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Robert Samuelson comments on what to expect with the looming passage of the Obamacare abomination.

Barack Obama’s quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America’s long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He’s championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country’s long-term interests. “This isn’t about me,” he likes to say, “I have great health insurance.” But of course, it is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved “universal” health insurance. He’ll be disappointed.

Even if Congress passes legislation — a good bet — the finished product will fall far short of Obama’s extravagant promises. It will not cover everyone. It will not control costs. It will worsen the budget outlook. It will lead to higher taxes. It will disrupt how, or whether, companies provide insurance for their workers. As the real-life (as opposed to rhetorical) consequences unfold, they will rebut Obama’s claim that he has “solved” the health-care problem. His reputation will suffer. …

…Obama’s plan might add almost an additional $1 trillion in spending over a decade — and more later. Even if this is fully covered, as Obama contends, by higher taxes and cuts in Medicare reimbursements, this revenue could have been used to cut the existing deficits. But the odds are that the new spending isn’t fully covered, because Congress might reverse some Medicare reductions before they take effect. Projected savings seem “unrealistic,” says Foster. Similarly, the legislation creates a voluntary long-term care insurance program that’s supposedly paid by private premiums. Foster suspects it’s “unsustainable,” suggesting a need for big federal subsidies. …

In the Atlantic blogs, Megan McArdle posts on the Congressional kamikazes.

So there’s now about a 90% chance that the health care bill will pass.

At this point, the thing is more than a little inexplicable.  Democrats are on a political suicide mission; I’m not a particularly accurate prognosticator, but I think this makes it very likely that in 2010 they will lost several seats in the Senate–enough to make it damn hard to pass any more of their signature legislation–and will lose the house outright.  In the case of the House, you can attribute it to the fact that the leadership has safe seats.  But three out of four of the Democrats on the podium today are in serious danger of losing their seats.

No bill this large has ever before passed on a straight party-line vote, or even anything close to a straight party-line vote.  No bill this unpopular has ever before passed on a straight party-line vote.  We’re in a new political world.  I’m not sure I understand it. …

One Dem has had enough. Politico reports on an Alabama congressman who is switching to the GOP. His northern Alabama seat has not been held by a Republican since 1866. That was an 18. That’s right, not since Reconstruction.

Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith announced Tuesday that he’s switching parties – saying he can no longer align himself “with a party that continues to pursue legislation that is bad for our country, hurts our economy and drives us further and further into debt.”

“Unfortunately there are those in the Democratic Leadership that continue to push an agenda focused on massive new spending, tax increases, bailouts and a health care bill that is bad for our healthcare system,” Griffith said in a statement. “I have always considered myself to be an independent voice and I have tried to be that voice in Congress – but after watching this agenda firsthand I now believe that the differences in the two parties could not be more clear and that for me to be true to my core beliefs and values I must align myself with the Republican party and speak out clearly on these issues. …

In Politico, Carrie Budoff Brown and Patrick O’Connor look at what’s left to do to pass ObamaCare.

…But the real fight will occur in negotiations between House and Senate leaders over a final bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California can’t afford to lose any Democrats. And with Stupak threatening to vote against the Senate compromise, she’ll need to offset his vote with other Democrats who voted against it the first time. She might be able to pick up some moderate-to-conservative Democrats who favor the Senate approach, but many of these lawmakers will need to be OK with the final abortion restrictions.

On the other side, a bloc of abortion-rights backers, led by DeGette, has already promised to vote against any bill that includes Stupak’s amendment, which would prevent people who receive government subsidies from purchasing coverage for elective abortions through the exchange. DeGette believes many of the 41 Democrats who voted for Stupak and “yes” on the House health care bill are willing to work with party leaders to find a middle ground.

The opposing camps are similarly entrenched on the public option and the method for financing the health care expansion. The House would create a government-sponsored insurance plan, but the Senate bill is silent on this point. After several attempts at compromise, Reid nixed the public option altogether. …

Jennifer Rubin says Olympia Snowe may finally be coming to her senses.

Obama has finally managed to do it. He first lost David Brooks — and now Sen. Olympia Snowe. In her statement of opposition to ObamaCare, Snowe detailed some substantive concerns, but basically she got fed up with the bullying:

It defies logic that we are now expected to vote on the overall, final package before Christmas with no opportunity to amend it so we can adjourn for a three week recess even as the legislation will not fully go into effect until 2014, four years from now. … Ultimately, there is absolutely no reason to be hurtling headlong to a Christmas deadline on monumental legislation affecting every American, when it doesn’t even fully go into effect until 2014. When 51 percent of the American people in a recent survey have said they do not approve of what we are doing, they understand what Congress does not — and that is, that time is not our enemy, it is our friend.

Therefore, we must take a time out from this legislative game of “beat the clock,” reconvene in January – instead of taking a three week recess – and spend the time necessary to get this right. Legislation affecting more than 300 million Americans deserves better than midnight votes on a bill that cannot be further amended and that no one has had the opportunity to fully consider – and the Senate must step up to its responsibility as the world’s greatest deliberative body on behalf of the American people.

It’s significant that the not-very-conservative conservatives hovering around the middle of the political spectrum have thrown up their hands in collective disgust, recognizing that ObamaCare is not about reasoned policymaking but about brute political strength. Notice how popular — and broad-based — is the coalition of “no.” Recall that Olympia Snowe voted in favor of the stimulus plan, providing a bare fig leaf of bipartisanship to that embarrassing legislation. That she has reached her limit and can no longer justify even to her not-at-all-hardcore-conservative constituents voting for the latest junk-a-thon bill says something about how the political landscape has shifted. …

Jennifer Rubin also posts on Senator Mitch McConnell’s efforts to get Dems to look at the political precipice they were standing on.

On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, among the cagier and more effective Republicans, uttered a final thought in his fiery denunciation of the health-care bill: “All it takes is one. Just one. One can stop it — or every one will own it.” Every one of the Democrats who voted in lockstep for cloture after 1 a.m. now owns the health-care bill. Each of the senators up in 2010 becomes the decisive vote. And each of them up in 2012 as well. In each and every race, this vote will be one of the top, if not the top issue, and voters enraged by one or another of the bill’s provisions (e.g., abortion subsidies, the violation of Obama’s pledge not to tax families with income less than $250,000, the slashing of Medicare) will get to register their disapproval.

As McConnell pointed out dryly, “But make no mistake: if the people who wrote this bill were proud of it, they wouldn’t be forcing this vote in the dead of night. … The final product is a mess — and so is the process that’s brought us here to vote on a bill that the American people overwhelmingly oppose.” …

Peter Wehner posts on the political consequences to come from Obamacare.

Here are some thoughts on where things stand in the aftermath of the certain passage of the Senate health-care bill.

1. Few Democrats understand the depth and intensity of opposition that exists toward them and their agenda, especially regarding health care. Passage of this bill will only heighten the depth and intensity of the opposition. We’re seeing a political tsunami in the making, and passage of health-care legislation would only add to its size and force.

2. This health-care bill may well be historic, but not in the way the president thinks. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything quite like it: passage of a mammoth piece of legislation, hugely expensive and unpopular, on a strict party-line vote taken in a rush of panic because Democrats know that the more people see of ObamaCare, the less they like it.

3. The problem isn’t simply with how substantively awful the bill is but how deeply dishonest and (legally) corrupt the whole process has been. There’s already a powerful populist, anti-Washington sentiment out there, perhaps as strong as anything we’ve seen. This will add kerosene to that raging fire.

4. Democrats have sold this bill as a miracle-worker; when people see first-hand how pernicious health-care legislation will be, abstract concerns will become concrete. That will magnify the unhappiness of the polity. …

Rick Richman discusses Obama’s fall from grace.

In Monday’s Rasmussen presidential poll, only 26 percent of the nation’s voters strongly approve of Barack Obama’s performance as president, while 43 percent strongly disapprove — giving him a Presidential Approval Index rating, a sum calculated by subtracting the number of strong disapprovals from the number of strong approvals, of negative 17. His overall disapproval rating is 53 percent (it has been 50 percent or more for over a month). But it is the extraordinarily high proportion of those who strongly disapprove that bears noting.

In January, George W. Bush left office with a “Strongly Disapprove” rating of … 43 percent. It took Bush eight years to achieve that level of strong disapproval, despite how the mainstream media pummeled him for years. Obama has reached that level in 11 months, despite a media that for months could not use his name in a sentence without also adding “Lincoln” and “FDR.”

To appreciate the magnitude of Obama’s ratings fall, consider that after his first full day in office, his presidential index was positive 30. Today’s index of negative 17 reflects a swing of 47 points in less than a year.

A commenter at the Huffington Post today observes that Obama has “accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center.” The president has also unified the Republican party and created a tea-party movement that in some polls is more popular than both the Democratic and Republican parties. …

We have Thomas Sowell’s final installment of the five part series on the housing crisis.

Congressional support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went far beyond words. When the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight — the agency overseeing these government-sponsored enterprises — turned up irregularities in Fannie Mae’s accounting and in 2004 issued what Barron’s magazine called “a blistering 211-page report,” Republican Sen. Kit Bond called for an investigation of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, tried to have their budget slashed and sought to have the leadership of the regulatory agency removed. Democratic Congressman Barney Frank likewise declared: “It is clear that a leadership change at OFHEO is overdue.”

In short, Fannie Mae’s political support in Congress has been bipartisan. “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s employees and political action committees donated nearly $5 million to current members of Congress since 1989,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Sen. Bond received $95,000 and Sen. Christopher Dodd received $165,000. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The two companies employ armies of lobbyists and consultants and are major campaign donors. “There has been no more powerful organization in Washington than Fannie Mae,” said Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn. “They have been able to manipulate the regulatory and legislative process for years.” …

In the Corner, Samuel Gregg posts on how the Marxist liberation theology has hurt the Catholic church.

It went almost unnoticed, but on December 5, Benedict XVI articulated one of the most stinging rebukes of a particular theological school ever made by a pope. Addressing a visiting group of Brazilian bishops, Benedict followed some mild comments about Catholic education with some very sharp and deeply critical remarks about liberation theology and its effects upon the Catholic Church.

After stressing how certain liberation theologians drew heavily upon Marxist concepts, the pope described these ideas as “deceitful.” This is very strong language for a pope. But Benedict then underscored the damage that liberation theology did to the Catholic Church. “The more or less visible consequences,” he told the bishops, “of that approach — characterised by rebellion, division, dissent, offence and anarchy — still linger today, producing great suffering and a serious loss of vital energies in your diocesan communities.” …

…For a start, there’s little question that liberation theology was a disaster for Catholic evangelization. There’s a saying in Latin America that sums this up: “The Church opted for the poor, and the poor opted for the Pentecostals.” …

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WSJ editors comment again on the end of the DC voucher program. Among those who acted dishonorably were the National Education Association, who care more about protecting union power in a mediocre school system than helping students get ahead.

The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a private school.

On Sunday the Senate approved a spending bill that phases out funding for the five-year-old program. Several prominent Senators this week sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid pleading for a reconsideration. Signed by Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, Democrats Robert Byrd and Dianne Feinstein, and Republicans Susan Collins and John Ensign, it asked to save a program that has “provided a lifeline to many low-income students in the District of Columbia.” President Obama signed the bill Thursday.

The program’s popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal evaluation earlier this year said the mostly black and Hispanic participants are making significant academic gains and narrowing the achievement gap. But for the teachers unions, this just can’t happen. The National Education Association instructed Democratic lawmakers to kill it.

“Opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA,” declared the union in a letter sent to every Democrat in the House and Senate in March. “We expect that Members of Congress who support public education, and whom we have supported, will stand firm against any proposal to extend the pilot program. Actions associated with these issues WILL be included in the NEA Legislative Report Card for the 111th Congress.” …

A couple of Corner posts on the health care bill. Mark Steyn found the best line.

I like the way this guy puts it: “Cash for cloture.”

This line from Congressman Cantor caught my eye:

They’re allocating taxpayer dollars as if those dollars belonged to the senators. It borders on immoral. Just look at the way Senator Landrieu put her vote up for sale. Senator Nelson did the same.

You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t “border on immoral”: it drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.

David Warren discusses Copenhagen, and waxes philosophical on related topics, which you may read in his full article.

The farce in Copenhagen continues. As I have intimated before, I am not without hope for this “earth summit.” I see more and more evidence that people — “electorates” in all the western countries, where we do have elections, and can throw the bums out, which is about the only pleasure we have as “electors” — have seen through this imposture completely. …

…But as I say, this gives me reason for hope. The environmentalists have taken the “global warming” imposture so far, have pushed it with claims so ridiculous, and are by now so well exposed, that some real good is being achieved.

The participants in Copenhagen may or may not succeed in burning through another trillion or five in borrowed money, to fuel new environmentalist bureaucracies. At the moment of writing, it appears even this accomplishment will be denied to them, for they are falling out among themselves, and Barack Obama’s big galvanizing speech has impressed nobody. …

…For the most part, even the most primitive of “third world” dictators saw through the Copenhaggling immediately, and joined in only as a way to board the latest gravy train of western guilt money. This is by now a venerable suckering operation, that began the morning after each backward country became nominally independent. It has kept their politicians rich and their peoples poor. …

David Warren references Gerald Warner‘s blog in the Telegraph, UK. Mr. Warner is about to become one of our favorites.

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do? …

…This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future. …

In the Club For Growth, Michael Connolly reports on the club president’s sarcastic response to ‘meaningful accord’ reached in Copenhagen.

The Club for Growth today hailed President Obama’s announcement in Copenhagen of a “meaningful accord” with China, India, and South Africa about climate change and green house emissions.  Club President Chris Chocola made the following statement after the accord’s announcement:

“Like most Americans, I feared President Obama went to Copenhagen to sign a binding, job-killing, economic suicide pact.

“I am greatly relieved that the last-minute agreement President Obama negotiated is being widely described as ‘meaningful.’  When politicians call something ‘meaningful,’ that means it isn’t.

“Without even reading the accord, pro-growth, limited government conservatives today can celebrate the word, ‘meaningful.’  Today that adjective probably saved thirty million jobs.”

Howard Bloom, in the WSJ, gives a few glimpses of a number of factors that affect earth’s climate, none of which are ‘human-caused’.

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet’s climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It’s Mother Nature’s way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man. …

You would think it’s an exhausted subject, but you will learn it is not. In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor reports on Duke University: the hatred directed at the lacrosse players in 2006 still festers in academia. Actually, it is hatred towards our country.

…Vanderbilt (University) was so proud to have signed up Baker, a professor of English and African and African-American studies at Duke, in April 2006 that it prominently featured a photo of him on its website for months. This was shortly after Baker had issued a March 29, 2006, public letter pressuring the Duke administration to dismiss the lacrosse players — whom he deprecated 10 times as “white” — and all but pronouncing the entire team guilty of “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white, male privilege” against a “black woman who their violence and raucous witness injured for life.”

For such conduct, the official Vanderbilt Register admiringly characterized Baker as Duke’s “leading dissident voice” about the administration’s handling of the rape allegations.

In June 2006, Baker falsely suggested that Duke lacrosse players had raped other women. In a pervasively ugly response to a polite e-mail from the mother of a Duke lacrosse player, he called the team “a scummy bunch of white males” and the woman the “mother of a ‘farm animal.’ ”

In 2007, Cornell proudly lured another of the 88, Grant Farred, with a joint appointment in African studies and English.

This, after the following events: In September 2006 and before, Farred produced such faux scholarship as a nonsensical monograph portraying Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets’ Chinese center, as representing “the most profound threat to American empire.” In October 2006, Farred accused hundreds of Duke students of “secret racism” for registering to vote against Nifong, who was subsequently disbarred for railroading the indicted lacrosse players. In April 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the players innocent. Then Farred smeared them again, as racists and perjurers.

Cornell elevated Farred this year to director of graduate studies in the African-American studies department. …

…The fact that these five people of questionable judgment have subsequently won glorification by Duke or advancement to other prestigious positions may reflect the interaction of academia’s demand for more “diversity” with the small supply of aspiring black professors who are well credentialed in traditional disciplines. These factors, amplified by politically correct ideology, have advanced many academics who — unlike most African-Americans — are obsessed with grievances rooted more in our history of slavery and racial oppression than in contemporary reality. …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Harvey Silverglate has a dark commentary on government prosecutorial abuse and press collusion. This blog post has interesting questions to ask about the whole government case against Blagojevich.

In a discussion on WAMU Radio yesterday, host Kojo Nnamdi noted that vagueness in the federal criminal law has recently made “strange bedfellows” of the political left and right. This same “emerging consensus” was also the subject of an insightful November 23 article by Adam Liptak, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter.

What has occasioned this coming together? As I mentioned here on Monday, individuals and organizations of all political stripes are realizing the danger to all when prosecutors are empowered with exceedingly broad and—worse—hard-to-define federal laws. A diverse coalition of groups—including the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Cato Institute, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the ACLU, among others—have been sounding a clarion call against this species of executive expansion. They have pointed out that, from webmasters to fund managers, no segment of civil society is safe.

But this phenomenon is not new. As I document in Three Felonies a Day, the proliferation of vague laws—and prosecutions under them—began in the mid-1980s. Why has widespread recognition, especially from the American public, taken so long?

For one thing, the Department of Justice has a very effective public relations machine. With every major indictment, there is a press release and, not infrequently, a press conference that major national media typically attend with bated breath. Flanked by FBI, IRS, DEA, SEC, and members of the other myriad supporting agencies, prosecutors feed reporters the government’s side of the case, often a matter of hours after a hapless defendant has been rousted out of bed and paraded in the infamous “perp walk” (much to the delight of press photographers who have been tipped off in advance). At the end of this prejudicial circus-like performance, prosecutors often refuse to answer media questions on the ironic ground that they are bound by the federal court’s rules against pre-trial publicity and, in any event, they do not want to cause the public (especially potential jurors) to prejudge the case! …

John Stossel writes about the electric car tax credit.

…Colangelo says: “I never, in my entire life, got anything back from the government, and I’ve always paid taxes. Why shouldn’t the people who worked hard for their money get something back?”

Because government shouldn’t be in the business of taking money and giving it back! That just gives the venal cretins more power over our lives. …

…The electric-vehicle subsidy is ludicrous not just because it is a form of industrial policy — which almost always picks losers — it’s also destructive because it creates more pollution, not less. That’s because much of the electricity needed for their operation comes from burning coal. As the National Research Council puts it:

“Although they produce no emissions during operation, they rely on electricity powered largely by fossil fuels for their fuel and energy intensive battery manufacturing.”

…Congress makes life worse every time it meets, and green hysteria sucks so many good things from the country.

Government is a meddling presumptuous pain in the neck. The sooner we get it to stop manipulating us through tax laws, the better.

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Mark Steyn writes about the global warming hypocrites in Copenhagen.

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun: “Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the ‘solution’.”

Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. “The fate of my country rests in your hands,” Fry told the meeting. “I make this as a strong and impassioned plea … I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit,” he continued, “his voice choking with emotion,” in the Reuters reporter’s words. Who could fail to be moved?

…As to whether the emotion-choked lachrymose pleader has ever lived in “his” endangered country of Tuvalu, his wife told Samantha Maiden of The Australian that she would “rather not comment.” Like his fellow Copenhagen delegate Brad Pitt, Ian Fry is an actor: He’s not a Tuvaluan, but he plays one on the world stage. …

…So just to recap: The Prince of Wales, a man who has never drawn his own curtains, ramps up a carbon footprint of 2,601 tons while telling us that western capitalist excess is destroying the planet. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the International Panel on Climate Change and has demanded that “hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying,” flew 443,226 miles on “IPCC business” in the year and a half before the Copenhagen summit. And Al Gore is a carbon billionaire: He makes more money buying offsets from himself than his dad did from investing in Occidental Petroleum. …

Charles Krauthammer reflects on the 25 years he has been writing columns.

…Looking back on the quarter-century, the most remarkable period, strangely enough, was the ’90s. They began on Dec. 26, 1991 (just as the ’60s, as many have observed, ended with Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974) with a deliverance of biblical proportions — the disappearance of the Soviet Union. It marked the end of 60 years of existential conflict, the collapse of a deeply evil empire, and the death of one of the most perverse political ideas in history. This miracle, in major part wrought by Ronald Reagan, bequeathed the ultimate peace dividend: a golden age of the most profound peace and prosperity.

“I recently told an assembly at my son’s high school,” I wrote in 1997, “that they were living through a time so blessed they would tell their grandchildren about it. They looked at me uncomprehendingly . . .  because it is hard for anyone to apprehend the sheer felicity of one’s own time until it is gone.”

I concluded with “golden ages never last.” Throughout the decade, and most especially as it began to wane, I returned to this theme of the wondrous oddity, the sheer impossibility of an age of such post-historical tranquility. …

…Of course, it didn’t keep up. It never does. History is tragic, not redemptive. Our holiday from history ended in fire, giving birth to a post-9/11 decade of turbulence and disorientation as we were faced with the unexpected resurgence of radical eschatological evil. …

David Harsanyi reviews the fire and brimstone preachings of the president.

President Barack Obama grimly warned America this week that if his health care plans fail, the nation will go “bankrupt.”

Sure, adding another trillion-dollar entitlement program to our $12 trillion debt may seem like a counterintuitive way to stave off economic ruin, but who are we to argue? The president’s got smarts.

And like with so many issues, Obama adorned his rhetoric with sharp warnings of calamity should he fail, fabricated consensus to buttress his case and a promise of rapture should he succeed.

You’ll remember it was Obama who cautioned that failure to pass the stimulus boondoggle would “turn a crisis into a catastrophe.” He claimed that a failure to act on cap and trade will lead us to “irreversible catastrophe” and a failure to pass a government-run health care system will mean “more Americans dying every day.”

It’s like living the Old Testament. Scary. …

Karl Rove gives some reasons why Obama has received the lowest ratings for a president’s first year in office.

…This kind of attack gives Mr. Obama’s words a slippery quality. For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it “flawed” and blamed “the last administration” for launching it “hastily.”

Really? Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner designed it. If it was “flawed,” why did Mr. Obama later nominate Mr. Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman and make Mr. Geithner his Treasury secretary?

Mr. Obama also claimed at Brookings that he prevented “a second Great Depression” by confronting the financial crisis “largely without the help” of Republicans. Yet his own Treasury secretary suggests otherwise. In a Dec. 9 letter, Mr. Geithner admitted that since taking office, the Obama administration had “committed about $7 billion to banks, much of which went to small institutions.” That compares to $240 billion the Bush administration lent banks. Does Mr. Obama really believe his additional $7 billion forestalled “the potential collapse of our financial system”?

Mr. Obama continued distorting the record in his “60 Minutes” interview Sunday when he blamed bankers for the financial crisis. They “caused the problem,” he insisted before complaining, “I haven’t seen a lot of shame on their part” and pledging to put “a regulatory system in place that prevents them from putting us in this kind of pickle again.”

But as a freshman senator, Mr. Obama supported a threatened 2005 filibuster of a bill regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He doesn’t show “a lot of shame” that he and other Fannie and Freddie defenders blocked “a regulatory system” that might have kept America from getting in such a bad pickle in the first place. …

John Whitehead interviews writer and libertarian Nat Hentoff in the Rutherford Institute.

John W. Whitehead: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?

Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.

In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn’t want torture anymore? Throughout Obama’s career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to. …

JW: Is the so-called health commission that you referred to earlier what some people are referring to as death panels? Is that too strong a word?

NH: …In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia. Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health. That leads to the government not doing it and you gradually or suddenly die. The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England. The tipoff was months ago on the ABC network. President Obama was given a full hour to describe and endorse his health plan. A woman in the audience asked Obama about her mother. Her mother was, I believe, 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn’t want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States. …

James Delingpole blogs in the Telegraph, UK, about the Russians confirming that the data used from Russia was cherry-picked by CRU scientists, and significantly distorts the CRU climate data.

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)

…Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration. …

In the WSJ, Patrick Michaels writes about the global warming conspirators who have been bullying their colleagues. Michaels was on the receiving end of some of the conspirators’ tactics.

…Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn’t like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU’s own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” he wrote in one of the emails. “We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn’t toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones’s line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

This happened to me and to the University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene. …

In Bloomberg News, Christian Wienberg writes that God has a sense of humor.

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”

Delegates from 193 countries have been in Copenhagen since Dec. 7 to discuss how to fund global greenhouse gas emission cuts. U.S. President Barack Obama will arrive before the summit is scheduled to end tomorrow.

Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI’s definition, and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as minus 4 Celsius (25 Fahrenheit). …

The Copenhagen Post also reports on the snow and frigid temperatures the global warming crowd dealing with.

Bitter cold and steady snowfall has paralyzed the country’s roads and public transport since yesterday, and the icy cold weather is expected to get even worse over the next couple days.

On the island of Funen up to a metre of snow fell in some places, while in mid-Jutland several snow plows were reported to be stuck.

National train service DSB had delays on nearly all its lines, with delays of up to an hour on some routes. The S-train system and Metro trains serving the Greater Copenhagen area have also experienced considerable delays.

No serious injuries or deaths have been reported so far as a result of the icy weather, however.

National weather centre DMI has forecast temperatures to drop to a chilly minus 6 by tomorrow evening, along with more snow possibly on the way.

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In the Orange County Register, Alan Bock takes the opportunity to talk with Thomas Sowell about his new book, Intellectuals and Society, and other topics.

…  most academics in the social sciences, people in the media (especially opinion journalists) and most teachers are intellectuals – as is Tom Sowell himself. They – we – often operate in an intellectually enclosed society in which esteem is gained from the opinions of peers rather than from any evidence that our ideas are useful in the real world, freeing them – us – from real accountability as to the validity of the ideas we espouse or generate. Tom Sowell’s serious writing stands up better than most because he assiduously appeals to and analyzes evidence in the real world to support his theories, but when you get down to it he’s an intellectual too.

…In our interview/conversation he expounded on the fact that people generally become “public intellectuals” by veering from the subjects they really know and venturing into areas where they can’t be expected to have serious knowledge. … he reminded us that Noam Chomsky’s innovations in linguistics hardly made him an expert on foreign policy, or that Paul Ehrlich’s training as an entomologist didn’t qualify him to expound on the imminence of world hunger. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when noting that being profoundly wrong hardly ever constrains public intellectuals from expounding on the next real or imagined crisis so long as they share the vision of the anointed – or from being taken seriously by their peers and admirers. …

…That observation is part and parcel of a more general concern that the United States is losing the cohesion and sense of shared values that help a country to hang together when things get rough. A community organizer’s job, he noted, is precisely to polarize people, to intensify a given group’s sense of grievance with the larger society, and he fears that Obama is not able to move beyond that ability to be a leader who unites people. …

Andrew McCarthy has a perfect illustration of Obama’s inability to see beyond the community organizer’s mindset. He writes on the woman proposed for ambassador to El Salvador.

… This is the second time she’s been proposed for an ambassadorship. The first didn’t go so well. President Clinton nominated her to be ambassador to the Dominican Republic but, as detailed on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, it turned out that she had “co-habited” with an agent of the Cuban intelligence service. In fact, a confidential U.S. intelligence memo alleged that she had been recruited to become a Cuban spy in her own right. The revelations caused her nomination to be quietly withdrawn … whereupon she reportedly refused to answer questions from the FBI (saying that since she was no longer seeking an executive branch slot, she no longer needed to cooperate in a background security check). Now, despite that debacle, and heedless of the controversies stoked by Van Jones, Kevin Jennings, et al., Obama wants to press ahead …

Unfortunately the economy is still in serious trouble, says Peter Schiff in EuroPacific Capital.

I hate to shoot down these high-flying expectations, but the economy is not improving. All that has changed is that we are now more indebted to foreign creditors, with even less to show for it. Washington’s current policies have once again deferred the fundamental, market-driven reforms needed to redirect us onto a sustainable path. Instead, through aggressive monetary and fiscal stimuli, we are trying to re-inflate a balloon that is full of holes. This was the Bush Administration’s exact response to the 2002 recession. It’s shocking how few observers note the repeating pattern, especially the fact that each crash is worse than the last. …

…Second, major investment and commercial banks are not back on their feet, but remain fundamentally insolvent. Their current business model of risk-free speculation depends upon the maintenance of government backstops, the continued availability of cheap money from the Fed, and the use of accounting gimmicks that allow them to conceal losses behind phony assumptions. …

…Finally, it is true that the GDP yardstick shows an economy returning to growth. However, as I have often repeated, this measure has deep flaws that render it almost useless for judging the soundness of an economy. Currently, the figures are merely reporting increasing indebtedness as growth. Using GDP as the main financial indicator is equivalent to judging a man’s success by the cost of his house, car, and wristwatch. Rather than gauging income, these figures merely indicate a level of spending and have nothing to do with earning power. …

In the Times, UK, Hannah Devlin, Ben Webster, Philippe Naughton report that the Copenhagen goals are melting away, and Al Gore has stirred up some controversy. We must thank Al Gore, though, because the title of his documentary is the gift that keeps on giving.

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. …

…In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore. …

…Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. …

David Harsanyi writes about requesting information from Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The request was denied because even though the government funds the center, it is not a federal agency and therefore does not fall under the Freedom of Information Act.

…Surely the tragically uninformed among us could use some perspective on innocuous Trenberth comments like “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” or “we are [nowhere] close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter.” …

…In fact, Trenberth’s work is one reason the nation is moving toward rationed energy use via cap-and-trade legislation. His work is one reason the Environmental Protection Agency, through its endangerment findings on carbon emissions, can regulate industry by decree. It is Trenberth’s government-financed science that drives public policy across this country. Yet Trenberth has less accountability to the public than the local parks department. …

…Chris Horner, an attorney and senior fellow at CEI working on the NASA case, says of NCAR: “Without government these jobs would not exist, that is a reasonable threshold test to determine whether documents should be available to the taxpayer.”

Public confidence continues to fall on the global warming alarmism front. There are many reasons for this. But if the evidence of coming tragedy is as incontrovertible as we’re told, taxpayers certainly should not have to beg those they pay to hand it over. …

David Warren says, just wait, once global warming is globally debunked, the militant environmentalists will come up with another environmental disaster with which to extort money and power. For this reason, he calls for criminal prosecutions of the Climategate scientists.

…For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the “global warming” scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those “hacked” documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting “the right results.” This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts.

My reasoning here is that “environmentalism” at large has — like all other “progressive” movements — exploited public gullibility about motivations.

The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure, and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure, while themselves being on the take.

While I do not personally enjoy a mudfight, it is necessary to disarm these people, by taking away this public benefit of the doubt. …

In the Spectator, UK, Melanie Griffiths explicates on a David Rose article about the impact of the Climategate tricked data.

In the Mail on Sunday, David Rose has dug into the email correspondence at the heart of the East Anglia CRU ‘Climate-gate’ scandal and found that, far from being a few carelessly written messages taken out of context, they are – surprise, surprise — a game-changer. He writes correctly that they strike at the very heart of anthropogenic global warming theory by showing that the ‘evidence’ that post-industrial revolution temperatures are unprecedented is a manufactured fiction – and that at least some of these scientists, themselves at the very heart of promulgating AGW theory, knew perfectly well that the evidence did not support their claims. Here’s what Rose reports about the infamous ‘trick ‘of ‘hiding the decline’ to which the CRU director Phil Jones referred and which warmists claim has been wrenched out of context. Not so. Rose writes:

However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling. Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.

There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time. In fact, its subject was more technical – and much more significant.

It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram. It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report – the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century. …

In Reason, Jacob Sullum has decoded Obamaspeak.

“There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits…and investing in job creation and economic growth,” President Obama said last week. “This is a false choice.” During the same speech, he asked his audience to “let me just be clear” that his administration, having racked up the biggest budget deficits ever, is embracing fiscal responsibility, as reflected in his vow that “health insurance reform” will not increase the deficit “by one dime.”

For connoisseurs of Obama-speak, the address featured a trifecta, combining three of his favorite rhetorical tropes. There was the vague reference to “those who” question his agenda, the “false choice” they use to deceive the public, and the determination to “be clear” and forthright, in contrast with those dishonest naysayers. These devices are useful as signals that the president is about to mislead us.

…Here are some other things Obama has asked us to let him be clear about: “Earmarks have given legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects”; the U.S. government “has no interest in running GM”; Medicare cuts will be made “in a way that protects our senior citizens” from changes in benefits or costs; and a “public option” for health care, which would invite businesses to offload their medical costs onto taxpayers and could drive private insurers from the market, “would not impact those of you who already have insurance.” From now on, when you hear Obama speak, try replacing “let me be clear” with “let me lie to you,” and see if it makes more sense. …

Christopher Hitchens has an uplifting article about Iraq.

If the intervention in Iraq was indeed “a war for oil,” then some of that war’s more positive consequences were to be seen in Baghdad last week. The country’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, presided over an auction at which development rights for seven major oil fields were awarded in competitive bidding among several international consortia. Three features of the outcome were worthy of note. The auction was to award service contracts rather than the production-sharing agreements that the major corporations prefer. The price was set at between $1.15 and $1.90 per barrel, as opposed to the $4 that the bidders originally proposed. And American corporations were generally not the winners in an auction where consortia identified with Malaysia, Russia, and even Angola did best. (ExxonMobil and Occidental have, in previous negotiations, been awarded contacts in other Iraqi oil fields.)

Thus, the vulgar and hysterical part of the “war for oil” interpretation has been discredited: Iraq retains its autonomy, the share awarded to outsiders in development is far from exorbitant, and there is no real correlation between U.S. interests and the outcome. Except that we do have a very genuine interest in the success of this endeavor as it unfolds. If the recuperation of Iraq’s oil fields persists, and if production levels continue to rise, the country will begin to reacquire what it lost under the insane regime of Saddam Hussein, which debased the oil infrastructure and then squandered its proceeds. Current production is about 2.5 million barrels a day, which, on current projections, could rise to 7 million barrels in a relatively short time and which Shahristani, perhaps optimistically, believes could rise to 12 million barrels a day in 2016. The potential for this recovery certainly exists. Iraq has the third-largest proven reserves in the world at 115 billion barrels, and new explorations undertaken since the removal of Saddam Hussein and the lifting of sanctions suggest that even that figure could be on the low side.

What this means is that Iraq could quite soon be in a position to rival the output of Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is precisely what many of us in the regime-change camp used to point out: the huge, glittering prize of a democratic and federal Iraq situated between two parasitic theocracies and capable of challenging their oil duopoly.

If you bear this in mind, two further things also become somewhat easier to understand. The unbelievable cruelty and viciousness of the so-called “insurgency,” which daily continues to murder Iraqis in areas of the country that are not patrolled by Americans, is to a considerable extent a mercenary and reactionary movement financed from outside the country. The Sunni killers of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia draw on sources of support within Saudi Arabia, while the Shiite gangs are part of a shadow thrown by the so-called Revolutionary Guards and other paramilitary elements of the Iranian dictatorship. It is they who are shedding blood for oil and trying to prevent the recovery of a country that could challenge their patrons in more ways than one. …

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Mark Steyn has some important thoughts on what is at work behind the campaign for acceptance of the misogynist cultures in our midst.

The other day, George Jonas passed on to his readers a characteristically shrewd observation gleaned from the late poet George Faludy: “No one likes to think of himself as a coward,” wrote Jonas. “People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it’s safer or more convenient, but because it’s the right thing?.?.?.?Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror’s bidding, it’s not because they’re terrified but because they’re socially concerned.” …

…Still, Burka Barbie and Fatima’s Secret are minor and peripheral. What about the so-called most powerful man in the world? “The U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it,” President Obama told his audience in Cairo earlier this year. “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”

My oh my, he’s a profile in courage, isn’t he? It’s true that there have been occasional frictions over, say, the refusal of Muslim women to reveal their faces for their driver’s licences—Sultaana Freeman, for example, sued the state of Florida over that “right.” But the real issue in the Western world is “the right of women and girls” not “to wear the hijab.” A couple of weeks ago in Arizona, a young woman called Noor Almaleki was fatally run over by her father in his Jeep Cherokee for becoming “too Westernized.” If there were a Matthew Shepard-style gay crucifixion every few months, liberal columnists would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in America. But you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse (to cite merely the most lurid recent examples of North American “honour killings”), and nobody cares. Certainly, there’s no danger of Barack Obama ever standing up for the likes of poor Miss Almaleki to a roomful of A-list imams. When it comes to real hate crimes, as opposed to his entirely imaginary epidemic, the president of the United States has smaller cojones than Ken.

If you eschew the Grand Cherokee in favour of the Toronto subway, you may have noticed that the poster girl for the latest “social justice” campaign is a Muslim woman. “Drop Fees for a Poverty-Free Ontario” is the ringing cry, and next to it is a hijab-clad lady speaking up and speaking out. It’s something to do with the cost of post-secondary education, which, like everything else in Canada, is supposed to be “free.” The image is a curious choice as an emblem for educational access: after all, one of the most easily discernible features of societies that adopt Islamic dress is how ignorant they are. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, girls were forbidden by law to attend school—i.e., not just fritter-away-half-a-decade-on-Ontario-taxpayers “post-secondary” education, but kindergarten and Grade 1. In Pakistan, 60 per cent of women are illiterate. …

The editors at WaPo reach deep into the paper to bring us news about the Dems and DC vouchers. Seems like there won’t be any more voucher kids with Malia and Sasha at Sidwell Friends School.

IT IS DISTRESSINGLY clear that congressional leaders never really meant it when they said there would be a fair hearing to determine the future of the District’s federally funded school voucher program. How else to explain language tucked away in the mammoth omnibus spending bill that would effectively kill the Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program?

Deep in the folds of the thousand-page 2010 spending bill, which wraps together six bills, is language that (thankfully) would continue funding for students currently in the program but close it down for new students. Also included are onerous requirements about testing and site visits.

Contrary to claims of this being a compromise, the measure is really slow death for a program that provides $7,500 annually to low-income students to attend private schools. The number of students participating in the program has already shrunk from more than 1,700 to 1,319, and the nonprofit that administers the scholarships has said that it may have to pull out because the conditions would be untenable. It’s also possible that some schools that now enroll voucher students could be forced to shut down.

Key lawmakers in the appropriation process have been, at best, disingenuous about their intentions, thus placing the program’s advocates in their current no-win situation. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) made encouraging comments about allowing new students but, despite his clout as majority whip, did nothing to make that happen. Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) said that he didn’t want to usurp local control, even as the mayor, the schools chancellor and a majority of the D.C. Council lobbied for the acceptance of new students. …

In Minyanville, John Mauldin looks in-depth at unemployment and the economy, and suggests we will be missing a lot of jobs for a long time.

…As it turns out, Princeton Professor Paul Krugman agrees. On December 11, he wrote in the New York Times:

“I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment. How big? My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. It was basically a terrible report, which was reported as good news only because we’ve been down so long that it looks like up, to the financial press.” …

…Everywhere, the headlines said continuing claims are plunging. And they did. But what really happened is that the drop wasn’t from people getting jobs but from people rolling over to the extended-benefits programs. The states, by and large, pay for the first 26 weeks, and that’s where we get the continuing-claim reported number from. (In some parts of the US however, you can get unemployment insurance for up to 99 months, paid for by the federal government. …

…It was reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 10% from 10.2%. To get that number, they had to shrink the number of people looking for work by 98,000. Basically, if you haven’t looked for work in the last four weeks, you’re said to be “discouraged” and are taken out of the unemployment statistics. If you add back in the discouraged workers, the rate goes up to 10.5%. And it’s worse than that. If you haven’t looked for a job in 12 months, you’re taken off the rolls altogether.

Here’s one of the reasons that the unemployment number is going to remain stubbornly high through 2010. Let’s assume a modest recovery of 3%, which is maybe enough to get jobs back into the 150,000 range. As people go back to work, that 0.5% of discouraged workers starts to look for jobs and they’re now counted as unemployed. That small number of 0.5% is 750,000 people that will be (should be) added back into the unemployment numbers!

Let’s use Krugman’s 100,000 jobs a month needed to keep up with population growth. (Studies are all over the place on this. 100,000 is the low estimate and 150,000 is the high.) That means we need 1.2 million new jobs next year just to keep the unemployment rate at 10%. And another 750,000 jobs to go to the discouraged workers who will want to start looking. Close to two million jobs will be needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising.

And the current business climate says that’s not going to happen. …

IBD editors comment on the government spending that is going on during the recession.

…Congress is raising the federal debt ceiling by as much as $1.8 trillion in hopes that next October, when Republicans will be pounding them on this, voters won’t remember what they were up to way back in December of 2009.

But that astronomical amount is twice what was baked into their budget resolution earlier this year. When asked about so much red ink, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., just shrugged and told the Politico: “The credit card has already been used. When you get the bill in the mail you need to pay it.”

Except that it isn’t Obey or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or President Barack Obama paying for the trillions they have racked up on their American Excess card. It’s you, the long-suffering American taxpayer. …

…Among the countless absurdities built into the federal salary system is the mandate that when the head of an agency gets a raise, lots of his underlings automatically do too. That’s what happens when it’s play money you’re handling, which is what Washington thinks the revenues provided by the people who give politicians their jobs is.

The average pay for all these thumb-twiddling geniuses is $30,000 more than that of workers in the real world of the private sector — $71,206 vs. $40,331. …

Charles Lane, in WaPo, lists three things that Obama or Congress could do immediately to increase jobs that Congress would not have to spend money on.

…End federal protectionism and price supports for sugar. Since 1982, the federal government has guaranteed the U.S. sugar lobby — er, industry — up to 85 percent of the market. The rest gets divided among other countries lucky enough to hold quotas. The government also guarantees minimum prices for raw cane sugar and refined beet sugar.

Sugar is an ingredient in a huge percentage of candy, beverages and baked goods. Expensive sugar makes it expensive to produce those goodies. U.S. candy-makers and other food processors cite sugar costs as a major factor in their industry’s recent job losses — including 70,000 between 1997 and 2004. …

…Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. Passed in the 1930s to “stabilize” the construction industry (in part by protecting white workers in the North against competition from migrating Southern blacks), this law requires employers to pay the “prevailing” local wage on federally funded projects. Today, Davis-Bacon applies to about a third of all public construction spending.

A large staff at the Labor Department calculates prevailing wages using a formula skewed to reflect union pay rates. This inflates the cost of labor on public construction by an average of about 10 percent, according to a 2008 study by the Beacon Hill Institute of Suffolk University in Boston. The added cost to taxpayers was $8.6 billion in 2007, the study found. …

…We are experiencing the worst unemployment since 1982 (when Congress enacted the sugar program), and the second-worst unemployment since the Great Depression (when we got Davis-Bacon and the federal minimum wage). Yet these outmoded, job-killing policies linger on the books. …

The WSJ editors wants a teaching moment with Obama.

The Obama Administration desperately wants a strong economic recovery, or so it says, but does it have any idea how to encourage one?

It says it wants job growth, but its policies keep raising the cost of creating new jobs. It says it wants small business to take risks, but it keeps reducing the rewards if those risks succeed. And it says it wants banks to lend more money, even as it keeps threatening to punish bankers if they make too many bad loans or make too much money. …

…Mr. Obama summed up his White House meeting with the bank CEOs by once again blaming them for the financial crisis and suggesting that they have an obligation to support new regulation being written by Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.).

You have to smile at that irony. No two Members of Congress did more to encourage the financial crisis, by preventing reform of the government-sponsored housing behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By ignoring Washington’s role in creating the credit mania, Mr. Obama is hardly offering confidence that his financial reform efforts will prevent a repeat. …

In the New York Daily News, James Kirchick comments on the NPR kerfuffle over Mara Liasson’s appearances on FOX.

…According to Politico, NPR honchos in October told Liasson she should “reconsider” appearing on the network.

Liasson stood her ground and is still a Fox regular. You can add this episode to the vast catalogue of incidents demonstrating the American left’s intolerance for the airing of views that dissent from liberal orthodoxy. But what’s so chilling about this revelation is that NPR’s attempt to silence Liasson occurred just as the White House‘s war against Fox News was in full gear. NPR denies that it coordinated with the Obama administration, and that’s probably true, as the station didn’t need prompting. As early as this February, station executives asked NPR contributor Juan Williams not to identify himself as such when appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

NPR should be pleased to have exposure on the country’s top cable news channel, but the station panicked when the mere presence of Liasson led to complaints from the station’s liberal listeners - most of whom, I’ll wager, never even watch Fox.

Station execs never accused Liasson of saying anything objectionable during her Fox appearances. It was simply her attendance at the news desk that so angered Fox’s critics. …

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Colby Cosh, in Macleans, writes about Stephen McIntyre, the global-warming skeptic who has quietly and methodically discredited some of the cherished creations of the militant environmentalists.

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times. …

…McIntyre first became notorious in 2003 for his statistical critique, co-authored with economist Ross McKitrick, of the “hockey stick graph” that showed global temperatures rocketing upward in the 20th century. The hockey stick, featured in the 2001 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had a profound influence on policy worldwide, and played a starring role in presentations like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The McIntyre-McKitrick critique called attention to uncertainties in its temperature reconstructions dating back before 1600, to certain problems with dendrochronology (the use of tree rings to estimate past temperatures), and to issues with the statistical calculations underlying the hockey stick. Some climatologists insist that the graph tells the same story when you correct for all this, but much of the critique is now accepted, and the hockey stick, whose weaknesses are better understood, has itself become a somewhat inconvenient distraction for climatologists and environmentalists.

Meanwhile, McIntyre, working alone, has gone on to score further critical points. In 2007, he caught a mistake in the reporting of U.S. surface temperatures by NASA’s Goddard Institute that was quickly acknowledged, with thanks, and corrected. (NASA’s gracious manner contrasts sharply with the attitudes displayed behind the scenes at the CRU.)

The truth is that McIntyre, 62, little resembles the caricature of a wild-eyed climate-change “denier.” He is scrupulous about focusing his criticism on statistical procedures and disclosure practices. He is polite to, and about, climate scientists. He refuses to make grand categorical statements of the “Global warming is just commie horse puckey” type, preferring to remain agnostic, and he discourages such talk on his website, Climate Audit.

When reached for an interview, he interrupts briefly to turn down a request to appear on BBC television about the exploding “Climategate” scandal. “Anything I say now would just be piling on,” he remarks, noting that he has no interest in helping the media stage a drama of personalities. Given the opportunity of a lifetime to gloat over those who referred to him as a “moron” and “Mr. I’m Not Entirely There In The Head,” he demurs. …

Toby Harnden gives Obama props for his Nobel acceptance speech.

…The Obama who turned up was not just a Bush but also a Ronald Reagan, a John F. Kennedy and a Franklin D. Roosevelt – in short, an American president who articulated enduring American principles, values and interests. …

…True, the self-referential Obama who is confident in his own historical greatness was in there. Few men would have the audacity to speak of their “great humility” and then describe themselves a few breaths later as being “living testimony to the moral force of non-violence”.

And it is a stretch to argue that the speech outlined an “Obama doctrine” that fuses realism and idealism. In truth, there was little original in what Obama said. If anything, that was part of what lent the speech its significance – he was embracing the historical essence of what it means to be an American commander-in-chief. …

…We shall see whether Obama can fulfill the promise of his Oslo speech and follow through by making its moral clarity a guiding force rather than a mere momentary rhetorical flourish. …

Robert Samuelson has written numerous articles about healthcare reform and Obamacare fallacies. Here he discusses the savings that the Obami are currently touting.

We are witnessing a determined counterattack by the Obama administration and its political allies on the matter of health-care costs. Many critics (including me) have argued that President Obama’s “reform” agenda wouldn’t control rapidly rising health spending and might speed it up. The logic is simple. People with insurance use more health services than those without. If government insures 30 million or more Americans, health spending will rise. Greater demand will press on limited supply; prices will increase. The best policy: Control spending first, then expand coverage.

But the administration insists that it can insure most of the uninsured and tackle runaway health spending simultaneously. There’s so much waste in today’s health-care system that both goals can be pursued together, Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, has said. …

…Who’s right? Let’s start with the numbers. Unfortunately, the word “savings” is used misleadingly. It doesn’t mean (as is usual) actual reductions; it signifies smaller future increases. There’s a big difference.

In 2009, national health spending will total an estimated $2.5 trillion, or 17.7 percent of gross domestic product. By 2019, it’s projected to rise to $4.67 trillion under present policies, or 22.1 percent of GDP. With CAP’s “savings,” it rises a little less sharply to $4.49 trillion, or 21.3 percent of GDP, according to Harvard economist David Cutler, the study’s co-author, who provided these figures. Similarly, family health insurance premiums rise from 19 percent of median family income in 2009 to 25 percent in 2019 under present policies and 23 percent with CAP’s “savings.” The point is simple: Even with highly optimistic assumptions, health spending remains out of control. It absorbs more of government, business and family budgets. Higher health spending would put pressure on future budget deficits, already projected to total about $9 trillion over the next decade. If new taxes and Medicare “savings” are real, they could be used exclusively to pay down deficits, not finance new spending.

But many may not be real. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, gave the various health bills a “failing grade” and said they wouldn’t “control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care.” Quoted in Newsweek, Dr. Delos Cosgrove, head of the Cleveland Clinic, said much the same. Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, doubts the cost-saving provisions touted by CAP would save much money. He’s also skeptical that Congress, facing complaints from hospitals and a squeeze on services, would allow all the Medicare reimbursement cuts to take effect. True, Congress has permitted some reimbursement reductions to occur, but it has repeatedly blocked the Sustainable Growth Rate adjustment for doctors, which most resembles the new proposals. …

Thomas Sowell’s fourth installment on the housing bubble could be titled ‘Why Congress should not be in charge of anything important.’

Many in Congress and elsewhere never really got it.

Rep. Barney Frank, in response to warnings about growing riskiness in housing markets, said in 2003: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping make housing more affordable.” Critics “exaggerate a threat of safety” and “conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see.” …

…He said, “I would like to get Fannie and Freddie more deeply into helping low-income housing and possibly moving into something that is more explicitly a subsidy.” He added: “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.” …

…Frank was by no means the only member of Congress to dismiss warnings and assert that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were safe and sound institutions. His counterpart in the Senate, Chairman Christopher Dodd of the Senate Banking Committee, was equally adamant on the subject and continued to be so equally long — well into 2008, long after the financial system had already gone into a historic collapse. …

…After accounting errors totaling $11 billion were discovered in the books of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, President Bush in 2007 said that these government-sponsored enterprises should complete “a robust reform package” before being allowed to expand their mortgage portfolios. Sen. Dodd said that President Bush should “immediately reconsider his ill-advised” position. …

In Forbes, Richard Epstein makes some suggestions as to what Obama can do to improve the economy.

…Exhibit A is Christina Romer’s recent Wall Street Journal column, “Putting Americans Back to Work.” Romer heads the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Her column rates as a bit of transparent propaganda that belongs in a fan magazine, not a serious newspaper. If she wrote it of her own volition, she should be fired for economic incompetence. If, as seems more likely, the White House wrote it for her, or told her just what to say, she should resign in protest. …

…Instead of her presidential genuflection, Romer should have given this blunt advice to the president:

You can only improve labor markets by freeing them up. Scrap the talk about goofy ad hoc subsidies, and tell the president, for the first time in his life, to think hard about deregulation. Roll back the three recent minimum-wage increases that have blunted job creation for low-skilled workers in a stagnant labor market. Announce he will veto any effort by Congress to pass the Employer Free Choice Act, whose uncertain threat of compulsory unionization has prompted many businesses to shelve any plans for expansion. Abandon the monstrous health care bills winding through Congress, whose panoply of taxes, subsidies and regulations are job killers of the first magnitude. Put a halt on legislation for carbon caps and taxes until the science gets sorted out. Don’t let the EPA make a hasty endangerment finding on carbon dioxide.

Deregulation costs nothing to administer, increases jobs and adds to the tax base. It is only an added benefit that sound economics reduces presidential power. …

In Science News, Lisa Grossman reports that a new theory has emerged about how water poured into the Mediterranean at the Straits of Gibraltar.

A cataclysmic flood could have filled the Mediterranean Sea — which millions of years ago was a dry basin — like a bathtub in the space of less than two years. A new model suggests that at the flood’s peak water poured from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin at a rate one thousand times the flow of the Amazon River, according to calculations published in the Dec. 10 Nature.

“In an instantaneous flash, the dry Mediterranean became a normal Mediterranean like we see it today,” says lead author Daniel Garcia-Castellanos of Spain’s Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Barcelona

He and his colleagues calculate that at the height of the flood, water levels rose more than 10 meters and more than 40 centimeters of rock eroded away per day. The model also shows that 100 million cubic meters of water flowed through the channel per second, with water gushing at speeds of 100 kilometers an hour. Rather than a Niagara Falls-esque cascade from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, the team’s results imply a torrent several kilometers wide at a fairly gradual slope.

“It would be an exciting rafting place,” Garcia-Castellanos says.

“As a hypothesis it makes sense, though it’s still in early stages,” says Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London. “There’s lots more to be done to explore this idea. It’s quite exciting, and I think it will get people interested in this topic.”  …

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In the Spectator, UK, Melanie Griffiths posts a speech given by historian Andrew Roberts about the disappointing relationship the UK has had with Israel. He reviews the historical record and highlights a number of points where British support was nominal or nonexistent, and how this pattern continues.

It’s a great honour to be invited to address you, especially on this the 60th anniversary of AIA (Anglo-Israel Association), and I’d like to take the opportunity of this anniversary to look at the overall story of the relationship between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths. …

…Because there are 22 ambassadors to Arab countries, and only one to Israel, it is perhaps natural that the FO (Foreign Office) should tend to be more pro-Arab than pro-Israeli. … Overall, however, such men are swimming against the tide of an FO assumption that Britain’s relations with Israel ought constantly to be subordinated to her relations with other Middle Eastern states, especially the oil-rich ones, however badly those states behave in terms of human rights abuses, the persecution of Christians, the oppression of women, medieval practices of punishment, and so on.

It seems to me that there is an implicit racism going on here. Jews are expected to behave better, goes the FO thinking, because they are like us. Arabs must not be chastised because they are not. So in warfare, we constantly expect Israel to behave far better than her neighbours, and chastise her quite hypocritically when occasionally under the exigencies of national struggle, she cannot. The problem crosses political parties today, just as it always has. William Hague called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2007, as though proportionate responses ever won any victories against fascists. In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 600,000 Germans – twelve times the number and hardly a proportionate response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses should be?

Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would not do placed in the same position? The population of the United Kingdom of 63 millions is nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example entirely at random, Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed 8 patrolmen and kidnapped 2 others, and that summer fired 4,000 Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further 43 civilians. Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would not do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire 36,000 rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 British civilians, after killing 72 British servicemen in an ambush and capturing a further eighteen? I put it to you that there is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right too. So why should Israel be expected to behave any differently? …

…Although History does not repeat itself, it’s cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this:

That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.

In the Corner, Daniel Foster posts on CBS’s report that Bin Laden’s successor was killed.

Reports about this have been floating around for a while but this is the first I’ve seen with a name — and that of a “natural successor to Bin Laden” to boot.

(CBS)  A U.S. government official says a top al Qaeda operative has been killed in a drone attack in western Pakistan, and local media says that the strike killed al Qaeda’s number 3 in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi.

The U.S. is still not confirming the report, CBS News has learned.

Abu Yahya al-Libi is the spiritual successor to Palestinian philosopher Abu Azzam – and the inspiration for much of Bin Laden’s beliefs, according to CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan. He is very powerful and believed by some to be the natural successor to Bin Laden.

Intelligence officials have confirmed that the pace of attacks by armed unmanned aerial vehicles has increased during the Obama administration.

As Jim Geraghty Tweeted: “If our drone killed an al-Qaeda bigwig DURING Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, it would be as cool as the closing scenes of The Godfather.”

Ariana Eunjung Cha, in WaPo, looks at the aging population in China. China instituted controls to decrease the population, and have ended up creating more issues for its society. Perhaps Thomas Friedman will lose his admiration for Chinese coercion. Remember this?: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

…More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed “little emperors,” a population crisis is looming in the country.

The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple as compared with six when the policy went into effect, according to the U.N. Population Division, while the number of residents 60 and older is predicted to explode from 16.7 percent of the population in 2020 to 31.1 percent by 2050. That is far above the global average of about 20 percent. …

…Almost overnight, posters directing families to have only one child were replaced by copies of regulations detailing who would be eligible to have a second child and how to apply for a permit. …

“People in the West wrongly see the one-child policy as a rights issue,” said Yang, a construction engineer whose wife is seven months pregnant with the couple’s first child. “Yes, we are being robbed of the chance to have more than one child. But the problem is not just some policy. It is money.” …

…Wang, the human resources administrator, said she wants an only child because she was one herself: “We were at the center of our families and used to everyone taking care of us. We are not used to taking care of and don’t really want to take care of others.” …

Victor Davis Hanson reviews the disastrous first year of the Obami with a list of notorious actions. Here are some of the events that made his list.

The fight with the former CIA directors

Czars everywhere

Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” chauvinism

The demonization of the Town-Hallers

The Obama readjustment in the order of paying back car creditors

The Emanuel “never let a serious crisis go to waste” boast

The planned $9 trillion added to the national debt

New income tax rates; health care surcharge talk; and payroll tax caps to be lifted

Rahm Emanuel’s promised payback to those states that trash the stimulus

Voting present on the Iranian reformers in the street

Charles Krauthammer discusses the outrageous overreach of authority seen in the EPA’s recent announcement regarding carbon dioxide. There is more to the story than just the militant environmentalists totalitarian intentions; there is a power struggle between the legislative and executive branches.

…On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an “endangerment” to human health.

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.

…Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There’s the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society — as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based — you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats. …

John Podhoretz posts on Tiger’s troubles.

…The United States is an inscrutable place in many ways. We live in a country in which it is likely a sixth state out of the 50 is going to legalize gay marriage in the next few weeks. On television, practically every night, one show or other features a scene of two women kissing. We do not judge illegitimacy any longer. And so on. We lived through a scandal a decade ago in which we learned the president of the United States had basically seduced a 21 year-old employee in his service—and tens of millions of people hotly defended his and her right to privacy and condemned the notion that there was any public interest served in the exploration of the subject of his misconduct.

Yet now, as 2009 draws to a close, someone who is famous and rich because he is a brilliant player of a game—someone, moreover, who is unique among American celebrities in his manifest refusal to do anything to court or interest or woo the audience that is so fascinated by him—drives his car into a tree, and for nearly two weeks, we are overrun with the details of his personal indiscretions. It is fascinating. If ever there were a subject that is truly and completely and without question nobody’s business, it is this one. He did not violate a public trust, he broke no law, evidently, in his traffic accident, and no legal action has been taken in the case. These would all ordinarily be the triggers for a news story and its continuation. But it is open season on Tiger Woods. Let anyone say there might be a legitimate debate to be conducted on the redefinition of marriage, which is a public-policy issue involving pretty much everybody, and that is considered beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse by a great many people slobbering over the discovery of the latest IHOP waitress to have caught Woods’s fancy.

I hold no brief for Tiger Woods’s behavior, but it strikes me as among the least surprising revelations in the course of human history. It is America’s prurience on this matter in the midst of its own cultural confusion on matters sexual and marital that surprises and confounds.

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Mark Steyn on the absurdity of the Obami and big government.

…The Obama speechwriting team … seem(s) to be the last guys on the planet in love with the sound of his voice and their one interminable tinny tune with its catchpenny hooks. The usual trick is to position their man as the uniquely insightful leader, pitching his tent between two extremes no sane person has ever believed: “There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause.”…

…The news this week that the well-connected Democrat pollster, Mark Penn, received $6 million of “stimulus” money to “preserve” three jobs in his public relations firm to work on a promotional campaign for the switch from analog to digital TV is a perfect snapshot of Big Government. In the great sucking maw of the federal treasury, $6 million isn’t even a rounding error. But it comes from real people – from you and anybody you know who still makes the mistake of working for a living; and, if it had been left in your pockets, you’d have spent it in the real world, at a local business or in expanding your own, and maybe some way down the road it would have created some genuine jobs. Instead, it got funneled to a Democrat pitchman to preserve three nonjobs on a phony quasi-governmental PR campaign. Big Government does that every minute of the day. When Mom’n'Pop Cola of Dead Skunk Junction gets gobbled up by Coke, there are economies of scale. When real economic activity gets annexed by state, and then federal, government, there are no economies of scale. In fact, the very concept of “scale” disappears, so that tossing six million bucks away to “preserve” three already-existing positions isn’t even worth complaining about.

At his jobs summit, Obama seemed, rhetorically, to show some understanding of this. But that’s where his speechifying has outlived its welcome. When it’s tough and realistic (we need to be fiscally responsible; there are times when you have to go to war in your national interest; etc), it bears no relation to any of the legislation. And, when it’s vapid and utopian, it looks absurd next to Harry Reid, Barney Frank & Co’s sleazy opportunism. For those of us who oppose the shriveling of liberty in both Washington and Copenhagen, a windy drone who won’t sit down keeps the spotlight on the racket. Once more from the top, Barack!

The country is on to them, The Rasmussen Daily Prez Poll is finding new depths. The poll tracks the difference between strongly approve and strongly disapprove. When he took office, it was +30. Today it set a new low of -19. Looking at the trends, 36 points of this 49 point decline came about in four separate periods of about one week. The first was in March right after Eric Holder declared when it came to race, we are a “nation of cowards.” Next at the end of June and beginning of July we saw Obama’s lack of interest in the protests in Iran . Then at the end of July came Gatesgate and the trashing of the Cambridge, MA police. The last period is 12/9 – today 12/13, when the index has moved from -10 to -19. Anybody think of notable Nobel reasons for that?

David Warren comments on the fraud being committed by the global warming crowd.

A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen “Earth summit” has even been attempted before in human history. …

…This “man-made crisis” is the successor to many previous environmental scares, each designed as a means to shake down western taxpayers, and justify the creation of huge, intrusive, national and international bureaucracies for the benefit of their sponsors. One thinks of everything from the pioneering DDT scare of the early 1960s, forward — including the various Club of Rome forecasts from the 1970s, and even the “global cooling” scare of the previous generation, now conveniently buried in the mists of the world before Google. …

…As these frauds have been perpetrated by largely the same class of people, each environmental scare has benefited from experience gained in publicizing the previous one, through supine liberal media. “Environmentalism” has moreover ballooned since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Reds of this world, defeated in the ambition to impose socialism directly, have turned Green in pursuit of the same end: the creation of an international command economy, under their own “expert” direction. …

…The very premise is ludicrous: demonizing carbon dioxide as a “pollutant,” when it is a vital part of the Earth’s atmosphere, absolutely essential not only to plant life but everything that depends on plants.

This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under the usual radical Obama appointment (Lisa P. Jackson), did something that could be fairly described as insane. It declared carbon dioxide and five other benign atmospheric “greenhouse gases” to be threats to public health, thus awarding itself extraordinary regulatory power over the entire economy, beyond reach of the U.S. Congress. Yet this is only one of innumerable strange and unnatural acts, being performed under the veil of Copenhagen.

In National Review, Andrew McCarthy looks at the Attorney General Eric Holder playing politics with important issues.

‘This,” said Eric Holder, “is almost a ‘Trust me’ thing.” The attorney general of the United States was trying to reassure Alice Hoagland, whose 31-year-old son, Mark Bingham, lost his life with the other heroic passengers who wrested control of Flight 93 from four suicide hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda’s likely target was the U.S. Capitol, and, eight years later, Holder was at that same Capitol, attempting to justify treating acts of war — the deadliest ever committed on U.S. soil — as mere crimes.

In November, Holder announced what he insists is his own decision to vest Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other jihadists with the constitutional rights once enjoyed by Mark Bingham and the nearly 3,000 other Americans they massacred. The Obama administration is transferring this al-Qaeda quintet from military custody at Guantanamo Bay, where they’ve been held as enemy combatants and charged as war criminals under the authority of a congressionally approved military commission. They will be brought to New York City, where, in what used to be the shadow of the Twin Towers, they will be swaddled in the Bill of Rights at a civilian trial in a majestic Manhattan courthouse. That courthouse is the epicenter of the law-enforcement approach to terrorism regnant in the 1990s while Holder served as the No. 2 official in the Clinton Justice Department — a time when nearly as many terrorists were pardoned as prosecuted, while al-Qaeda serially attacked U.S. interests.

Alice Hoagland had flown in from California to hear Holder explain himself to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She intercepted him as he was making his way out of the hearing room. After hours of Holder’s uneven, unconvincing, and occasionally uninformed testimony, Hoagland was badly in need of reassurance. Composed but clearly disturbed, she told the attorney general, “I take great exception to your decision to give short shrift to the military commissions.” So do dozens of the 9/11 victims’ family members, along with millions of Americans who have seen the video of Holder’s dreadful performance. …

…To further the myth of a fully detached Obama, the administration projects a fully engaged Holder, hitting the books, agonizing for long hours over the most difficult decision of his career. But at the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) exploded the myth by asking the most elementary legal question: What is the precedent? “Can you give me a case in United States history,” he asked, “where an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?” After several seconds of excruciating silence, Holder stammered, “I don’t know, I’d have to look at that.” What, pray tell, has he been looking at, if not that? Senator Graham, an experienced Air Force lawyer, informed the nation’s top law-enforcement official that there has been no such case.

Holder was equally adrift on the policy implications of his decision. What happens, Senator Graham continued, if we capture Osama bin Laden tomorrow? Does he get Miranda warnings, a defense lawyer during his interrogation, and a civilian trial? A flustered Holder answered, “That all depends.” Even as he disputed Graham’s contention that he was “criminalizing the war,” Holder demonstrated that he was doing just that. The government, he explained, had neither “the desire [nor] the need” to question bin Laden because “the case against him at this point is so overwhelming.” It apparently did not occur to Holder that United States might have an interest in doing something with bin Laden other than prosecuting him — for instance, interrogating him about ongoing plots. That, presumably, is Dick Cheney stuff — the sort of thing that was done with KSM, with the result that many Americans are alive today who might otherwise have missed the spectacle of his civilian trial.

The elevation of politics over duty, coupled with a willingness to say almost anything in order to defend this elevation, is vintage Holder. …

David Harsanyi tells politicians to stay out of college sports.

…Barton (not entertaining) explained that this year’s testimony from college bigwigs had been “more cogent than four years ago and it is much more open about why the bowl system exists — and it is money.”

Really? Money, you say? College football generates millions of dollars and operates through interstate commerce. Isn’t that why Barton claimed to have a government interest in the BCS in the first place?

Of course it’s about money. Many bowls will feature strong teams that the public has a desire to watch. Now, I don’t mean to offend any sports fans, but there are schools that create anticipation and drive ratings across the country. And then there are teams from Utah. …

In USA Today, Dennis Cauchon has a really obscene story for us. Want to know where the stimulus money is going?

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000. …

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Ross Douthat was in Pickings October 14th with this Nobel advice.

This was Barack Obama’s chance.

Here was an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that’s weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.

Here was a place to draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.

Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.

He didn’t take it. Instead, he took the Nobel Peace Prize.

Big mistake. …

Was Douthat right? Toby Harnden in the Daily Telegraph, UK has some answers.

… Obama will need all his famed rhetorical skills to persuade an angry Left, sceptical Americans and churlish Norwegians that he is a worthy recipient of the prize. By the end of Thursday, I’d hazard that he will well be wishing he’d never accepted the damn prize and had stayed at home trying to fix the economy instead.

The Daily Beast reports on some unhappiness in Oslo. Are they still in love? Not so much.

A day before President Obama receives his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the president’s treatment of his Norwegian hosts has become hot news across Scandinavia.

News outlets across the region are calling Obama arrogant for slashing some of the prize winners’ traditional duties from his schedule. “Everybody wants to visit the Peace Center except Obama,” sniped the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, amid reports the president would snub his own exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center. “A bit arrogant—a bit bad,” proclaimed another Aftenposten headline.

“It’s very sad,” said Nobel Peace Center Director Bente Erichsen of the news that Obama would skip the peace center exhibit. …

… “It’s very strange that he is unwilling to meet the press,” said Marie Simonsen, political editor at Dagbladet, one of Norway’s biggest daily newspapers. “I’m very disappointed. You get the impression he is not proud of the prize.” …

Jennifer Rubin liked parts of Obama’s speech.

… the president gives perhaps his most robust defense yet of America’s role in the world and of his responsibilities as a wartime commander in chief. Moreover, he uses the E world — yes, evil. He explains:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago – “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak –nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

This will stick in the craw of the Left, which found George Bush hopelessly daft and downright dangerous for identifying “evildoers” and an “axis of evil” and which vilified (and still does) the vast neocon conspiracy (or Manichean conspiracy, as Peter Beinart recently sneered) — namely, those who have made the case for robust wars against the forces of evil that threaten America and the West. …

Roger Simon blogs on the Iran protests. Where is the leader of the free world during all of this?

It’s not a secret to readers of this site that I am not a fan of Barack Obama. I have not been since I learned he remained in the pews of the Reverend Wrights’ church for twenty years. But even more disturbing than that for me has been his Iran policy, which can described as somewhere between dysfunctional and reactionary. In the face of the incredibly brave freedom demonstrators – who, almost on a daily basis, put themselves at risk of beatings and death – we have from our president nothing but silence. Does the man have blood in his veins? This is real “hope,” yet he ignores it. Of course, the freedom fighters themselves have noticed, chanting in the streets “Obama, Obama, are you with us or are you with them?” Good question.

Now the action has escalated to the point that even the New York Times itself has noticed: “Iran’s broadest and most violent protest in months spilled over into a second day on Tuesday, as bloody clashes broke out on university campuses between students chanting antigovernment slogans and the police and Basij militia members.”

Michael Ledeen, as always, has more, including a violent confrontation between the Basij and the wife of reform leader Mousavi. But worth noting from the NYT coverage is the following: “Monday’s protests marked a striking escalation in direct attacks on the country’s theocratic foundation and not just on the June presidential elections, which the opposition has attacked as fraudulent. Protesters burned pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei, and even the father of the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They held up flags from which the “Allah” emblem, added after the revolution, had been removed.” …

…Meanwhile, if you want to stay updated on matters in Iran, as we all should, I would direct you to PJTV correspondent Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi’s Planet Iran. I will be on PJTV with Banafsheh discussing recent events in the country on Wednesday, but for now check out her site. It has many videos from Monday’s demonstrations – not to mention continued frustration on the part of the demonstrators with, you guessed it, Barack Obama.

Mark Steyn has a somber commentary on defending Western culture and values.

… “Think globally, act locally” works for environmentalism and jihad. Adherents of both causes are saving the planet from the same enemy — decadent capitalist infidels living empty consumerist lives. Both faiths claim their tenets are beyond discussion. Only another climate scientist can question the climate-science “consensus” … Likewise, on Islam, for an unbeliever to express a view is “Islamophobic.” As to which of these competing globalisms is less plausible, I leave it to readers: Barack Obama promises to lower the oceans; Hizb ut-Tahrir promises a global caliphate. The Guardian’s ecopalyptic Fred Pearce says Australia will be uninhabitable within a few years; Islam4UK says Britain will be under sharia within a few years. I’m not a betting man but if I had to choose . . .

“Think globally, act locally”: but, if you’re on the receiving end of globalized pathologies, it’s very hard to act locally. …  If you truly believe that Islam is the cuckoo in your clock, you might ban new mosque construction or even Muslim immigration. Instead, they have banned a symbolic architectural flourish, while the mosque-building and the immigration continue — which means that one day the minaret ban will be overturned. And were the country a member of the European Union, even this forlorn gesture would not be permitted.

… Recently, the writer Barbara Kay testified to the House of Commons in Ottawa about a Jewish teacher at a francophone school in Ontario. Around 2002 she began to encounter explicitly anti-Semitic speech from Muslim students: “Does someone smell a Jew? It stinks here.” “You are not human, you are a Jew.” Had Anglo-Saxon skinheads essayed such jests, Oliver Kamm’s warriors of secular pluralism would have crushed them like bugs. But when the teacher went to the principal, and the school board, and the local “hate-crimes unit,” they all looked the other way and advised her that it would be easier if she retired. Sixty out of 75 French teachers at the school opted to leave: A couple were Jewish, a few more practicing Catholics, and most of the rest were the liberal secularists on whom Oliver Kamm’s defense of the West rests. The francophone children withdrew, too. And now the principal and most of the students and faculty are Muslim. …

In US News & World Report, MSNBC’s Michelle Bernard discusses her concerns about Obamacare.

I am black. I am a woman. And, with all due respect, I think Harry Reid has lost his mind.

Yesterday, on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Reid compared those who oppose his healthcare reform package to those who opposed ending slavery, fought against women’s suffrage, and thwarted civil rights. What’s next, Holocaust comparisons?

Many assume that given my race and gender, I would support the Senate health reform bill as a savior of the masses. I do not. And thousands, if not millions, of blacks, Hispanics, women, low-income, and at-risk communities feel the same.

There are many reasons why I don’t support the proposed healthcare legislation. I worry about how Congress’s regulations will drive up insurance premiums, a “public” option might strangle private health insurance, employer mandates might exacerbate the job crisis, and that ultimately this program will add to our already exploding debt. …

…I firmly believe that decisions about my care should be left between me and doctor. I worry that for millions of American women, these kinds of personal choices will increasingly become influenced by government bureaucrats. …

Ed Morrissey blogs about Canadian waiting lines, and Obama’s prescription for care in one town hall meeting.

Why does Cheryl Baxter’s story sound so familiar? Baxter needed a hip-replacement surgery, but since she lived in Canada, she had no choice but to wait for a surgical date that never came. Instead of curing her problem with the common surgery, Canadian doctors just gave her painkillers while she waited … and waited … and waited. Finally, as Reason TV reports, Baxter decided to head south for some free-market medicine and an actual cure:

The Canadian approach sounds familiar because it mirrors what Dr. Barack Obama offered five months ago in an ABC town-hall forum on ObamaCare:

Jane Sturm told the story of her nearly 100-year-old mother, who was originally denied a pacemaker because of her age. She eventually got one, but only after seeking out another doctor.

“Outside the medical criteria,” Sturm asked, “is there a consideration that can be given for a certain spirit … and quality of life?”

“I don’t think that we can make judgments based on peoples’ spirit,” Obama said. … “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking painkillers.“ …

Thomas Sowell explains how government destroys jobs and makes it more expensive for companies to hire workers. Here is the opening:

President Obama keeps talking about the jobs his administration is “creating” but there are more people unemployed now than before he took office. How can there be more unemployment after so many jobs have been “created”?

Let’s go back to square one. What does it take to create a job? It takes wealth to pay someone who is hired, not to mention additional wealth to buy the material that person will use.

But government creates no wealth. Ignoring that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do in fact. Without creating wealth, how can they create jobs? By taking wealth from others, whether by taxation, selling bonds or imposing mandates.

However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector, not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy.

If that was all that was involved, it would be a simple verbal fraud, with no gain of jobs and no net loss. In reality, many other things that politicians do reduce the number of jobs. …

We have National Review shorts today. Here a few:

Liberals are pushing for a temporary surtax on the rich to fund the war in Afghanistan — and it is only to spare our readers eyestrain that we have omitted quotation marks around most of those qualifiers to indicate our disbelief. Keep in mind that we are still paying telephone taxes that were introduced as a temporary measure to get the rich to pay for the Spanish–American War. We should fund the wars by cutting domestic spending. Raising taxes on a weak economy would be masochism masquerading as virtue.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D., R.I.) said that the Catholic bishops ought to speed the passage of health-care legislation by dropping their objection to abortion funding. After his bishop, Thomas Tobin of Providence, criticized him in return, Kennedy claimed that the bishop had ordered the priests in his diocese not to give him communion because of his support for abortion. The bishop then clarified that the letter he sent Kennedy in early 2007 included a request, not an order: “I believe it is inappropriate for you to be receiving Holy Communion and I now ask respectfully that you refrain from doing so.” Public commentary has predictably centered on the alleged church-state issues raised by the bishop’s action. But the bishop is of course not ordering Kennedy to vote a certain way, nor can he. He is explaining the spiritual consequences of certain political decisions, as is his duty. Complicity in injustice — including the denial of legal protection to the unborn — takes a Catholic out of communion with his church. Moved by the same principle, the archbishop of New Orleans in 1962 took the stronger step of formally excommunicating Catholic politicians who supported white supremacy. Meanwhile, everyone is missing the real story. John F. Kennedy, Patrick’s uncle, was elected president nearly 50 years ago. It is not too soon for the bishops to outgrow the family’s mystique.

The Iranian government has done something curious, in regard to Shirin Ebadi. She is the lawyer and human-rights activist who, in 2003, won the Nobel Peace Prize. The government recently confiscated her Nobel medal and diploma. For good measure, according to reports, its goons beat up her husband and threatened close relatives. (Ebadi herself has been out of the country since June.) Ebadi has not been a particularly outspoken or troublesome critic of the regime. Indeed, some other activists have faulted her for her relative restraint. Yet the government has moved against her. Why? Ebadi has the shield of the Nobel Peace Prize. And yet the government felt it could move. Why? They are in a period of extreme boldness, Iran’s rulers. They believe they can do anything they like, without bringing the wrath of the “world community” down on them. What ever gave them that idea?

Boy Scouts have overcome many enemies over the years: mosquitoes, bears, anti-religious zealots, and gay-rights activists. Now the group has faced down its fiercest foe of all: the Service Employees International Union. After Kevin Anderson, a 17-year-old aspiring Eagle Scout in Allentown, Pa., cleared a new footpath in a public park, the local SEIU branch threatened to file a grievance, on the grounds that landscaping is union work. No great surprise there; the SEIU thinks government exists for the purpose of employing its members. But when word of the union’s power play got out, the outpouring of scorn from the public was merciless. The SEIU withdrew the complaint, its local officials resigned, and on Thanksgiving weekend, union members were among the 40 volunteers who performed repairs in Kimmets Rock Park — under Anderson’s supervision. However much the SEIU may like to throw its weight around, it’s no match for a Boy Scout with justice on his side.

Obama and the militant environmentalists march on, undeterred by facts and the Constitution. David Harsanyi explains.

Every now and then, apparently, history challenges us with a crisis far too important to be left to the democratic process or the vagaries of public opinion. In these instances, the enlightened, the powerful, the moral must act swiftly.

So sayeth the Obama administration this week, empowering the Environmental Protection Agency to police greenhouse gases as a danger to public health and welfare, giving the agency discretion to regulate . . . well, anything it pleases. Or, I should say, whatever is left.

“These long-overdue findings cement 2009′s place in history as the year when the United States government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” explained EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. “This continues our work towards clean energy reform that will cut GHGs and reduce the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our national security and our economy.” …

…In effect, the EPA is warning most of the nation’s businesses that burdensome regulations are coming unless the president is suitably mollified with a law that severely caps carbon emissions. Or, in other words, figure out your own punishment, kids, or we’ll have to come up with one for you. You know, choice.

The administration also acts as if this is the last chance to save mankind, when, in fact, on the heels of the Climategate scandal, sagging poll numbers on warming hysteria and genuine economic worries (worries that would be exacerbated by more growth-inhibiting regulations) it might only be its last chance to cram through a framework for harsh emission standards.

Granted, there are a few obstacles standing in the way. Votes. People. Process. And so on . . . .

One of our favorites wails on one of our favorites. What to do? How ’bout we let you look for yourself. Christopher Hitchens discusses his dislike of Palin in no uncertain terms.

Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant “independent.” (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn’t disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn’t exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left the University of Hawaii after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous. So she came home.” And so on. As I tried to summarize the repeated tactic:

So there it is: anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be “deniable”) to the paranoid fringe element who darkly suggest that our president is a Kenyan communist. …

Now we’ll go back to an investigation of data about climate as reported to us by scientists. Jim Lindgren of Volokh Conspiracy has posted a lengthy inquiry by Willis Eschenbach of Watts Up With That. This post made Pickings long for the day. However, it is the end of the week, so if you are inclined to dig into this you will be rewarded by learning how data is manipulated or to put it more delicately, how “ inhomogeneities” are removed.

When the CRU at East Anglia disclosed that it had lost some of the raw temperature data, leaving only the “homogenized” data, some honest commentators expressed the hope that the homogenizing was competently done.

Anyone who has been following Climate Audit for the last few years knows that at least some of the adjustments to the raw data done by the major data depositories appear to have been incompetently done at best. The statistical techniques used in the scientific backwater of historical climatology are often ad hoc, bearing little relation to the techniques that are standard in other fields. In particular, their techniques for handling missing data are particularly unscientific.

Perhaps the most accessible blog post demonstrating the effects of homogenization adjustments on a set of temperature records is by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That. …

(…)

To get the full flow of the argument, please read Eschenbach’s whole post.

Turning declines in raw data into rises in one’s tables is one of the things that led to Michael Bellesiles’s resignation from Emory in the Arming America scandal.

Remember, people are usually at least somewhat circumspect in writing emails to professional colleagues around the world. Thus, is it likely that the corruption in this subfield of climatology is LESS serious or MORE serious than the scientists would disclose to their colleagues in their own emails?

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With the approaching Nobel prize to be awarded, Paul Johnson, in Forbes, writes that Obama has done nothing to earn it. He has taken only one notorious action.

…The trouble with Mr. Obama is that he talks a great deal and seems to believe that talk is often a substitute for deeds. During his nearly 11 months in office he has already put out more words for public consumption than most Presidents put out during an entire term–and likely more than Calvin Coolidge uttered during his entire career as a politician. …

…Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is expected to take decisive action, as well as orate. In his country’s relations with Russia and China, in its dealings with Iran and Iranian nuclear aspirations and in ensuring that the U.S. and its people are safely defended in a hostile and rapidly changing world, Mr. Obama needs to be a shrewd, cautious and active statesman, who may well be called upon to make fast and dramatic moves at short notice.

So far the President has shown no signs that he possesses the requisite gifts. His most important actual move during his first year in office has been to backtrack on the creation of a missile defense system that was to run through Poland and would have defended the U.S. and its allies from rogue states that managed to acquire nuclear weapons. Quite what Mr. Obama intends by this decision is not clear. However, it looks suspiciously like unilateral disarmament, since it has been unaccompanied by comparable concessions from the U.S.’ potential or actual opponents.

…Now, for the first time, a U.S. President has made a unilateral concession in the vital field of nuclear defense. Mr. Reagan must be turning in his grave. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on Politico’s forum on what Obama should say for his acceptance speech.

Politico has a fun forum on what Obama should say to accept his undeserved Nobel Peace Prize. …

…all share a common understanding that this is a cringe-inducing moment that requires Obama to avoid pretending that the award is deserved.

Tevi Troy puckishly wonders if the president shouldn’t ask why the Nobelists couldn’t have “waited a year before bestowing it upon me.” Well, by then the multilateralist, we-are-the-world, America-wins-by-accepting-decline hooey would have been recognized by more people as, well, hooey. Obama already is throwing the elite Left under the bus on Afghanistan. And he’ll soon have to junk Iranian engagement now that it has proved disastrous. (When J Street gets on board with sanctions, you know the jig is up, albeit too late to have much impact.) And the Middle East hasn’t had that “new beginning” we were promised; indeed the parties are further apart than ever. …

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has an insightful article in the Christian Science Monitor on the Swiss vote to ban minarets. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali Muslim by birth, whose film on the oppression of Muslim women led to the murder of the film director Theo Van Gogh, and a threat on her life.

Washington – The recent Swiss referendum that bans construction of minarets has caused controversy across the world. There are two ways to interpret the vote. First, as a rejection of political Islam, not a rejection of Muslims. In this sense it was a vote for tolerance and inclusion, which political Islam rejects. Second, the vote was a revelation of the big gap between how the Swiss people and the Swiss elite judge political Islam. …

…In Europe, as in other places in the world where Muslims settle, the places of worship are simple at first. All that a Muslim needs to fulfill the obligation of prayer is a compass to indicate the direction of Mecca, water for ablution, a clean prayer mat, and a way of telling the time so as to pray five times a day in the allocated period.

The construction of large mosques with extremely tall towers that cost millions of dollars to erect are considered only after the demography of Muslims becomes significant.

The mosque evolves from a prayer house to a political center.

Imams can then preach a message of self-segregation and a bold rejection of the ways of the non-Muslims.

Men and women are separated; gays, apostates and Jews are openly condemned; and believers organize around political goals that call for the introduction of forms of sharia (Islamic) law, starting with family law. …

…The pragmatists, most of whom are power holders, are partially right when they insist that the integration of Muslims will take a very long time. Their calls for dialogue are sensible. But as long as they do not engage Muslims to make a choice between the values of the countries that they have come to and those of the countries they left, they will find themselves faced with more surprises. And this is what the Swiss vote shows us. This is a confrontation between local, working-class voters (and some middle-class feminists) and Muslim immigrant newcomers who feel that they are entitled, not only to practice their religion, but also to replace the local political order with that of their own.  …

Jennifer Rubin blogs on NPR’s move to side with the Obami.

Josh Gerstein reports that NPR, the bastion of lefty radio where nary a conservative thought is heard that isn’t misrepresented or mocked, wanted its reporter Mara Liasson off Fox News. The reason? Well, get it out of your head that this had anything to do with the Obami’s crusade to delegitimize Fox. It was because those people at Fox are so darned biased that the mere appearance of their reporter on the Fox news shows might sully NPR’s reputation for journalistic purity. Hmm. But it seems the White House’s gripes did come up:

One source said the White House’s criticism of Fox was raised during the discussions with Liasson. However, an NPR spokeswoman told POLITICO that the Obama administration’s attempts to discourage other news outlets from treating Fox as a peer had no impact on any internal discussions at NPR. …

Apparently NPR has had a problem with Liasson and Juan Williams appearing on Fox for some time. For one thing, NPR’s liberal audience complains a lot. And for another, people might get the wrong idea, you see:

One complaint from NPR executives is that this very perception that Liasson and Williams serve as ideological counterweights reinforces feelings among some members of the public that NPR tilts to the left. “NPR has its own issues in trying to convince people that, ‘Look, we’re down the middle,’” the source said. …

In the Telegraph, UK, Christopher Booker writes about the one incident in the Climategate scandal that he believes is the most important.

…At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU’s leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]‘s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann’s procedure for the “hockey stick” (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre’s Climate Audit, known only as “Lucy Skywalker”. She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.) …

Bret Stephens, in the WSJ, explains that global-warming conspirators are advocating totalitarian ideas.

…Here’s a partial rundown of some of the ills seriously attributed to climate change: prostitution in the Philippines (along with greater rates of HIV infection); higher suicide rates in Italy; the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia; an increase in strokes and heart disease in China; wars in the Middle East; a larger pool of potential recruits to terrorism; harm to indigenous peoples and “biocultural diversity.”  …

…One of those things, I suspect, is what I would call the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warming true believers are closet Stalinists. But their intellectual methods are instructively similar. Consider:

• Revolutionary fervor: There’s a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of “bourgeois” values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that “our lifestyles are unsustainable.” Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that “civil disobedience has a role to play” in strong-arming governments to do his bidding. (This from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.) …

• Intolerance: Why did the scientists at the heart of Climategate go to such lengths to hide or massage the data if truth needs no defense? Why launch campaigns of obstruction and vilification against gadfly Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick if they were such intellectual laughingstocks? It is the unvarying habit of the totalitarian mind to treat any manner of disagreement as prima facie evidence of bad faith and treason.

• Monocausalism: For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists. And as the list above suggests, global warming has become the fill-in-the-blank explanation for whatever happens to be the problem. …

Does anyone else think that Copenhagen is an excuse for self-important people to party using other people’s money, while feeling self-righteous? In the Telegraph, UK, Andrew Gilligan fills us in.

…Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. …The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders adds more details to Mike Huckabee’s pardon of Maurice Clemmons, that led to the tragic deaths of four police officers.

There is no need to tiptoe gingerly around this topic: Maurice Clemmons, who was shot and killed as authorities tried to apprehend him for the shooting deaths of four Washington police officers – is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s Willie Horton. …

…I am especially angry at Huckabee because I support the pardon system. With so many nonviolent, first-time drug offenders serving long federal sentences, there should be more – not zero – sentence commutations from the Obama White House.

But the pardon system works only when executives do their homework lest they release inmates who are violent or sure to re-offend.

When I looked into Huckabee’s pardon record in 2006, I expected to praise what became his more than 1,000 pardons, including 163 commutations.

Instead, I found a sorry history of Huckabee failing to do his homework. He commuted the sentence of a three-time drunk driver serving a six-year sentence – only to see the man become a four-time drunk driver. Huckabee commuted the sentence of rapist Wayne Dumond, who went on to kill a Missouri woman. …