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With the approaching Nobel prize to be awarded, Paul Johnson, in Forbes, writes that Obama has done nothing to earn it. He has taken only one notorious action.
…The trouble with Mr. Obama is that he talks a great deal and seems to believe that talk is often a substitute for deeds. During his nearly 11 months in office he has already put out more words for public consumption than most Presidents put out during an entire term–and likely more than Calvin Coolidge uttered during his entire career as a politician. …
…Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is expected to take decisive action, as well as orate. In his country’s relations with Russia and China, in its dealings with Iran and Iranian nuclear aspirations and in ensuring that the U.S. and its people are safely defended in a hostile and rapidly changing world, Mr. Obama needs to be a shrewd, cautious and active statesman, who may well be called upon to make fast and dramatic moves at short notice.
So far the President has shown no signs that he possesses the requisite gifts. His most important actual move during his first year in office has been to backtrack on the creation of a missile defense system that was to run through Poland and would have defended the U.S. and its allies from rogue states that managed to acquire nuclear weapons. Quite what Mr. Obama intends by this decision is not clear. However, it looks suspiciously like unilateral disarmament, since it has been unaccompanied by comparable concessions from the U.S.’ potential or actual opponents.
…Now, for the first time, a U.S. President has made a unilateral concession in the vital field of nuclear defense. Mr. Reagan must be turning in his grave. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on Politico’s forum on what Obama should say for his acceptance speech.
Politico has a fun forum on what Obama should say to accept his undeserved Nobel Peace Prize. …
…all share a common understanding that this is a cringe-inducing moment that requires Obama to avoid pretending that the award is deserved.
Tevi Troy puckishly wonders if the president shouldn’t ask why the Nobelists couldn’t have “waited a year before bestowing it upon me.” Well, by then the multilateralist, we-are-the-world, America-wins-by-accepting-decline hooey would have been recognized by more people as, well, hooey. Obama already is throwing the elite Left under the bus on Afghanistan. And he’ll soon have to junk Iranian engagement now that it has proved disastrous. (When J Street gets on board with sanctions, you know the jig is up, albeit too late to have much impact.) And the Middle East hasn’t had that “new beginning” we were promised; indeed the parties are further apart than ever. …
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has an insightful article in the Christian Science Monitor on the Swiss vote to ban minarets. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali Muslim by birth, whose film on the oppression of Muslim women led to the murder of the film director Theo Van Gogh, and a threat on her life.
Washington – The recent Swiss referendum that bans construction of minarets has caused controversy across the world. There are two ways to interpret the vote. First, as a rejection of political Islam, not a rejection of Muslims. In this sense it was a vote for tolerance and inclusion, which political Islam rejects. Second, the vote was a revelation of the big gap between how the Swiss people and the Swiss elite judge political Islam. …
…In Europe, as in other places in the world where Muslims settle, the places of worship are simple at first. All that a Muslim needs to fulfill the obligation of prayer is a compass to indicate the direction of Mecca, water for ablution, a clean prayer mat, and a way of telling the time so as to pray five times a day in the allocated period.
The construction of large mosques with extremely tall towers that cost millions of dollars to erect are considered only after the demography of Muslims becomes significant.
The mosque evolves from a prayer house to a political center.
Imams can then preach a message of self-segregation and a bold rejection of the ways of the non-Muslims.
Men and women are separated; gays, apostates and Jews are openly condemned; and believers organize around political goals that call for the introduction of forms of sharia (Islamic) law, starting with family law. …
…The pragmatists, most of whom are power holders, are partially right when they insist that the integration of Muslims will take a very long time. Their calls for dialogue are sensible. But as long as they do not engage Muslims to make a choice between the values of the countries that they have come to and those of the countries they left, they will find themselves faced with more surprises. And this is what the Swiss vote shows us. This is a confrontation between local, working-class voters (and some middle-class feminists) and Muslim immigrant newcomers who feel that they are entitled, not only to practice their religion, but also to replace the local political order with that of their own. …
Jennifer Rubin blogs on NPR’s move to side with the Obami.
Josh Gerstein reports that NPR, the bastion of lefty radio where nary a conservative thought is heard that isn’t misrepresented or mocked, wanted its reporter Mara Liasson off Fox News. The reason? Well, get it out of your head that this had anything to do with the Obami’s crusade to delegitimize Fox. It was because those people at Fox are so darned biased that the mere appearance of their reporter on the Fox news shows might sully NPR’s reputation for journalistic purity. Hmm. But it seems the White House’s gripes did come up:
One source said the White House’s criticism of Fox was raised during the discussions with Liasson. However, an NPR spokeswoman told POLITICO that the Obama administration’s attempts to discourage other news outlets from treating Fox as a peer had no impact on any internal discussions at NPR. …
Apparently NPR has had a problem with Liasson and Juan Williams appearing on Fox for some time. For one thing, NPR’s liberal audience complains a lot. And for another, people might get the wrong idea, you see:
One complaint from NPR executives is that this very perception that Liasson and Williams serve as ideological counterweights reinforces feelings among some members of the public that NPR tilts to the left. “NPR has its own issues in trying to convince people that, ‘Look, we’re down the middle,’” the source said. …
In the Telegraph, UK, Christopher Booker writes about the one incident in the Climategate scandal that he believes is the most important.
…At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.
This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.
But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU’s leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]‘s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann’s procedure for the “hockey stick” (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.
A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre’s Climate Audit, known only as “Lucy Skywalker”. She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.) …
Bret Stephens, in the WSJ, explains that global-warming conspirators are advocating totalitarian ideas.
…Here’s a partial rundown of some of the ills seriously attributed to climate change: prostitution in the Philippines (along with greater rates of HIV infection); higher suicide rates in Italy; the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia; an increase in strokes and heart disease in China; wars in the Middle East; a larger pool of potential recruits to terrorism; harm to indigenous peoples and “biocultural diversity.” …
…One of those things, I suspect, is what I would call the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warming true believers are closet Stalinists. But their intellectual methods are instructively similar. Consider:
• Revolutionary fervor: There’s a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of “bourgeois” values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that “our lifestyles are unsustainable.” Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that “civil disobedience has a role to play” in strong-arming governments to do his bidding. (This from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.) …
• Intolerance: Why did the scientists at the heart of Climategate go to such lengths to hide or massage the data if truth needs no defense? Why launch campaigns of obstruction and vilification against gadfly Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick if they were such intellectual laughingstocks? It is the unvarying habit of the totalitarian mind to treat any manner of disagreement as prima facie evidence of bad faith and treason.
• Monocausalism: For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists. And as the list above suggests, global warming has become the fill-in-the-blank explanation for whatever happens to be the problem. …
Does anyone else think that Copenhagen is an excuse for self-important people to party using other people’s money, while feeling self-righteous? In the Telegraph, UK, Andrew Gilligan fills us in.
…Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”
And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”
The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.
As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. …The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. …
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders adds more details to Mike Huckabee’s pardon of Maurice Clemmons, that led to the tragic deaths of four police officers.
There is no need to tiptoe gingerly around this topic: Maurice Clemmons, who was shot and killed as authorities tried to apprehend him for the shooting deaths of four Washington police officers – is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s Willie Horton. …
…I am especially angry at Huckabee because I support the pardon system. With so many nonviolent, first-time drug offenders serving long federal sentences, there should be more – not zero – sentence commutations from the Obama White House.
But the pardon system works only when executives do their homework lest they release inmates who are violent or sure to re-offend.
When I looked into Huckabee’s pardon record in 2006, I expected to praise what became his more than 1,000 pardons, including 163 commutations.
Instead, I found a sorry history of Huckabee failing to do his homework. He commuted the sentence of a three-time drunk driver serving a six-year sentence – only to see the man become a four-time drunk driver. Huckabee commuted the sentence of rapist Wayne Dumond, who went on to kill a Missouri woman. …