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Dave Barry is back with his end of the year review.

… land a US Airways flight safely in the Hudson River after it loses power shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia. Incredibly, all 155 people on board survive, although they are immediately taken hostage by Somali pirates. …

… The Academy Awards are a triumph for Slumdog Millionaire, which wins eight Oscars, only to have them stolen by Somali pirates.

… This will stimulate the economy by creating millions of jobs, according to estimates provided by the Congressional Estimating Office’s Magical Estimating 8-Ball. …

… In foreign affairs, former president Bill Clinton goes to North Korea to secure the release of two detained American journalists who purely by coincidence happen to be women. …

… But the big story in October, the story that grips the nation the way a dog grips a rancid squirrel, is the mesmerizing drama of a silver balloon racing through the blue skies above central Colorado, desperately pursued by police, aviation and rescue personnel who have been led to believe that the balloon contains O.J. Simpson.

No, that would have been great, but the authorities in fact have been led to believe that the balloon contains 6-year-old Falcon Heene, the son of exactly the kind of parents you would expect to name a child “Falcon.” …

… In sports, the New York Yankees, after an eight-year drought, purchase the World Series. But the month’s big sports story involves Tiger Woods, who, plagued by tabloid reports that he has been hiking the Appalachian trail with a nightclub hostess, is injured in a bizarre late-night incident near his Florida home when his SUV is attacked by golf-club-wielding Somali pirates. …

… The International Space Station is taken over by Somali pirates. …

Pickerhead had meant to keep today to David Barry and a cartoon review from Slate. But, events intrude. However, we will have nothing to do with any commentators who criticize the president for his vacation. The way he thinks, we’d be happy if he vacationed 50 weeks a year. Congress too.

We’ll have three serious items. Toby Harnden of the Daily Telegraph, UK, gives Obama an F for protecting Americans.

There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the marshalling of  “every element of our national power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).

Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2009 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants.  He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.

The picture we’re getting is more and more alarming by the hour. Here are some key elements to consider: …

And Dianne Ravitch in Politico takes the administration to task.

… In short, the Obama administration has woven a web of confusion, rhetoric, and illogic that will entangle it for years to come, as it attempts to defuse, de-escalate and minimize the terrorist threat. The reason this strategy is politically foolish is that the terrorist threat is real. It can’t be assuaged by words or dissipated by turning the other cheek. No matter what the president says, no matter how many civilian trials he promotes, the terrorists are not going away. Sooner or later, they will get lucky, they will bring down a jetliner or blow up a rail terminal, and the American people will be very angry. They will see the strategy of de-escalation not as wise but as dangerous. Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s. It won’t work now.

Another column for us from Maureen Dowd? Did she let her brother write another? Nope! She is on the subject of Obama’s reactions to the Christmas Day bombing attempt. She closes with, “Heck of a job, Barry.”

… W.’s favorite word was “resolute,” but despite gazillions spent and Cheney’s bluster, our efforts to shield ourselves seemed flaccid.

President Obama’s favorite word is “unprecedented,” as Carol Lee of Politico pointed out. Yet he often seems mired in the past as well, letting his hallmark legislation get loaded up with old-school bribes and pork; surrounding himself with Clintonites; continuing the Bushies’ penchant for secrecy and expansive executive privilege; doubling down in Afghanistan while acting as though he’s getting out; and failing to capitalize on snazzy new technology while agencies thumb through printouts and continue their old turf battles.

Even before a Nigerian with Al Qaeda links tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet headed to Detroit, travelers could see we had made no progress toward a technologically wondrous Philip K. Dick universe.

We seemed to still be behind the curve and reactive, patting down grannies and 5-year-olds, confiscating snow globes and lip glosses.

Instead of modernity, we have airports where security is so retro that taking away pillows and blankies and bathroom breaks counts as a great leap forward. …

Slate picked 65 cartoons as their favorites for the year. We culled out 34.

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Nile Gardiner blogs in the Telegraph, UK, about Obama’s disappointing comments about the Iranian revolution.

…Obama made no direct challenge to the illegitimate authority of the Iranian government, and spoke of its actions “apparently resulting in injuries, detentions and even deaths.” He was careful not to use the word freedom in describing the ultimate goal of the protesters, nor did he name any of the people detained. There was no mention of any consequences for Iran’s rulers or a shift in US policy.

As Charles Krauthammer eloquently observed on Fox News last night (transcribed here at NRO’s The Corner), referring to the president’s less than convincing statement:

…He talks about aspirations. He talks about rights. He talks about justice in the statement he made. This isn’t about justice. It isn’t about a low minimum wage. This isn’t about an absence of a public option in health care. This is about freedom. This is a revolution in the streets.
Revolutions happen quickly. There is a moment here in which if the thugs in the street who are shooting in the crowds stop shooting, it’s over and the regime will fall. The courage of the demonstrators and their boldness isn’t only a demonstration of courage, it is an indication of the shift in the balance of power. The regime is weakening.

This is a hinge of history. Everything in the region will change if the regime is changed. Obama ought to be strong out there in saying: It is an illegitimate government. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people in the street. He talks about diplomacy. He should be urging our Western allies who have relations [with Iran] to cut them off, isolate the regime, to ostracize it. He ought to be going in the U.N. — at every forum — and denouncing it. This is a moment in history, and he’s missing it. …

…If he is serious about the plight of the Iranian people, Barack Obama must have a Reagan moment, where he makes it clear that the United States stands shoulder to shoulder with the brave dissidents who are laying down their lives for freedom, and will do all in its power to help tear down the walls of oppression that enslave them. This is not an opportunity for more dithering and endless political calculation, but a time for real strength and leadership from the American President.

Tony Blankley discusses the reaction to Obama’s policies over the past year, including the emergence of the Tea party.

…But all is not solidity on the right. In one of the more remarkable entrances into American politics, the tea-party movement, which did not exist until spring, already has gained a second-place affiliation status in Scott Rasmussen’s poll last month: Democratic Party, 36 percent; tea party, 23 percent; Republican Party, 18 percent. …

…Keep in mind: They have no national leaders – no billionaire Ross Perot-type nor nationally admired Barry Goldwater-type. Of course, individuals are stepping up across the country to help organize, but they are the purest example of what Thomas Jefferson might have called an aroused yeomanry (back then, the small freeholders who cultivated their own land). They are a reaction (in the very best sense of the word) to the ongoing attempted power grab by Washington of a free people’s wealth and rights.

In the aftermath of the economic collapse and the election of a glamorous new, young president who seemed to many people as a fresh force, unentangled with entrenched special interests (emphatically not my view, during the election or afterward) – the country could have gone one of two ways: Fearing the rigors of economic hard times, people could have sought shelter under the wing of a stronger government (as Americans did during the Great Depression), or, fearing the power of government, they could seek shelter in freedom – come what may economically.
It may turn out to be one of the most important facts of the 21st century that the American people – as exemplified by, but not limited to, the tea-party fighters – came down on the side of freedom over fear. I don’t know if there is another people on the planet who would have had a similar impulse and judgment. …

Richard Epstein, in Forbes, responds to a New Yorker article from Atul Gawande which posits that the government can use the same interventions used in agricultural markets to support health care reform.

…Worse, by far, is how Gawande ignores the disastrous policy mistakes in the economic regulation of agricultural markets over the past 100 years. The standardization of agricultural commodities could have facilitated the rapid emergence of efficient competitive markets. Alas, the commoditization of agricultural goods allowed Congress to cartelize and subsidize the industry at the worst possible time.

Section 6 of the Clayton Act largely immunized agricultural cooperatives from the antitrust laws. When these broke down, the U.S. passed a string of Agricultural Adjustment Acts during the 1930s that allowed the U.S. to limit quantities for production in order to keep commodity prices at their high levels during the bounty years of 1910-14. “Excess crops” were often destroyed, put into storage facilities or sold off at bargain prices outside the U.S., even as the caloric consumption for welfare families in U.S. sunk to dangerously low levels during the dark days of the depression. At the same time, foreign agricultural economies were wrecked by the importation of subsidized U.S. goods. …

…These dreadful agricultural reforms are cut from the same cloth as the Democratic health care bill that will shortly become law. But Harry Reid’s hodgepodge legislation contains every gimmick imaginable to regulate the services sold and the prices charged in health care markets. As I have argued elsewhere, it is a disaster of constitutional proportions to run a system that pumps up the demand for health care services with huge subsidies only to strangle firms by closely regulating the services they must supply and limiting the profits that they can earn. Our lawmakers have learned all to well from their forays into agricultural markets. Far from encouraging Congress to tighten the noose on health care markets, Gawande should have urged a removal of many of the senseless barriers to entry that systematically impede the operation of health care markets. David Hyman and I have pushed hard on this libertarian approach, which tragically has fallen on deaf ears. All too predictable, given the spirit of the age.

Thomas Sowell clarifies Congress’ and Obama’s disregard of the will of the American people.

…What does calling this medical care legislation “historic” mean? It means that previous administrations gave up the idea when it became clear that the voting public did not want government control of medical care. What is “historic” is that this will be the first administration to show that it doesn’t care one bit what the public wants or doesn’t want.

In short, this is not about the public’s health. It is about Obama’s ego and his chance to impose his will and leave a legacy.

…Legislation is not the only sign of this administration’s contempt for the intelligence of the public and for the safeguards of democratic government.

The appointment of White House “czars” to make policy across a wide spectrum of issues — unknown people who get around the Constitution’s requirement of Senate confirmation for Cabinet members — is yet another sign of the mindset that sees the fundamental laws and values of this country as just something to get around, in order to impose the will of an arrogant elite.

That some of these “czars” have already revealed their own contempt for the values of American society in the things they have said and done only reinforces the point. In a sense, this administration is only the end result of a long social process that includes raising successive generations with dumbed-down education in schools and colleges that have become indoctrination centers for the visions of the left. Our education system has turned out many people who have never heard any other vision and who can only learn what is wrong with the prevailing vision from bitter experience. …

Maureen Dowd gives her column over to her brother, Kevin, for a Christmas present to all conservatives.

…Here are some reflections for 2009:

To President Obama: Thank you for saving the Republican Party and for teaching all of us that too much of anything is a bad thing.

To Bill Clinton: You did too much work on Northern Ireland for the Nobel committee. Next time, do nothing.

To Harry and Nancy: “The Twilight Zone” once had an episode where the town got the exact opposite of what it wanted. Farewell, Harry!

To John McCain: Thank you for your chivalry in banning Palin attack dogs — including my sister — from the campaign plane.

To Sarah Palin: Keep up the good work. Anyone who annoys Keith Olbermann that much is a friend to all of us.

To Glenn Beck: Thanks for being the only journalist interested in stories that used to win Pulitzer Prizes. …

Ed Koch responds to Jimmy Carter’s letter to the Jewish community asking for forgiveness.

Former President Jimmy Carter recently sent a letter to the JTA, which is a wire service for Jewish newspapers. The letter was made public by the JTA on December 21st, along with the following statement:

“Jimmy Carter asked the Jewish community for forgiveness for any stigma he may have caused Israel. In a letter released exclusively to JTA, the former U.S. president sent a seasonal message wishing for peace between Israel and its neighbors, and concluded: ‘We must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances, even as we strive in a positive way to help Israel continue to improve its relations with its Arab populations, but we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel. As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so.’ ‘Al Het’ refers to the Yom Kippur prayer asking G-d forgiveness for sins committed against Him. In modern Hebrew it refers to any plea for forgiveness. Carter has angered some U.S. Jews in recent years with writings and statements that place the burden of peacemaking on Israel, that have likened Israel’s settlement policies to apartheid, and that have blamed the pro-Israel lobby for inhibiting an evenhanded U.S. foreign policy.”

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, a leading advocate for the Jewish community, responded as follows: “We welcome any statement from a significant individual such as a former president who asks for Al Het. To what extent it is an epiphany, time will tell. There certainly is hurt which needs to be repaired.”

Having known Jimmy Carter when I was a Congressman and Mayor, I have a minimum of high regard for him. I believe that he has often used his position — most recently as a writer of books – to damage the State of Israel, and in doing so, he has injured the Jewish community worldwide. …

…My advice to Jimmy Carter is to come clean. I believe that we Jews are a forgiving people, but we are also a people who, having been brutalized through the centuries, are suspicious of those who at the end of their lives wish to make amends but have not demonstrated any repentance. What does President Carter intend to do with the balance of his life to remedy the harm and injury to the Jewish people that he has inflicted over the years?

Gerald Warner blogs in the Telegraph, UK, about political correctness that has run amuck once again.

Some help, please, for the latest victim of cretinous municipal politically correct tyranny. John Sayers, aged 75, is the bingo caller at a weekly charity event at Sudbury town hall in Suffolk. Now council officials have told Mr Sayers, a former mayor of Sudbury, that terms such as “Legs Eleven” are sexist, and “Two Fat Ladies” could offend obese players and these phrases have been banned, for fear of litigation.

So Mr Sayers now just calls the numbers by themselves, which players are denouncing as “boring”. Clearly, a new lexicon of politically correct bingo calls will have to be produced. We could start the ball rolling with “88 – crime of hate”; “Number 10 – Gordon’s Den”; “Number 2 – civil duo”; “47 – Aneurin Bevan”; “62 – for the many, not the few”… And so, tediously, on.

There is now no area of life, however trivial or frivolous, that is not controlled by the Thought Police. And whose fault is that? Ours, of course. Our fault for not snuffing out this tyrannical nonsense at its first manifestation. Our fault for submitting to it. Our fault for voting for any of the mainstream political parties, all of which subscribe to this madness. Our fault for not ejecting from office the jobsworths who enforce it. Our fault for tolerating the legislative busybodies in the House of Commons. First New Year resolution for 2010: Make Political Correctness History.

Richard Brookhiser reflects on the bagpipe after a recent encounter on a New York City street.

…The piper has taken up his position in the direction I am going anyway, but my steps quicken, as they always do when I hear a bagpipe. When I draw alongside him, I can’t see much. His legs are trousered (too cold for a kilt). If he has an open instrument case — immemorial stimulus fund of New York City street musicians — on the pavement in front of him, it is hidden in the shadows. He displays no sign (not that you could read one) and he is too busy blowing to make any pitch. So, within the limits of the urban cheek-by-jowl, he respects my privacy, and I do the same, hanging back to listen with the decorum and the thrill of a voyeur.

I have heard him a few times before, and I will hear him again after tonight, though when I have seen him in the light I realize he is multiple: one time he was a young man; on other occasions, he is pepper and salt, with a beard. Whatever his age, he plays a traditional Highland pipe. With the blowpipe in his mouth he fills the bag; the air he squeezes from the bag with his arm exits by four pipes, which make the music: three pipes above the bag like a marlin’s fin, two short (the tenor drones), one long (the bass drone); one pipe (the chanter) hanging from below, like an artificial teat. Fingers on the chanter pick out the melody; the drones produce the hypnotizing hum.

Bagpipe melodies have lots of tweedle-dee, imposed in part by the mechanism itself: Since the air leaves the bag in a steady stream, it is impossible to repeat a note without intervening grace notes. So even marches take on the swing of jigs. What stirs my innards is the drone. The drone turns a lone piper into an army. It adds distance to the sound, and therefore motion: We are coming. It also adds time, and therefore pathos: We have been here; you have heard us. …

Click here to hear the pipes.

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WSJ takes a look at the war on drugs and Mexico.

In the 40 years since U.S. President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” the supply and use of drugs has not changed in any fundamental way. The only difference: a taxpayer bill of more than $1 trillion.

A senior Mexican official who has spent more than two decades helping fight the government’s war on drugs summed up recently what he’s learned from his long career: “This war is not winnable.” …

Christopher Hitchens wonders what new travel horror the public safety goobers are going to dream up for us.

It’s getting to the point where the twin news stories more or less write themselves. No sooner is the fanatical and homicidal Muslim arrested than it turns out that he (it won’t be long until it is also she) has been known to the authorities for a long time. But somehow the watch list, the tipoff, the many worried reports from colleagues and relatives, the placing of the name on a “central repository of information” don’t prevent the suspect from boarding a plane, changing planes, or bringing whatever he cares to bring onto a plane. This is now a tradition that stretches back to several of the murderers who boarded civilian aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, having called attention to themselves by either a) being on watch lists already or b) weird behavior at heartland American flight schools. They didn’t even bother to change their names.

So that’s now more or less the routine for the guilty. (I am not making any presumption of innocence concerning Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.) But flick your eye across the page, or down it, and you will instantly see a different imperative for the innocent. …

Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff posts twice on the problems Obama has communicating with his generals.

… Lawyers sometimes write deliberately ambiguous passages. Their purpose is to avoid being pinned.

This may well be Obama’s purpose when it comes to Afghanistan. Like many politicians, Obama likes to tell people what they want to hear. Constituencies important to Obama want to hear divergent things about Afghanistan. His base wants to hear, at a minimum, that we will be out of that country soon. A critical mass of mainstream voters wants to hear that he we won’t be there for a lengthy period of time. The military wants to hear that we will fight to win.

After Obama’s West Point speech announcing that some sort of a drawdown would begin no later than July 2010, various administration officials articulated (in some cases through leaks) various glosses on the speech that seemed designed to placate the various constituencies mentioned above. I assumed that Obama was responsible for the resulting ambiguity, which not only appeases competing viewpoints but leaves him with flexibility as July 2010 approaches.

I did not assume that the competing pronouncements about what will happen in July 2010 (and what will dictate what happens then) were standing in the way of clear instructions to the military about how to fight in Afghanistan now. Yet, the Washington Post’s reporting indicates that this has, in fact, become a problem.

If so, it is is inexcusable. It is one thing (though not desirable) for a president to confuse the public; it’s another thing for a president to confuse his generals. One cannot wordsmith one’s way around the difficult decisions associated with conducting a war. I suspect only a lawyer would think of trying.

John Steele Gordon in Contentions tips us to Michael Barone’s piece on population shifts.

The Census Bureau has come out with its annual state-by-state head count and it makes for interesting reading. There is no one better than Michael Barone at the art of looking at numbers and bringing them to life. He notes that Texas had the highest population gain (and third highest in percentage terms) and thinks he knows why: …

And here’s Mr. Barone. He thinks the big winner is Texas.

… No. 3 in percentage population growth in 2008-09 was giant Texas, the nation’s second-most-populous state. Its population grew by almost half a million and accounted for 18 percent of the nation’s total population growth. Texas had above-average immigrant growth, but domestic in-migration was nearly twice as high.

There may be lessons for public policy here. Texas over the decades has had low taxes (and no state income tax), low public spending and regulations that encourage job growth. It didn’t have much of a housing bubble or a housing price bust.

Under Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry, it has placed tight limits on tort lawsuits and has seen an influx of both corporate headquarters and medical doctors.

Bush’s late job ratings may have been low, and Perry may be a wine that doesn’t travel. But their approach to governing may not be lost even in Washington.

Polidata Inc. projects from the 2009 estimates that the reapportionment following the 2010 Census will produce four new House seats for Texas, one for Florida, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, and none for California for the first time since 1850. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois are projected to lose one each and Ohio two. Americans have been moving, even in recession, away from Democratic strongholds and toward Republican turf.

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Roger Simon wonders how Janet Napolitano keeps her job.

… But perhaps you are a perfect match for our reactionary narcissist president who continues to say not a word as the brave demonstrators in Iran again risk their lives to overcome their brutal Islamic regime. What’s interesting about Obama and Napolitano is that they pretend to be “progressive,” but they are actually heartless.

Nile Gardiner asks in his Telegraph blog, ‘where’s Obama when the protesters in Iran need him.’

… once again huge street protests have flared up on the streets of Tehran and a number of other major cities, with several protesters shot dead this weekend by the security forces and Revolutionary Guards, reportedly including the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, and dozens seriously injured. And again there is deafening silence from the Commander-in-Chief as well as his Secretary of State. And where is the president? On vacation in Hawaii, no doubt recuperating from his exertions driving forward the monstrous health care reform bill against the overwhelming will of the American public and without a shred of bipartisan support.

This is not however a time for fence-sitting by the leader of the free world. The president should be leading international condemnation of the suppression of pro-democracy protesters, and calling on the Iranian dictatorship to free the thousands of political dissidents held in its torture chambers. Just as Ronald Reagan confronted the evils of Soviet Communism, Barack Obama should support the aspirations of the Iranian people to be free. The United States has a major role to play in inspiring and advancing freedom in Iran, and the president should make it clear that the American people are on the side of those brave Iranians who are laying down their lives for liberty in the face of tyranny.

John Fund knows why the Obami don’t want us to see the health care bill.

… It’s no wonder Congress and the White House are so determined to hide their handiwork from the public while the House and Senate versions are “reconciled.” President Obama has said the negotiations will take place in the West Wing and he will be actively involved. But when ABC’s Jake Tapper asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the president’s campaign pledge to “have the [health care] negotiations televised on C-SPAN,” Mr. Gibbs dodged the question and took refuge in his talking points, insisting that voters already “have a pretty good sense of who is battling on behalf of thousands of lobbyists that are trying to protect drugs profits and insurance profits, and who’s fighting on behalf of middle-class Americans.”

In other words, no one in the White House wants the public to be looking on as this Frankenstein monster is finally stitched together.

Mark Steyn columns on climate fads.

… As I always say, if you’re 30 there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school after a lifetime of eco-brainwashing, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. None. After the leaked data from East Anglia revealed that Dr. Phil Jones (privately) conceded this point, Tim Flannery, one of the A-list warm-mongers in Copenhagen, owned up to it on Aussie TV, too. Yet, when I reprised the line in this space a couple of weeks back, thinking it was now safe for polite society, I was besieged by the usual “YOU LIE!!!!!!!” emails angrily denouncing me for failing to explain that the cooling trend of the oughts is in fact merely a blip in the long-term warming trend of the nineties.

Well, maybe. Then again, perhaps the warming trend of the nineties is merely a blip in the long-term ice age trend of the early seventies. I doubt many of my caps-lock emailers are aware of the formerly imminent ice age. It was in Newsweek and the New York Times, and it produced the occasional bestseller. But, unlike today’s carbon panic, it wasn’t everywhere; it wasn’t, in every sense, the air that we breathe. Unlike Al Gore’s wretched movie, it wasn’t taught in schools. TV networks did not broadcast during children’s time apocalyptic public service announcements that in any other circumstance would constitute child abuse. Unlike today, where incoming mayors announce that as their ?rst act in office they’re banning bottled water from council meetings, ostentatious displays of piety were not ubiquitous. It was not a universal pretext for recoiling from progress: back in the seventies, upscale municipalities that now obsess about emissions standards of hot-air dryers were busy banning garden clotheslines on aesthetic grounds. There were no fortunes to be made from government grants for bogus “renewable energy” projects. Unlike Al Gore, carbon billionaire, nobody got rich peddling ice offsets. …

A couple of days ago we featured a piece from The Nation by Alexander Cockburn. It was an item from a left publication acknowledging the importance of the climategate revelations. Jonathan Tobin posts on that extraordinary event in Contentions.

There are some people who are so odious that when you find yourself on the same side of an issue with them, your first instinct must be to question whether you were right in the first place. Alexander Cockburn is certainly such a person. He is a rabid leftist, apologist for totalitarians and a vicious hater of Israel. From his perch as editor of his own rag CounterPunch and as a columnist for the Nation, he has spewed forth nonsense and bile for a long time. But like the proverbial blind squirrel, it appears as though even Cockburn is capable of finding an acorn. That is the only way to explain the utterly rational and completely on-target attack on the Copenhagen Global Warming jamboree and the entire Climategate cover-up that he has written for the Nation and which can be read for free at RealClearPolitics.com. …

Michael Barone wrote on the similarity between the recent Senate battle for health care and the one fought in 1854 for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Turns out a blogger had made the comparison a few days before him, so Barone pays obeisance in another post. Of course, we have that blog post from Streetwise Professor. The three items are a good history lesson.

It’s time to blow the whistle on two erroneous statements that opponents and proponents of the health care legislation being jammed through Congress have been making. Republicans have been saying that never before has Congress passed such an unpopular bill with such important ramifications by such a narrow majority. Barack Obama has been saying that passage of the bill will mean that the health care issue will be settled once and for all.

The Republicans and Obama are both wrong. But perhaps they can be forgiven because the precedent for Congress passing an unpopular bill is an old one, and the issue it addressed has long been settled, though not by the legislation in question.

That legislation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Its lead sponsor was Stephen A. Douglas, at 41 in his eighth year as senator from Illinois, the most dynamic leader of a Democratic Party that had won the previous presidential election by 254 electoral votes to 42. …

Here’s Barone’s second post.

I thought my comparison of Democratic health care legislation with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 in my Wednesday Examiner column was an original idea. After all, even David Broder and Lou Cannon weren’t around to cover Stephen Douglas’s brilliant floor managing of this disastrous legislation. But fewer of our ideas are original than we suppose. Blogger Streetwise Professor, who in non-blog life is Craig Pirrong, a professor at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business. …

And, introducing … The Streetwise Professor as he tries to find something to compare to the Senate bill.

… I struggle to find a historical parallel.  The closest thing that comes to mind is the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.  Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas was fixated on the creation of a transcontinental railroad.  Southern senators blocked the advancement of Douglas’s dream, so he proposed a bill that, to gain Southern support, completely undermined the careful (and yes, imperfect) compromises over slavery and the territories that had been crafted in the previous two generations (extending back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820).  In so doing, he set in motion a train of events (no pun intended) that culminated in the Civil War.

Perhaps you consider the parallel hyperbolic.  And no, I am not forecasting civil war.  But if this bill, or anything close to it, passes, the results will convulse the country.  The fault lines will not be sectional, as they were in the 1850s, but generational and socio-economic.  And perhaps the most important fault line will be between citizen and state as it will completely revolutionize the relationship between the government and the governed. …

WSJ has an interview with Robert Morgenthau.

In the criminal justice system, the people of Manhattan have been represented for 35 years by New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. This is his story.

Mr. Morgenthau, who inspired the original D.A. character on the television program “Law and Order,” will retire on Thursday at age 90. Much of the barely fictitious drama is set in his office in Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building. This week, amid half-filled boxes and scattered personal mementos, he sat down to discuss his life’s work.

Even though he knows I’m wearing a wire—actually an audio recorder placed on the table between us—America’s D.A. speaks candidly, including about his public blowups with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Morgenthau says this is the first mayor he hasn’t gotten along with, and that the relationship went south when his office started investigating the city’s role in the death of two of New York’s bravest in an August, 2007 fire. Among other mistakes, city inspectors had failed to note that the water had been turned off at the old Deutsche Bank building opposite Ground Zero. The blaze resulted in 33 “mayday” calls from firefighters, and the D.A. is amazed that only two lost their lives.

Mr. Morgenthau soon got a call from a city lawyer telling him that “the mayor wanted me to tell you that he’s surprised that you’re looking at the Deutsche Bank case.” Mr. Morgenthau says he told the mayor’s minion, “You tell the mayor that I’m surprised that he’s surprised.”

Why would the mayor encourage such a call? Because, says Mr. Morgenthau, Mr. Bloomberg “thinks all lawyers work for him” and “doesn’t want anybody around who doesn’t kiss his ring, or other parts of his body.” …

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A topical note from Mark Steyn concerning the failed Christmas Day bomber in Detroit.

… So once again we see the foolishness of complaceniks who drone the fatuous clichés about how “in this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs“. The men eager to self-detonate on infidel airliners are not goatherds from the caves of Waziristan but educated middle-class Muslims who have had the most exposure to the western world and could be pulling down six-figure salaries almost anywhere on the planet. And don’t look to “assimilation” to work its magic, either. We’re witnessing a process of generational de-assimilation: In this family, yet again, the dad is an entirely assimilated member of the transnational elite. His son wants a global caliphate run on Wahhabist lines.

Jennifer Rubin follows on the story of the Nigerian terrorist trained in Yemen.

… reality is complicating the Obama administration’s war on terror policies. It must be maddening to the Obami that they are presented once again with inconvenient evidence that their insistence on emptying Guantanamo of dangerous people is mind-bogglingly inane. …

Charles Krauthammer says, as regards Iran …

… We lost a year. But it was not just any year. It was a year of spectacularly squandered opportunity. In Iran, it was a year of revolution, beginning with a contested election and culminating this week in huge demonstrations mourning the death of the dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri — and demanding no longer a recount of the stolen election but the overthrow of the clerical dictatorship.

Obama responded by distancing himself from this new birth of freedom. First, scandalous silence. Then, a few grudging words. Then relentless engagement with the murderous regime. With offer after offer, gesture after gesture — to not Iran, but the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” as Obama ever so respectfully called these clerical fascists — the United States conferred legitimacy on a regime desperate to regain it.

Why is this so important? Because revolutions succeed at that singular moment, that imperceptible historical inflection, when the people, and particularly those in power, realize that the regime has lost the mandate of heaven. With this weakening dictatorship desperate for affirmation, why is the United States repeatedly offering just such affirmation? …

Jennifer Rubin agrees.

… Because the policy of engagement is so nonsensical one is left wondering whether the end game is and has always been some form of  “nuclear containment,” which is itself quite preposterous when it comes to a revolutionary Islamic state that has already announced its regional aspirations (including the elimination of the Jewish state) and compiled a track record of terror sponsorship. But it does explain the Obami’s effort to be inoffensive, talk down military options, and defer sanctions until the time line on halting the mullahs’ nuclear program collapses on itself. (Too late!)

These two explanations are, of course, not mutually exclusive. The Obami’s may have thought they’d give engagement their best shot, with the “back up” plan of learning to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. (Do you feel safer yet?) Regardless, we are in a far worse position at the end of 2009 because we were practicing engagement at the exact moment we should have been pressing for regime change. It was a colossal misjudgment, one which will be viewed, I suspect, (along with the decision to give KSM a civilian trial) as among the worst national-security calls by any president.

Mark Steyn warns what is in store for us in ObamaCare.

Last week, during a bit of banter on Fox News, my colleague Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something I’d all but forgotten. Last September, during his address to Congress on health care, Barack Obama declared:

“I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

Dream on. The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever.

Government can’t just annex “one-sixth of the US economy” (ie, the equivalent of annexing the entire British or French economy, or annexing the entire Indian economy twice over) and then just say: “Okay, what’s next? On to cap-and-trade…” Nations that governmentalize health care soon find themselves talking about little else.

In Canada, once the wait times for MRIs and hip surgery start creeping up over two years, the government distracts the citizenry with a Royal Commission appointed to study possible “reforms” which reports back a couple of years later usually with recommendations to “strengthen” the government’s “commitment” to every Canadian’s “right” to health care by renaming the Department of Health the Department of Health Services and abolishing the Agency of Health Administration and replacing it with a new Agency of Administrative Health Operations which would report to a reformed Council of Health Policy Administrative Coordination to be supervised by a streamlined Public Health Operations & Administration Assessment Bureau. This package of “reforms” would cost a mere 12.3 gazillion dollars and usually keeps the lid on the pot until the wait times for MRIs start creeping up over three years. …

Peter Schiff has similar thoughts.

As business owners undergo the yearly ritual of passing through eye-popping health insurance premium increases to their employees, it’s easy to understand why any attempt at health insurance reform would be met with some degree of hope. Unfortunately, President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are about to take a very bad system and make it unimaginably worse.

While ramming their new legislation through Congress, the Democrats have taken great pains to point out that they do not intend to “socialize medicine.” But make no mistake, that’s where we’re headed. Even if some naïve centrists believe that their efforts have denied the Left a total victory, the practical implications of the current legislation sow the seeds for complete capitulation. …

Some of the grownups in the Dem party are getting the message. Bill Daley, brother to the mayor, and former Clinton Commerce Secretary says it is time to trim their far-left sails.

… All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.

For liberals to accept that inescapable reality is not to concede permanent defeat. Rather, let them take it as a sign that they must continue the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading their fellow citizens to embrace their perspective. In the meantime, liberals — and, indeed, all of us — should have the humility to recognize that there is no monopoly on good ideas, as well as the long-term perspective to know that intraparty warfare will only relegate the Democrats to minority status, which would be disastrous for the very constituents they seek to represent.

The party’s moment of choosing is drawing close. While it may be too late to avoid some losses in 2010, it is not too late to avoid the kind of rout that redraws the political map. The leaders of the Democratic Party need to move back toward the center — and in doing so, set the stage for the many years’ worth of leadership necessary to produce the sort of pragmatic change the American people actually want.

Jennifer Rubin makes the same point less obtusely.

… And if the Democrats refuse to heed the voters and their own nervous members? Then we will have a major course correction on Election Day 2010. It is now conceivable that the House may fall back into Republican hands and that the Democrats will lose their filibuster-proof majority. And that will be the end of the untrammeled experiment in Obamaism, which can loosely be described as the endeavor to campaign as a moderate and race as far Left as possible until the voters notice.

We will see in 2010 whether the Democrats pull back from that precipice, or whether the voters shove a good number of them over it. Either way, 2010 will be the beginning of a new phase in the Obama presidency. Polls indicate that the public will be relieved, whether that new beginning comes from a voluntary course adjustment or a tidal wave election.

Reiha Salam, in Forbes, provides a review, of sorts, of James Cameron’s new movie Avatar.

… In a sense, capitalism is the villain of Avatar. Yet what Cameron fails to understand is that capitalism represents a far more noble and heroic way of life than that led by the Na’vi. As Abraham Lincoln noted in 1858, the unique thing about the industrial revolution wasn’t that humans invented steam-power and other ingenious inventions. In fact, a steam engine was manufactured in ancient Alexandria without ever being used. But that society didn’t value the invention and spread of labor-saving devices. Instead, it valued physical courage and martial valor. The truly revolutionary thing about the industrial revolution was the rise of entrepreneurship. An entrepreneurial society doesn’t value the ability to murder mammoths or members of the neighboring tribe above all else. It values the ability to develop useful ideas and devices and practices that had never been seen before. …

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A couple of items on global warming. First Debra Saunders.

… — Enough with the worst-case scenarios. Al Gore has a penchant for repeating the most dire predictions on global warming – and not always accurately. As the Times of London reported last week, Gore told a Copenhagen audience, that according to a Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, “there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

Except Maslowski told the Times he had no idea where Gore got that idea. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Polls show Americans are cooling on global warming. It could be that voters don’t buy into the all-bad scenarios predicted by Gore and company.

More surprising than Saunders, is a piece by Alexander Cockburn in The Nation, one of the most obnoxiously liberal magazines in the country.

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. Coolers transmuted into Warmers, and it became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker. …

Spengler covers events in Central and South Asia.

History speaks of a Pax Romana, a Pax Britannica, and a Pax Americana – but no other namable eras of sustained peace, for the simple reason cited by Henry Kissinger: nothing maintains peace except hegemony and the balance of power. The balancing act always fails, though, as it did in Europe in 1914, and as it will in Central and South Asia precisely a century later. The result will be suppurating instability in the region during the next two years and a slow but deadly drift toward great-power animosity. Those who wanted an end to US hegemony will get what they wished for. But they won’t like it.

“No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” US President Barack Obama told the United Nations on September 23. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” Having renounced hegemony as well as the balance of power, Obama by year-end chose to prop up the power balance in the region with additional American and allied soldiers in Afghanistan. Obama chose the least popular as well as the least effective alternative. The US president’s apparent fecklessness reflects the gravity of the strategic problems in the region.

There is one great parallel, but also one great difference, between the Balkans on the eve of World War I and the witch’s cauldron comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and contiguous territory. The failure of the region’s most populous state – in that case the Ottoman Empire, in this case Pakistan – makes shambles out of the power balance, leaving the initiative in the hands of irredentist radicals who threaten to tug their sponsors among the great powers along behind them. But in 1914, both France and Germany thought it more advantageous to fight sooner rather than later. No matter how great the provocation, both India and China want to postpone any major conflict. The problem is that they may promote minor ones. …

… The Obama administration has antagonized India in the hope of mollifying Pakistani irredentism, just as it has antagonized Israel with the dubious argument that if Israel makes concessions to the divided, ineffectual Palestine Authority, it will be able to mollify Iran. Nothing will assuage the Palestinians, who are failed before coming a state, nor the Pakistanis, whose failure is ineluctable.

As I argued in Asia Times Online on October 20 (When the cat’s away, the mice kill each other), the net effect of America’s fecklessness is to give the Russian Empire an opportunity to stretch a hand out of the geopolitical grave and grasp a last, great opportunity. Russia faces a slow demographic death, but it remains a great power in terms of military technology: its surface-to-air missile systems are as good as anything American can field, and its newest system, the as yet undeployed S-500, may be better, according to a senior American aviation executive. …

Christopher Hitchens draws our attention to South Central Asia also.

… This will continue to get nastier and more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is not Pakistan but India. And India is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don’t have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn’t based on hysteria and envy. Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world’s largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes.

One reason the Pakistani army coddles the Taliban in Afghanistan is because it has recently been told that the United States will not be deploying there in strength for very much longer. Who can blame them for basing their future plans on this supposition and continuing to dig in for a war with India that we are helping them to prepare for? Meanwhile, though, it is the Afghans who get the lectures about how they need to shape up. “Lots of luck in your senior year” was the breezy way in which the vice president phrased his message to Kabul as I watched. (I wonder how that translates into Pushtun.) Speed the day when the Pakistanis are publicly addressed in the same tones and told that the support they so much despise is finally being withdrawn.

Jimmy Carter’s grandson is running for state legislative office in Georgia. The district encompasses many Jews. Jimmy is now making nice to them. Is there anybody more disgusting than him? Jonah Goldberg has the story in a Corner post.

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In the WSJ, Julia Vitullo writes about Kings College Chapel at Cambridge and some of its surprising features.

Praised by the poet William Wordsworth in 1820 as “this immense and glorious work of fine intelligence,” King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England, is the product of an extraordinary combination of royal commitment, turbulent religious politics, violent civil wars, vicious labor disputes, superb medieval craftsmanship, and engineering that has never been replicated and is still not fully understood today. The historian Francis Woodman, author of “The Architectural History of King’s College Chapel,” calls it “the English building of the late Middle Ages, every element capturing the artistic and political revolution of its time.”

The chapel is indeed immense, with an outside measurement of 310 feet from turret to turret, each of which is 146 feet high. The interior—289 feet long and 40 feet wide—is dominated by the celebrated fan vault ceiling, whose equidistantly spaced curved ribs radiate up and away, forming a series of huge half cones. The largest fan vault in the world and estimated to weigh 1,875 tons, it is “an unfathomable piece of beautiful technology,” Mr. Woodman says. Modern engineers have not been able to work out how the master-mason John Wastell put the fan vault into place, though Mr. Woodman says “we know he built it from the top down.” Wordsworth poetically described the engineering feat as “that branching roof self-poised.”

Each side of the chapel has 12 large stained-glass windows that are said to constitute, along with the eastern window of Golgotha, the most important collection of pre-Reformation windows in Britain, often prompting the question of why they were not destroyed by Oliver Cromwell’s men in the 1640s. The presence of defaced porcelain saints, decapitated statues and erased brasses makes it clear that the Iconoclasts had indeed been through. But then, perhaps survival of the windows is not surprising, since the chapel had itself been conceived in the midst of dynastic struggles and blood-thirsty conflicts, says Carola Hicks, author of “The King’s Glass: A Study of Tudor Power and Secret Art.” …

John Bolton tells us why Dick Cheney is the Human Events’ Conservative of the Year.

…How is it, therefore, that someone who has no political ambitions can cause so much angst at the White House and in the mainstream news media? The irrefutable answer is that what Cheney is saying, primarily on foreign policy, defense and anti-terrorism, makes sense to more and more American citizens growing increasingly worried by the Obama Administration’s insouciance when U.S. national interests are threatened, both at home and abroad. Since the only real, long-term way to deal with persuasive positions on substantive policy matters is to refute them with sounder policy arguments, it is not hard to understand why the Obama White House is near panic. Where are they going to go to find a better policy inside his administration? …

…Perhaps most importantly of all, Cheney knows that the personal attacks on him, as offensive as they are, in reality constitute stark evidence that Obama and his supporters are simply unable to match him in the substantive policy debate. An old lawyers’ cliché says: “If the law is against you, pound on the facts; if the facts are against you, pound on the law; if the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table.” Obama and his supporters are doing the political equivalent of continuous table-pounding, because that’s basically all they have to offer. Cheney’s unwillingness to be deterred by the media assaults on his character, his judgment and his performance in office are therefore his most impressive force multiplier with the general public. Outside-the-Beltway Americans see him for exactly what he is: a very experienced, very dedicated patriot, giving his fellow citizens his best analysis on how to keep them and their country safe.

Cheney’s quiet, inner-directed motivation is simply impervious to the attacks orchestrated against him by the Chicago machine-style politicians at the White House, a fact also plainly visible to his fellow citizens. And it is yet another important reason to have confidence that Cheney’s solid policy analysis will yet prevail in the national political arena. Of course he is the conservative of the year!

While we’re watching ObamaCare, the administration is weakening our country elsewhere too.  Andy McCarthy provides details on some of the Gitmo detainees release to Yemen, Afghanistan and Somaliland. Makes you yearn for Cheney.

… At least one of the released terrorists, a Somali named Abdullahi Sudi Arale (aka Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad), was released notwithstanding the military’s designation of him as a “high-value detainee” (a label that has been applied only to top-tier terrorist prisoners — and one that fits in this case given Arale’s status as a point of contact between al-Qaeda’s satellites in East Africa and Pakistan).

And then there is the appearance of impropriety. As Tom Joscelyn explains, the Justice Department has taken the lead role in making release determinations — the military command at Gitmo has “zero input” and “zero influence,” in its own words. DOJ is rife with attorneys who represented and advocated for the detainees, and, in particular, Attorney General Holder’s firm, represented numerous Yemeni enemy combatants. Does Justice not appreciate not only how perilous but how unseemly it appears under the circumstances for it to be leading the charge to release the Yemeni detainees? And could anyone really believe that the supposedly noxious symbolism of Gitmo is more dangerous to Americans than is deporting terrorists to the places where terrorism thrives?

John Stossel gives us the lowdown on the pork the Senate leadership had to hand out to buy the votes they needed for Obamacare.

So, how exactly did Senate leadership persuade the few remaining Democrats who were dragging their heels? By appealing to their principles, of course. FoxNews.com reports:

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., won between $100 million and $300 million in additional federal aid for her state’s Medicaid population. The deal, secured before she cast her critical vote in favor of bringing the health bill to the floor, was immediately dubbed the “Louisiana Purchase,”  though the actual Louisiana Purchase was considerably cheaper.

… Florida, New York and Pennsylvania — where five of six senators are Democrats — will have their seniors’ Medicare Advantage benefits protected, even as the program sees massive cuts elsewhere.

… Nebraska’s [Sen. Ben Nelson] won permanent federal aid for his state’s expanded Medicaid population, a benefit worth up to $100 million over 10 years. Other states get the federal aid for three years, but Nebraska’s benefit is indefinite.

If the health care bill were really about life and death, it wouldn’t take earmarks to get votes. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the political partisanship that has characterized the making of Obamacare.

On Sunday, the New York Times fessed up:

“Nasty charges of bribery. Senators cut off mid-speech. Accusations of politics put over patriotism. Talk of double-crosses. A nonagenarian forced out after midnight for multiple procedural votes.In the heart of the holiday season, Senate Republicans and Democrats are at one another’s throats as the health care overhaul reaches its climactic votes, one of which is set for 1 a.m. Monday. A year that began with hopes of new post-partisanship has indeed produced change: Things have gotten worse.”

Well, yes they have. How did we get to this point? Well, for starters, Obama, who ran on his determination to transcend partisan divisions, remained a passive and aloof figure when it came to the drafting and the details, allowing partisan passions to run wild. His sole concern was winning, not building a broad-based coalition for revolutionary legislation. Indeed, he contributed to partisan furies by labeling opponents as confused and misinformed and by repeating a series of partisan and baseless accusations against Republicans (the principal one — that they had “no alternative” — was easily disproved by the plethora of conservative plans and proposals). Obama had a reason for proceeding in this way — he wanted to rely on the muscle of large Democratic majorities to obtain the most liberal bill he could get. …

In the New York Daily News, Michael Goodwin voices what many are thinking.

I am a baby boomer, which is to say my life has coincided with turbulent and awesome times. From the Cold War to Vietnam, from Watergate to Monicagate, through the horrors of 9/11 and the stunning lifestyle advances, my generation’s era has been historic and exciting.

Yet for all the drama and change, the years only occasionally instilled in me the sensation I feel almost constantly now. I am afraid for my country.

I am afraid — actually, certain — we are losing the heart and soul that made America unique in human history. Yes, we have enemies, but the greatest danger comes from within.

Watching the freak show in Copenhagen last week, I was alternately furious and filled with dread. The world has gone absolutely bonkers and lunatics are in charge.  …

George Will reviews Copenhagen and Obamacare.

It was serendipitous to have almost simultaneous climaxes in Copenhagen and Congress. The former’s accomplishment was indiscernible, the latter’s was unsightly.

It would have been unprecedented had the president not described the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit as “unprecedented,” that being the most overworked word in his hardworking vocabulary of self-celebration. Actually, the mountain beneath the summit — a mountain of manufactured hysteria, predictable cupidity, antic demagoguery and dubious science — labored mightily and gave birth to a mouselet, a 12-paragraph document committing the signatories to . . . make a list.  …

Thomas Sowell notes the lack of media interest in climategate. When it comes to whistleblowers, it depends whose ox is gored.

…When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them.

As for politicians, Senator Barbara Boxer has urged prosecution of the hackers who uncovered and revealed the e-mails! People who have in the past applauded whistleblowers in business, in the military, or in Republican administrations, and who lionized the New York Times for publishing the classified Pentagon papers, are now shocked and outraged that someone dared to expose massive evidence of manipulations, concealment and destruction of data — and deliberate cover-ups of all this — in the global warming establishment. …

…People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs underway and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.

Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few — like themselves — can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives. …

Roger Simon was in Copenhagen. He had some thoughts on the way back.

… Yes, it’s comical, but it’s quite worrisome, if you examine the true game afoot. Copenhagen was intended as an important advance toward world governance. On the face of it, it’s a beautiful idea. When I was younger, I was highly attracted to it. But my up-close-and-personal encounters with the UN have turned that attraction to near revulsion. It’s very clear that under global government – because of its size and natural inefficiencies – accountability is nigh on to impossible, transparency nothing but a distant dream, very often not even desired. In short, it’s 1984. And COP15 was just that – legions staring at world leaders on Jumbotrons as they blathered platitudes, while negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. (That’s bad enough in our Congress, but on a global scale…?)

Well, now jet lag is setting in, so I’m going to shut down for the moment. But I will add that, perhaps fortuitously, my long voyage home (9 1/2 hours from Copenhagen to Atlanta, another 4 from Atlanta to LA) finally gave me ample undisturbed time to finish a book I had wanted to read for a long time – F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. How apropos it turned out to be. Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944. I recommend to all who haven’t taken the time. It’s just a sign of my own indoctrination that I had read Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, etc., etc. first

Scrappleface says we’re gonna cut carbon with ‘cash for cardigans.’

President Barack Obama has acknowledged that his new $23 billion weatherization subsidy program will merely slow the leakage of heat from homes.

So today the president introduced what the White House calls “phase II” of an overall program to completely eliminate carbon emissions from residential buildings.

//

The $37 billion “cash for cardigans” program will help homeowners to pay for sweaters, cardigans, housecoats, even Snuggies (the blanket with sleeves, As Seen on TV), so that they can dial back the thermostat to a setting that would require combustion of fossil fuels “only during the most frigid episodes of global cooling.” …

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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.