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We start with a few items related to globaloney. First a scary item from Protein Wisdom about California’s efforts to control thermostats in homes. “First they came for the thermostats ……. “
Jeff Jacoby has a welcome column. He writes about an article in the Russian news service Novosti that Pickerhead has been wanting to include but was put off by a poor translation. How’s this? “Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.” That’s a literal translation of typical Russian bombast, but it’s not what we want to offer here. Jacoby does better.
… “Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!” advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. “The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012.”
Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity – sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time – as having the greatest effect on climate.
“Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change,” Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. “Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind.” …
According to Country Store, NASA has noticed the same changes to the sun as the Novosti article.
Today, the Space and Science Research Center, (SSRC) in Orlando, Florida announces that it has confirmed the recent web announcement of NASA solar physicists that there are substantial changes occurring in the sun’s surface. The SSRC has further researched these changes and has concluded they will bring about the next climate change to one of a long lasting cold era.
Today, Director of the SSRC, John Casey has reaffirmed earlier research he led that independently discovered the sun’s changes are the result of a family of cycles that bring about climate shifts from cold climate to warm and back again. …
OK, back to the contest over who’s going to be in charge of stealing from us.
Since he’s close to the action, Howie Carr’s might be a voice to heed about the vote in New Hampshire today.
John McCain is old – very old.
Which may explain his abject confusion about whether he supports amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens. When you’re 71 years old, short-term memory loss can be part of the package, along with the delusion that Wilfred Brimley’s endorsement is big with the iPod generation.
Last spring McCain and the hero of Chappaquiddick, with the help of La Raza, put together a grandiose scheme to grant amnesty to millions upon millions of foreign invaders. It was so outrageous they refused to hold hearings on it. The bill went down in flames, twice, and so did McCain’s campaign for almost a year.
Now McCain is back, sort of. But his “amnesty†bill is still political poison. So when he’s called on it, as he was by Mitt Romney Saturday night at Saint Anselm College, he speaks with forked tongue: …
Which might be a reason to listen to a Corner post. This begins a series of Corner posts suggesting McCain’s not doing so well. Pickerhead’s theory is McCain does poorly because many independents he counted on have been attracted to the Obama drama. Serves him right. He can only win a GOP primary that is thoroughly polluted by independents.
I’ve just gotten off the phone with Professor David Paleologos, who conducts the Suffolk University/WHDH poll in New Hampshire. I asked him why his poll is the only one showing Romney ahead. Here is what he said, hastily transcribed by me:
We all have different methodologies. I think the difference will be measured in the independents. We believe that this most accurately reflects where New Hampshire is going…I think the difference is there have been broad-brush gifts of independents to McCain. …
Dick Armey, one of the GOP’s grown-ups has Huckabee cautions.
… Of course, his genial demeanor and willingness to overlook both principle and fact is indicative of a distinct and disturbing trend in American politics. Huckabee seemed to come from nowhere in the race, but he is not just a lonely, surprise candidate, but a symbol of the new wave of feel-good conservatism, which seeks not to deal in policy that works so much as policy and rhetoric that provide emotional gratification.
Huckabee comes off as the self-esteem candidate, in which merely feeling good is the core of the message. He’s not the only Republican making a practice of peddling cotton-candy bromides. As FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe recently pointed out, former Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has been pushing a similarly foolish agenda: inspiring, heartfelt–and utterly ineffective.
More than ever, we need to remember that freedom, prosperity, and opportunity are at the center of the limited government vision for America. Ours is an inherently compassionate and positive agenda, and it would be better if more candidates adopted Huckabee’s accessible, upbeat tone. But sunshine rhetoric in the service of liberal fantasies is a political and policy dead end. Allowing Mike Huckabee to become the face of conservatism would trade unity and principle for an ill-advised romance with a flighty, flaky new brand of politics.
Thomas Sowell gives all the candidates a glancing blow.
It was not that long ago that the big political question was how Rudolph Giuliani would do against Hillary Clinton in the November election. The Iowa caucus votes have made that question sound like ancient history, if not science fiction. The results of the Iowa caucus are only a small part of the story of this election year but their implications are significant. One implication that reaches well beyond politics is that a state that is 95 percent white gave its biggest vote total to a black man. More Iowa women voted for Obama than for Hillary. So much for the “race, class and gender” mantra among the intelligentsia. So much also for the “inevitable” or “invincible” candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the biggest story out of Iowa is that 71 percent of Democrats voted against Hillary.
The next biggest story is that no one in either party won a majority. It is still a wide-open race in both parties. …
John Fund comments on the blame Bill Clinton is spreading around.
… Despite fawning media coverage of the “Comeback Kid” in the 1992 campaign and the media’s almost complete failure to cover the fundraising scandals that led to 24 guilty pleas after the 1996 campaign, Bill and Hillary still labor under the delusion that most reporters are biased against them. Their sense of victimization has intensified as they’ve seethed over the favorable coverage Barack Obama has gotten in recent days. Team Clinton is convinced reporters want to write premature obituaries of Hillary Clinton: “Give me a break. This whole [Obama] thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” a frustrated President Clinton told reporters in New Hampshire yesterday. …
Christopher Hitchens is tired of hearing about Obama’s race.
… The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, “uplift,” and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.
IBD Editors show what’s coming for Obama.
… Obama, whose foreign policy includes talking to our enemies while invading our allies, told the assembled veterans at the VFW Convention in Kansas City, “All our top military commanders recognize that there is no military solution in Iraq.” Except, of course for Gen. Petraeus.
Of the current surge, Obama says “our troops have helped reduce violence, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006.” The New York Times reported late last month that “violent attacks in the country had fallen by 60% since June.”
Obama’s idea of change is to spend “at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries.” Wrong again. As we have reported, Iraqi refugees are returning in droves to enjoy the peace and democracy we have established thus far.
Obama is a hard-core liberal whose voting record in the Senate is virtually indistinguishable from Ted Kennedy’s. Half the Democrats in the Senate voted for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts — even Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold. But not Barack Obama. It is doubtful as well his plans for change include less domestic spending and smaller government.
Obama to this point has been a stealth candidate, not hiding but not emphasizing his deep liberal beliefs, content to ride the wave of adulation that has carried him to this point. But is he the next John F. Kennedy, or merely the next Jimmy Carter?
Former Clinton guru Dick Morris thinks he’s the latter — “a Jimmy Carter, running for president on his personal moral outlook, his background and making a virtue out of his limited knowledge of how American government works.” We all know how the Carter administration turned out.
The Captain notes WaPo and WSJ editors are on the Dem scent too, and comments on Clinton crybabies.
How often do the editorial boards of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal not only agree, but coincide on foreign policy? Rarely enough so that today’s twin broadsides on the Democratic presidential contenders is worthy of special notice. Both editorial boards scold the Democrats for not only getting Iraq wrong, but also for seriously misrepresenting the progress achieved through the surge.
The Post’s criticisms get tart indeed: …
… What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures — coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections — a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence. …
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… Yesterday, Hillary let us know how hard it is to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on a campaign trail. She has to eat fast food, she doesn’t get her exercise, and we should all care about how much she’s sacrificing for all of us! Today, we should pity Mark Penn because he had a bad day, which of course is because of all of us and the media.
Hey, didn’t these people sign up for this voluntarily? Don’t they get to lead the Free World if they win? Will the White House host regular pity parties, or only occasionally?
Bill seems to be the party coordinator. He’s complaining about underhanded tactics from Barack Obama? Perhaps Bill might want to review which campaign dug up kindergarten essays for a basis of criticism, and whose campaign second talked about how much more black Bill was from Barack. …
A stunning photo of a great white shark tailing a kayak showed up a few years ago. We came across the photographer’s story. How’s that for a change of pace?
… To capture this image I tied myself to the tower of the research boat Lamnidae and leaned into the void, precariously hanging over the ocean while waiting patiently for a white shark to come along. I wanted to shot a photograph that would tell the story of our research efforts to track white sharks using kayaks. When the first shark of the day came across our sea kayak it dove to the seabed and inspected it from below. I quickly trained my camera on the dark shadow which slowly transformed from diffuse shape into the sleek outline of a large great white. When the shark’s dorsal fin broke the surface I thought I had the shot, but hesitated a fraction of a second and was rewarded with marine biologist Trey Snow in the kayak turning around to look behind him. I pressed the shutter and the rest was history. Throughout the day I shot many more images, most showing the kayak following the shark, but all lacked the power of that first image of the great white tracking the kayak. …