be willing to contend that polling Democrats is always going to produce an answer that fits the PC party line.

Rush Limbaugh brings up the Wilder Effect, AKA the Bradley Effect and the Dinkins Effect, all cases in which black Democrats polled far higher than the eventual ballot boxes emitted. Fact is:

The Iowa Caucuses ["Hawkeye Cauci}" are public open spaces where one has to publicly move to one part of a large room to be counted among the advocates of Obama, Clinton, Edwards, et al. If you switch your vote, it is done in a highly public manner in front of your friends and neighbors.

In NH, you pull the lever or punch the ballot card in the privacy of your booth. You can tell pollsters whatever, but God & yourself only know what you did in the booth.

When I mentioned this to a psychologist friend, he told me an interesting story. He got a Masters in Statistics at Ohio State with a minor in psychology. Then he came to Florida to do his Doctoral thesis and used "anonymous" opinion polling in his school to do part of his thesis, as a control group. But a double-bind method of statistics enabled him to ascertain that even though the polling was "anonymous," those polled told the polling system what they thought the ultimate poller, my friend the good Doctor, wanted to hear. Independently, they were more candid with the pollster, the Doctor found out, and gave their "real" or "true" opinion---sometimes different from the "anonymous" opinion given in the poll.

If a cross-section of students polled gave answers on the basis of their perceived bias of the pollster, what will Democrats do who want to appear desperate to give themselves to a higher cause and a bigger government?

When will Democrats Admit the Surge is a Success?

Democrats in Denial confronts the problem any Democratic nominee will face if nominated:

...the four Democratic Presidential candidates' stunning display of misinformation and false statements about the surge Saturday evening is that they have simply stopped thinking about Iraq. They seem to have concluded that opposition to the war permits them to literally not know what the U.S. or the Iraqis are doing there. As the nation commences the selection of an American President, this is a phenomenon worth noting.

Barack Obama is of a sudden the front-runner, so his view of the surge merits the closest look. His first assertion echoed what has become a standard line by the war's opponents, that "we have not made ourselves safer as a consequence." What can this possibly mean? In more than six years there hasn't been one successful terrorist attack on the U.S., even as places elsewhere were hit or actively targeted.

Then Senator Obama placidly said that the Sunnis in Anbar Province began to help the U.S. "after the Democrats were elected in 2006." What's more, the Democrats' victory showed them they were "going to be left very vulnerable to the Shias." This obviously means the Democrats would abandon them.

But the Sunni Awakening, as it is called, with its fall in bloodshed, occurred only after the Anbar Sunnis were convinced that the U.S. troops would not abandon them to al Qaeda in Iraq. Sunni sheiks have said explicitly it was the new U.S. policy of sustaining the offensive against AQI that made it possible for them to resist the jihadists. The U.S. military has supported the spread of these "awakening councils" in other areas of Iraq. It is navel-gazing in the extreme for Mr. Obama to suggest U.S. Congressional elections caused this turn.

But Barack is a beacon of clarity compared to the bat-guano ka-raaazy donkey-squat Bill Richardson, formerly of sound mind & good repute, spews onto the campaign dais:

Governor Bill Richardson, who touts his foreign policy credentials, in the space of a minute made five false statements about Iraq. He asserted "zero" internal reconciliation, "zero" progress on sharing oil revenue, "zero" regional elections, "no" increased effort by the government to train their own security forces and "no" effort to push back against Iran. One can certainly question what the Iraqis have done in all these areas, but to reduce the last year to a nullity isn't worthy of a serious candidate.

John Edwards is habitually wrong on almost everything and consistently purveys half-truths and outright lies in his own gibberish at the lectern:

"If you look at what happened in Iraq," said John Edwards, you'll see that violence fell after the British withdrew from "where those troops were located." This is precisely the opposite of what happened. The Brits were located in southern Basra province, and their drawdown began last month after what U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband at the handover ceremony called a "massive" decline in insurgent activity. Mr. Edwards's view that a troop pullout will reduce Iraq's violence is unique among public figures anywhere.

A good sum-up follows:

In different ways one can explain the views of these three. Senator Obama seems to be talking his way toward believing that eloquence and credibility are the same thing; Mr. Edwards's campaign is aggressively parochial in its interests; and Bill Richardson used the debate Saturday to blow up the remnants of his campaign.

Not that it probably matters, but the final strawperson or stick-figure foreign policy guru in the Democratic Party, contributed her own habitual obfuscations and doubletalk on foreign policy:

That leaves Senator Hillary Clinton, the one of these four whose "experience" should have insulated her from fantastic statements. As is her wont, it is difficult to pin down precisely what she said.

Reminded of her famous September remark to General Petraeus that only a "willing suspension of disbelief" could show that the surge had done any good, she replied "that's right," adding that the surge had failed to create "space" for political reconciliation. But at the Iraqi grassroots there has been a great movement toward a modus vivendi, resulting in much of the reduction in violence.

Perhaps catching the exuberance of her debate mates, Mrs. Clinton then said there was no reason troops "should remain beyond, you know, today." President Bush and the Iraqis recently announced a plan to negotiate a long-term presence by some U.S. troops. Would these candidates walk away from that commitment?

The editorial finally poses the question. Are the Democratic candidates sincere or are they playing to their imagined audiences?

Even allowing for the stresses of the endless campaign, these responses are astonishing. Has the self-directedness of these candidates gone so deep that they now believe they can get away with saying anything at all on national TV?

We are not arguing that one had to agree with the surge or the Bush decision to go into Iraq. Dissent is a deep tradition in U.S. politics, and this war has become a bitter subject.

It is evident, though, that the opposition to Iraq after the Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 has put these candidates in a corner. For the past year, Democrats in both the Senate and House have enforced rock-solid party opposition to every jot and tittle of the Bush policy. They now have four candidates running for the U.S. Presidency who seem to believe it is to their political advantage to deny manifest reality.

Maybe the four lemmings are all mindlessly headed for a high dive over a high cliff into deep waters.

Obama and the Perfect as Enemy of the Good

Bret Stephens has a wonderful op-ed piece today in the Wall Street Journal on "Great (American) Expectations: Barack Obama shows why foreigners consider us naive."l. Among the droplets of wisdom:

Barack Obama, still fresh from his victory in Iowa last week and confident of another in New Hampshire tonight, has as his signature campaign theme the promise to "end the division" in America. Notice the irony: The scale of his Iowa victory, in a state that's 94% white, is perhaps the clearest indication so far that the division Mr. Obama promises to end has largely been put to rest.

Meanwhile, in Kenya last week a mob surrounded a church in which, according to an Associated Press report, "hundreds of terrified people had taken refuge." The church was put to flame, while the mob used machetes, Hutu-style, to hack to death whoever tried to escape. The killers in this case were of the Luo tribe, their victims were of the Kikuyu, and the issue over which they are bleeding is their own presidential election.

When foreigners assail Americans for being naive, it is often on account of contrasts like these. A nation in which the poor are defined by an income level that in most countries would make them prosperous is a nation that has all but forgotten the true meaning of poverty. A nation in which obesity is largely a problem of the poor (and anorexia of the upper-middle class) does not understand the word "hunger." A nation in which the most celebrated recent cases of racism, at Duke University or in Jena, La., are wholly or mostly contrived is not a racist nation. A nation in which our "division" is defined by the vitriol of Ann Coulter or James Carville is not a truly divided one--at least while Mr. Carville is married to Republican operative Mary Matalin and Ms. Coulter is romantically linked with New York City Democrat Andrew Stein.

I've lived overseas in five countries, including France, the UK, and Lebanon before it fell from grace. I've visited roughly fifty more for varying amounts of time, including a month in Pakistan and Egypt respectively. There is not a scintilla of a doubt that the USA is by and large the greatest country in the world to live in. A Pakistani friend recently told me that his sons "knelt on the tarmac and kissed the ground" after they returned to the USA after a couple of years in their ancentral land. Stephens notes a few other eccentric facts about the US:

From The Wall Street Journal's offices in New York City, one can look down at Ground Zero, still mostly a huge pit after more than six years during which its reconstruction, now in its umpteenth design iteration, was supposed to have been the signal proof that Americans would rebuild--better, taller, prouder.

Also across the way is the hulk of the old Deutsche Bank building, critically damaged on 9/11 and slated for destruction. In an attempt to ensure that not even trace levels of asbestos and other unpalatable elements would escape the wreck, a meticulous plan was devised to dismantle the building floor by floor, at a price exceeding that of its construction. In August a fire broke out, and two firefighters died after getting lost in the maze of internal scaffolding erected to keep the asbestos in. Those brave men lost their lives for the sake of an EPA standard, and there's been no work to speak of on the building since. It's a case of the perfect becoming the enemy--the mortal enemy--of the good.

So more NYFD personnel die because of the fatuous nonsense of PC nitwittery. Stephens ends in an interesting coda:

There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.

But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.

It is often said that the Bush administration's effort to bring democracy to the Middle East wasn't so much a case of American idealism as it was of hubris. That may yet prove true. But is it any less hubristic to think the enterprise was ever going to be brought off without blundering time and again? It's a thought that ought to weigh especially heavily on Mr. Obama, dream candidate of America's great expectations.

As translations of the millions of documents captured at the fall of Baghdad are beginning to show, Saddam collaborated with the Sunni Taliban & Al Qaeda, at least in support of anti-Iranian activities and possibly further to export terror to his western enemies, especially the US:

The problem with Iraq today is that it is a net importer of terrorism and instability. Yet when the U.S. invaded, it was a net exporter of both. An improvement? On balance, probably yes. Since Iraq regained its sovereignty in 2004, it has had two presidents and three prime ministers. This is too much in the Italian mold of government. Yet who, outside of the CIA, wants to return to the strongman model?

Barack Obama might have to pony up on foreign policy a bit. He would do well to consider appointing a realist like Richard Holbrooke as Secretary of State, rather than an ultra-lefty who might diminish and even destroy the important gains American foreign policy has achieved under GWB.

Fouad Ajami on Bush's Democracy in Iraq Threatening Arab Autocracies

Fouad Ajami has become the lonely oracle of truth in the face of the madness of the malevolent anti-war loons.
He speaks words of wisdom that should shame the shameless opponents of the Iraq project now that his "doubling down" with the surge has brought Iraq to the jaws of victory.

There is a standoff of sorts between the American project in Iraq on the one side, and the order of Arab power on the other. The Arabs could not thwart or overturn this new Iraq, but the autocrats--battered, unnerved by the fall of Saddam Hussein, worried about the whole spectacle of free elections in Iraq--survived Iraq's moment of enthusiasm.

They hunkered down, they waited out the early euphoria of the Iraq war, they played up the anarchy and violence of Iraq and fed that violence as well. In every way they could they manipulated the nervousness of their own people in the face of this new, alien wave of liberty. Better 60 years of tyranny than one day of anarchy, goes a (Sunni) Arab maxim.

The ancient corrupt methods of degenerate autocrats are threatened by REAL democracy. Democracy in a hierarchical constitutional sense is alien to the endemic theocratic unilateral rule prevailing in Muslim lands. The US pays the piper while the corrupt regimes are awash in money under the American umbrella of protection that they crave, even while complaining about its constraints.

Hosni Mubarak takes America's coin while second-guessing Washington at every turn. He is the cop on the beat, suspicious of liberty. He faced a fragile, democratic opposition in the Kifaya (Enough!) movement a few years back. But the autocracy held on. Pharaoh made it clear that the distant, foreign power was compelled to play on his terms. There was never a serious proposal to cut off American aid to the Mubarak regime.

In the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, a new oil windfall has rewritten the terms of engagement between Pax Americana and the ruling regimes. It is a supreme, and cruel, irony that Mr. Bush travels into countries now awash with money: From 9/11 onwards, America has come to assume the burden of a great military struggle--and the financial costs of it all--while the oil lands were to experience a staggering transfusion of wealth.

Saudi Arabia has taken in nearly $900 billion in oil revenues the last six years; the sparsely populated emirate of Abu Dhabi is said to dispose of a sovereign wealth fund approximating a trillion dollars. The oil states have drawn down the public debt that had been a matter of no small consequence to the disaffection of their populations. There had been a time, in the lean 1990s, when debt had reached 120% of Saudi GDP; today it is 5%. There is swagger in that desert world, a sly sense of deliverance from the furies.

Arabia, or rather its Yemeni outlier, spawned Osama bin Laden and his irredentist move to return to Yemen the lands the Saudis took from them in 1930---half their country, which subsumed an entire population of Yemenis into the Kingdom who remain second-class citizens. Of the 15 "Saudis" who flew into the WTC & Pentagon, 12 were of Yemeni rather than Saudi origin, though they carried Saudi passports. The Saudi/Yemeni problem is a bit like it would have been when the US subsumed Mexico's northern provinces in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and there had been as many Mexicans "adopted" into the US as the US had citizens itself.

The battle against jihadism has been joined by the official religious establishment, stripping the radicals of their religious cover. Consider the following fatwa issued by Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdallah al-Sheikh, the Mufti of the Kingdom--the highest religious jurist in Saudi Arabia--last October. There is evasion in the fatwa, but a reckoning as well:

"It has been noted that over the last several years some of our sons have left Saudi lands with the aim of pursuing jihad abroad in the path of God. But these young men do not have enough knowledge to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and this was one reason why they fell into the trap of suspicious elements and organizations abroad that toyed with them in the name of jihad."

Traditional Wahhabism has always stipulated obedience to the ruler, and this Wahhabi jurist was to re-assert it in the face of freelance preachers: "The men of religion are in agreement that there can be no jihad, except under the banner of wali al-amr [the monarch] and under his command. The journey abroad without his permission is a violation, and a disobedience, of the faith."

Iraq is not directly mentioned in this fatwa, but it stalks it: This is the new destination of the jihadists, and the jurist wanted to cap the volcano.

The reform of Arabia is not a courtesy owed an American leader on a quick passage, and one worried about the turmoil in the oil markets at that. It is an imperative of the realm, something owed Arabia's young people clamoring for a more "normal" world. The brave bloggers, and the women and young professionals of the realm, have taken up the cause of reform. What American power owes them is the message given them over the last few years--that they don't dwell alone.

The Annapolis Meetings address the major running sore that the Arabs complain about---the continuing humiliation that Palestinian violence and ineptitude display in the feckless attempt to overthrow Israel, their real long-term goal. But the Saudi attempts to impose a tincture of Saddam's iron control over attempts at reform is the real problem facing the Arabs. Writ large across the region, real representation is a long ways away. And to those who have lived in the Middle East, the innate conservative ethos of the populations actually makes the autocrats look enlightened. Tribal customs such as "honor killings" are not part of Islam itself, but uncomfortably close to the spirit of the desert code that spawned Islam. A bit like tanistry in the Appalachians, all extended-family kinship codes can be cruel and unforgiving. Freedom and enlightenment are complex concepts in age-old societies:

The realists have always doubted this Bush campaign for freedom in Arab and Muslim lands. It was like ploughing the sea, they insisted. Natan Sharansky may be right that in battling for that freedom, Mr. Bush was a man alone, even within the councils of his own administration.

He had taken up the cause of Lebanon. The Cedar Revolution that erupted in 2005 was a child of his campaign for freedom. A Syrian dominion built methodically over three decades was abandoned in a hurry, so worried were the Syrians that American power might target their regime as well. In the intervening three years, Lebanon and its fractious ways were to test America's patience, with the Syrians doing their best to return Lebanon to its old captivity.

But for all the debilitating ways of Lebanon's sectarianism, Mr. Bush was right to back democracy. For decades, politically conscious Arabs had lamented America's tolerance for the ways of Arab autocracy, its resigned acceptance that such are the ways of "the East." There would come their way, in the Bush decade, an American leader willing to bet on their freedom.

Ajami ends his tour d'horizon of the region with clarity and wisdom:

"Those thankless deserts" was the way Winston Churchill, who knew a thing or two about this region, described those difficult lands. This is a region that aches for the foreigner's protection while feigning horror at the presence of strangers.

As is their habit, the holders of Arab power will speak behind closed doors to their American guest about the menace of the Persian power next door. But the Arabs have the demography, and the wealth, to balance the power of the Persians. If their world is now a battleground between Pax Americana and Iran, that is a stark statement on their weakness, and on the defects of the social contract between the Sunnis and the Shiites of the Arab world. America can provide the order that underpins the security of the Arabs, but there are questions of political and cultural reform which are tasks for the Arabs themselves.

Suffice it for them that George W. Bush was at the helm of the dominant imperial power when the world of Islam and of the Arabs was in the wind, played upon by ruinous temptations, and when the regimes in the saddle were ducking for cover, and the broad middle classes in the Arab world were in the grip of historical denial of what their radical children had wrought. His was the gift of moral and political clarity.

In America and elsewhere, those given reprieve by that clarity, and single-mindedness, have been taking this protection while complaining all the same of his zeal and solitude. In his stoic acceptance of the burdens after 9/11, we were offered a reminder of how nations shelter behind leaders willing to take on great challenges.

We scoffed, in polite, jaded company when George W. Bush spoke of the "axis of evil" several years back. The people he now journeys amidst didn't: It is precisely through those categories of good and evil that they describe their world, and their condition. Mr. Bush could not redeem the modern culture of the Arabs, and of Islam, but he held the line when it truly mattered. He gave them a chance to reclaim their world from zealots and enemies of order who would have otherwise run away with it.

Historians will credit George W. Bush far more than the cheap-shot journalists and half-truth academics and grasping politicians will do in the near future. GWB will soon leave the stage and we can only hope that America will choose its next leader with an eye to at least supporting his achievement of democracy in Iraq.

HIllary Plagiarizes Saturday Night Live----Kinda!

James Taranto has a nice send-up of Hillary in his WSJ evening post:
Life Imitates 'Saturday Night Live'

* "With our experience, we're gonna have ideas for change combinations that probably haven't occurred to you. If you have a 50-dollar bill, we can give you 50 singles. . . . We can give you 49 and 10 dimes. We can give you 25 twos. Come talk to us. . . . We are not going to give you change that you don't want. If you come to us with a hundred-dollar bill, we're not going to give you 2,000 nickels . . . unless that meets your particular change needs. We will give you the change equal to the amount of money that you want change for! At First Citiwide Change Bank, Our business is making change. That's what we do."--"Saturday Night Live" ad parody, Oct. 8, 1988

* "I want to make change, but I've already made change. I will continue to make change. I'm not just running on a promise of change. I'm running on 35 years of change. I'm running on having taken on the drug companies and the health insurance companies, taking on the oil companies. So, you know, I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change. And we don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered. The best way to know what change I will produce is to look at the changes that I've already made."--Hillary Clinton, Jan. 5, 2008

Truth is funnier than comedy when it comes to politics.

Fiskie/Fallaci Awards Right on Target

Little Green Footballs has a final list of the five Robert Fisk [worst phony posing as a journalist] and five Fallaci [best journalist punished for her a rebours comments that draw the wrath of the phony MSM Bolshies].

I would have put the Canadian Liberal Fascist Mafia called the "Human Rights Commission" at the top, but Keith has more credibility, hence is slightly more dangerous [but just as obnoxious.]

Our first round of voting for the Idiotarian and Anti-Idiotarian Awards of 2007 ended yesterday.

Keith Olbermann’s stellar idiocy put him way ahead of the pack for the Fiskie Award, followed by Ron Paul Supporters and Rosie O’Donnell.

In the Fallaci Awards, we also have a runaway leader, General David Petraeus, followed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Mark Steyn.

The top five in each category will go on to the final round of voting, beginning later this afternoon.

Fiskie

Keith Olbermann
Ron Paul Supporters
Rosie O’Donnell
New York Times
Canadian Human Rights Commission

Fallaci

General David Petraeus
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Mark Steyn
US Armed Forces
Michael Yon

Any comments welcome~

Where Has Global Warming Gone?

The Boston Globe of all papers has a columnist who seems to be recanting former Anthropogenic Global Warming ideas. And wonder whether Global Warming itself is a periodic phenomenon, despite D-Student Gore's [in Science] protests to the contrary!

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Gee, what am I going to do with all the carbon offsets I bought---NOT!

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO{-2} is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current US approach of CO{-2} reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."

Gosh, you mean you can't trust the United Nations anymore when it comes out with a plan to tax rich nations for something like breathing? You mean the latest changeling specimen of socialist nonsense, Anthropogenic Global Warming, might be a colossal fraud---and that trustworthy Al Gore, that paragon of truthfulness, might be duped, or worse, even dishonest?

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.

The way "climate science" is propounded by blonde geniuses like Sam Champion, I got the impression that it is a religion, and that Heidi from the Weather Channel was the High Priestess!

Guess I may not be a heretic after all, at least in the Boston Globe's eyes!
UPDATE:
Novosti reports that the Russians are stocking up on fur hats and thick winter clothing, as they somehow haven't swallowed D-Student [in "Science" at Vanderbilt] Al Gore's Nobel-winning vaticinations on Anthropogenic. Dr. Sorokhtin is merely a Fellow in the Russian Academy of Sciences, so he may have to bow to Gore and weathermen like Sam Champion in resume impressiveness---NOT!!!

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

They don't call them "dumb Swedes" for nothing...!

It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations—in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill?

But how could so many countries be wrong? Hmm...

Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.

The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

What, I thought there was a "consensus" and "the debate is settled," according to pre-Laureate Al Gore in 1992!?!

Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean’s surface warms up, it produces the “champagne effect.” Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.

Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution—a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.

Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.

So Carbon Dioxide is actually good for all of us, all the time? Not so fast...!

Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.

Then Lyin' Al ain't lyin' all the time? Katrina & tornados are to be blamed on GWB's failure to sign Kyoto?? Well, not quite....

Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.

Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.

The principal among those diverse links is Earth’s reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.

Hmmm.... Biofeedback on a planetary scale. What goes up must come down, and vice versa. Finally, Dr. Sorokthin kicks in with some traditional Russian fatalism:

What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.

Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that

.
The good doctor sounds a bit wiser than Sam Champion and Miles O'Brian and even Nobel Laureate distinguished speaker [@ $100,000/hour] Al Gore.

Noonan Points Out Why Barack Obama will Beat Huckabee

Peggy Noonan at her best has more brains and class than any writer in the USA. She demonstrates this today with her quick-take snapshot reaction to last night.

Hillary Clinton, the inevitable, the avatar of the machine, lost.

It's huge. Even though people have been talking about this possibility for six weeks now, it's still huge. She had the money, she had the organization, the party's stars, she had Elvis behind her, and the Clinton name in a base that loved Bill. And she lost. There are always a lot of reasons for a loss, but the Ur reason in this case, the thing it all comes down to? There's something about her that makes you look, watch, think, look again, weigh and say: No.

She started out way ahead, met everyone, and lost.

As for Sen. Obama, his victory is similarly huge. He won the five biggest counties in Iowa, from the center of the state to the South Dakota border. He carried the young in a tidal wave. He outpolled Mrs. Clinton among women.

He did it with a classy campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it forward together.

He had a harder row to hoe than Mrs. Clinton did. He was lesser known, too young, lacked an establishment. He had to knock her down while building himself up. (She only had to build herself up until the end, when she went after his grade-school essays.) His takedown of Mrs. Clinton was the softest demolition in the history of falling buildings. I think we were there when it happened, in the debate in which he was questioned on why so many of Bill Clinton's aides were advising him. She laughed, and he said he was looking forward to her advising him, too. He took mama to school.

And so something new begins on the Democratic side.

Anyone who remembers her tergiversations on licenses for illegals, then recalls that cackle as the planted question was put to Obama about Clinton advisers, knows that she is flawed goods. So was her hubby, but his quicksilver evasiveness always eluded the final running-to-ground. She is frumpy and much less fast-on-her-feet than Billy Jeff.

And Obama's comebacker really did trump her ace. As for Huckabee, Noonan notes the real issues that propelled him to the top:

Mr. Huckabee likes to head-fake people into thinking he's Gomer Pyle, but he's more like the barefoot boy of the green room. He's more James Carville than Jim Nabors.

What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he's an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.

They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools' squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don't admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don't need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.

They believe that Mr. Huckabee, the minister who speaks their language, shares, down to the bone, their anxieties, concerns and beliefs. They fear that the other Republican candidates are caught up in a million smaller issues--taxing, spending, the global economy, Sunnis and Shia--and missing the central issue: again, our culture. They are populists who vote Republican, and as I have read their letters, I have felt nothing but respect.

But the "Two Problems" she points out are bifurcated: one is institutional

the presidency, as an office, can actually make real changes in the areas of economic and foreign policy, the federal government has a limited ability to change the culture of America. That is something conservatives used to know.

The second is darker:

Second, I'm sorry to say it is my sense that Mr. Huckabee is not so much leading a movement as riding a wave. One senses he brilliantly discerned and pursued an underserved part of the voting demographic, and went for it. Clever fellow. To me, the tipoff was "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

My sense is that Mr. Huckabee's good supporters deserve a better leader.

His next problem may be not so much New Hampshire as Ed Rollins, the Reagan White House political aide who came in a week ago to manage his campaign. Mr. Rollins began his tenure announcing to respectful young reporters that he--"the grizzled veteran," the "old battler"--would like to sink to his knees and "shoot Romney in the groin" and "punch his teeth out." Such class is of course always welcome on the trail, but one senses the verbal ante will constantly be upped, and I'm not sure that will work well for Mr. Huckabee. Self inflated dirigibles, especially unmoored ones, can cast shadows on parades.

His statement on Mormonism was bigotry unmasked. And Rollins is turning out to be a nasty old curmudgeon. With an ego the size of all outdoors.

Both Clinton and Romney have second chances. But while Huckabee is unimprovably witty & clever, he's deeply flawed & his ignorance on national security & foreign policy appears to mean he won't close the deal.

Obama, however, demonstrates a sort of wisdom and class that Bill Clinton never possessed. It looks like the Repubicans could be in trouble.