There is some suggestion that the Russians are behind the recent embarrassing Climategate data dump:

Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

(Via JammieWearingFool) Specifically, the Russian FSB, which is of course the successor organization to the KGB. You know: the organization that Vladimir Putin used to run.  And if you’re wondering why a slightly institutionally paranoid nation-state that’s a major producer of fossil fuels might be interested in publishing compromising materials involving groups trying to cut fossil fuel production… well, read that again until you work it out.

On the bright side, maybe this will encourage Democrats to start pushing back on (unrelated) Russian attempts to aggrandize themselves at our expense.  It could happen: Ted Kennedy is dead, after all.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Oops.

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of  “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

Guess that Al Gore’s going to come up with a new talking point - HA! I kid, I kid. He’ll ignore it completely, of course. Doesn’t fit the religious orthodoxy.  It’s too good an iconic image for proselytizing efforts.  Can’t confuse the faithful, no?

[pause]

Eppur e’ meno umido.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

There is a school of thought that says, Do not delight in reminding your extremist ideological opponents that they are being betrayed by their own. The underlying rationale is that doing so help make the people doing the betrayal appear to be ‘moderate,’ even when they’re really not. Given that said extremist ideologues will also still vote for their betrayers in the future, the argument is that pragmatically there’s not enough of an upside to mocking them for it. I respect the reasoning behind of this school of thought.

It’s just that sometimes I don’t give a tinker’s dam. Via AoSHQ, not a Photoshop or parody. This is real:

And the neocons laugh. Oh, how we laugh.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

It’s going to take a while for them to cycle through the process, though. As in, more than a week. A lot more than a week.

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world.

Just in time for Copenhagen, which relied heavily on the climate change data that CRU provided, and can no longer even remotely back up.  Meanwhile, the President - who seems to have a real gift at walking into these controversies at the worst possible moment for him - seems determined to use the luster of his name to ensure results at the Copenhagen thing.  Personally, I think that it’d be good for the planet, the country, and his political party if the President just dropped the trip entirely.  Which he won’t, of course.

Via Q&O, who thinks that they should completely cancel Copenhagen; and Hot Air, who thinks that the British government should stop trying to keep the Met Office from pushing the reset button.  And if either actually happens, all three of us will be massively surprised.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

When you’re a Democrat, not only can you use “I’m sleeping with her” as a stealth job prerequisite for an US Attorney’s position - HI, Senator Max Baucus (D) of Montana! - but when you’re a Democrat you can also publicly disrespect inconveniently conscientious female journalists (even if they’re African-American ones) when they insist on doing their jobs. Although I will admit that at least Bobby Gibbs didn’t use the word ‘uppity’ in public:

Yet. They’ll be saving it for after the midterms, no doubt.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I think that Allahpundit is over-analyzing the reasons why support for ‘torture’ is currently polling at 54/41 in favor (God help us all).  It looks fairly simple to me: the antiwar movement has spent the last five or six years attempting to equate waterboarding to torture.  They even more or less succeeded - but then they made a classic mistake: they assumed that stigmatization would inevitably follow.  Their thinking presumably was that if you can define X as Y, and Y is bad, then it becomes inconceivable that people could possibly support X.

Apparently, what happened instead was that they got the American people to define X as Y… and then the American people decided that perhaps this meant that Y wasn’t so bad after all.  This answer allows them to keep doing X, which was after all keeping us from losing any more national landmarks and innocent civilians to terrorist attacks.  Men not being angels, that’s enough for a justification right then and there.

Mind you, it’s not the waterboarding that’s the problem here: it’s that this strategy also makes it slightly easier for the CIA to feel better about handing over suspected terrorists caught abroad to say, France; who will hand them over to, say, Egypt; who will hand them over to people with car batteries.  Which is bad, by the way; but it’s now also easier.

Oops?

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, all of this was incredibly stupid of the antiwar movement - not to mention morally shortsighted of them.  Antiwar progressives, remember?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Via The Weekly Standard and HolyCoast.com comes excellent news:

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, testifying today about the state dinner security breach, refuted stories that President Obama has received more threats than previous presidents.

“The threats are not up,” Sullivan said, adding that they receive about the same amount of threats against Obama as they did for presidents Clinton and Bush.

Except of course for those people on the Left who can’t function without a belief in the utter villainy in their political enemies. In that case, the news that the current President is nothing special when it comes to being threatened is probably depressing the living life out of those folks. Check out the TPM link above for some examples, in fact: they’re busy telling themselves stories about how the President really is more at risk, really, uh-huh, no fooling…

Moe Lane

PS: Of course I’m being contemptuous towards people who need the Right to be devils. Why aren’t you just as contemptuous? It’s one of the more annoying fetishes out there.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

UPDATE: Word on the Tweet was wrong. Went down .2% instead of up .2%. My sarcastic reaction to the folks responsible for this amazing long-term trend in the American economic situation remains unchanged.

If true: wonderful. Simply wonderful. And at precisely what unemployment rate do we have to reach before the current ruling party starts to admit that they’ve been mucking up economic policy since January 2007? 11%? 12%? 15%? 36.567%? Things are starting to get a little stretched out here.

Via Hot Air.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

In this respect, at least, the country would be better off if Obama really did have brilliant oratorical skills.

- Taranto, in discussing the President’s West Point speech (H/T: Instapundit).

Truth of the matter is, while the President is great at inspiring people who want to be inspired, he’s not that good at persuading people who don’t want to be, or who are going to be in opposition to what he wants them to do.  This would be less of a problem for the man if he weren’t a fairly typical bicoastal, Ivy League-educated academic who has been operating in one or another gentle bubble of privilege since the age of ten*.  Said bubbles do in fact teach many valuable life lessons.  Learning to handle fundamental disagreement on core issues is typically not one of them.

Ach, well, it’s not like I need the man to succeed (or fail!) to feel good about myself.

Moe Lane

*Although I do give him props for working in a Baskin Robbins while in high school.  Admittedly, if he’s held a real job since then, it’s news to me.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

House version (Via Instapundit):

Congressmen John Carter[*] (R-TX) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) yesterday introduced the Geithner Penalty Waiver Act, requiring that the IRS assess the same penalty against U.S. taxpayers that came forward in the UBS tax fraud investigation as paid by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for failing to pay taxes on his IMF income — zero.

Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it? I like Rep. Carter. And not just because of his name.

Senate version (Via Don Surber):

In their first shot at the measure this week, Republicans decided to try to strike at the heart of how Democrats plan to pay for the $848 billion measure by attempting to eliminate the proposal’s almost $440 billion in Medicare cuts.

But instead of offering a conventional amendment, they decided to use an esoteric procedural tactic that would send the bill back to committee with instructions to eliminate the cuts. If successful, the GOP’s gambit would force Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to use time-consuming procedures and hold another filibuster-killing vote on whether to restart debate on the bill.

That takes it off the floor, requires another committee vote, delays the bill, and ticks off Senate Democrats.  The ‘delays the bill’ part is probably the most important thing, here: health care rationing just isn’t popular these days.

Moe Lane

PS: Arcane procedural tactics are fun, but they’re no substitute for a Congressional majority. Reverse the Vote.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Erick wasn’t the only one who noticed that the President’s speech last night contained no use of the word ‘victory:’ Andrew Malcolm over at the LA Times’ blog observed that, too.

President Obama spoke 4,582 words in his primetime Afghanistan war speech at West Point last night.

He said “al Qaeda” 22 times.

He mentioned the “Taliban” 12 times.

And here’s how many times the Democratic chief executive used the word “victory” — 0.

That telling omission says more than anything about Obama’s 322d day in office when he gave his first major address as the United States’ commander-in-chief.

Mind you, I’m not particularly surprised. The ostensible audience for this speech - the cadets - already know more about victory than the President (or for that matter, me) could hope to tell them; and the actual audience (the progressive antiwar Democratic base) reacts to that particular word in much the same way that a traditional vampire reacts to a cross.  Apparently, that means that mentioning ‘victory’ would be superfluous in the first place, and contraindicated in the second.  At least to this administration.

All that being said: Saying “We have been at war for eight years, at enormous cost in lives and resources,” in front of a room full of people who have been taught about Shiloh and Okinawa?  There’s a Presidential speechwriter out there who could use firing.

Moe lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

For those keeping track: yes on ’stimulus;’ no on cap-and-trade and health care rationing. Apparently, that wasn’t enough:

Rep. John Tanner (D-TN), a leading Blue Dog Dem, will retire at the end of his current term, Dem sources tell Hotline OnCall.

[snip: see below]

Tanner has begun informing key House Dems of his decision — one that will make his seat a prime pickup opportunity for GOPers. He has served 11 terms in Congress representing northwest TN, a district based around Jackson, Clarksville and Union City.

At least, not enough for TN-08 - which is a R+6 district, and was a Leans Democratic pickup possibility (I assume that this will improve now). Rep Tanner’s claiming that he only stuck around to be President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly; which is why, of course, that he has no anointed successor for his seat and announced his retirement sans warning or initial explanation. For that matter: Rep. Tanner claims to be a fiscal conservative, even though he voted for the ’stimulus.’  So you can believe or not believe his explanation as you like.

At any rate: that’s the second one. Meanwhile, the GOP’s excellent 2010 recruiting continues apace.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Took them long enough.

LONDON — Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

And one hopes that they do a better job with him than with what Jones produced.

H/T Instapundit.

Read More →

…but it’s all right: she wasn’t being a proper Democrat, anyway.

CLEVELAND, OHIO — A controversial editorial cartoon in the Call & Post, a weekly Cleveland newspaper with a large black readership, has increased the racial and political tensions surrounding Cuyahoga County government reform and one of its key backers.

The cartoon, which appeared on the front page of Wednesday’s paper, depicts State. Sen. Nina Turner as Aunt Jemima, the much-maligned vaudeville character and food-company logo that has become a pejorative symbol of a black woman who aims to please whites in authority positions.

Turner, who represents Cleveland’s East Side, was the only black politician to endorse Issue 6, the reform proposal passed by voters last month.

Read More →

I had actually put this together on Sunday, but: well, new baby. Rasmussen’s new trust numbers are out. The short version is: eight for ten for the GOP, and the Democrats’ free-fall from last month have been mostly reset back to September’s numbers…

…except for health care, of course. The Democrats seem to have lost that particular automatic lead. And, on reflection: there’s not much to say about this, except that it’s amazing how quickly a new equilibrium can form in politics. Last year the GOP was trying to get itself more trusted on one out of ten, let alone eight…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

And no doubt unicorn rides, seeing as the third is just as likely to happen as the first two.

In case you’re wondering, this call is due to the announcement that census worker Bill Sparkman killed himself for the insurance money (H/T: R.S. McCain) - which means that he was not murdered by conservative monsters from the id, or murdered for ideological purposes - or, in fact, was murdered at all.  I’m sure that this would be an embarrassment for everyone on the Other Side who flogged this particular narrative, except this would imply that they cared about Sparkman in the first place.  Which they didn’t, so expect a grudging bare minimum, at best.

Moe Lane

PS: For the record: when you try to set up your suicide to make it look like you’ve been murdered by your ideological opponents, you have officially abrogated any obligation for me to be upset at your plight.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Erick covered this already:

Lieberman Digs In on Public Option
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, speaking in that trademark sonorous baritone, utters a simple statement that translates into real trouble for Democratic leaders: “I’m going to be stubborn on this.”

Stubborn, he means, in opposing any health-care overhaul that includes a “public option,” or government-run health-insurance plan, as the current bill does. His opposition is strong enough that Mr. Lieberman says he won’t vote to let a bill come to a final vote if a public option is included.

…but I cannot resist asking: does anybody over on the Other Side sometimes, ah, regret, aiming at a king - and missing? I ask because this is the second time that Lieberman has been the grit in the gears for progressives: the last time was during the pre-Surge period, of course. His mere presence in the 110th Congress meant that Harry Reid couldn’t shut down the war before we could implement the standard American victory strategy*. And now he seems happy to do it for government-option health care. There’s obviously sound reasons for it - he goes into them - but, really, there’s a certain amount of blood-soaked revenge going on here.

I’ll spare you the lie about how I’m not enjoying this. I am. Even though I know that we’re still on track to get a no-public-option, no-abortion-funding monstrosity of a health care bill; honestly at this point there’s a certain fascination to seeing how much excrement that Congressional Democrats can dump on the sandwich and still be able to get its base to eat it.

Moe Lane

*Systematically flail about until we come across a working solution, then throw our essentially infinite logistics behind said solution and descend upon the enemy like an asteroid from orbit. It’s not the most elegant strategy out there, but it works.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Nine days after there was an announcement that their group was going to be investigated? Yup, that’s right: ACORN. San Diego office - just before California AG Jerry Brown came to visit. Alas, if only somebody had had the foresight to wait for this sort of thing to happen, and retrieve the documents…

Oh. Right.

They didn’t shred, they didn’t redact, and they threw out people’s sensitive and personal information - including things like copies of Social Security cards, W-4 forms, and driver’s licenses. I’m not a lawyer, but apparently that’s grounds for legal action right there; document disposal requirements are very, very strict. Which is why the local ACORN branch is trying the novel ‘Oops, fall cleaning‘ excuse.

Which almost might be believable, except of course for the underage El Salvadoran illegal immigrant brothel thing.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Drawing on and expanding from Jim Geraghty’s summary:

• IA-03. D+1.  Leonard Boswell is the incumbent (first elected 1997); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Former wrestler Jim Gibbons (no campaign website yet) has just announced; he’ll be facing former National Guard chopper pilot Dave Funk in the primary.
• MN-01. R+1. Tim Walz is the incumbent (first elected in 2006); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (probably because the Congressman won handily in 2008).  Former state legislator (and lightning rod) Allen Quist has declared; he’ll be hammering Walz on the latter’s support of the ’stimulus,’ cap-and-trade, and health care rationing.
• CT-04. D+5.  Jim Hines is the incumbent (freshman); Cook currently lists the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Rick Torres (no campaign website yet) joins Rob Russo, Dan Debicella, Rob Merkle, & Will Gregory as competing for the Republican nomination.

Yup, the 2010 campaign season’s started. Time to start paying attention to your own, local races…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

They were asked why they didn’t bring in former Governor Sarah Palin to campaign for them in Virginia & New Jersey, and both of them made what are entirely excusable fibs about scheduling conflicts and the need to stay focused on state-specific problems.  Come, I will hide nothing from you: they didn’t bring her in because both of them concluded that her reputation had taken a hit and had not recovered enough.

Yet.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.