Libertarian Leanings

Losing the Faith

According to Marc Morano, mainstream media are losing that old Global Warming religion.

A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, a continued lack of global warming, real world data and scientists continuing to dissent, have finally moved major establishment media outlets to report that the debate not only is "not over" but that skeptics may have been correct all along. [Note: Journalists are now sensing what Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, warned about in 2008. “Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined," Peden said.]

Well, maybe they should have their professional careers ruined for promoting this crap.  This comes via Tim Blair by way of Instapundit.

History of the Earth: Revised

Geologic Ages and Events.

Hat tip narciso.

Rush on the media: "I know how to yank their chain."

Rush Limbaugh agreed to an interview on the TODAY Show with Jamie Gangel.  I'd say he gained a fan.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Racial Fixation

From time to time I'll read an opinion by E.J. Dionne, and each time I do I seem to find him even more pathetic than the last.  True to form, his offering today on Real Clear Politics is pathetic.  Dionne is fixated on race.  Although he's willing at last to concede that there may be other causes, racism continues to be his fallback explanation for the opposition that has built up to Obama's policies, and because of those policies, to Obama himself.

There is no doubt that some of the anger is fueled by racial feeling, which is not the same as saying that all opposition to Obama is explained by racism. Most Obama opponents are simply conservative Republicans who disagree with him. But there are too many racist signs at rallies and too many overtly racial pronouncements in the fever swamps of the right-wing media to deny that racism is part of the anti-Obama mix.

It's disappointing, but not unexpected, to see Dionne's unabashed dishonesty on display.  Sorry, but I've been to some rallies and they were not in any way racist.  If there were racist signs, I didn't see them, and I looked.  Unfortunately media elites like Dionne parade their own bigotry in the guise of thoughtful analysis, in a deliberate slander of anybody with an idea that doesn't conform to liberal ideology.

After taking his moment to assure readers that racism is behind much of Obama's rising opposition, Dionne does manage to concede that there may just be legitimate reasons for typical (assumed by Dionne to be racist) "angry white men" to be upset about the current state of affairs.

Gillard, a leader of Australia's center-left Labor Party, argues that high unemployment, particularly the displacement of men from previously well-paying jobs, helped unleash Hansonism and "the politics of the ordinary guy versus these elites, the opera-watching, latte-sipping elites."

Hansonism collapsed, partly because the Australian economy boomed. Gillard argued that the key to battling the politics of rage is to acknowledge that it is driven by "real problems" and not simply raw feelings.

No doubt some who despise Obama will see the judges in Norway as part of that latte-sipping crowd and hold their esteem for the president against him. He can't do much about this. What he can do -- and perhaps then deserve the domestic equivalent of a peace prize -- is reach out to the angry white men with policies that address their grievances, and do so with an understanding that what matters to them is not status but simply a chance to make a decent living again.

What Dionne doesn't acknowledge, or maybe even realize, is that Obama's policies aren't intended to solve problems for ordinary people.  Obama's policies are supposed to solve a problem for Democrats and media elites, who understand that their lousy, socialist ideas could very well shut them out of power if enough people come to understand what they really are.  Since their lousy, socialist ideas don't fly all that well on their own, they hope to force feed them onto a reluctant public by stifling debate, demonizing the opposition, and ramming them through before anybody has the chance to know what they are.  Obama's policies are all about getting and retaining power.

So when people start to wonder how we can expand health care coverage to millions who are not now covered without adding to the cost, then we get this kind of thoughtful analysis from bigots like Dionne.  We get it when anybody questions how we can still maintain a high level of care for the elderly when we cut $500 billion from Medicare.  If you should wonder how this is all going to work, expect to see some enlightened analysis into possible underlying racist tendencies.

Did He Just Say George Bush Was a Great Leader?

I believe he did.  He is Bob Kerrey, Democrat and former U.S. Senator from Nebraska, who was commenting on President Obama's strategy for Afghanistan and how it might be affected, now that the president has won the Nobel Peace Prize.  The Nobel committee might have waited a bit, thinks Mr. Kerrey.

By awarding the prize to Mr. Obama, the Nobel committee also surely hoped to influence the debate about U.S. policy in Afghanistan. I wish they had waited until the debate was settled here at home. My wish is based on a fear that American political leaders are about to talk themselves into breaking yet another foreign policy commitment.

Mr. Kerrey avoids mention of political parties, but it's almost impossible to miss which "American political leaders" he fears will break foreign policy commitments.  It's as if we're about to have a replay of the debate that began in late 2006.  That debate was about winning in Iraq.  This time it will be about winning in Afghanistan.  Does this sound familiar? 

No serious leader in Kabul is asking us to leave. Instead we are being asked to withdraw by American leaders who begin their analysis with the presumption that victory is not possible. They seem to want to ensure defeat by leaving at the very moment when our military leader on the ground has laid out a coherent and compelling strategy for victory.

Mr. Kerrey is taking his own party to task, though he does it without naming names.  Note that he doesn't actually say that Democrats were the ones who declared the war in Iraq a lost cause back in 2006 .  And though he won't name Democrat names he does mention a name, which makes his sin is so much the greater.  He commits the unthinkable by praising George W. Bush. 

In December 2006, President George W. Bush was faced with a similarly difficult foreign policy decision. The Republicans had suffered tremendous losses in the November election, in part because of the conduct of the war in Iraq. At the time, the unpopular Republican president was being pressured by ascendant congressional Democrats and some members of his own party into withdrawing from Iraq. Failure in Iraq loomed, as public opinion for the effort to help the democratically elected government survive had faded thanks to a series of tactical blunders and inaccurate assessments of what would be needed to accomplish the mission.

Then, against all reasonable predictions, President Bush chose to increase rather than decrease our military commitment. The "surge," as it became known, worked. Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat.

Sure, Mr. Kerrey paid lip service to the tactical blunders and inaccurate assessment.  But in the end he gives George Bush his due by conceding that he was right.  David Petraeus was right.  "Reasonable predictions" were wrong.  I wonder when reasonable predictions can stop being reasonable.  Mr. Kerrey may be loathe to admit it, but not only were Democrats wrong about the surge in Iraq, they were wrong about the strategic importance of Iraq.

But at the time they had plenty of political cover.  Hawkish sounding Democrats, including Obama lined up against George Bush, urging capitulation, claiming Iraq was a war of choice, a huge mistake, and a distraction from the real and necessary war.  Democrats claimed that they were the real party of national security because they would fight the war on terror on its real central front.  Afghanistan. 

And so here we are again, getting ready to listen to those same "American leaders" who, it would now seem, want to change their minds.  They're thinking maybe the war in Afghanistan really isn't so necessary after all.  They talk about the importance of getting the military strategy right.  It's a strategy settled on months ago, but which has now somehow come into question.  They look to the opinion polls for guidance.

Great American leaders of our past have ignored popular sentiment and pressed on during the darkest hours, even when setbacks give rhetorical ammunition to the skeptics.

President Obama's decision is extremely difficult. Today, less than 50% of Americans support the war. No doubt even fewer Americans would be on the side of doing what Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants to do: temporarily increase the number of troops and dramatically change our strategy.

Backing General Mchrystal would be a departure for Democrats  Recent history has shown they value electoral victory over American military victory, and here they've been given a rare second chance.  They may do for Afghanistan what they were unable to do in Iraq.  Give it up to the terrorists.

Mr. Kerrey urges President Obama not to give it up.  He urges the president to ignore the opinion polls and do what's right.

When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more then your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership.

George W. Bush ignored popular sentiment and pressed on with the surge, while reasonable Democrats and their allies in the media presumed the impossibility of success.  Mr. Kerrey would like President Obama to follow the example of a great American leader from our past, George W. Bush.

Elvis

Elvis recorded "My Baby Left Me" at the RCA Studios in New York in 1956.  It was not one of his big hits, but it was always a favorites of mine.

Is Anybody Surprised?

Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. 

"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples"

What are they talking about?  This puts him right up there with Yassar Arafat, Jimmy Carter, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore, the United Nations, and Kofi Annan. 

Nobel prize awards are based on political considerations above all.  Anything that enhances the power or image of the "world government" crowd is reason for handing them out.  U.S. leaders who happen to be strong on national defense don't win prizes.  For example, with START Ronald Reagan achieved a breakthrough agreement to reduce, not just limit mind you, but to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in existence.  You might think that would be worth a nod from the Norwegian Parliament, but if you did you'd be wrong. 

Charles Krauthammer describes the prize winning posture, a pose maintained by Democrats for decades.  Obama has it down to perfection and Nobel awarders were obviously impressed.

When the Iraq War (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

"I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as 'the right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom," wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. "This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq -- while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Obama was forced into his public agonizing by Bob Woodward when he published the secret report saying things were not going well in Afghanistan. Before that happened Obama had been content to procrastinate on Afghanistan and focus entirely on his domestic agenda.  But with the cat out of the bag it became politically impossible for Obama to ignore Afghanistan any longer.  But he doesn't seem to want to win it and General McChrystal can't very well disavow what's in the report, so we get the public agonizing.

I think it will go this way:  At the moment there is substantial public support for winning in Afghanistan. After careful consideration Obama will send more troops, but only enough to make it look like he's trying real hard, and not enough to bring security to the Afghans.  That means we can expect to be back to this decision again some months down the road. By that time Obama will hope that enough time has passed for Americans to become fed up and demand a pullout.

Naturally the defeat in Afghanistan will be all George Bush's fault.  Obama's Nobel credentials will be intact.

Update:  Obama said he was "humbled" to win it.

More:  Power Line lists some qualifications of previous winners.

2007
AL GORE The award to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years.

2005
MOHAMED ELBARADEI (joint winner). He's done such a nice job with Iran.

2004
WANGARI MAATHAI The Kenyan ecologist peacefully teaches that the AIDS virus is a biological agent deliberately created by the Man.

2002
JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America. A true cosmopolitan, he has undermined the foreign policy of his own country and vouched for the bona fides of tyrants and murderers all over the world. Commenting on the award, Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge emphasized that the award was meant as a denunciation of American policy toward Iraq. "It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," Berge said. "It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

2001
UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA.
KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General. Among other things, they respectively served as the vehicle for, and presided over, one of the biggest scams in history.

1994
YASSER ARAFAT (joint winner), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority. He was a cold-blooded murderer both before and after receiving the award.

1992
RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. She is the notorious Guatemalan faker and author, sort of, of I, Rigoberta Menchu. Like President Obama, she is a memoirist of distinction.

1988
THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A. Notwithstanding rapes and sex abuse committed by the team in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Congo, still doing fine work all over the world.

1976
BETTY WILLIAMS, United Kingdom, founder of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement (later renamed Community of Peace People), who in later years repeatedly called for the assassination of President George Bush. How peaceful can you get?

1973
LE DUC THO (with Henry Kissinger) for the 1973 peace with honor bequeathed to the fortunate people of Vietnam.

With her repeated calls for the assassination of George Bush I'm stupified that 1976 winner Betty Williams won it only once.

Tilting At Windmills

A Washington Whispers item in US News and World Report says that a noted scientist is trying to convince congress that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming.

A noted geologist who coauthored the New York Times bestseller Sugar Busters has turned his attention to convincing Congress that carbon dioxide emissions are good for Earth and don't cause global warming. Leighton Steward is on Capitol Hill this week armed with studies and his book Fire, Ice and Paradisein a bid to show senators working on the energy bill that the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade scheme could actually hurt the environment by reducing CO2 levels.

"I'm trying to kill the whole thing," he says. "We are tilting at windmills." He is meeting with several GOP lawmakers and has plans to meet with some Democrats later this week.

Trying to convince congressional Democrats that their justification for regulating the world economy is mistaken, well there's tilting at windmills for you.   Good luck with that Mr. Steward.

CBO Pipe Dreams

According to the Washington Post the Congressional Budget Office has given its blessing to the health care bill under consideration by the Senate Finance Committee.  It won't raise the deficit, says the CBO.

The $829 billion cost would be more than offset by reducing spending on Medicare and other federal health programs by about $400 billion over the next decade, and by imposing a series of fees on insurance companies, drugmakers, medical device manufacturers and other sectors of the health industry that stand to gain millions of new customers under the legislation.

Mitch McConnell has it right.

"The real bill will be another 1,000-page, trillion-dollar experiment," McConnell said in a statement, "that slashes a half-trillion dollars from seniors' Medicare, raises taxes on American families by $400 billion, increases health care premiums, and vastly expands the role of the federal government in the personal health-care decisions of every American."

There's a certain beauty to the CBO's pronouncement.  When the deficit goes up something else will be to blame.  I'm betting it will be George Bush and the war in Iraq.

Update:  Cato estimates the cost of the bill, not at $829 billion, but at over $2 trillion.

Catastrophic Global Nonlinearity

I occasionally peer into a Thomas L. Friedman column, out of a sense of horrible fascination I suppose.  In today's offering there was this nugget of wisdom.

As we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to unprecedented levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event — like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all of its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melting all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer. And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable changes in others that could alter our whole world.

It's hard to believe anybody could say stuff like that with a straight face, but then who knows what Friedman's face looked like when he wrote it.  The world is hostage to a carbon molecule!  Talk about melodrama.  But this was only one part of his world ending trifecta.  Nuclear weapons, massive U.S. debt, the carbon molecule. 

With something less than piercing insight, the magnificent Friedman conjures up solutions for only two out of three.  He'll tackle Markets and Mother Nature.  How disappointing.  After leading off as the number one bomb threat, nuclear holocaust goes unmentioned the rest of the way.  Why is that?

Progressives like Friedman are all about regulation, and as it happens, there aren't any regulatory solutions for a nuclear detonation.  If we expect "the dollar is going to tip over into fear in a nonlinear way," there are broad based tax increases and entitlement cuts.  For addressing the anticipated "nonlinear climate event" there's cap and trade.  For nuclear holocaust, no plan.

No plan, but no problem!  Nuclear bombs aren't that big of a deal. Certainly not big enough to mention.  Friedman doesn't.

...our government has not been able to put in place the long-term policies needed to guard against detonating our mounting debt bomb and climate bomb. As such, we’re in effect putting our kids’ future in the hands of the two most merciless forces on the planet: the Market and Mother Nature.

For the Friedman's of our world life would be really grand if our government could just have unlimited power.  Then nothing could stop it from protecting us from the merciless Market.  And merciless Mother Nature too, but mostly from the merciless Market.  I mustn't forget to mention that conservatives and libertarians like the Market.  That's why it's so bad.

Mother Nature presents a slightly more complex problem.  The complexity is reflected in the recent shift away from the commonly used phrase "global warming" to the more flexible "climate change."  Over the last decade while progressives have been aggressively promoting the global warming phenomenon, temperatures have been dropping.  Believe it or not, progressives actually noticed.  Hence the shift to "climate change."

And not a moment too soon.  Our New Hampshire summer has been one of coolest, with record low temperatures.  Out west they are seeing earliest snowfalls on record, right now.  In Bellevue, Idaho school kids got their earliest snow day on record.  In Colorado ski resorts enjoyed their earliest opening day in 40 years.  In Las Vegas a ski and snowboard resort opened earlier than ever before.

When catastrophic climate change manifests itself as the coming ice, progressives can still take credit for accurately predicting a nonlinear climate event.  So what if they're a little off on the temperature direction.  They rate a hit on the catastrophic nonlinearity.  Two out of three is pretty good and either way the cause is the same.  Unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

Carbon dioxide has now risen to roughly .035% of the atmosphere.  That would be three and one half one hundredths of one percent.  This is huge.  Staggering.  It used to be only two and three quarter one hundredths of one percent.  If it ever gets to be four one hundredths of one percent, we're toast.  Or ice, maybe.  Hard to know.  

Whatever.  The solution is the same either way.  Total government control of everything that has anything to do with carbon, and total progressive control of government.  Once the climate nonlinearity is relinearized, progressive saviors can take steps to prevent nonlinear market events.  Total progressive government control is the answer.

That's the ticket.  That's Friedman.  Horribly fascinating.