On mandates:
In the primaries, Obama distinguished himself from Clinton on health care by opposing an individual mandate. In the general election, he distinguished himself from McCain by opposing taxes on health benefits. So now he is trying to pass bills with both an individual mandate and taxes on health benefits—and his supporters are saying that Congress should go along because he won the election.
“I won” is not a substitute for substantive policy discussion.
No, chump diplomacy:
Oh, how the international community loves Barack Obama — loves to stiff him, play him along, and manipulate him. He’s the world’s celebrity ingenue, the slender naïf perpetually undone by the recalcitrance of foreign leaders.
…Democrats spent years banging on Bush for alienating our allies. What they really meant was that he hadn’t been nice enough to our enemies. Reversing field entirely, Obama has been hell on allies like Hamid Karzai and the Israelis. He’s undercut the Poles and Czechs. He’s given a cold shoulder to friends who have the temerity to want to trade with us, like the Colombians and South Koreans. He’s cooled the special relationship with Britain. And he hammered the government of Honduras when it stopped a creeping Chávezist coup by its sitting president.
It’s hard to figure out just what country he’s president of.
And the warm-mongers aren’t happy about it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Environmentalists exposed as liars. I’m shocked, shocked I say.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s more on the apparent fraud at the Climate Research Unit.
The problem is that the files and emails seem just too good to be true. A number of files seem to be smoking guns — revealing how to resist Freedom of Information Act requests for their data (which would both be scientific misconduct and actually illegal); long-term marketing plans on how to push the climate-change agenda; and discussions of how to pressure peer-reviewed journals to stop accepting papers that disagree with the “accepted” view of global warming.
In other words, just what the skeptics have been suggesting for years. It seems just too neat, and we don’t have independent verification of where the files came from. Someone who is willing to hack might also be willing to create fakes.
But then, the whole package is very large — 63 megabytes — and seems to be very internally consistent. Several people have already corroborated a number of the emails as being ones they wrote or received. The package also includes substantial data and computer programs, which are being explored as this is being written.
The best we can say right now is that we should keep our eyes on this. If these files are eventually corroborated and verified, it is a bombshell indeed — evidence that there has been a literal conspiracy to push the anthropogenic climate change agenda far beyond the science.
I wish I could say that I was surprised. Actually, I am, a little. I wouldn’t have thought they’d be this blatant about it, but it’s been clear for years that this was being driven by a non-science agenda.
As noted in comments, Jerry Pournelle has some thoughts today:
sounds to me as if climatologists are now admitting they have not the faintest idea of what is going on. I have a remedy for them. Study the data and refine the models. Stop assuming you already know the answers and start looking for better models….
But that’s no fun. It doesn’t give them an excuse to implement socialism via the green door.
[Afternoon update]
Here is more from James Delingpole:
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true, it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.
What I find delicious about this is (as always) the toxic brew of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. I don’t want to hear anyone, ever again, tell me that it’s “just about the science.”
[Mid-afternoon update]
A lot of discussion over at Slashdot.
Some thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.
…by NPR.
…on the lunacy of Eric Holder:
…why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system, where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.
Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.
…Finally, there’s the moral logic. It’s not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, (accused) mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.
By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his Nov. 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.
What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime — an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war that the United States itself has engaged in countless times?
By what possible moral reasoning, then, does KSM, who perpetrates the obvious and egregious war crime, receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom, while he who attacked a warship is relegated to a military tribunal?
This will not end well.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And speaking of the corrupt political hack running the Department of Injustice, Andrew Breitbart has a warning: investigate ACORN properly, or I’ll release a lot more tapes just before the election next year. You know, I think he has them by the short hairs. I wonder if they’re too stupid to realize it, though.
And in a sane world, Breitbart, Giles and O’Keefe would be getting a Pulitzer.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oh, this is precious, too. Breitbart totally pwned a hack columnist at the LA Times as well.
I’m not a big fan of Lindsey Graham, but once in a while he’s not a total waste of oxygen:
One would have thought that Holder would have been prepared for this obvious question. That he wasn’t just shows what an incompetent, political hack he really is.
[Update a few minutes later]
Andy McCarthy, the anti-Holder, expands on the subject:
The lawyer’s stock in trade is precedent. Whether you’re a prosecutor or any other lawyer faced with a policy question, the first thing you want to know is what the law says on the subject: Has this come up before? Are there prior cases on point? What have the courts had to say? Those are the first-order questions — always.
…How could Holder possibly not know the answer to this fundamental question — how could he, in fact, be stumped by it. If he studied and agonized over this decision as he says he did, this would have been the first issue he’d have considered: the fact that there was no legal precedent for what he wanted to do. Or, put another way, if there was a single case that supported Holder’s decision, it would have been the only case we’d have been hearing about — from DOJ, the academy, and the media — for the last ten months.
Hack. The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Update a few minutes later]
The insanity grows. Senator Leahy says it’s OK, we don’t need to interrogate bin Laden.
Only outlaws will have wood.
Throw all the bastards out. One of the elements in the Republicans’ new contract with America has to address these outrageously long, unread bills.
Andy McCarthy has already come up with a list from this morning’s Senate testimony. Including a response to Holder’s attack on him.
Ilya Somin says that George Bush should, finally, stop giving a bad name to free markets:
Bush’s belated support for free markets follows in Hoover’s footsteps. After leaving office in 1933, Hoover wrote books and articles defending free markets and criticizing the Democrats’ New Deal. Some of his criticisms of FDR were well-taken. Many New Deal policies actually worsened and prolonged the Great Depression by organizing cartels and increasing unemployment. But by coming out as a free market advocate, the post-presidential Hoover actually bolstered the cause of interventionism because he helped cement the incorrect impression that he had pursued free market policies while in office, thereby causing the Depression. Bush’s post-presidential conversion creates a similar risk: it could solidify the already widespread impression that he, like the Hoover of myth, pursued laissez-faire policies which then caused an economic crisis.
What should Bush now do if he genuinely wants to help the free market cause? The best thing would be to take up economist David Henderson’s half-joking suggestion that he “express his regret at nationalizing airport safety, carrying out illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, raiding medical marijuana clinics, bailing out General Motors, AIG and other companies, and socializing prescription drugs for the elderly [the biggest new government program from the 1960s until the present financial crisis].” Bush could also point out that he advocated an ideology of “compassionate conservatism” that included vastly expanded government, and an “ownership society” that (in his own words) involved “us[ing] the mighty muscle of the federal government” to incentivize dubious mortgages of the kind that helped cause the financial collapse of 2008. The greatest contribution Bush can now make to free market policies is to dispel the impression that he pursued them while in office.
Unfortunately, as Somin points out, the likelihood that he will admit his perfidy to markets, or the disastrous nature of many of his domestic policies, is pretty low, so the best thing he can do for free markets now is to just shut up.