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National Review OnLine with a symposium on things for which we might want to give thanks.
David Warren is the first of our favorites to column on the hacked emails of the globalony specialists in England; what Mark Steyn has called Warmergate.
A computer hacker in England has done the world a service by making available a huge quantity of evidence for the way in which “human-induced global warming” claims have been advanced over the years.
By releasing into the Internet about a thousand internal e-mails from the servers of the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia — in some respects the international clearing house for climate change “science” — he has (or they have) put observers in a position to see that claims of conspiracy and fraud were not unreasonable.
More generally, we have been given the materials with which to obtain an insight into how all modern science works when vast amounts of public funding is at stake and when the vested interests associated with various “progressive” causes require a particular scientific result.
There is little doubt that the e-mails were real. Even so warmist a true-believer as George Monbiot led his column in the Guardian yesterday with: “It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The e-mails extracted … could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” …
Debra Saunders writes on the misuse of pardon power.
On Wednesday, President Obama will issue the White House’s standard hokey pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey. It goes with the job.
That’s good news for the lucky turkey, but not much help for the many nonviolent first offenders languishing in federal prisons because, nine months into office, Obama has yet to exercise his presidential pardon power. …
… the new president doesn’t seem eager to use his unfettered pardon power to correct sentencing injustices for the politically unconnected.
Look at Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder. When Holder worked for the Clinton administration, Ruckman noted, “he wouldn’t take the time, energy or effort to make it a regular feature of government.”
“But he would, if you will, make an effort in wildly controversial situations.” Such as Holder’s “neutral leaning positive” recommendation for the pardon sought by fugitive gazillionaire Marc Rich and his role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists.
When you think about it, the pardon petition is the rare Washington exercise that encourages politically unconnected people to petition their president for relief. But like Bush and Clinton before him, Obama seems to be hoarding this power. It’s as if Team Obama sees justice as perk, not an equal right.
David Harsanyi on Washington “courage.”
… These days, the idea of courage — especially in Washington — flows freely.
Recently, Newt Gingrich called Obama “a liberal Democratic president who has the courage to take on the establishment on education,” as if the tepid education reforms of the administration were akin to a power move against the Gambino crime syndicate (though, admittedly, the National Education Association comes close).
Actress Angie Harmon this week declared Sarah Palin was a “woman who has her own set of values and morals and ethics and has the courage to live her life accordingly.” How many of you have the steely courage to sell 700,000 books in a week? …
John Stossel says we pay politicians to lie to us.
When you knowingly pay someone to lie to you, we call the deceiver an illusionist or a magician. When you unwittingly pay someone to do the same thing, I call him a politician.
President Obama insists that health care “reform” not “add a dime” to the budget deficit, which daily grows to ever more frightening levels. So the House-passed bill and the one the Senate now deliberates both claim to cost less than $900 billion. Somehow “$900 billion over 10 years” has been decreed to be a magical figure that will not increase the deficit.
It’s amazing how precise government gets when estimating the cost of 10 years of subsidized medical care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill was scored not at $850 billion, but $849 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her bill would cost $871 billion.
How do they do that? …
Jennifer Rubin has a couple of posts on the KSM New York trial. First on how the prez might get out of this. She also posts on KSM’s lawyer who has made frivolous pleadings in the past. And has been admonished by the court and ordered to pay the costs his opponents incurred defending against his bogus motions.
… The president can blame Greg Graig or Holder, if he must. Obama reversed course on the detainee photos after advice from Justice, so he’s not unaccustomed to the process. Embarrassing? Sure. But if he thinks about what years and years of a show trial will mean, and the impact it will have on his image as commander in chief as the public realizes that this could easily have been avoided, Obama may come to see that a quick dose of embarrassment now is preferable to years of humiliation down the road.
Someone’s polls are crashing and J. Rubin posts on that also.
… You might have to strain to get the point, but the Times is explaining that the health-care debate is making things worse because it’s proving conservatives’ point about Obama’s statist tendencies. It’s also significant that Obama did not get a bump, in fact got a slide, out of his overseas trip, which reminded Americans of their president’s cringey incompetence. (The Times, again, spins this: “The media coverage of Mr. Obama’s visit to China was critical of the way he dealt with Chinese leaders.”)
Well, rational people would look at this and reassess, see what has gone wrong, fire those whose judgment was flawed, and try to get the presidency back on track. This crowd? A combination of true believers and purveyors of “damn the consequences for the moderates,” I suspect, will prevent much if any alteration in the course of this administration. Only elections, I suspect, will have much impact.
Ryan Streeter at American.com says Texas v. California might be a metaphor for the divisions in our country.
New Geography, the online magazine created by Joel Kotkin and others with a special focus on demographics and trends, has been tracking the implosion of California in an interesting way: by comparing it to Texas.
Texas and California are America’s two most populous states, together numbering approximately 55 million people, which is only about 6 million less than the United Kingdom, where I live. California, as everyone knows, has a coolness factor that Texas cannot match. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and wine. Say no more. But, unless one has been living in a cave, everyone knows that the cool state is also the broke state. If Hollywood turned California’s budget and fiscal position into a movie, it would be a blockbuster horror film indeed.
Texas, on the other hand, is growing, creating wealth, and attracting the entrepreneurial and creative classes that too many people think only go to places like New York and California. This interesting post by Tory Gattis at New Geography explains why. He shares a four-point analysis from Trends magazine: …