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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on Dick Cheney’s weekend.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney stormed the beachheads of the liberal US media again Sunday with a fiery performance on ABC’s This Week. He offered a stinging rebuke to current VP Joe Biden’s ludicrous claim that Iraq may end up as one of Barack Obama’s “great achievements”, as well as blistering criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of terrorist suspects. He also launched a strike on Biden’s recent comment that another 9/11 scale attack was “unlikely.” …

…In many respects, Cheney’s vision is the antithesis of that of Barack Obama. In contrast to the current occupant of the White House, Cheney firmly believes the West is engaged in an epic global war against a vicious, Islamist enemy. It is striking for example how the recent 108-page Quadrennial Homeland Security Review omitted the words “Islam”, “Islamic” or “Islamist”, preferring to use the term “violent extremist”, a revealing insight into the Obama administration’s refusal to publicly acknowledge the Islamist nature of the enemy the US is fighting in the form of al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

Dick Cheney is a refreshingly forceful advocate of American exceptionalism, and the idea that the United States is a special country with a unique role to play in shaping history. He also understands the importance of maintaining and strengthening America’s key alliances. …

…Perhaps most strikingly, Dick Cheney, like Ronald Reagan before him and in complete contrast to Barack Obama, views the world in terms of good and evil. For Cheney, engagement with America’s enemies such as Iran and North Korea is a surrender of American global power, and a shameful abdication of responsibility by the world’s only superpower. In this new era of appeasement, Cheney’s outspoken criticism, like that of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, is increasingly striking a chord with an American public that is sharply turning against the Obama administration’s agenda.

Charles Lane, in the WaPo, comments on Senator Evan Bayh’s decision to leave Washington.

Millions of Americans long to tell their bosses “take this job and shove it.” Hardly any have the power and money to do so, especially in these recessionary times. Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, however, is the exception. His stunning retirement from the Senate is essentially a loud and emphatic “screw you” to President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For months now, Bayh has been screaming at the top of his voice that the party needs to reorient toward a more popular, centrist agenda — one that emphasizes jobs and fiscal responsibility over health care and cap and trade. Neither the White House nor the Senate leadership has given him the response he wanted. Their bungling of what should have been a routine bipartisan jobs bill last week seems to have been the last straw.

…Let it never be forgotten that Bayh is a perennial Democratic golden boy, the keynote speaker at the party’s 1996 convention, scion of a political dynasty, proven vote-getter in a red state and, in his own mind, prime presidential timber. For him, then, the question was: even if I win, who needs six more years of dealing with these people, after which I might be 60 years old and trying to pick up the pieces of a damaged political party brand? …

…Bayh’s dramatic vote of no-confidence in his own party’s leadership looks like another Massachusetts-sized political earthquake for the Democrats. Not only does it imperil the president’s short-term hopes of passing health care and other major legislation this year. It also makes it much more likely that the Republicans can pick up Bayh’s Senate seat in normally red Indiana and, with it, control of the Senate itself. If present trends continue, November could turn into a Republican rout.

Let the Obami take note: Abigail Thernstrom, in the Corner, discusses a real post-racial election.

Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu is the next mayor of New Orleans. The city is two-thirds black, and he will be the first white elected to the office since 1970, when his father, Moon Landrieu, won the seat.

The election was a true post-racial moment. Four and a half years after Katrina, black voters decided competence trumped race. The prospect of a white mayor would be “an earth-shaking event,” a politically active black lawyer told a New York Times reporter before the election.

… Nagin’s incompetence persuaded black voters that racial solidarity wouldn’t repair the still-broken city.

About a third of the city’s homes are still empty; the murder rate is among the highest in the nation; and the police department is scandal-plagued. …

In Power Line, Scott Johnson discusses an article by Thomas Cooley and Peter Rupert on the jobs picture.

…Cooley and Rupert comment: “Although job losses slowed in December, there is no evidence of recovery in employment. This will be a continuing drag on the economy and on the fiscal condition of both state and federal governments.”

…Yet Cooley allows that the Obama administration has “created some very large sources of uncertainty that impact small businesses and those who would finance them. By pursuing a huge policy agenda without much success they have created large-scale uncertainty about health care costs, cap-and-trade policies, corporate taxes, taxes on incomes over $250,000 and estate taxes.”

Will new jobs be formed on net with the scheduled tax increases and regulatory overhang? It is odd that so little serious attention has been devoted to the problem of job growth in the private sector except insofar as it can be used as an argument to enlarge the size and scope of the government itself.

We have a hat-trick of Pickings favorites who didn’t like Audi’s green police. Mark Steyn gives an example of what happens when kids are taught community-activist-type nonsense.

…Let’s turn to an item from The Philadelphia Inquirer. A young American with a white-bread name (“Nick George”) and a clean-cut mien returns from Jordan to resume his studies at Pomona College in California, and gets handcuffed and detained for five hours by U.S. Immigration and Philly police. Why? Well, he had Arabic-language flash cards in his pocket. Also, upon his return to the United States, his hair was shorter than on his Pennsylvania driver’s license. “That is an indication sometimes,” explained Lt. Louis Liberati, “that somebody may have gone through a radicalization.” Really? As Nick George’s boomer mom remarked, once upon a time long hair was a sign of radicalization. …

…At any rate, the coiffure set off a Code Red alert, and Nick George found himself being asked: “How do you feel about 9/11?”

According to the Inquirer’s Daniel Rubin, “He said he hemmed and hawed a bit. ‘It’s a complicated question,’ he told me by phone.” However, young Nick ended up telling his captors, “It was bad. I am against it.”

My, that’s big of you.

Take it as read that the bozos at the airport called this one wrong. The problem is not that Nick George, his radical haircut notwithstanding, is a jihadist eager to self-detonate on a transatlantic flight. The problem is that he is an entirely typical American college student – one for whom 9/11 is “a complicated question.” After all, to those reared in an educational system where the late Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” (now back in the bestseller lists) is conventional wisdom, such a view is entirely unexceptional. It’s hardly Nick’s fault that the banal groupthink of every American campus gets you pulled over for secondary screening when you’re returning from Amman. …

Jonah Goldberg takes a turn.

…Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism and PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”

…To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless, upscale white men (all the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.” …

…It will be interesting to see whether the ad actually sells cars. The premise only works if you take it as a given that this Gorewellian nightmare is inevitable. But the commercials arrive at precisely the moment when that inevitability is unraveling like an old pair of hemp socks. The global-warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety, and surging popular skepticism (according to a Pew Research Center survey released in January, global warming ranks 21st out of 21 in terms of the public’s priorities). …

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, sees the serious issue of government encroachment on liberty that is highlighted by the Audi ad.

…On Twitter, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom expressed his approval more concisely: “That ‘green police’ Audi commercial hits home.’’ He would know. Under a composting ordinance Newsom signed last year, throwing orange peels, coffee grounds, or greasy pizza boxes in the trash is now illegal in San Francisco, and carries fines of up to $500 per violation.

There was a time when Americans were thought capable of deciding for themselves what to do with their coffee grounds or whether to carry groceries home in paper or plastic bags. It isn’t only in San Francisco, and it isn’t only when it comes to “green’’ issues, that such mundane or personal choices are being supplanted by government coercion. One thin slice at a time, liberties we used to take for granted are replaced with mandates from above. Rather than leave us free to choose, Big Brother increasingly makes the choice for us: On trans fats. On gambling. On smoking. On bicycle helmets. On health insurance.

In Massachusetts, the Globe reported last week, new regulations will soon require thousands of restaurant workers to undergo state-designed training on handling food allergies … In Pennsylvania, the Reading Eagle notes that it is illegal for volunteers to sell pies or cookies at a charity bake sale unless the treats were “prepared in kitchens inspected and licensed by the state Agriculture Department.’’ In Oregon, an eight-year-old boy was suspended from his public school on Monday because he came to class with a tiny plastic toy gun from his G.I. Joe action figure.

It isn’t to evil dictators with a lust for power that Americans have been slowly surrendering their autonomy. It is to well-intentioned authorities who believe sincerely that our freedoms must be circumscribed for our own good. …

In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel tells the sordid tale of Pfizer cozying up to big government. Perhaps the pharmaceutical companies took a pragmatic view of the situation and decided to join the enemy since they couldn’t beat them. It is still disappointing to see the lack of principles that were displayed. Fortunately for us, this story has a happy ending. We think.

The sight of ObamaCare on life support has many Democrats disappointed. It could be worse. They could be Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler.

…Fortune 500 execs could stand up for a free market that benefits consumers and shareholders, or hitch their cart to the new Democratic majority. Pfizer’s Mr. Kindler is a case study in the hitch-and-hope mentality—a CEO who became the motivating force behind Big Pharma’s $80 billion “deal” on reform, and industry support of ObamaCare. …

Pfizer also aggressively shifted political giving. … In 2009 Pfizer became the fourth largest federal lobbyist, spending nearly $25 million. The year before it hadn’t even made the top 20.

With these gestures, Mr. Kindler surely believed Democrats would treat his industry gently. The strategy: The industry would pledge $80 billion to reform. In return it would get greater volume and a requirement that people buy brand-name drugs. Democrats would also fight against drug reimportation and forgo price controls. …

…Critics warned the legislation would lead to a government takeover and price controls. They warned Democrats would take the money and double-cross them. None of it fazed the industry, right up until ObamaCare imploded. …

In the NYTimes, David Kirkpatrick and Duff Wilson write about another side of the Big Pharma sellout story. This about the lobbyist Billy Tauzin.

After about two dozen years in Congress, Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana was after bigger game — the giant, 200-pound whitetail deer that run through the area of south Texas that hunters call the Golden Triangle.

So in 2003 Mr. Tauzin, then chairman of the powerful energy and commerce committee, made a deal. Though still on a modest Congressional salary, he paid more than $1 million for a 1,500-acre ranch there. And he invited a dozen friends — mostly executives and lobbyists with interests before his committee — to cover its mortgage by paying him dues as members of a new hunting club. It did business as Cajun Creek L.L.C., based in the Baton Rouge office of a lobbyist who was a member.

Now, seven years later, Mr. Tauzin’s friends say, it is to his Texas ranch that Mr. Tauzin, 66, will retreat, to contemplate the apparent collapse of the grandest in a career of fearless deals — a pact to trade the drug industry’s political support for favorable terms under President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. …

In the Vancouver Sun, Randy Boswell reports on an interesting hypothesis about Inuit migration.

One of Canada’s top archeologists argues in a new book that the prehistoric ancestors of this country’s 55,000 Inuit probably migrated rapidly from Alaska clear across the Canadian North in just a few years — not gradually over centuries as traditionally assumed — after they learned about a rich supply of iron from a massive meteorite strike on Greenland’s west coast.

The startling theory, tentatively floated two decades ago by Canadian Museum of Civilization curator emeritus Robert McGhee, has been bolstered by recent research indicating a later and faster migration of the ancient Thule Inuit across North America’s polar frontier than previously believed. …

…McGhee believes the Thule Inuit had learned about the valuable metal at the Cape York meteorite field from contact with Canada’s aboriginal Dorset people, who were already using iron and trading it with Norse sailors from southern Greenland and Iceland. …

…He adds that this interpretation of Inuit origins in Canada — as resulting from “commercial motives” and “mercantile exploration” — challenges the prevailing view that ancient native cultures would only migrate to new territories incrementally and in response to environmental pressures, dwindling food supplies or competition from rival peoples.

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There actually is a plan out there to get government under control. In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson comments on one amazing congressman and his sensible, innovative plan.

Paul Ryan, a six-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is the ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee, has yanked himself from obscurity by doing something no one else in Congress or apparently the White House has done: design a specific plan to control long-term government spending and budget deficits. That he stands virtually alone is a damning commentary on our politics. …

…Here are some features of his plan:

– Social Security: For those 55 or older today, the program would remain unchanged. For those younger, benefits would be reduced — with no cuts for the poorest workers. Workers 55 or younger in 2011 could establish individual investment accounts that would be funded with part of their payroll taxes. Government would guarantee a return equal to inflation.

– Medicare: Current recipients and those enrolling in the next decade would continue under today’s program, though wealthier recipients would pay somewhat higher premiums. In 2021, Medicare would become a voucher program for new recipients (those today 54 or younger). With vouchers, recipients would buy Medicare-certified private insurance. In today’s dollars, the vouchers would ultimately grow to $11,000. Eligibility ages for Medicare and Social Security would slowly increase toward 69 and 70, respectively.

– Spending freeze: From 2010 to 2019, “non-defense discretionary spending” — about a sixth of the federal budget, including everything from housing to parks to education — would be frozen at 2009 levels.

– Simpler taxes: Taxpayers could choose between today’s system or a streamlined replacement with no deductions and virtually no special tax breaks. Above a tax-free amount ($39,000 for a family of four), taxpayers would pay only two rates: 10 percent up to $100,000 for joint filers and 25 percent on income more than that.

In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel tells how the Obami and other liberals are using community organizing tactics to try to smear that plan.

… The cameras rolling, the president praised Mr. Ryan for putting forward a “serious proposal.” He in fact singled out the congressman at least three times. Having done his spotlight bit, Mr. Obama then left it to the rest of the Democratic Party to systematically distort and trash the road map.

Within two days of the retreat, Obama budget director Peter Orszag had begun deflecting questions about the White House’s ugly budget by hammering on Mr. Ryan’s plan, claiming it “shifted costs” to families. Congressional Democrats held a conference call with reporters devoted to road map trashing, howling that it showed that Republicans would privatize Social Security, voucherize Medicare, and give tax breaks to the wealthy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi lambasted the Ryan plan in a speech to the Democratic National Committee.

Democrats used it to turn the health discussion, claiming it was hypocritical of Republicans to hit Democrats for slashing Medicare when Mr. Ryan’s plan would also cut the program. They used it to stoke populist fears. California’s Loretta Sanchez claimed the road map would both “privatize” Social Security and leave it to the “whims of Wall Street.”

Connecticut’s John Larson (a member of the Democratic leadership) introduced a resolution to force Republicans to oppose Social Security “privatization” in a high-profile vote. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already announced ads targeting 12 House Republicans, “calling on them to come clean with seniors” whether they support “House Republicans’ extreme budget plan that privatizes Social Security and Medicare.” As hoped, the assault re-energized liberal bloggers and the base.

Better yet for Democrats, some Republicans are falling into the trap. As with its campaign last year to smear Republican Whip Eric Cantor, the White House’s attack on Mr. Ryan is designed to isolate and discredit one of the GOP’s brightest thinkers. So it only aids the White House when “anonymous” Republican members—annoyed that they must have this debate—gripe to the press that Mr. Ryan doesn’t “speak” for them. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Biden trying to own Iraq success.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, the saying goes. Well, we’ve seen that by the bushel-full from the Obami. First, they hide behind George W. Bush’s skirts on the handling of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists (whom, unlike Bush, they can’t bring themselves to call by name). Now they are claiming credit for the triumph of the Iraq war, …

Max Boot says that it’s actually a good thing for the Obami to claim an Iraqi victory as theirs.

… The best news I’ve read about Iraq in a while is that, as Jennifer points out, Joe Biden is claiming that “a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government … could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Some might dismiss this as chutzpah from someone who, like Barack Obama, opposed the surge needed to stabilize the situation in Iraq. But, brazen or not, it’s great to see the Obama administration taking ownership of Iraq and realizing that simply pulling out all our troops can’t be the sole goal of our policy there. We have to make sure that the Iraq we leave behind is stable, secure, and preferably democratic.

Peter Wehner also weighs in.

…If Obama and Biden had had their way, they would have engineered an epic American military loss. They would have handed jihadists their most important victory ever. And in Iraq mass death, and quite probably genocide, would have followed.

It was also the previous administration, not the Obama administration, which is responsible for the Status of Forces agreement that is unwinding, in a responsible way, American involvement in Iraq.

More important, the success we’re experiencing in Iraq is due above all to the most remarkable fighting force in the world: the United States military; to commanders like David Petraeus, who implemented a new strategy when it was clear the old one was failing; and to the Iraqis themselves, who are taking impressive, if halting, steps toward self-government. …

Abe Greenwald thinks cutting NASA funding is a bad idea. Too bad the astronauts and aerospace engineers aren’t unionized; then Obama would be happy to throw money at them.

Charles Krauthammer points out that, come 2011, “for the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the U.S. will have no access of its own for humans into space — and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.” Barack Obama’s budget kills NASA’s Constellation program, the successor to the Shuttle. …

… China – as the New York Times columnists never tire of telling us — is leading the world in electric bicycles, solar panels, and speed trains. It has been suggested that the next man on the Moon will be Chinese.  The truth is, electric bicycles, solar panels, speed trains, and even Moon travel are decades-old novelties — the kind of stuff that a country desperate to be seen as a great innovator would love to tout. But real innovation won’t come from obscurantist autocracies. It will come from parties living in free countries.  It will come from sources like the Ad Astra Rocket Company of Webster, Texas, which recently developed the most powerful plasma engine in the world; it gets as hot as the surface of the sun. As it happens, the head of Ad Astra is a former NASA astronaut with the beautifully American name, Franklin Chang-Diaz. …

Jonathan Petre, in the Daily Mail, UK, reports on a BBC interview with the Phil Jones the man who ran the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia.

Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made. …

David Warren discusses the lie in the theory of life in the Primordial Soup.

…In a series of laughable experiments through the 1960s and ’70s, Darwinian biologists mixed various recipes for this hypothetical soup, then zapped them with energy this way and that, without any success whatever. Frankenstein’s monster simply would not stir from their puddle.

This soup nonsense is still presented in biology textbooks, as if it were true. But in an important paper in the journal BioEssays this week, William Martin et al., of the Institute of Botany III in Düsseldorf, spilled the last drop of it onto the trash heap of history. They summarize effectively why it not only did not work, but could not work, under laboratory or any other conditions.

Instead, following footsteps of the geochemist Michael J. Russell, they guess the first simple cells originated in geothermal vents under the oceans, where concentrated energy could work upon a rich variety of minerals. My reader must go to the sources to read the new “kick-start” hypothesis. …

John Fund in a send off for Charlie Wilson and John Murtha gives us a taste of how Washington used to work.

…But the secrecy and skullduggery that Wilson said served the country well had a flip side. When Murtha died he had become a symbol of suspect pork-barrel projects linked to campaign contributions. Last May, he dismissed complaints by telling reporters, “If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district.” …

…Murtha was named an unindicted co-conspirator in Abscam, an FBI sting operation in which agents offered members of Congress bribes. A tape showed Murtha describing “the secret” of how a public official can take a bribe and get away with it. He told the undercover agents he was turning them down for now: “You know, you made an offer. . . . After we’ve done some business, well, then I might change my mind.” E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., the special prosecutor appointed by House Ethics Committee, was building a complaint against Murtha; he was also probing links between Abscam and O’Neill’s office.

That prompted O’Neill to shut down the probe. According to Crile’s book, O’Neill called Wilson into his office and said he wanted him to join the Ethics Committee. Wilson had been pestering him to get a lifetime seat on the board of the Kennedy Center. “It’s the best perk in town,” Wilson told Crile. O’Neill would appoint Wilson, but he’d have to join the Ethics Committee to take care of Murtha.

Wilson didn’t need any prodding: “He was a happy warrior as he raced to the rescue of his imperiled friend John Murtha,” Crile wrote. “Before Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation.” …

In the Corner, Lisa Schiffren comments on Charlie Wilson’s war.

Charlie Wilson did not, as the eponymous movie would have it, singlehandedly force the U.S. government to aid the Afghan Mujaheddin in killing Commies and liberating their country from the Soviet grip. Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey, and a large handful of congressmen and senators, dedicated staffers, and a few good people in the national-security apparatus all had a hand. But Wilson did pull strings and push buttons, at the right time, and make important things happen, while imbuing the cause with raffish Texan charm. And, most important, he pushed back hard against the permanent bureaucracy at the CIA that had chosen the wrong guys to back, and the wrong way to back them. …

Michael Rubin adds an interesting twist to this story, in the Corner.

…It’s interesting to read the declassified reports from the time. Here’s the conclusion from a CIA assessment entitled “The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan,” from February 1987:

Despite the increasing trends, however, the economic costs resulting from these operational developments are unlikely, in our view, to be of sufficient magnitude to constitute a significant counterweight to the political and security implications the Soviets would attach to withdrawal under circumstances that could be seen as a defeat.  Indeed, we believe the recent rising trend in economic cost is more a reflection of determination in Moscow to counter a better armed insurgency and this shows continued willingness to incur whatever burden is necessary.

So there you have it. Right before the Soviets decided to withdraw, the CIA concluded that nothing could force the Soviets to withdraw. I always look at this document as a useful reminder to the importance of separating intelligence analysis from policy. Intelligence should color policy, certainly, but it should not supplant it. While raw intelligence can be useful, often the intelligence community’s consensus documents are not. At the very least, they must be taken with a grain of salt. After all, a natural conclusion from this document — perhaps the one which the Agency was pushing — was that we could not win by sponsoring insurgency in Afghanistan; perhaps diplomacy would be better. Men like Charlie Wilson may have been in the minority, but fortunately they were in the right place at the right time and had a president serving over them like Ronald Reagan

John Tierney opines that corporate-backed research does not automatically signify biased research.

…Sure, money matters to everyone; the more fears that Dr. Pachauri and Mr. Gore stoke about climate change, the more money is liable to flow to them and the companies and institutions they are affiliated with. Given all the accusations they have made about the financial motives of climate change “deniers,” there is a certain justice in having their own finances investigated.

But I don’t doubt that Mr. Gore and Dr. Pachauri would be preaching against fossil fuels even if there were no money in it for them, just as I don’t doubt that skeptics would be opposing them for no pay. Why are journalists and ethics boards so quick to assume that money, particularly corporate money, is the first factor to look at when evaluating someone’s work?

One reason is laziness. …

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Our major focus today is on the debt crisis in Europe. A WSJ op-ed starts us off.

… At the end of the G7 meeting in Canada last weekend, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told reporters, “I just want to underscore they made it clear to us—they, the European authorities—that they will manage this [Greek debt crisis] with great care.”

But the Europeans have not been careful so far. The issues for troubled euro zone countries are straightforward: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (known to the financial markets, and not in a polite way, as the PIIGS) had varying degrees of foreign- and bank credit-financed rapid expansions over the past decade. In fall 2008, these bubbles collapsed.

As custodian of their shared currency, the European Central Bank responded by quietly opening lifelines to all these countries, effectively buying government bonds through special credit windows. Europe’s periphery was fragile but surviving on this intravenous line of credit from the ECB until a few weeks ago, when it suddenly became apparent that Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the ECB, and his German backers were finally lining up to cut Greece off from that implicit subsidy. The Germans have become tired of supporting countries that do not, to their minds, try hard enough. Investors naturally flew from Greek debt—Greece’s debt yields rose, and its banking system verged near collapse as investors and savers ran from the country.

But it’s not just about Greece any more. …

Niall Ferguson is next with a piece from the Financial Times.

It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate. …

Paul Johnson wrote in Forbes about the mistakes made by the U. S. and the U. K. following current Keynesian nostrums.

… However, the European Union, led by Germany, proved reluctant to tread the Keynesian road and shoulder vast burdens of government debt. The result of this decision can be seen in the rise of the euro against the dollar and the pound and in the fact that Germany and France are now pulling out of recession.

China and India declined to go for a full-bloodied Keynesian solution. Their economies have continued to expand, if more slowly than before the crisis, and both are in a strong position to exploit the new decade’s opportunities. China has notably narrowed the gap between its economy and that of the U.S.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Britain are still deeply mired in recession, having acquired a vast amount of new government debt to no constructive purpose. No amount of juggling with unemployment figures can obscure the fact that in both countries real jobs are still being lost and that the creation of phony government ones is not altering the drop in family incomes. The public senses the truth, and the signs point to voters taking a fearful revenge on the Keynesian “miracle workers.” …

Jake Tapper notes Obama just signed a bill into law with no fanfare; no bells and whistles; no fellow conspirators waiting around for a pen.

Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion. …

Peter Schiff explains why values of asset classes are moving in tandem.

Over the past three or four years a strange phenomenon has developed in the global investment markets. With some exceptions, many asset classes, in particular domestic and foreign equities, commodities, and foreign currencies have tended to move in the same direction on a day to day basis. The mega-correlation has lasted so long that most now take it for granted. This leaves investors with relatively simple choices: when to get in to the market in general and when to park assets in cash and U.S. Treasuries.

However, few recall that this pattern is relatively new in the annals of financial history. Fewer still realize the reason for the current anomaly. From my perspective the most logical explanation is fear, which has become global, pervasive, and persistent. …

Caroline Baum from Bloomberg News looks at small business attitudes.

… “Stay out of our way,” says Sherry Pymer, vice president of Pymer Plastering Inc., a 124-year-old family owned business in Columbus, Ohio. She sounded more like an Ayn Rand hero than a woman dealing with a payroll, unemployment insurance and Ohio’s commercial activity tax. “We don’t want them bailing out banks and big business. We want them to go away with their mandating and meddling and return this country to the principles it was founded on over 200 years ago.”

We’re a long way from the Founding Fathers, that’s for sure. The handful of small-business owners I talked to across the country are about as close to the entrepreneurial spirit as it gets. They all had one implied piece of advice for Washington: Less is more. Specifically, you do less — and get your fiscal house in order — and we’ll do more, Henderson says.

And as for the closing of the federal government this past week due to weather, these small-business owners had one wish: more snow.

Mark Steyn alerts us to Phil Jones, head of the infamous Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University, saying there’s been no warming since 1995. More on this tomorrow.

Say it loud, he’s unsettled and proud. Hide-the-decliner Phil Jones is embracing his inner decline:

“Climategate U-turn as Scientist at Centre of Row Admits: There Has Been No Global Warming Since 1995″

That would be 1995 as in a decade and a half ago? Gee, you wouldn’t get that impression from reading the papers. …

Now that it is increasing clear we’ve been lied to for years, thank God some of the more idiotic green initiatives never passed. David Harsanyi says the founders of our republic wanted our country to be hard to govern.

If you’ve been paying attention to the left-wing punditry these days, you may be under the impression that the nation’s institutions are on the verge of collapse. Or that the rule of law is unraveling. Or maybe that this once-great nation is crippled and nearly beyond repair.

You know why? Because the 40 percent (or so) political minority has far too much influence in Washington. Don’t you know? This minority, egged on by a howling mob of nitwits, is holding progress hostage with their revolting politics and parliamentary trickery.

Leading the charge to fix this dire problem is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who advocates abolishing the Senate filibuster to make way for direct democracy’s magic. …

Ilya Somin blogs on snow storm entrepreneurship and seasonal property rights enforced without government.

The massive “Snowmageddon” snowstorm is a good time to consider this interesting 2001 article about snowstorms and parking space property rights by Northwestern University law professor Fred McChesney [HT: Alex Tabarrok]:

“Before snowfalls, a parking space belongs to the one who occupies it: you leave it, you lose it. In wintertime Chicago, however, excavating one’s car changes the system of property rights. Once car owners dig themselves out of their snow cocoon (Chicagoans carry snow shovels in their trunks for this), they claim the place they cleared as their own. How? Diggers routinely place lawn furniture, buckets, two-by-fours, bar stools, orange highway construction cones and other markers in the space they have just dug out. That means the space now belongs to the excavator. When he leaves, the markers dictate that the space must sit empty until the owner returns. “People do look at these spaces as their own property,” a local law professor comments.

The space belongs to the original snow-mining engineer until the snow melts along the curb. Woe betide anyone who would take that space while its owner is away. Others in the neighborhood—who have undertaken similar excavations and staked out their own spaces—will protect the space for its absent owner. Broken windows, scratched paint, deflated tires and other punishments often follow parking in a space designated by whatever debris marks the excavator’s property….”

If you have been paying attention, you might have noticed Camille Paglia has not graced our pages since November. She explains why.

The inventor of the Frisbee has passed. WSJ has the obit.

Dilbert says products that don’t work are the causes of our economic problems.

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Veronique de Rugy says it is time to stop blaming Bush.

… In his latest budget request, President Obama added roughly $1.6 trillion in spending over the next ten years on top of what he requested last year. Can President Obama blame that extra $1.6 trillion on former President Bush? …

Pickings is unusually mono-focused today as it looks at some of the firestorm of criticism of members of the administration. Calls for resignations of Holder and Brennan have now led to detailed portraits of the “Chicago Four”; Axelrod, Jarrett, Emanuel, and Gibbs. The catalyst for this was an article by Edward Luce in Financial Times about the people surrounding the president who, while good at winning the job, apparently have no clue how to govern. This piece, which is below, and related items are being followed in the blogospere with intense interest. We start with a Daniel Foster Corner Post on the subject.

There is a great deal of back-and-forth in the blogosphere today on the subject of a Financial Times piece (subscription required) that lays the blame for Obama’s floundering first year in office on an advisory staff geared for campaigning, not governing.

Based on extensive anonymous interviews with people around the Obama White House, the Financial Times’ Edward Luce paints a picture of an administration run almost entirely from within the president’s political machine — with campaign-managers-turned-advisers David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs, along with Chicagoan legislative tactician Rahm Emanuel, in the room for every major decision. …

Jonah Goldberg is next. We’ll keep pull quotes short so we don’t get too long.

… it seems to me Obama is to blame for his current woes and in a way that is unique to him. The upshot of the Luce article is that Obama is still in campaign mode. That’s a point conservatives have been making for a year, so it’s a bit funny to hear liberals suddenly credit this analysis. …

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note introduces the article.

… this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation’s top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the “four horsepersons of the Obama White House” will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay ‘legs.’ …

Here is the Edward Luce piece in Financial Times.

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong? …

Andrew Malcolm of LA Times also weighs in on the subject.

… In the last few days at least three major outlets have published well-informed evaluations of Obama’s first year in office. All are well worth reading. The dominant themes: disappointment and disillusionment with the Chicago way.

In one respect it’s not surprising that a capitol city with its own style of take-no-prisoners politics should find a professed outsider’s style of smoother-spoken take-no-prisoners discomforting.

But now, no less than the Huffington Post headlined its Obama evaluation by Steve Clemons: “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama presidency.”

The devastating Financial Times report by Edward Luce: “A fearsome foursome”

And the Washington Post story by Ann Gerhart: “A year later, where did the hopes for Obama go?”  …

Streetwise Professor rhetorically asks why he can never remember Gibbs’ first name.

I know that his name is “Robert,” but I always find myself calling him “Dick.”  I wonder why that is?

Actually, I don’t.  He is the most insufferable, appalling, obnoxious, dishonest, and thuggish press secretary in memory.  And stupid, too.  What is his mission in life?  To make Scott McClellan look good?  One would have thought that Mission Impossible, but Gibbs has succeeded beyond anything Tom Cruise could ever aspire to. …

… the coalescing conventional wisdom is that these jokers are responsible for Obama’s cliff dive.  (A competing explanation is that you idiotic people are to blame for not recognizing the wonderfulness that is the modern Washington political class.)

Surely, they have contributed.  But this explanation wreaks of the old story of the Czar being betrayed by his boyars and officials.  The Czar, of course, is faultless: it is his underlings that have failed him.

It’s an old explanation/rationalization/excuse, and almost always wrong.  It’s wrong in this case.  As usual, responsibility ultimately rests at the top–with Obama. …

Jennifer Rubin picks up on the Czar/Boyar analogy with a piece titled with the age old cry of Russian reformers, “If the Czar Only Knew.”

Democrats are loathe to say outright what a political disaster Obama has been for their party. So they have seized upon his right-hand man:

“Democrats in Congress are holding White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel accountable for his part in the collapse of healthcare reform.The emerging consensus among critics in both chambers is that Emanuel’s lack of Senate experience slowed President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority. …”

In a follow-up, Rubin introduces Doug Wilder’s essay in Politico.

Former Virginia Governor Doug Wilder vividly writes:

“Indeed, even before Bob McDonnell’s resounding victory, the canary had been dead on the floor for months. In Virginia’s most Democratic-friendly regions, the Democrats had been narrowly winning — or outright losing — special elections that should have been taken easily. …”

Summing up this look at Obama’s administration we have the Doug Wilder piece mentioned by J. Rubin above. More on Wilder with this from November 5, 2008 Pickings upon the election of the kid president;

“Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. A testament to the open-minded tolerance of this country’s citizens; at least, the majority of them.

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the American people have already moved on.

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble, follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.”

Here’s Wilder today;

… It would be a grave mistake for the president and those around him to misread the current polls and analyses. They suggest that 1) the American people do not like the direction in which the country is heading; 2) they do not believe that either Democrats or Republicans are showing that they get the message and are doing the business of the people; 3) they hold Congress in very low regard; but 4) they really like the president. Yet, they keep going to the polls to rebuke him resoundingly every chance it is presented.

Unless changes are made at the top, by the top, when the time comes for voters to show how they really feel about Obama, his policies and the messages he sends directly or through the people around him, the president will discover that Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were not just temporary aberrations but, rather, timely expressions of voters who always show that they are ahead of the politicians.

The president should keep uppermost in his mind the biblical admonition as to what happens to those trees that do not bear “good fruit”: The ax is already at the tree.

Dilbert makes peace with his shop vac.

Now that I have a manly garage, with a manly workbench, I was delighted to receive for Christmas a Shop Vac. It’s a magical device that sucks up all sorts of debris, even liquid. It has attachments for everything. I think one attachment is for haircuts, but I haven’t tried it yet. The Shop Vac is gray and black and reminds me of R2D2 so much that I expect it to jack into my breaker panels and reprogram my DVR. …

Very good cartoons tonight.

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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner says that Obama has another opportunity to stand up for the Iranian revolutionaries.

This week may prove another defining moment for Barack Obama on the world stage, and a major test of his failing leadership. As tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators prepare to take to the streets of Tehran on February 11 in defiance of the security forces on the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution, the president will have to make it clear whose side he is on – the brutal Islamist dictatorship or dissidents fighting for their freedom. He can no longer sit on the fence as a dispassionate neutral observer. As the leader of the free world President Obama has a responsibility to speak out in support of those who are bravely laying down their lives in opposition to a dictatorship that has emerged as America’s most dangerous state-based threat. …

…The Obama administration’s shameful appeasement of the Iranian regime has been a spectacular failure, which has significantly undermined Obama’s standing on the world stage and demonstrated the bankruptcy of his strategy of engagement. It is not too late however for the president to change course and show some backbone, both in confronting the mounting Iranian nuclear threat as well as by backing those bravely fighting for freedom against the Mullahs.

American leadership is not about currying favour with Washington’s enemies. It is forged in the defence of freedom and through standing up to the forces of tyranny. This week Barack Obama has a major opportunity to take a clear stand against a sadistic Islamist theocracy, by sending a clear message that the American people are united with the protesters, and will support their drive for freedom. He should follow the example and courage of Ronald Reagan when he aggressively confronted and defeated the Soviet Empire, and actively advance the cause of liberty in Iran and across the Middle East.

The Economist has more numbers on the jobless recovery.

A week ago, Americans were told that their economy had expanded for a second consecutive quarter, and rapidly at that: output grew at an annual rate of 5.7%. This week, they are reminded that a return to growth has yet to benefit the jobless. The economy lost 20,000 jobs in January, a decline driven by the loss of 75,000 jobs in the construction sector. Economists had forecast an increase in employment of around 15,000. The unemployment rate, based on household rather than establishment data, showed a slight improvement, dropping from 10% to 9.7%, but nearly 15m Americans remain unemployed. As Larry Summers put it in Davos last week, the American economy is experiencing “a statistical recovery and a human recession”.

Several positive trends continued in January. Firms added 52,000 temporary workers and increased hours, just as they did in December, hinting at growing if cautious optimism. Employment rose in health, education and professional services, and retail employment grew by 42,000 in January, on a seasonally adjusted basis, after declining in December. Manufacturing employment also grew, by 11,000, the first increase since the beginning of recession. Analysts point out that the adjustment of the data is tricky around the holiday season, and actual underlying employment may have grown in January. …

…Most troubling of all is the continued failure of economic growth to benefit the labour market. Employment fell by over 300,000 jobs during the last three months of 2009, despite strong expansion in GDP. The first quarter of 2010 is unlikely to show as big an output gain, suggesting that the pace of improvement in employment may be slowing, even as regular job growth has yet to return. And the situation may be more dire still; initial jobless claims have grown in recent weeks, indicating that what momentum there was in labour markets has been lost. …

Thomas Sowell provides some clear thinking on the idea of fairness.

…Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and “unfair” to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity — David Riesman, I believe — who said: “The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results.”

If by “fair” you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense. …

…Many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing — whether a mental test or an institution — is conveying a difference that already exists or is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise.

Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups. …

Michael Barone discusses how unions in government workplaces force excess financial burdens on taxpayers. But Barone ends on an optimist note of sorts.

…Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits — and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy. Not surprisingly, Americans have been steadily migrating out of such states and into states like Texas, where public-sector unions are weak and taxes are much lower. …

…Obama and his party are acting in collusion with unions that contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic party.

But it may not turn out to be a perpetual motion machine. Public-sector employees are still heavily outnumbered by those who depend on the private sector for their livelihoods. The next Congress may not be as willing as this one has been to bail out state governments dominated by public-sector unions. Voters may bridle at the higher taxes needed to pay for $100,000-plus pensions for public employees who retire in their 50s. Or they may move, as so many have already done, to states like Texas. …

In the WaPo, Fred Hiatt discusses an example, well-known to our regular readers, of public-sector unions destroying the D.C. voucher program out of “fairness” to those that aren’t given vouchers. A more jaded opinion is that they are protecting their jobs to the detriment of children’s futures.

…The second objection is that if children or families with get-up-and-go actually get up and go, things will be even worse for those left behind. There are a lot of problems with this argument, but the main one is that the people who make it usually aren’t willing to condemn their own children to attend terrible high schools in order to improve things for the other kids there. Why should we demand that of families who have high aspirations but can’t afford to move?

But even if you’re inclined against vouchers, why not embrace a program that has a chance to shed real light on the long-running, fraught and inconclusive argument about their effectiveness? The D.C. program was established to provide such evidence. It enrolled a control group of children who applied for vouchers but didn’t get them, and it is following them along with the kids with vouchers. In a couple more years, if funded robustly, it would give us a real sense of what worked and what didn’t. That could be helpful to lots of children.

Yet the Obama administration seems to be doing everything it can to wind down the program. Why? Early research results have been positive — certainly in terms of parental satisfaction, but also for achievement. Maybe the Democratic Party, and the teachers union leaders who support it, would rather not see any more evidence. …

The WSJ editors note the irony of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo pursuing legal action against BofA. Cuomo’s share of responsibility for the mortgage crisis appears much more serious.

…Entitled, “Highlights of HUD Accomplishments 1997-1999,” the document chronicles the “accomplishments under the leadership of Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who took office in January 1997.”

HUD’s Web visitors learn that in 1999 “Secretary Cuomo established new Affordable Housing Goals requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—two government sponsored enterprises involved in housing finance—to buy $2.4 trillion in mortgages in the next 10 years. This will mean new affordable housing for about 28.1 million low- and moderate-income families. The historic action raised the required percentage of mortgage loans for low- and moderate-income families that the companies must buy from the current 42 percent of their total purchases to a new high of 50 percent—a 19 percent increase—in the year 2001.” …

…We know that in the wake of Mr. Cuomo’s agitation, Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of subprime loans skyrocketed. Subprime and “liar” loans became loss leaders that eventually caused the two mortgage giants to fail—with taxpayers so far on the hook for $111 billion in losses and perhaps hundreds of billions more to come. …

…Even if one believes the allegations hurled by the New York Attorney General at Bank of America—and there is much reason to doubt them—Mr. Cuomo has arguably done far more harm to taxpayers and investors than the defendants have. Before he is handed the New York governorship by Democratic and media acclamation, voters deserve a full accounting of Mr. Cuomo’s complicity in the mortgage meltdown.

Jonathan Pearce makes a good point about the Toyota recalls. Toyota isn’t telling you that they need more of your money to fix a problem that they created. To continue the analogy, Toyota would then have to make the problem even worse and then blame Bush or Wall Street.

Toyota is recalling thousands of motor vehicles around the world to deal with certain problems, such as possible brake failures. The story was the lead item on the BBC TV news today, not surprisingly, given the large number of people who now drive Toyota cars. On one level, this issue is being billed as a terrible embarrassment for the Japanese company, but to an extent I find the comprehensive recall of the cars to be a pretty good example, in fact, of how private businesses with a huge brand-name investment have to act when their products have a problem. Can you imagine, say, a government department doing such a massive “recall” of a failed policy? With private business, the penalties for failure are bankruptcy. For government, the consequence of a mess is often more of the same, only with more lumps of taxpayers’ money. To put it more technically, there is little in the way of a negative feedback loop when governments are involved. …

David Kopel blogs about a surprising coincidence. The Obama Birther conspiracy and the Bush National Guard conspiracy appear to have the same source.

So suggests John Avalon, in a Daily Beast column “The Secret History of the Birthers.” He traces birtherism to a Texas woman named Linda Starr, who was a Hillary Clinton delegate to the 2008 Texas state Democratic Convention. Avalon writes that Starr “was also cited as a key source for CBS’ discredited election year investigation into George W. Bush’s National Guard records that led to Dan Rather’s replacement after 24 years as the evening news anchor.” Avalon links to the Thornburgh/Boccardi report, which was conducted at the request of CBS News to examine CBS’s conduct in producing the infamous 60 Minutes story about Bush supposedly evading National Guard service and then having the records scrubbed. As the report details, Starr made the claim about Bush in an article on her website, three days before the 2000 presidential election. She also played a key role in serving as an intermediary for CBS to obtain the document which purported to be National Guard memo regarding the removal of NG records about Bush. The Thornburgh/Boccardi report does not claim that Ms. Starr knew that the document  was a clumsy fabrication.

At the very least, however, the fiasco of the Bush National Guard story shows that Ms. Starr did not provide her Internet readers, or CBS, with a story which could withstand factual scrutiny. Accordingly, if Avalon’s reporting is correct, he has provided yet another reason for people to disbelieve the (already-implausible) assertion that President Obama was not born in the United States. In contrast to the way the mainstream media initially handled the 2004 Bush National Guard story, the mainstream media did a better job in 2008 by not embracing a story about a presidential candidate which could not be supported by solid, verifiable facts.

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente, while hedging her bets, rounds up the current climate science scandals.

…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.” …

…Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labeled 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. …

In the American Interest, Walter Russell Mead reviews more of the IPCC “science”.

…Now another headline grabbing IPCC scare story is melting away.  A report in Sunday’s London Times highlights new humiliations for the IPCC.

“The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.”

There is however one teensy-weensy little problem.  As Professor Chris Field, the lead author of the IPCC’s climate impact team has now told reporters that he can find “no evidence” to support the claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report. …

…But there’s more. Much, much more.  Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes.  The former head of IPCC has publicly said the organization risks losing all credibility if it can’t clean up its act.  The head of the largest British funder of environmental research has joined the head of Greenpeace UK in criticizing the IPCC.  (At Greenpeace, they want Pachauri to resign.)  The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level.  Actually, it’s only about a quarter.  A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation.  The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry). The deeply environmentalist Guardian carries a story documenting the decline in both public and Conservative Party confidence in the need to address global warming. …

Terence Corcoran, in the National Post, contrasts Toyota and the IPCC.

…In fact, Toyota’s troubles mounted when it spoke honestly of its struggles in finding a cause and solution to the acceleration problem. Maybe Toyota could learn a few things from the IPCC. The wheels are practically falling off the climate change organization, with fresh evidence of faulty science, false advertising and flawed procedures being revealed almost daily. Even worse, the records show that the IPCC has a long history of scientific crashes, data manufacturing and out-of-control spins.

Clearly the IPCC is not taking any instruction from the corporate goodness community. For example, it took the IPCC more than two months to officially acknowledge its false claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Rather than rush to come clean on the mistake, the IPCC dragged its feet for weeks, calling it “voodoo” science, before issuing a self-congratulatory statement. “It has…recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.” …

…Note that the IPPC admits to a mistake only in “a paragraph,” thus implying that the thousands of other pages of IPCC reports and science material over the years contain nothing but rock-solid science—an untenable implication given what we know about the IPCC. If the IPCC were a private-enterprise auto company, the class-action suits would have been piling up at the agency’s doors and the U.S. Congress would be parading the IPCC’s executives through a public humiliation. So far, however, most media and just about all governments seem willing to accept the IPCC’s response on its Himalayan junk science. Just a little thing. Nothing to worry about. …

Roger Simon wants your help to find who has been making money by making climate science fiction.

Since it’s clear the Internet (notably the blogosphere) exposed the dubious science of anthropogenic global warming, thankfully before we all went broke (or more broke than we already are), it’s time to turn to our next assignment – following the money.

Cui bono in this giant metastasizing scam? Yes, we already know that the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri may have some ill-gotten gains, not to mention a few scientists who may have flown first class to Bali and other such boondoggles, but they are indeed small potatoes. Big money was – or was intended to be – made with carbon exchanges set up in Europe and the USA. Fraud at the European exchange to the tune of one and half billion dollars is already under investigation by Scotland Yard. But that’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As far back as July 2009, the Science and Public Policy Institute published a broadside – Climate Money – alleging that 79 billion had already been spent on this unproven science. That’s an extraordinary sum, even if exaggerated by eighty or ninety percent. Who knows how much has been spent and who has benefited?

Well, we at Pajamas Media would like to know – and we imagine you would too. And speaking of the tip of that proverbial iceberg, this is not only about Al Gore. There are plenty of high rent dots to be connected here with much pertinent information to be revealed and names to be named. I am writing this post to solicit your help. Just as the blogosphere was so instrumental in dissecting the science, it can also help track the money. If you have knowledge or expertise in this area, please contact us at webmaster@pajamasmedia.com. We will forward this on to Charles Martin – our resident guru on all matters climatic – who will collate and report back. Thanks for your help.

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In the WaPo, Gerard Alexander discusses liberal condescension.

…Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades — until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited — until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush’s aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin’s college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals. …

Jennifer Rubin extends a glorious ray of hope that Eric Holder may soon be dumped.

…But Holder seems to be on thin ice and the White House might now view him as a liability. The New Yorker quotes a source close to the White House:

“The White House doesn’t trust his judgment, and doesn’t think he’s mindful enough of all the things he should be,” such as protecting the President from political fallout. “They think he wants to protect his own image, and to make himself untouchable politically, the way Reno did, by doing the righteous thing.”

Even more ominous for Holder: Rahm Emanuel is making it clear to all those concerned that he disagreed with a string of highly controversial and politically disastrous decisions by Holder. We learn: “Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions.” And then there is the KSM trial:

At the White House, Emanuel, who is not a lawyer, opposed Holder’s position on the 9/11 cases. He argued that the Administration needed the support of key Republicans to help close Guantánamo, and that a fight over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could alienate them. “…the informed source said. . . .  “Rahm felt very, very strongly that it was a mistake to prosecute the 9/11 people in the federal courts, and that it was picking an unnecessary fight with the military-commission people,” the informed source said. “Rahm had a good relationship with [Sen. Lindsay] Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don’t prosecute these people in military commissions I won’t support the closing of Guantánamo. . . . Rahm said, ‘If we don’t have Graham, we can’t close Guantánamo, and it’s on Eric!’ ”

Interesting that Emanuel and his spinners are now distancing the White House from their attorney general. One wonders where Obama stands in this drama. Isn’t he, after all, the commander in chief? Either the president was content to go along with Holder’s decisions until they went south or he subcontracted, with no oversight, some of the most critical decisions of his presidency to a lawyer who is prone to making the kind of mistakes a “first-year lawyer would get fired for. …

In the Corner, Bill Burck and Dana Perino blog about the Obami leaking that Abdulmutallab is talking again. So once again national security is compromised to try to make the White House look better.

Yesterday, we talked about the White House’s outrageous decision to leak that the underwear bomber was now cooperating with the FBI. We said that these coordinated leaks would damage national security by, among other things, telling the underwear bomber’s fellow terrorists that he had flipped on them and it was time to go to ground.

The White House dismissed this criticism, saying that revealing the underwear bomber’s cooperation would not harm national security. Well, apparently FBI director Robert Mueller didn’t get the memo. According to this letter from Senator Bond on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director Mueller on Monday “personally stressed [to Senator Bond] that keeping the fact of his cooperation quiet was vital to preventing future attacks against the United States.”

Less than 24 hours later, the White House was deliberately leaking this very information to the press. What changed in those 24 hours? Nothing except the White House decided the political benefits of leaking outweighed the national security costs.

Also in the Corner, Daniel Foster blogs about the moving of the Obama statue in Indonesia.

Further evidence that the thrill is gone for President Obama, from my friend Aaron Connelly’s Indonesia-based blog:

Earlier today, Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo authorized the removal of a recently erected statue of Barack Obama as a child, from its current spot in a park in the city’s classy old Menteng neighborhood to the nearby school that he attended. The order followed the creation of a Facebook group campaigning for the statue to be torn down. Newspapers and television stations here reported on the group extensively, and newswires picked it up and sent it global. After all that attention, the group’s membership soared to over 50,000 members.

The story has been played back home– and will no doubt be played again today– as an amusing piece of news that sums up succinctly the narrative which the media has settled on for President Obama’s current predicament: fading enthusiasm for the president, even in his old strongholds like Menteng and Massachusetts! The Facebook group creators have been quoted arguing that Obama has not yet accomplished enough for a statue to have been erected in his honor, which of course sounds like an echo to anyone who has turned on FoxNews since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in September.

The permutations of clever leads are endless. The blog Ironic Surrealism remarked when the news of the group broke: “Obama is not only falling off of his pedestal here in the US. In Indonesia where he spent a few years as a child, he may soon be literally knocked off of his pedestal.”

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor gives us an idea of how a liberal deals with facts when they have to admit to errors. Not entirely forthcoming, soft-pedaling the number and the seriousness of the mistakes made, and “empathizing” with those involved.

“I have some experience with interrogation, and 50 minutes does not get you what you need,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He also understands a distinction that appears to escape Holder: Although torture is a moral horror, aggressive interrogation is a moral imperative when lives could be at stake.

…After all, Mirandizing is the law-enforcement routine in this country, a routine that the Bush administration followed in similar cases. It took me a while to realize that Mirandizing was a big mistake in this case. So I empathize with those who made the mistake. I also defended Holder’s plan to hold the 9/11 trial in Manhattan, which seems a very bad idea now that the initial enthusiasm of many New York politicians has morphed into nightmare visions.

And I would still defend his decision to maximize the trial’s legitimacy by prosecuting Mohammed under civilian rather than military law. Too bad that Holder almost immediately made the trial sound like a charade by declaring that “failure is not an option.” Then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs went him one better by asserting that Mohammed is “likely to be executed.” …

…But if Obama wants to fend off the soft-on-terrorism label, he will have to think less like a law professor and more like a war leader.

In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson tells us what the politicians aren’t saying and the MSM haven’t analyzed. It’s about our deficit.

…First, from 2011 to 2020, the administration projects total federal spending of $45.8 trillion against taxes and receipts of $37.3 trillion. The $8.5 trillion deficit is almost a fifth of spending. In 2020, the gap is $1 trillion, again approaching a fifth: Spending is $5.7 trillion, taxes $4.7 trillion. All amounts assume a full economic recovery; all projections may be optimistic. The message: There’s a huge mismatch between Americans’ desire for low taxes and high government services.

Second, almost $20 trillion of the $45.8 trillion of spending involves three programs — Social Security, Medicare (health insurance for those 65 and over) and Medicaid (health insurance for the poor — two-thirds goes to the elderly and disabled). The message: The budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes. As more baby boomers retire in the 2020s, deficits would grow.

Third, there is no way to close the massive deficits without big cuts in existing government programs or stupendous tax increases. Suppose we decided to cover all future deficits by raising taxes. Taxes would rise in the 2020s by roughly 50 percent from the average 1970-2009 tax burden. …

In Forbes, John Tamny says that government actions are increasing healthcare costs. Decreasing government intervention would reduce costs.

…Specifically, the federal government should stop protecting the pharmaceutical firms that sell their wares more cheaply in foreign markets, only to block the entrance of those drugs into the U.S. This isn’t to suggest for one second that Big Pharma shouldn’t achieve the highest profits possible on its innovations, but it is to say that Americans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize the consumption of foreigners. Allowing drug re-importation would quickly force drugmakers to sell their products at market rates overseas, which would allow them
to charge us a non-subsidizing rate in the states. Re-importation would quickly become a non-issue if this “tariff” were removed.

Also, the tax-deductible nature of company health insurance is a subsidy like any other. The better solution would be to get rid of all health care tax subsidies so that companies have a greater incentive to offer their employees health savings accounts, as opposed to insurance that creates the illusion of “free” care. As individuals we’re always most careful with our own money, and if our employers require us to pay out of pocket for routine, non-catastrophic care, we’ll necessarily use the funds provided more wisely.

Back to GDP: Health care certainly constitutes 16% of our economy, but this is not a good thing. It’s the result of unconstitutional government efforts to subsidize with transfer payments and tax breaks a lot of wasteful spending. In that sense, the only proper reform would involve the federal government exiting health care altogether so that spending on what is a good as opposed to a “right” is rationalized to our economic betterment.

And don’t miss the cartoons!

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Mark Steyn says to the president, it’s the spending, Stupid.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike? …

…Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690. …

Peter Schiff explains how government is strangling the American economy.

…Regulation acts like a tax on job creation. By subjecting employers to all sorts of extra expenses when they hire people, regulations increase the cost of employment far beyond the wages employers actually pay their workers. In fact, some regulations are specifically tied to the number of workers employed. This provides some employers with a strong incentive to stay small and not hire.  …

…Subsidies produce the opposite effect of regulation, but sometimes the results can be just as harmful. Government subsidies divert resources towards politically favored activities, resulting in more jobs in areas such as health care and education, but fewer jobs in other sectors such as manufacturing. The net effect of this transfer is to diminish the productive capacity and efficiency of the economy, which lowers real economic growth and diminishes employment opportunities.

Although not as visible as regulations and subsidies, government spending also plays a large role in job destruction. The more money government spends, the more resources it drains from the private sector. The fiscal 2011 budget proposed by President Obama contains $3.8 trillion in federal spending. Think of government as a cancer feeding off the private sector. The larger it grows, the more jobs it kills. …

Jennifer Rubin knows why the administration can’t figure out how to get jobs created.

… Perhaps if the president or anyone in his administration had ever run a business or been responsible for a payroll, there would be more understanding about the negative impact Obama’s policies (including his mandate- and fine-filled health-care bill) have on those we must rely on to fuel the economic recovery. Unfortunately, this administration is long on academic types and government bureaucrats and short on entrepreneurs. We could use a few about now.

David Goldman (aka Spengler) comments on last Friday’s jobless numbers.

… I don’t think that government statisticians are faking the data; they simply are running the old statistical routines out of the canned econometrics program to generate seasonal adjustment factors which are–to put it mildly–a lot less meaningful in the present environment than in a normal economy.

The Liberal death march continues. Charles Krauthammer explains why.

…A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly. …

In the Detroit News, Nolan Finley discusses the condescension and the irresponsibility that we are seeing from the president.

There’s always been a disconnect between what Barack Obama says and what he does, but for the last few weeks, the president’s rhetoric has been wholly detached from reality. …

…After unveiling his budget earlier this week, Obama crisscrossed the country, lecturing Americans on the virtues of frugality. “We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences,” the president said, adding that the government has to make hard choices and set priorities.

That’s a good message. Except that this is entirely Obama’s budget. He’s the one who failed to set priorities, who didn’t make hard choices. The nearly $1.3 trillion deficit built into this budget is historic in its fiscal recklessness, and it belongs to him. …

In the WaPo, Charles Lane comments on a request from Senator Blanche Lincoln to Obama, asking for a more centrist approach. The president refused on the grounds that anything other than Obama policies are Bush policies.

…The first was the ease with which he cast Lincoln’s plea for a bit more centrism as a call for a return to Bushism — the “exact same proposals that were in place for the last eight years.” That’s not what she was advocating; it’s not what any Democrat who’s questioning his approach is advocating. But the president set up this strawman, and he pummeled it, rather than engaging Lincoln’s valid concerns.

The second striking thing was how easily he appeared to write off Lincoln politically. Conceding nothing, he implied that her defeat was not only a foregone conclusion, but also an acceptable price to pay for staying the course on policy. …

…Still, give the president credit: No one can accuse him of bending his principles to politics. Of course, if there’s a price to be paid for that this year, he won’t be the one paying it. Blanche Lincoln, among others, will get to do that.

Jennifer Rubin adds excellent comments to Charles Lane’s piece.

Charles Lane catches Obama writing Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s political obituary. During the meeting Senate Democrats had with Obama, the imperiled Red State senator practically pleaded with the president to turn to the Center. (”Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?”) Her request was summarily denied. Any accommodation to “centrism” is a return to Bush policies, said Obama. Lane is stunned on two grounds by Obama’s stridency…

Well, at least the Red State senators and Blue Dog Democrats know where they stand. They are about to be pushed off that “precipice” Obama keeps talking about. But, as Lane notes, the dogmatic fidelity to leftism requires Obama to ignore some fairly convincing political evidence that this is the way to ruin for the Democratic party — and for Obama. (”If Virginia and New Jersey didn’t prove that, Massachusetts did. And November could prove it again.”)

This is what happens when arrogance and political extremism meet political tone-deafness. The Obami haven’t learned anything from Massachusetts; they simply are more candid that the Blanche Lincolns have no place in their party. But in doing so, they’re also writing off the majority of the electorate, which doesn’t share their fascination with big government and doesn’t appreciate their disdain for the ability of ordinary citizens to make decisions on their own. When Obama tells Lincoln to get lost, he’s also telling the voters of Arkansas (and a bunch of other states) that his agenda and his party’s political goals aren’t for them. Does he suppose that he can govern and win re-election by dismissing all centrists in this fashion? That’s a recipe for becoming a fringe minority party, not a broad governing majority. I suspect Lane is right: it will take a November 2010 election to ram that message home.

Ed Morrissey has some interesting thoughts on Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goldman’s comments about Obama. You know, like the one where the mayor said, “I gotta tell you this, everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I gotta tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner.”

…I find myself in the odd position of defending Obama on this score.  His speech contained very clear conditionals (emphases mine):

When times are tough, you — you tighten your belts.  You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage.  You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.

Well … yeah.  Maybe Obama would have been better advised to keep it generic by saying “in the casinos” rather than “on Vegas”, but otherwise, this is only remarkable for its banality.  You’d hear the same kind of advice from your parents, and probably would have rolled your eyes at its obvious nature. …

…But the man who will pay most will be Harry Reid, who has spent the past year carrying Obama’s water on Capitol Hill.  He can’t win re-election without a huge turnout in Sin City and a big spread.  If Obama becomes unpopular in Las Vegas, Reid’s re-election will become an impossibility rather than the improbability it is at the moment. …

John Stossel calls him Spiro T. Obama.

This week the President again showed how thin-skinned he is about criticism in the media. Maybe he’s so sensitive to criticism because he’s gotten so little of it. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner says that Obama can stop apologizing for America, and start apologizing for himself. Gardiner recommends 10 items. Here are three:

4. Apology to the victims of Communism

Barack Obama made Berlin a central stage of his presidential election campaign when he addressed an adoring crowd of hundreds of thousands of Germans in July 2008. However in November 2009, President Obama could not be bothered to fly to Berlin to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when even the Russian president showed up. Hillary Clinton stood in for the commander-in-chief and delivered an underwhelming speech that was more about Obama than American leadership in the Cold War. The White House decision to snub the Berlin ceremony was an insult to the memory of the tens of millions who perished at the hands of Communism in Europe. It demonstrated a callous disregard for human suffering and a refusal to acknowledge the huge role played by Ronald Reagan and the American people in bringing down the Iron Curtain. It also displayed what can only de described as an arrogant disdain for the transatlantic alliance.

5. Apology to the victims of the Sudan genocide

The Obama administration’s decision to engage with the brutal regime in Khartoum led by Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was both shocking and morally sickening. Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Major General J. Scott Gration summed up the new US strategy when he ludicrously declared: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.” This sent an appalling signal to would be genocidal regimes across the world that even they can be rehabilitated after murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Although it has received relatively little attention, the White House’s offer to lift sanctions against Sudan in exchange for “concrete steps in a new direction”, was one of the worst decisions made by Barack Obama since he took office.

6. Apology to the people of Honduras

It is still difficult to fathom the reasoning behind the White House’s incredible decision to side with Marxist despot Manuel Zelaya after he was removed by the Honduran Congress with the backing of the country’s Supreme Court. The Obama administration immediately condemned the fully constitutional actions of pro-American legislators who acted against a power-hungry figure determined to stay in power beyond his fixed term of office. Bizarrely, the White House aligned itself with the likes of America-hating tyrants like Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega against pro-democracy forces who love the United States.

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Saturday was the 99th anniversary of Reagan’s birth. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, and one of Reagan’s biographers shares a story.

… Reagan was just plain likable. Of all the subjects I’ve studied, few were as universally liked. Sure, Reagan, as president, was demonized by the Left, but that’s what the Left does: indecent, ugly rage. Still, even most liberals muster nice words about Reagan personally.

Central to that likability was Reagan’s humility. The word “I” didn’t dominate his conversation, unless he was poking fun at himself. He was no narcissist. Ronald Reagan was not full of pride; he was thoroughly unpossessed of self-love.

And so, with that background, I’d like to take the opportunity presented by Reagan’s time of year — not to mention the month of Presidents’ Day — to share an anecdote that was told to me by Bill Clark, Reagan’s close friend and most significant adviser. …

David Warren discusses how every major claim of “climate science” was fabricated.

…To my survey, there is not a single aspect of the “anthropogenic global warming” hypothesis that has been left standing by recent revelations, and more shoes drop every day. …

…the disgraced Dr. Phil Jones, the former boss of the East Anglia operation, now implicated in various cover-ups, attempts to intimidate and silence skeptics, and purposeful breaches of Britain’s freedom of information act. I’m sure he “believed” in what he was doing.

Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may “honestly” think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on “the right side of history,” that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime.

Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind “AGW” — not “most,” but all — have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don’t know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow. …

Michael Barone says climate scientists are on his list of the most distrusted professions. We take exception to his inclusion of trial lawyers being on the list, as we know some who are good, principled people. Perhaps he might include politicians and MSM reporters instead. Speaking of the MSM, where are they on this story?

Quick, name the most distrusted occupations. Trial lawyers? Pretty scuzzy, as witness the disgraced John Edwards, kept from the vice presidency in 2004 by the electoral votes of Ohio. Used car dealers? Always near the bottom of the list, as witness the universal understanding of the word “clunker.”

But over the last three months a new profession has moved smartly up the list and threatens to overtake all. Climate scientist. …

…”The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” writes Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American Interest. “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.”

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling. …

It’s Mark Steyn’s turn to roast the global-warming-sky-is-falling crowd.

Whenever I write about “climate change,” a week or two later there’s a flurry of letters whose general line is: la-la-la can’t hear you. Dan Gajewski of Ottawa provided a typical example in our Dec. 28 issue. I’d written about the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s efforts to “hide the decline,” and mentioned that Phil Jones, their head honcho, had now conceded what I’d been saying for years—that there has been no “global warming” since 1997. Tim Flannery, Australia’s numero uno warm-monger, subsequently confirmed this on Oz TV, although he never had before. …

…But where did all these experts get the data from?…

…That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scienti?c evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons. …

V. K. Raina, of the Geological Survey of India, produced a special report demonstrating that the run-for-your-life-the-glaciers-are-melting IPCC scenario was utterly false. For his pains, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the self-aggrandizing old bruiser and former railroad engineer who serves as head honcho of the IPCC jet set, dismissed Mr. Raina’s research as “voodoo science.” He’s now been obliged to admit the voodoo was all on his side. But don’t worry. By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain. In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier. As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it. …

In the WSJ, Eric Felten says that the corruption, deception, and back-stabbing we are witnessing in various scientific communities is better drama than most soap-opera writers could produce.

This has not been the proudest of weeks for science. Twelve years after publishing an article purporting to prove a link between childhood vaccines and autism, the prominent British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the paper in its entirety. But only after Britain’s General Medical Council found that the author of that article had been “irresponsible and dishonest” in his research, bringing medical science “into disrepute.”

That wasn’t the only controversy involving scholarly journals and the repute of researchers to flare up this week. Also in Britain, two prominent stem-cell researchers went to the BBC with their complaint that the peer review system has become corrupt. Flawed and unoriginal work gets published and promoted, while publication of truly original findings is often delayed or rejected, according to Austin Smith of Cambridge University and Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research.

…Not all such news comes from Britain, of course. Scott S. Reuben, formerly of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., and until recently a prominent researcher in pain medications, agreed last month to plead guilty to a federal charge of fabricating scientific data. The anesthesiologist had phonied-up results in as many as 21 articles published in scientific journals to secure funding from credulous pharmaceutical companies.

Or how about the case of Cello Energy of Alabama? Investors had poured millions into the company, which claimed it had devised a high-tech process for turning wood pulp and grasses into biodiesel. The Environmental Protection Agency had been counting on the firm to produce more than half of the “cellulosic biofuel” in the country this year. Belatedly, the moneymen decided to do some due diligence and took a sample of Cello’s biodiesel to an independent lab—and found that it was just old-fashioned fossil fuel dressed up in a new green bottle. In June a federal jury in Alabama found that investors had been defrauded and ordered Cello to pay $10.4 million in punitive damages. What are the odds that, with the government belching billions into green technology research, we will see repeats of the Cello fiasco?…

David Harsanyi has an interesting opinion on Rahm Emmanuel’s comment.

…In truth, in nearly every way the lives of the mentally disabled have vastly improved, from the care they receive to the quality of their lives to the respect they are given.

Though I’ve heard the r-word thrown around plenty (often, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn, directed at me) I can’t recall anyone using it as a pejorative to describe a person who was actually disabled. Far from ridiculing the disabled, our culture has humanized them.

Emanuel certainly deserves to be reprimanded. But if his offense is worthy of losing a job, you have to wonder if we really are a nation of the perpetually offended.

In American.com. Max Schultz takes a fascinating look at the new technology in drilling and transporting natural gas, and discusses the political and economic implications that will be felt worldwide. Here is an overview of the drilling advances:

…The first profound shift was made possible by a little-noticed technological breakthrough in the last three years that has changed the way we extract natural gas. Engineers now make use of two important innovations. One is horizontal, or directional, drilling, which permits wells to move laterally beneath the surface instead of going straight down. This technology minimizes the number of holes that have to be drilled, leaving a smaller surface footprint and accessing a larger area. The other technology is hydraulic fracturing, used to extract gas trapped in porous shale rock. In this process, also known as fracking, water and chemicals are pumped at tremendous pressure into shale rock formations to push gas into pockets for easier recovery.

By marrying and perfecting the two processes into a technology called horizontal fracking, engineering has virtually created, from nothing, new natural gas resources, previously regarded as inaccessibly locked in useless shale deposits. Suddenly, the mammoth shale formations in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Dakota, and elsewhere have the potential to produce abundant amounts of gas for decades to come. …

Proven reserves of natural gas in the United States have been revised upward by 50 percent in the last decade, and those numbers are sure to climb higher as more shale gas is discovered. Perhaps not surprisingly, other nations are sending geologists to the United States to study techniques for extracting gas from unconventional sources. China, India, and Australia all have enormous shale fields. In the coming decades, the shale gale won’t be just an American phenomenon; it will blow all over the globe. …

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Christopher Hitchens reviews B.R. Myers new book on North Korea, and the serious danger that the nation presents.

…I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters…The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that. …

…Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one. …

The WSJ editors comment on The Big Spender’s budget.

One rule of budget reporting is to watch what the politicians are spending this year, not the frugality they promise down the road. By that measure, the budget that President Obama released yesterday for fiscal 2011 is one of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history. …

…If this budget is Mr. Obama’s first clear demonstration of his long-term governing priorities, then it’s hard not to conclude that this spending boom is deliberate. It is an effort to put in place programs and spending commitments that will require vast new tax increases and give the political class a claim on far more private American wealth. …

…But the reality is that even these still-high deficits are based on assumptions for growth and revenue gains from record tax increases starting January 1, 2011. And what a list of tax increases it is—no less than $2 trillion worth over the decade. The nearby table lists some of the largest, all of which the Administration and its economists claim to believe will have little or no impact on growth. If they’re wrong, the deficits will be even larger. …

…Even these tax increases won’t be enough to pay for the spending that this Administration is unleashing in its first two remarkable years. On the evidence of this budget, the Massachusetts Senate election never happened.

Obama really is a one-trick President. More government is what he’s forcing on the us, despite public opinion and common sense. Jennifer Rubin comments.

…One marvels at the cognitive dissonance at work. The Obama team declares “jobs” to be the top priority. But job creators are getting a hefty tax hike. The Obama team declares its conviction that the private sector is the engine of recovery. But those who do the most hiring—small business—are getting whacked and money is being sucked out off the private sector and going into the public sector. (As Americans for Tax Reform spells it out, “Taxes are scheduled to rise from 14.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 19.6 percent by 2020.”)

Nor are all these taxes helping to close the deficit. As Keith Hennessey lays it out, “the president’s own figures show deficits averaging 5.1% of GDP over the next 5 years, and 4.5% of GDP over the next ten years. They further show debt held by the public increasing from 63.6% of GDP this year to 77.2% of GDP ten years from now. I think it’s a safe assumption that CBO’s rescore of the President’s budget will be even worse.” And the reason for this, of course, is that as much as Obama is raising taxes, he’s spending even faster than we can take them in. Hennessey again:

The President is proposing significantly more spending than he proposed last year:  1.8% of GDP more in 2011, and roughly 1 percentage point more each year over time. Spending is and will continue to be way above historic averages. At its lowest point in the next decade federal spending would still be 1.7 percentage points above the 30-year historic average.  Over the next decade, President Obama proposes spending be 12% higher as a share of the economy than it has averaged over the past three decades.

This is not a recipe for economic recovery. It is a formula to retard growth, investment, and job creation. It is also, I think, a political fiasco, the exemplification of tax-and-spend policies to which the public is forcefully averse. Once again taxes and fiscal sobriety will top the list of issues in the upcoming elections. You can understand why Democrats expect a brutal political season.

In Investor’s Business Daily, Betsy McCaughey points out that most of Congress is happy to spend more of our money, too.

…Almost no one in Washington, D.C., is calling for spending controls. In the nation’s capitol, the cause célèbre is deficit reduction. Last month, numerous senators from both parties called for a deficit-reduction commission to close the gap between federal spending and tax revenues.

To avoid burdening the next generation, they said, Americans must “pay as they go.” Nothing should be “off the table,” including tax increases, said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. President Obama joined in, announcing in his State of the Union message that if Congress won’t set up a deficit-reduction commission, he will.

Don’t be bamboozled by these sanctimonious calls for deficit reduction. In plain English, it means raising your taxes to keep pace with what politicians are spending. The real danger to our freedom is the level of spending, not whether it’s paid for with taxes now or borrowing. They’ll come after you and your children later. What’s needed is a cap on overall spending.

During the last 18 months, federal spending as a percentage of what the nation produces (gross domestic product) soared to 28% from 20%. Add in state and local government spending, and the result crossed that critical 40% threshold.

The president said in his State of the Union message that the federal government must tighten its belt, just the way American families are doing. But his budget proposal increases federal spending by $85 billion. That is belt-loosening. …

It must be hard when the facts aren’t on your side. Dick Morris corrects the president, and explains how Obama could lower the deficit.

President Obama was disingenuous when he said that the budget deficit he faced “when I walked in the door” of the White House was $1.3 trillion. He went on to say that he only increased it to $1.4 trillion in 2009 and was raising it to $1.6 trillion in 2010.

As Joe Wilson said, “You lie.”

Here are the facts:

In 2008, George W. Bush ran a deficit of $485 billion. By the time the fiscal year started on Oct.1, 2008, it had gone up by another $100 billion due to increased recession-related spending and depressed revenues. So it was $600 billion. That was the real Bush deficit.

But when the fiscal crisis hit, Bush had to pass TARP in the final months of his presidency, which cost $700 billion. Under the federal budget rules, a loan and a grant are treated the same. So the $700 billion pushed the deficit — officially — up to $1.3 trillion. But not really. The $700 billion was a short-term loan, and $500 billion of it has already been repaid.

So what was the real deficit Obama inherited? The $600 billion deficit Bush was running plus the $200 billion of TARP money that probably won’t be repaid (mainly AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited. …

In the Arizona Republic, Robert Robb also comments on the budget, and Obama’s reflexive spending and blaming.

…Obama likes to depict himself as a deficit victim. He inherited a huge deficit and a deep recession. Not his fault.

Certainly the Republicans during the Bush years were fiscally irresponsible. But within historical bounds. The deficits in Obama’s budget are beyond historical bounds and are his alone.

Even with Bush’s tax cuts, federal revenues in 2007 were at the average as a percentage of GDP, 18.5 percent, going back to 1960. The deficit was just 1.2 percent of GDP, historically on the low side. Accumulated federal debt was 36 percent of GDP.

Then the recession hit. From 2008 to 2009, federal spending increased 18 percent. This was a budget year that straddled the Bush and Obama presidencies. But the spending increase was driven by anti-recession measures, predominately the Bush stimulus and bailouts.

Obama supported these measures. In fact, his complaint about the Bush stimulus was that it was too small.

This raises a question of political ontology: If Obama agreed with Bush, is it still just Bush’s fault? …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Gerald Warner reports on the surprising story of a German family recently receiving political asylum in the US.

…Burman said: “We can’t expect every country to follow our constitution. The world might be a better place if it did. However, the rights being violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate.” He observed: “Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress. This family has a well-founded fear of persecution… therefore, they are eligible for asylum…”

…Judge Burman added that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the German government. He said that, rather than being concerned with the welfare of the children, it was trying to stamp out parallel societies. Making his court order, the judge voiced concern that, although Germany was a democratic country and an ally, the policy of persecuting homeschoolers was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.

That offers a useful insight into how Americans, living in a free country, view the creeping totalitarianism that has engulfed Europe. …

…The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. …

In the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez blogs about Scott Brown’s interview on a morning radio show.

Boston radio presence Michael Graham shares a morning surprise:

I’m in the middle of some rant or another, and my producer tells me that Scott Brown is on the line. I didn’t have a scheduled interview, but I’m always happy to have him on.

So I put him on the air and I quickly realize that he wasn’t expecting to be interviewed.  So what was he doing on my phone?

It turns out that Sen-elect Brown had taken time out of his insanely busy schedule to call my producer about a fundraiser for the Fisher House Boston that he and his daughter participated in a few weeks ago.  One of the donors who was supposed to get one of Ayla’s CDs as a thank-you gift for donating to Fisher House hadn’t gotten his.  So Sen.-Elect Brown called in to follow up on that one CD.

One CD for some guy Scott Brown will probably never meet. …

…In other words, he’s the same guy that spend months driving his pick-up across the Commonwealth.  That’s the political power behind Scott Brown.

John Stossel gives another reason to reduce the government. Politicians are so used to stealing from us that they apparently don’t remember it’s wrong.

…When the CEO said that opening his factory wouldn’t have been possible without the Obama administration, he may have known something we didn’t. Last month, Obama announced a new set of tax credits for so-called green companies. One window company was on the list: Serious Materials. This must be one very special company.

But wait, it gets even more interesting.

On my Fox Business Network show on “crony capitalism”, I displayed a picture of administration officials and so-called “energy leaders” taken at the U.S. Department of Energy. Standing front and center was Cathy Zoi, who oversees $16.8 billion in stimulus funds, much of it for weatherization programs that benefit Serious.

The interesting twist is that Zoi happens to be the wife of Robin Roy, who happens to be vice president of “policy” at Serious Windows. …

…On its website, Serious Materials says it did not get a taxpayer subsidy. But that’s just playing with terms. What it got was a tax credit, an opportunity that its competitors did not get: to keep money it would have paid in taxes. Let’s not be misled. Government is as manipulative with selective tax credits as it is with cash subsidies. It would be more efficient to cut taxes across the board. Why should there be favoritism?

Because politicians like it. Big, complicated government gives them opportunities to do favors for their friends.

In the Telegraph, UK, Christopher Booker discusses IPCC corruption.

…Dr North next uncovered “Amazongate”. The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

The blatant bias of each of its four reports has been pointed out by scientists – notably the rewriting of key passages in its 1995 report after the contributing scientists had approved the final text. This provoked a magisterial blast from Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen “a more disturbing corruption” of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was “incapable of following its most basic procedures”, it was best it should be “abandoned”. …

…It is noticeable how many of those now calling for Dr Pachauri’s resignation, led by Professor Andrew Weaver, a senior IPCC insider, are passionate global warming believers. Fearing that Pachauri damages their cause, they want him thrown overboard in the hope of saving the IPCC itself. But it is not just Pachauri who has been holed below the waterline. So has the entire IPCC process. And beyond that – and despite the pleading of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and the BBC that none of this detracts from the evidence for man-made global warming – so has the warmist cause itself. Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end.

In the Corner, Iain Murray blogs about the awaited end of the globalony conspiracy. It’s not over until the funding is pulled.

…Walter Russell Mead pronounces that “the global warming movement as we know it is dead.” He concludes:

The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road. Basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip. The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank.

…And the upshot of all this is that even President Obama now recognizes that cap-and-trade is dead, as summarized over at Talking Points Memo:

The remarks represent the first time the President has acknowledged that the Senate may not be willing to adopt a cap and trade system: the central feature of the climate change initiative that Obama ran on during the 2008 campaign. …

…This leaves the EPA and its sledgehammer (see Marlo Lewis’s assessment of the proposed regulations here and here) as the only hope left for the global warming alarmists. Given that many people assume that the EPA introduced its unwieldy rule in an attempt to pressure the Senate to act to prevent the EPA rule from taking effect, one has to wonder how much political capital will be put behind the EPA’s regulation now

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Fouad Ajami chronicles the rise and fall of The One.

…There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

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 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. …

Joe Klein didn’t like Ajami’s above piece. Peter Wehner has some things for Joe to think about.

Time magazine’s Joe Klein is angry. Again. This time his animus is aimed at the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami and yours truly. Again. And so, one more time — just for the fun of it — let’s take a look at what is fueling Joe’s fury and see if we can make some sense of it.

Here’s what Klein writes: …

In the WaPo, Richard Cohen is one of the disillusioned liberals. He still has to comment on Bush, of course, but the rest of the article is really quite something.

There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America’s critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up? …

…Administration officials defend what happened in Detroit and assert, against common sense and the holy truth itself, that they got valuable intelligence — and so what more would you want? But Abdulmutallab went silent before terrorism experts from Washington could get to him. It has been more than a month since he last opened his mouth, and even if he resumes cooperating — a deal may be in the works — he now knows just a bit more about the present-day location of various al-Qaeda operatives than does Regis Philbin. …

…KSM, Abdulmutallab and other accused terrorists should be tried. But these two are not Americans, and they are accused of terrorism, tantamount to an act of war — a virtual Pearl Harbor, in KSM’s case. A military tribunal would fit them fine. If it is good enough for your average GI accused of murder or some such thing, it ought to be good enough for a foreign national with mass murder on his mind. …

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, criticizes Obama for his lack of vision and leadership in foreign affairs.

…But the scant attention paid in the State of the Union speech to US leadership was pitiful and frankly rather pathetic. … Needless to say there was nothing in the speech about the importance of international alliances, and no recognition whatsoever of the sacrifices made by Great Britain and other NATO allies alongside the United States on the battlefields of Afghanistan. …

…Significantly, the global war against al-Qaeda was hardly mentioned, and there were no measures outlined to enhance US security at a time of mounting threats from Islamist terrorists. Terrorism is a top issue for American voters, but President Obama displayed what can only be described as a stunning indifference towards the defence of the homeland.

The Iranian nuclear threat, likely to be the biggest foreign policy issue of 2010, was given just two lines in the speech, with a half-hearted warning of “growing consequences” for Tehran, with no details given at all. There were no words of support for Iranian protestors who have been murdered, tortured and beaten in large numbers by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thuggish security forces, and no sign at all that the president cared about their plight. Nor was there any condemnation of the brutality of the Iranian regime, as well as its blatant sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the example of Iran showed, the advance of freedom and liberty across the world in the face of tyranny was not even a footnote in the president’s speech. I cannot think of a US president in modern times who has attached less importance to human rights issues. For the hundreds of millions of people across the world, from Burma to Sudan to Zimbabwe, clamouring to be free of oppression, there was not a shred of hope offered in Barack Obama’s address. …

In the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone asks who Obama is trying to score points with by being soft on terrorism.

..If the answer to these questions is that we are trying to impress Islamist terrorists, we have clearly failed.

It is a matter of simple fact that the announcement that we would close Guantanamo and other implement policy changes did not prevent Abdulhakim Muhammad from killing U.S. soldiers at the Little Rock recruiting station last June. It did not prevent Nidal Hasan from killing U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood in November. It did not prevent Abdulmutallab from attempting to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over U.S. or Canadian airspace on Christmas day.

Public opinion polls in the Arab and Muslim world have shown only slight upticks in opinion about America in the months after Barack Obama’s speeches in Cairo and Turkey and after these administration policy changes. Terrorists did not say, “Gosh, now that Obama is closing Guantanamo and terrorists are being given Miranda rights, I’ve got to change my mind and decide that the United States is a really nifty country and that freedom and democracy are good things after all.”

But perhaps our goal was to convince not terrorists but “world opinion.” Are the government and billion people of India going to think better of the United States if we treat terrorists more gently? Not likely; they’re the targets of terrorists themselves. …

In the National Review, Andrew McCarthy reviews commentary from former CIA director, General Michael Hayden, on the amazingly poor judgment of Attorney General Eric Holder. He ends with an important point about the Abdulmutallab situation that the president can still rectify. Perhaps Obama should hold a national security summit to help him make a decision.

…Remember, though, that this is not a done deal. The Obama administration is treating what everyone now agrees was a mistake as if it were a bell that can’t be unrung. That is wrong, and it is irresponsible.

Right this minute, President Obama could designate Abdulmutallab an unlawful enemy combatant (or, as they now call it, an “unprivileged belligerent”) and proceed with his interrogation, unimpeded by a defense lawyer or Miranda restrictions. It is a power he has had every minute since Abdulmutallab’s capture five weeks ago. The case would still be there, and it would still be a slam-dunk, whether it were tried two, three, or five years from now. The only potential downside for the case is no downside at all: Prosecutors would not be able to use any statements he makes. …

…Moreover, we’re not merely rehashing past mistakes. This is an ongoing problem. After four months of al-Qaeda training in Yemen, Abdulmutallab has valuable information. President Obama still has the legal means to get it. Every day he fails to act — every day he elevates trifling trial strategy over vital intelligence collection — is a new, reckless failure to secure the nation.

And in The Corner, Dana Perino points out the problems with leaks about Abdulmutallab talking now.

… Now the administration has begun systematically leaking to the press that he started talking again last week after FBI agents prevailed upon his family in Nigeria to convince him to cooperate.

Last week?! So, first of all: How many of his fellow terrorists have rolled up operations since Christmas Day and headed for the hills? They’ve skedaddled for sure. It’s a classic al-Qaeda tactic: hold out for as long as you can so your fellow terrorists can go underground.

But even worse is that someone in the administration is leaking this at all. How does it further our national-security interests to tell Abdulmutallab’s fellow terrorists overseas that he is informing on them? What would you do if you were one of those fellow terrorists? If you hadn’t already gone to ground, you sure would do so now.

If the administration believed it was important to reassure Congress that Abdulmutallab was cooperating, they should have done so in private in closed session with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. This kind of sensitive information is shared all the time in that way. It is bad practice to tell the world that a terrorist has agreed to spill the beans on his fellow terrorists who are still walking around free overseas. That is, of course, unless the principal motivation is to try to save political hides at home, even at the expense of actually finding the terrorists Abdulmutallab worked with. …

Robert Costa blogs in the Corner about one of the few budget cuts that the White House has proposed. It is in education, no less. It is not much, only one million dollars. But, what it does show is what a nasty piece of work Barack Obama is. The program to be cut is a scholarship program named after the deceased son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich). Rep Stupak did not toe the ObamaCare line.

With tax hikes dominating today’s budget debate, you will not hear much about the smaller federal grants that President Obama is hoping to slash. One proposed cut sticks out: Obama’s budget eliminates a $1 million scholarship program for aspiring Olympic athletes at Northern Michigan University. Here’s why it matters: In 1998, the program was renamed to honor B. J. Stupak, the late son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), who committed suicide in 2000. Is the cut related to Stupak’s playing hardball on health care last year?

Stupak won’t speculate on the politics of the decision, but he does tell National Review Online that he is “disappointed” to hear about the cut. He says he found out about it through the media, not the president or the Democratic leadership. He notes, however, “that in the 18 years I’ve been in Congress, never has a presidential staff called me to tell they are cutting something. Usually everyone around here scrambles after a budget is released.”

Stupak pledges to fight for the grant to be reinstated into the budget. “I’ll do my appropriations request and put in testimony. I want it to be funded on its own merit. President Bush did the same thing, and we always restored it. We need to do a better job explaining the program.” Stupak adds that with the Winter Olympics approaching, it is “time to remind Congress why it is important to provide educational assistance to aspiring young Olympic athletes. We’ll all be cheering our athletes next month, but we should remember that programs like this give a major boost to those training for the games. Shani Davis, the first black speed skater to make the U.S. Olympic team, credits the scholarship with keeping in him school. There are hundreds of stories like that. This program has become a small farm team for Olympic education.”

Thomas Sowell dispels a few myths that pass as logic for politicians and the MSM.

…The big question that seldom— if ever— gets asked in the mainstream media is whether these are a net increase in jobs. Since the only resources that the government has are the resources it takes from the private sector, using those resources to create jobs means reducing the resources available to create jobs in the private sector.

So long as most people do not look beyond superficial appearances, politicians can get away with playing Santa Claus on all sorts of issues, while leaving havoc in their wake— such as growing unemployment, despite all the jobs being “created.” …

Roger Simon has words for the pseudo-leftism of John Edwards.

Now that we have reached the black comic post-portem stage of the John Edwards scandal with Andrew Young’s book out and pundits playing mop up, it’s time to address an interesting question: To what degree did John Edwards’ “leftism” affect his extraordinarily narcissistic behavior?

The quotes around leftism are, of course, deliberate because Edwards wasn’t a real leftist. He is the poster boy for a faux-leftism that permeates our culture. Nothing could be more obvious than that Edwards, who took the furthest left stance of the three Democratic presidential candidates in the last election, cared next to nothing for “the people” but excessively for himself, building the McMansion of McMansions, etc. And “stance” is the operative word here, because his positions always seemed adopted, not felt.

Is there a cause and effect relationship here? We do live in an era when the private behavior and lifestyles of liberal-left politician seem completely out of whack with their public pronouncements. Besides Edwards, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi come quickly to mind, but there are others. It’s doubtful Gore and Pelosi lived personal lives anywhere near as execrable as Edwards’ but there are parallels, especially in the area of personal enrichment (“green” or otherwise). …

A new blog for us, Doug Jones at Journal us has the lowdown on some of the lowdown uses of military jets by Nancy Pelosi’s family.

Is it a legitimate use of military jets to transport the Speaker of the House and her favored Congressional coterie for routine travel? Even if you believe it is — and, personally, I do not — any rational taxpayer would admit that it is monumental waste of money. Military flights cost between $5,000 and $20,000 per hour to operate. The Speaker and her passengers routinely reimburse the Air Force $120 to $400 for each flight.

Since Nancy Pelosi took over as Speaker in 2006, she’s rung up millions in military travel expenses to commute between San Francisco and Washington.

Worse still, she also appears to have requisitioned entire flights for the personal use of her children and grandchildren. That is, unaccompanied by any member of Congress, her kids, in-laws and grandchildren are utilizing entire military passenger jets for their routine travel needs. …