An Inconvenent Defense

Last week a British court ruled that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a piece of propaganda. The British government plans on sending copies of the movie to every school. The court ruling means that teachers will have to give a warning first. Global warming skeptics cheered the news since it means that an independent party looked at the evidence and found that the multiple award-winning movie is nothing but alarmism.

The left is rushing to Gore's defense. Here is an example.

So, is there anything to this spirited defense of the Goracle? No, and here is why.

The first claim is that the court validated the basic message of Gore's movie and that "deniers" cherry-picked at minor details. The court was not making a ruling on the IPCC's report, it was ruling on Gore's movie. This is an important distinction. Gore wasn't just trying to educate people about warming, he was trying to scare people into action. The fact that the court accepted the IPCC report cuts both ways as we will see later.

Next, there is the smear that the plaintiffs are so far right that normal conservatives call them "fascists" and that they were financed by oil money. Even if any of this is true, it doesn't matter. No one has accused the judge of any of malfeasance. His ruling has nothing to do with who financed the plaintiffs and this is nothing but a cheap shot.

One of the more alarming statements in the movie is that the sea level will rise by 20. The judge says

This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr Gore's 'wake-up call'. It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of 7 metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.

Note, the scientific consensus the judge is referring to is the most recent IPCC report. Gore's defenders are on very weak ground on this one. They point out that Gore does not actually say when the oceans will rise, just that they will. They ignore that Gore asserted in interviews that
the sea level change will happen by the year 2100, not 3000.

At one point Gore shows (separately) a graph showing world temperature rise and a graph showing CO2 rise. When presented this way the two graphs appear to be identical providing proof that CO2 causes warming. Gore's exact statement is

The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun inside.

Gore is not kidding when he says that the relationship is complicated. In fact, if the graphs were superimposed on each other they would show that the rise in CO2 followed the temperature rise. The judge says

In scenes 8 and 9, Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO₂ and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.

The judge is being kind.

The drowning polar bears is another case where the judge uses the IPCC's report against Gore.

In scene 19, Mr Gore says: "Coral reefs all over the world because of global warming and other factors are bleaching and they end up like this. All the fish species that depend on the coral reef are also in jeopardy as a result. Overall specie loss is now occurring at a rate 1000 times greater than the natural background rate." The actual scientific view, as recorded in the IPCC report, is that, if the temperature were to rise by 1-3 degrees Centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality, unless corals could adopt or acclimatise, but that separating the impacts of climate change-related stresses from other stresses, such as over-fishing and polluting, is difficult.

You can read the rest of the judgment yourself. The bottom line is that Gore's advocates could not present proof for several of Gore's more alarming claims. That's the real truth.

Happy Columbus Day

Officially Columbus day was celebrated (or ignored) last Monday. Regardless, this is the date that Columbus actually made landfall and changed the world. Even granting that it was all a huge mistake, he was on the wrong continent, it was still one of the most important events in history. It started the biggest human migration ever - a migration so large that it continues to this day. Prior to Columbus, humans stayed pretty close to where they were born. They also tended to marry people from the same area. This meant that you could make a good guess about the general area someone was from just by looking at him. National identity wasn't just a matter of shared culture - it was also shared genes.

Things ahve changed radically since then and the rate of change is increasing. Old concepts of race and national identity are breaking down. People are exposed to new ideas, also. The exchange is not limited to humans either. Our diet includes plants and animals from multiple continents (for lunch, I just had turkey (North America) and cheese sandwich (European cattle and wheat) with potato chips (South America).

For the most part, the world is a better place than it was in 1492. In many ways it is immeasurably better. You cannot say that about the progress between 992 and 1492. The worst things such as genocide in Darfur have historic roots. Genocide was much more common in 1492 than now and no one cared.

Gore, the Award and the Election

Al Gore won half of the Nobel Peace Prize today, sharing it with the IPCC. This has given a big boost the the Draft Al movement. This may turn out to be a defining point in the election. Here's why.

The Draft Al movement reflects a dissatisfaction with the current Democratic slate, especially front-runner Hillary. It is a distraction to Hillary's carefully managed campaign of inevitability. With Obama Edwards failing, this is the best shot that the Stop Hillary movement has.  If you are a dedicated progressive then you are pretty ambivalent about Hillary. Her health care proposal isn't as radical as you want, she's never apologized for her war vote, and she has taken a hawkish position against Iran. The environment is, at best, a second-tier issue for her. Gore seems much better in comparison and already proved that he could win a majority of the national votes.

Assuming that Hillary wins anyway, this weakens her. She will need all of her supporters to turn out in November, 2008. If the party gives her lukewarm support then a lot of potential voters might stay home or cast a protest vote. This is what cost Al Gore the election in 2000.

If the Draft Al movement succeeds then Gore will be the first modern candidate to try to build a national campaign in less than a year. This will be a huge problem. Gore might have to settle for running in just the blue states and a few swing states. This would be a huge boost for Congressional Republicans in red states. Also, Gore has shown that he is a lackluster campaigner. Bush is not a gifted public speaker but was able to hold his own in debates.

Gore carries his own baggage. His energy sink of a house is at the top of the list followed by his fraudulent carbon credits. Even his strong point, his movie, was judged an inaccurate piece of propaganda by a British court. All of these points would make great campaign ads for the Republicans to dismantle Gore's credibility.

The best thing that Gore could do for the Democrats would be to make it clear that he will not run and that the Draft Al people are wasting their time. I don't think that he will do this. Right now he is flattered by the attention. If he refuses to run then a lot of Democrats will turn on him. His performance during the 2000 recount shows that he is not one to put the country's interests ahead of his own.

If Hillary manages to decisively win the primaries and keeps her national poll numbers up then the Draft Al movement will die out. If Hillary seems weaker than expectations then the movement will gain strength and pull Hillary down. Either way, Democrats will probably look back at Gore as the person who cost (or almost cost) them the election.

Congratulations Al.

False Consensus

This is an interesting article on its own. It seems that there is little evidence that dietary fat is bad. The article traces how a consensus can be wrong. In this case, a diet researcher named Ancel Keys decided in the 1950s that dietary fat was bad. He did an incomplete study to back this up. Because of his prominence, what amounted to personal opinion became scientific consensus despite the fact that several studies have proven otherwise.

This is given as an example of the cascade effect. When multiple people are asked a question as a group, the first one to confidently give an answer can sway someone else who is not sure. This in turn convinces others who think that the majority must have the right answer.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

When Keys first announced that fat is bad, the American Heart Association disagreed. Three years later it switched positions, not because of new science, but because Keys and some fellow believers were now in control.

In the 1970s Senator George McGovern's office issued a report suggesting that people cut back on fat consumption. The committee that drew up the report relied on the advice of a single nutritionist.

Meanwhile, there still wasn’t good evidence to warrant recommending a low-fat diet for all Americans, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in a report shortly after the U.S.D.A. guidelines were issued. But the report’s authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed by the American Heart Association, the McGovern committee and the U.S.D.A.

The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.

With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a “consensus conference” that concluded there was “no doubt” that low-fat diets “will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease” for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.

All of this is interesting on its own but there are obvious parallels with global warming. In the case of warming, the confident voice belongs to Dr. James Hansen of NASA. In 1988 he convnced Congress that global warming was not only real, it was responsible for a heat wave gripping the country at the time. Congress authorized millions (which has since grown into billions) for research. If cascades can happen on their own, imagine the influence of so much cash.

Then there is the "reputational cascade". The background of anyone skeptical about global warming is examined to see if the skeptic ever received a penny from an oil company. If he did then he is denounced as an oil company mouthpiece and ignored.

The existence of the cascade effect does not prove the global warming is not happening but it should serve as a warning against placing too much faith in scientific consensus.

Obama's flameout

Last Spring things looked great for Barack Obama. He not only raised a lot of campaign money, the number of people donating implied that he had deeper support than Hillary. Polls showed Hillary ahead but he was close behind.c Also important, he came out better in match ups against potential Republicans. Hillary has strong voter negatives. All he needed was for Hillary to stumble and he would be in the White House.

Even the questions about him being "black enough" seemed to exist just to convince whites that he wasn't "too black".

But it is Obama who has stumbled. He had falled much further back in the polls. His fundraising is falling way behind Hillary.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out his proposal for reworking the Income Tax. While some candidates can ride a major proposal into the White House, it is a danger sign when an established candidate suddenly starts coming up with major proposals. It is a sign that his support is failing and is desperate attract attention.

That brings us to Obama's proposal for a world-wide elimination of nuclear weapons. Every nation with nukes would destroy them but retain enough technical knowledge to re-arm if needed.

I have a one-word answer for why this will not work - smallpox.

Smallpox was eliminated world-wide as a contagious disease in the 1970s but the USA and the USSR kept small supplies in their biological weapons labs. In the 1980s it was proposed that these should also be destroyed but they never were. Neither side trusted the other. Both were sure that the other side would cheat and hold back a sample.

The same will be true with nuclear weapons. Most countries will not disarm because they don't trust the other side to disarm.

Obama should know that. Either he is playing to the extreme anti-war wing of the party or he is dangerously naive. Either way, this probably disqualifies him as a vice-presidential candidate as well as a presidential candidate.

Selective Outrage

After getting whipped over MoveOn's Betray Us  ad, the left has come back swinging. Based on a Media Matters report that claimed Rush Limbaugh says that any Iraq veteran who opposes the war is a "phony soldier", they are trying to equate the two.

The trouble is that this is not what Rush said. A caller was complaining about the peace groups promoting "anti-war veterans who came out of nowhere" and Rush added "the phony soldiers". Rush has said several times since then that he was referring to literal phony soldiers, people who pretend to have been to Iraq but have not. From the context, it is clear that this is what he meant. Rush has a long history of supporting troops.

Of course, no one on the left wants to hear the truth. As the movie quote goes, they can't handle the truth (more accurately, they can't use the truth). Not only does it help them defend against MoveOn by saying that the right is just as over the top, it also helps their on-going campaign against Rush. Here is just one example.

The attack on Rush is not likely to work. He has a good defense and his network is supporting him. I suspect that this will go into the left's collective memory to be pulled out as an example of how the right does not really support the troops.

Memogate resurfaces

A couple of weeks ago Dan Rather filed suit against CBS over the incident known as Memogate or Rathergate. The whole incident shows what is wrong with the mainstream media.

First a recap.

When George W Bush ran in 2000 it didn't matter much that he had been in the National Guard instead of going to Viet Nam. Bill Clinton had never been in any version of the military. Al Gore had been in the Army and had served in Viet Nam, but he was in a non-combatant role as a reporter covering an engineering group. Regardless, Bush's National Guard service was a red flag for CBS producer, Mary Mapes. She was sure that the only people allowed to get into the Guard during Viet Nam were the children of the rich and influential. She investigated this and ran into a brick wall. People in the know insisted that there was no waiting line to be a fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. The requirement for a college degree and the commitment for extra time in flight training was enough to keep down the number of applicants. Regardless, Mapes didn't believe what she was told.

Four years later, things were very different. The nation was at war and the Democratic candidate's platform mainly consisted of his three months in Viet Nam. Bush's opponents started looking into his military record more closely. The found some gaps in the documentation and started questioning if Bush actually put in his required time. The White House responded with pay records showing that Bush had been present, even if other records had been lost in the 30+ years interval.

This is where Mapes entered the picture again. She was approached by someone who said that he had memos showing that Bush should have been charged with being AWOL but was not because of his family's influence. CBS was only able to get copies of these memos. They were worried about other sources breaking the story first so they rushed through verifying the memos and aired the story.

Then all hell broke loose. It turned out that CBS's verification process had consisted of asking some handwriting experts if the signature was valid. No one had validated the memos themselves and CBS had been cautioned that a copy of a signature could never be 100% validated.

Worse, there were major problems with the memos. They appeared to have been written in Microsoft Office instead of on a 1970s era IBM Selectric. The officer whose name was on them had already retired and was in no position to apply influence at the time that the incident allegedly occurred.  There were many problems with terminology, abbreviations, etc. Conservative bloggers jumped on all of these immediately. By this time Dan Rather was involved and he publicly defended the documents and the story for several days until the mountain of conflicting evidence became overwhelming and they had to back off of the story.

To this day, Mapes and Rather insist that the story was accurate. They even insist that they could have run it without the memos. The fact that the evidence does not support their story without the memos escapes them. They don't realize that all they have is unfounded opinion and opinion cannot be reported as news.

But that's only the first problem. The second, more serious problem is the polarization of the news in general and CBS in particular. This story was not going to be released in a vacuum. The Kerry campaign had advance notice of it and planned a campaign contrasting Kerry's status as a war hero with Bush's status as a deserter. No one at CBS seemed to feel that this was wrong. Everyone in the newsroom believed in the story strongly enough that no one listened to concerns raised by the people hired to authenticate the documents. When the panel that CBS brought in to evaluate the story included someone of unimpeachable reputation but with ties to the Bush I administration, Rather called it a political hatchet job and refused to consider the findings.

Rather's suit has revived the story as a whisper campaign. I've seen several liberals agree with Rather and Mapes that the story was true but the focus on the forged memos poisoned the story so that no one will touch it in the future. Since this is being presented in blogs and opinion pieces, no proof is required or given (the exception is Media Matters' biased recap of the story).

The liberal spin of numerous stories has passed into the generally accepted version. It is accepted that the Swift Boat Veterans attack on Kerry was all lies and that the Republicans linked Max Cleland with Osama bin Laden. Bush's stint in the TANG is likely to be the next
 commonly accepted untruth.

End of a Golden Age

It is very possible that sometime in the next 10-20 years we will look back at the 1990s and early 2000s as a golden era with low unemployment, low consumer prices, easy access to a wide variety of foods and consumer goods and cheap energy. Depending on the next election, all of this may change.

First there is the issue of global warming. The lead story in my local paper, the Columbus Dispatch, was about power companies canceling plans to build new coal-fired power plants. They expect new global warming-based legislation that will make new coal-fired plants too expensive to run. Since coal is the cheapest way to generate electricity, power costs will go up as less coal is used. New power plants in general are being discouraged nation-wide. Eventually the growth in demand for electricity will outrun the current generating capacity and we will see brownouts or rolling blackouts. This is already happening in California where regulations have discouraged new power plants for decades.

I expect global warming legislation to affect most other aspects of life, as well. It doesn't matter cap-and-trade or carbon taxes are enacted, it will raise the cost of energy which raises the cost of everything else.

All of this is almost a certainty. All of the Democratic candidates and many Republicans advocate doing something about global warming, even if that something is ultimately ineffective.

Something else the Democratic slate is against is world trade. Two potent factions within the party, unions and environmentalists, hate world trade. Hillary and Obama have talked about the need to reign in current trade and Edwards has made trade barriers one of his central themes. The trouble here is that trade is the fuel for wealth creation. If you stop buying from a country they stop having money to buy your goods. If you erect barriers to stop their goods they create similar barriers against yours. Restraint of international trade was a major reason for why the Great Depression (actually a world-wide depression) lasted so long.

Bill Clinton understood this and championed free trade as did Reagen and both Bushes. (Hillary was too busy dressing in pink and talking about vast right-wing conspiracies to have learned this lesson.) The result is that third world countries like
India and China and perpetually stagnant countries like Ireland have booming economies.

Progressives have always hated international trade. Unions don't care about larger issues, they only want to protect union jobs (look at the current UAW strike against GM). environmentalists worry about CO2 emissions caused by manufacturing and transporting goods in foreign countries and are convinced that off-shore manufacturing only exists to get around US environmental laws. These interest groups pretty much control the Democratic Party and will choose the next presidential candidate.

If a Democrat wins I expect restrictions of both foreign goods and produce.

Put it all together and we face a darker future.

The "Fascist" takeover

According to Naomi Wolf, we are moving along the path to a fascist (or communist, she dithers) takeover of the US. Her proof is an interesting example of how  you can prove anything if you break it down into small enough pieces and compare it with similar tiny pieces from broad enough sources. She starts with the Senate resolution condemning  the MoveOn Petreus ad. A rational person can assert that the ad was an example of free speech and none of the government's business (and a reasonable person would respond that MoveOn is an unofficial wing of the Democratic party). Wolf goes much further, comparing the non0binding resolution to the Nazi's outlawing of dissent. She then lists a long string of ways that we are like either Hitler's Germany, Stalin's USSR, or Mao's China. These include choices of words that match or are similar to translations of words other people used. For example, the Department of Homeland Security uses "Homeland" and Hitler called Germany the "Fatherland". (It was my impression that the Democrats first suggested the Department of Homeland Security. They said so often enough.) Even more damning, an unnamed official said that, had the shoe-bomber succeeded,  " the world would have stood still" and Hitler said that 'When "Barbarossa" begins, the world will hold its breath.' I guess that unnamed officials on all levels have been given Hitler quotes to use.

Stalin warned of sleeper cells.

...these were purported to be secret terrorist agents of global capitalism who would pretend to be good Soviet citizens, perhaps for years, but who would rise up at a signal to wreak mass havoc on Soviet society. By 2002 the White House introduced the term 'sleeper cells,' which was not in common usage in America.

Her definition of a sleeper cell exactly describes the 9/11 but somehow the existence of real sleeper cells escapes Wolf.

She goes on at length about similarities between concentration camps and Gitmo. Personally, I think it is an insult to the millions of jews murdered by the Nazis to compare them to the 500 or so (now down to 300 or so) enemy agents held at Gitmo. I could write a whole book about why these are different starting with the fact that the Gitmo prisoners will not be gassed.

She sees embedded reporters as proof because the Germans did this. So did the Allies in WWII. The point being...

Then there is this gem:

Nazi propaganda claimed that Jews hid from arrest in 'mouseholes.' When the scene of Saddam Hussein's capture was presented to the world, talking points, widely picked up by the media, introduced, again, a term that was generally unfamiliar in the U.S.: Hussein had been hiding in what they called a 'spider-hole.'

They found Saddam in a camouflaged hole. Is Wolf suggesting that the US army put him there first in order to replicate a Nazi quote?

In all, Wolf gives no proof of anything. I've seen a move convincing essay showing that eating pickles has been a factor in nearly every great disaster in history. Regardless, by printing this breathless list she convinces others that our society has been taken over by unspeakable evil.

Flooding Jamestown?

According to an article released by the AP, Jamestown Island and other historic sites will be covered with water sometime in the next 50-100 years due to rising ocean levels caused by thermal expansion. The article goes on to say that this will happen, no matter what we do.

Where to start?

The last IPCC report did say that the sea levels will rise around one meter due to thermal expansion. They later amended this statement. The figures said 1 millimeter/year and someone transcribed this as 1 meter/century. There are 1,000 millimeters in a meter but only 100 years in a century. The corrected figure should have been 0.1 meters (less than four inches) by the end of the century. Like the CDC's press release about obesity killing 300,000 per year that was later retracted, the 1 meter/century figure is the only one reporters remember.

But, for arguments sake, let's say that the ocean did rise by a meter. What would be the effect on the historic sites at Jamestown Island? Nothing. The site would still be well above the water level. I've been there several times, most recently this year. The water is a long way down. What's more, the water is a river meaning that it is at least slightly above ocean level. This part of the river is salty and slightly affected by the tide so it is close to sea level but not there.

There are parts of the island that would be underwater if the river rose a meter. These parts are on the far end and few tourists would notice the difference.

The study quoted claims to have used US Geological Survey maps. This makes me wonder - is the US Geological Survey that far off? Did the scientists in Arizona misread the data? Did they exaggerate the sea level rise in order to gain more alarming results? Is there a problem with the compute model they used? Something is wrong.

Ironically, the study lists New Orleans as a city that would be partly submerged if global warming continues. Someone forgot to tell them that it is already below sea level.

Obama Flames Out

Barack Obama proposed a complete overhaul of the tax system. He also proposes simplifying taxes so much that the IRS will be able to do your taxes for you. They will send you your tax return, already filled out. You just sign it and send it back in.

This marks the end of Obama's run as a serious candidate. He will still go through the motions and lots of people still support him.

Regardless, this sort of proposal always comes from second tier (or lower) candidates - the people who have no chance of winning.

There are a few reasons for this. In Obama's case, his simplified tax proposal is likely to upset too many special interests. A second reason is that he is making it revenue neutral while promising ta breaks for 150 million people. That means a tax increase for up to half the country - the half that has money. Keep in mind that Obama already expects the top wage earners to pay for his health care proposal so he is proposing a double hit on the rich (to be fair, his advisers claim that they have found other funding for health care) . Keeping in mind how loose the Democrats' definition of "rich" is. It is often defined as anyone in the upper 10% of wage earners which means that a family of two teachers could qualify as rich.*

While many people are willing to donate money to a candidate who promises to raise their taxes in order to cut someone else's, there are a lot more who succumb to self-preservation. Obama's donor base may well dry up.

As part of the new progressive movement, Obama is rejecting free market and the experience of the last half century or so. Current economic theory holds that placing a heavy tax burden on the top wage earners will cause a drag on the entire economy.

Fortunately, Obama's proposals seem more and more desperate. He has not been able to close the nearly 20% gap with Hillary. With the first primaries in four months or less and the nomination likely to be sewn up within five months, he is trying to offset his inexperience with specific proposals. This is a dangerous move. Once he has pinned himself down, his rivals have specifics that they can attack. There is no good way out of this. If he changes details he looks immature. If he sticks with them as announced, he may look stubborn, and immature. Either way, he looks like a candidate who knows he is losing.


* Currently they are tossing around a $200,000/year figure for rich but some Democrats define it as low as $100,000. In Columbus, the average wage for a teacher is over $50,000 so the fmily income of two teachers qualifies them as rich.

Jena 6

In case you haven't been paying attention to the Jena 6 case, it started with an ugly racial incident. A black student wanted to stand in the shade of a tree that some white students wanted to reserve for whites. The next day the tree was decorated with two nooses.

This is ugly. The students responsible were suspended from school for three days.

After that there were some racially motivated fights. In the worst of them, six black students beat a white student unconscious. Officials charged some of the attackers with attempted homicide.

This sparked a national cause. The complaint is that the white students (the ones who hung up some nooses but did not hurt anyone) were given lighter punishment than the black students (who beat someone unconscious).

Personally, I think that black leaders have seized on this as a way of stirring up their constituents. They don't way equal justice, they want an easier standard for blacks. Consider the Duke rape (non)case. In both cases a group of people were accused of attacking someone of a different race. When the accused attackers are black, the black leaders want the charges reduced or dropped. Then the accused attackers were white, these same black leaders wanted the book thrown at them.

How about some equal justice? Don't equate ugly but harmless action with a physical assault.

"Truth" and 9/11

One of the most dispiriting events since 9/11/1 has been the rise of the "truth" movement. This holds that the Bush administration either knew in advance that the attacks were coming and did nothing in order to trigger an event that would further their schemes, or that the Bush administration actually caused the events and no terrorists were ever involved.

The roots of this date back the the event itself. While it should have been obvious that Islamic terrorists were responsible, that never occurred to many on the left. Their initial reaction was that some of their own had done it as an expression of outrage at President Bush. Reasons included the US boycott of an African conference on racism (which already drafted a document condemning Israel) and the "stolen" election.

When the FBI announced the results of their investigation and published pictures, many on the left complained about over-reaction. They insisted that we treat it as a police matter. That would have been the end of things since Afghanistan refused to consider extradition.

Obviously, to many on the left, the Global War on Terrorism was a distraction from the fight against the real enemy - George W. Bush.

The Truth movement solves this conflict. Bush was part of it. Bin Laden was either uninvolved, on Bush's payroll, or a co-conspirator depending on how charitable you are.

They claim that they are just following the evidence. In reality they know the end point already. It is just a matter of stringing the facts together in the right order. I suspect that 99+% of the Truthers believe in evolution but their approach to 9/11 is similar to creationists (a comparison that would mortify them). They seize on minor inconsistencies, constantly shift their stories, and ignore the big picture.

All of this is deeply disrespectful to the people who died six years ago, to their survivors, and to the nation as a whole.

Six Years Later

For a brief time, six years ago, the country seemed united. Yes, there were still some idiots but most of them knew enough to keep it to themselves. No longer.

MoveOn took out a full page national ad in the New York Times rhyming General Petraeus and "Betray Us".

Osama bin Landen released a new video a few days ago in which he sounds a lot like a progressive. Think Progress denies it saying:

Considering bin Laden’s threat yesterday to “escalate the killing and fighting against” America, Brooks and his fellow conservatives’ attempts at humor — and that’s a charitable reading of their words — are especially insulting, as it impugns not only the patriotism, but also the character and intelligence of literally millions of daily participants in the progressive blogosphere.

I've read the whole thing and the vast majority of it does sound like someone from the far left. During much of it he is telling us how corrupt western civilization is starting with the Spanish Inquisition (no one expects...) and the Holocaust. He assures us that the Jews would have been safe if they had fled to Muslim lands. All of this is strange coming from the man who ordered the death of nearly 3,000 Americans six years ago. He buys into the Kennedy assassination theory (although he thinks that the neo-cons did it). The folks at Olberman Watch compared ObL with Olberman and decided that Olberman is harsher.

Even the part about escalating the killing isn't something the left can disown. Remember Michael Moore comparing the insurgents in Iraq with the Minutemen?

Seriously, the Left should be taking a long hard look at themselves. They sound too much like an avowed enemy of the US.

The Democrat's Problems

Over the weekend I saw various articles and posts about the current struggle for control of the Democrats. It boils down to some problems for them. Here's a run-down:

Governing. In retrospect it is obvious that the Democrats were not looking past the 2006 election. Their strategy was to recruit moderate candidates in possible swing districts in order to pick off vulnerable Republicans. This worked out fairly well for them as far as electing members of the party but it is causing headaches for them now. While the rest of the party has headed to the left, many of the new members are moderates, or even slightly conservative. This is especially true on defense. These new moderates quickly organized into the Blue Dog Democrats and vote against the liberals on some issues. There has been some talk of the Republicans still holding a working majority because of the Blue Dogs.

New Ideas. Do the Democrats have any new ideas? The new book, The Argument, says that they do not. The author, Matt Bai, points out that anyone debating what name to give to their ideas does not have anything new to offer. I've seen this countless times - the left insisting that the public is with them on the issues but votes for the Republicans out of ignorance. I sort of disagree with Bai. The Democrats do have a new idea - it is to become "progressive". This involves a hard turn to the left on virtually every issue. This is where they have their friction with the Blue Dogs.

Just look at the platforms of the Democrats running for president to see how this is playing out. They are currently engaged in a bidding war for how much their universal health care will cover. Over the weekend, Edwards upped his bid by including mandatory physical and mental check-ups.

While it is true that the Democrats have become much more progressive, I don't see much indication that the rest of the country has. Yes, the Democrats won a majority in 2006 but they were not running on a progressive platform at the time.

Reform. This is what the Democrats were running on in 2006. The issues they used were runaway federal spending, influence peddling in exchange for earmarked funds, and the need for a "new direction" in Iraq. Bush provided the new direction with the "surge". The Democrats have done nothing about other issues. Earmarks have increased as has spending. A lot of effort has gone into the fight between the progressives and the moderates with nothing to show for it.

History. Did the Democrats win in 2006 because voters preferred them or because a Republican president was in his 6th year? Historically, the opposing party usually wins seats in the 6th year. Even Reagan lost the Senate in that election. This does not mean that the country has shifted politically. Bush (41) won in 1988 and Gore almost won in 2000 even though their parties had comparable Congressional losses in 1986 and 1998. This means that the 2008 election is not a sure thing. Congressional approval is at a historic low which could easily turn into a backlash against over-reaching Democrats.

Net-Roots. The net-roots are not only focusing on electing Democrats, they are also concerned with "better" Democrats. Look at the Leiberman/Lamont fiasco. They spent a lot of effort trying to replace a long-time Democrat because he did not follow the net-roots line on the war. For a while they hated Leiberman as much as Bush and hailed his loss in the primary as one of democracy's greatest triumphs. Forcing a national party into an idealogical lock-step is a problem since it does not allow any room for centrists.

The net-roots are important in an election because of the amount of money they spend but they are independent of the party and are trying to force their views on party members. They are a difficult-to-manage group. Most of the white-hot hatred of Bush and the conspiracy theories come from this group. They control a lot of advertising money and some office-holders are members so the Democratic leadership has to take them seriously. At the same time, they are pretty far out of the mainstream and their vision of the party might not be electable.

Bush. Since 2000, the Democrats have defined themselves partly through their hatred of Bush. He will not be part of the 2008 campaign. Candidates running against Bush will seem dated.

A different problem - Bush was never a great candidate. He won against two stiff, wooden Democrats who came across as rich members of the DC establishment. The Democrats may have a more articulate candidate in 2008 but the Republicans will also. The current front-runners are all much better at public speaking than Bush. Hillary still comes off shrill, Obama makes mistakes, and Edwards has image problems. None should be considered a sure-thing against a charismatic Republican with a competent campaign.

Warming Spin

I'm sure I've said it before but one reason I'm skeptical about global warming is that I know the news stories about it are slanted. Take this one. In brief, biologists found that plants retain moisture better in an atmosphere that includes higher levels of CO2. I can think of three ways that this could be spun:

1) Catastrophic global warming less likely. I'm serious. The driving factor in the weather models that give the really alarming forecasts is not carbon dioxide, it is water vapor. The theory is that CO2 emissions will drive up the temperature enough to reach a tipping point where enough H2O is in the atmosphere that it will take over as the dominant greenhouse gas. This will induce a positive feedback loop where more heat causes more water vapor which traps more heat. The plant study shows that plants will hold water instead of releasing it into the air thus reducing a potential source of water vapor.

2) Plants will be more drought-resistant. No question about this. A plant that is retaining moisture does not need as much rainfall.

But this is how the study was spun:

3) Plants will make greenhouse effect flooding worse. The theory is that plants will pull less water from the ground which will make it easier for the soil to become saturated which is a contributing factor for floods. Even at that, I can see some potential flaws. This would only be a factor in minor flooding. In a major flood, the soil is going to get saturated, anyway. It would not be a factor in the really big downpours where rain falls faster than it can be absorbed. Then there is the question - if plants are holding more water then will rainfall and therefor flooding be reduced?

In the meantime, talks at expanding Kyoto are stuck on a proposal to reduce CO2 emissions by 25-40% from 1990 levels (that would be something like 30-50% cuts in today's emissions) by 2020. That's only 12 years and a few months away. To put this level of cut in perspective, you would have to cut off all residential power in order to meet the high end. Forget compact fluorescents,  we would have to do away with all lights, heat, refrigeration, etc. Or we could shut down all businesses. Then we would still have heat and refrigeration but nothing to eat or wear. I hope that these talks fail miserably.

Disparate Standards

A few weeks ago a mistake was found in the figures used to calculate annual temperature averages for the US. Dr. James Hansen of NASA quietly replaced the old numbers with new ones. When asked why this was not accompanied with a press release, Hansen made some statements about the continental US only representing 2.5% of the earth's surface and the adjustments being so small that they were statistically insignificant. Skeptics wondered if the same standards would have been used if the new figures had supported global warming instead of undercutting it.

We found out this week. A new study was just released on 2006 showing that warming that year was due to global warming, not el Nino. Naturally, that got press coverage . All of the same factors are true here as in the first story. It is only about the continental US so it is still an insignificant 2.5% of the earth's surface. The amount of warming is still very tiny. If one story is news the other should be.

To be fair, Hansen is not with NOAA, he is with NASA and it was NOAA that put out the press release on warming. That doesn't let Hansen off the hook.

Remember Al Gore announcing that the debate on climate change is over? That the 2,000 scientists of the IPCC reached a concensus and no one is allowed to argue with it? This point has been raised numerous times in the last year or so. Hansen himself referred to skeptics as "court jesters" and paid stooges of the petroleum industry.

So, from all this we should assume that the IPCC report is the final word on global warming and that no dissenting opinions are allowed.

Enter (re-enter) James Hansen. The IPCC's most recent report predicts a two-foot rise in the sea level, much of it due to thermal expansion (if you heat something it grows). Hansen disagrees. His figures say that the ocean level with rise by at least 85 feet!

So what do we make if this? Again a double standard is in effect. You can disagree with the IPCC but only if you say that things will be worse than they predict.

Just a Joke?

> Huffington Post blogger Martin Lewis now insists that he was only joking when he called for the arrest of President Bush by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And of course -- as befits those who worship at the shrine of Atwater and Rove -- my satire has been twisted into headlines such as "HuffPo Calls For Military Coup In USA" Yup -- these guys are the Chubby Checkers of politics. They sure know how to twist... Again and again.

If there is even a single person left in the progressive/liberal/Democratic world who doubts how vicious and malevolent these people will be in their desperate attempt to retain the White House and regain Congress next year -- be aware now. These people will literally stop at nothing. 2000, 2004 and 2006 will seem like church picnics compared to how dirty they will fight the 2008 elections.

So, everyone who took him seriously is a malevolent, humorless idiot.

Except...

Lewis wrote his entry on a blog which has been calling for the impeachment of Bush since it's creation. There have been numerous posts about seeing Karl Rove or Dick Cheney "frog marched" out of the White House. Huffington has given a forum to congressmen such as Conyers who are calling for Bush to be impeached.

Also, Lewis's column is totally deadpan. There is no over-the-top quality to it to tip off the reader that Lewis isn't serious. He says of this

In an ideal world one doesn't have to wink to the audience so that it gets a joke. And one doesn't have to label satire with a label that says "satire".

Considering the company that Lewis keeps, if he really meant the column as satire then he needed a lot more than a wink to indicate satire. If someone in the middle of a lynch mob suggests that the victim should be shot instead of hung, who is going to believe him later when he says it was a joke?

Someone posting a comment to Lewis's follow-up points out that the Lewis responded to many comments to the original post with total seriousness. Presumably the people commenting to Lewis were well-rounded liberals (make that progressives) who should have been intelligent enough to pick up on the satire.

Or maybe Lewis was completely serious and took the coward's way out. Rather than apologize, he claimed it was all a joke.

Calling for a Coup?

Who would have thought that the Left would call for a military take-over of the country? There's no other way to interpret this entry at Huffington. Martin Lewis asks that General Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, arrest President Bush and relieve him of his powers as commander in chief. Lewis dances around what he is asking for. He only wants Bush arrested and tried as commander in chief, not as president. He is unclear about how Bush would execute his duties as president while under arrest to say nothing of what would happen if he was court-marshaled.

The first commenter pointed out that this would be a coup. Lewis responded

As my post says - I am absolutely not advocating a de facto military coup. I am simply advising General Pace that he should relieve President Bush of his command of the military - pending a court martial.

It is an interesting question as to who would then become Commander-In-Chief. I'm not sure that it would be the Vice President. But if it was - the same course of action could be taken if the Vice President acted with "Conduct Unbecoming"

Sorry, but there is no way of separating the two. If the president is arrested and court-marshaled then the military will have circumvented the Constitution. Further problems - the president is a civilian commander. He cannot be tried as an officer. The Constitution lays out who can try a sitting president - Congress.

Lewis doesn't address what happens next. Would the Joint Chiefs direct themselves? Would the Vice-President? Then there is the precedent. This would have a chilling effect on all future presidents. I"m sure that Lewis thinks that this will make future presidents less likely to go to war but the opposite could as easily happen. The Joint Chiefs could advocate military action and threaten to arrest a president who does not agree.

This is really a sign of desperation. It is obvious that Congress is not going to end the war and many parties agree that the Surge is going well. When all legitimate avenues are closed, the the desperate turn to the illegal.

Of course, this is one single nut-job but he is writing for one of the most prominent political blogs.

Hansen and the Numbers

For years the global warming alarmists have insisted that we are already seeing the results of global warming. Almost all of the top ten hottest years occurred in the last decade. Now it turns out that this is not true, at least for the US. First I will describe what happened then what it really means.

As cities expand, they alter the local climate. This is known as urban heat island effect. you can feel it yourself - just walk across your yard and driveway on a hot day. Chances are really good that the driveway will be painfully hot as the cement absorbs and radiates heat. If you place a thermometer near the driveway,it will show the air as being warmer than over the grass.

There is a long-standing policy to fudge the data slightly in order to compensate for urban heat islands. Data from other weather stations that are in the wilderness is applied to the urbanized ones. NOAA does this in real time and forwards the results to NASA which then figures the national temperature.

The problem is that  NOAA stopped fudging the figures a few years ago and NASA didn't get the word. This meant that the effects of urbanization were introduced into the national temperature record which inflated the most recent readings.

A Canadian named Steve McIntyre noticed that the raw numbers looked strange. He sent a query to NASA and they discovered the difference in the numbers. After making the corrections, 1998 dropped from the hottest year in recorded US history to number two and the rest of the 1990s dropped out of the top ten.

So what does it mean? NASA's Goddard Institute says that the correction is meaningless because it only represents a tiny fraction of a degree and the US only represents 2% of the total surface of the Earth. I'll give them both of those butI see some other important implications.

The first is that the global warming hysteria machine has been using the incorrect numbers to insist that we are feeling the effects of global warming right here, right now. It's a harder sell tog et Americans to make most of the cuts when the effects are showing up elsewhere.

The next implication is that it might not be showing up elsewhere, either. The US is the only country that tries to filter out the effects of urban heat islands. Skeptics have long argued that urbanization was corrupting the figures and causing graphs to show warming where it is not.

Finally, there are the implications of NASA not noticing the error. The official guardian of the data is Dr. James Hansen. This is the same Dr. Hansen who first warned of global warming in 1988. It is impossible to know for sure but there is a good chance that he didn't notice the difference in the figures because he needed them to be correct. How many other figures have errors that went uncorrected because the results confirmed Hansen's or someone else's theories on global warming? There is no way to know.

NASA and Goddard should take a close look at all of the weather data currently being used to confirm that warming is happening. Without this, skeptcs like me can are justified in doubting the evidence.

Goodbye to Rove

Karl Rove announced his resignation yesterday. I'm not sorry to see him go. I think that most of what is wrong with the Republicans today came from his strategies. That includes abandoning fiscal conservatism in favor of big-spending social conservatism. Along the way Republicans wandered into territory normally occupied by Democrats - things like earmarks, trade wars, and general corruption. This let the Democrats win last year on a platform of being different (the difference is that they have no shame over earmarks).

But is he really gone? Liberals are sure that they drove him out. A quick look at Huffington shows that most posters think that Rove's departure was part of a deal over the Libby case or an attempt to get a lower profile before he could somehow be charged in the attorney firings.

Something none of them seem to have considered - did he really leave to go work on someone else's campaign? There's nothing for him to do in the Bush White House. The 2008 campaign will be managed by a new candidate and Bush will just be a bit player. Rove may have hopes of doing a repeat performance and putting the next Republican president in the White House.

I can hear the howls from the Democrats now if someone even suggested this to them. They always credited Rove with more power than is humanly possible. Remember the speculation that there would be an October Surprise in 2004 - that Rove had arraigned for bin Laden to be captured just before the election? Then there are the 9-11 Truthers who think that Rove planned the whole thing, probably with the help of the Jews.

To many Democrats, Rove is evil incarnate. The policies that I see as having Rove fingerprints on them - the moderating of the Republican party in order to capture a permanent majority - goes under their radar. Instead they assume that everything that has happened since Bush took office January, 2001 has been part of some Rovian master plan.

Who will they blame when Rove is gone?

Inside the Global Warming Hysteria Machine

This week's cover story on Newsweek promising an inside look at the Global Warming Denier's well-funded machine. It is actually a hatchet job. This article is just one example of a concerted effort to convince the country that there is no real argument about Global Warming and that anyone who says differently has been paid by ExxonMobil. This begins in the first paragragh:

{...} As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on.

This is a clever statement. It is factually correct - Boxer was told this but what Boxer was told was incorrect, or at least misleading. The think-tank in question had received less than 1% of its funding from ExxonMobil and it was offering a standard honorarium to scientists to compensate them for the time needed to write a peer-reviewed article.

Since 2005 at least, there has been a movement to shout down any skepticism to Global Warming. It has several features reflected in this article. The primary one is to insist that Global Warming is settled science. Al Gore did this in an Inconvenient Truth. This article echoes Gore.

In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they "cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes." Unfortunately, few of the Leipzig signers actually did climate research; they just kibitzed about other people's. Scientific truth is not decided by majority vote, of course (ask Galileo), but the number of researchers whose empirical studies find that the world is warming and that human activity is partly responsible numbered in the thousands even then. The IPCC report issued this year, for instance, was written by more than 800 climate researchers and vetted by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations.

This paragraph also denigrates skeptics. It would be more accurate to call the skeptics "Meteorologists" than "TV weathermen" but that would imply that they know a lot about weather. Instead, the Hysteria Machine wants to depict skeptics as people working out of their field or paid stooges.

Look at this example:

Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is "anything severe." Michaels had written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1989 warning of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he called "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than $165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, "What is this, a hatchet job?")

Of course it is a hatchet job. There is no mention of the World Climate Report's total budget or what percentage that $165,000 was or the circumstances of how it was granted. The reader does not know if this was 100% of Michaels' budget or 0.1%. It is quite likely that Newsweek has received more money from ExxonMobil over the years than any of the skeptics.

Another way that the Hysteria Machine manipulates public opinion is through careful use of smear terms. There are no "skeptics", only deniers.

Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said.

Gee - why would they hate a term that equates them with Holocaust Deniers? This is the only time that they are not called deniers in the article.

The other smear is here:

Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

Now warming skeptics have been equated with Nazi sympathizers and cigarette makers. As a topper, it's supposed to be the same companies charging you $3+ per gallon. It makes you want to stone them on sight, doesn't it?

The article also uses some of the same tricks it attributes to the skeptics. It has this to say of the skeptics:

ICE ads asked, "If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis [or Kentucky, or some other site] getting colder?" This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.

Newsweek is not above picking and choosing its facts to prove global warming. They have a graphic showing the breakup of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica. While this looks scary, they neglect to mention that Antarctic warming is limited to this small portion of the continent and the rest is staying constant or cooling. Giving that sort of factoid might lead you to think that there is some debate about climate science.

For a real look at the debate, look at the book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. The author meant this to be an attack on Republicans as a follow up to his book The Republican War on Science. ALong the way he discovered that the skeptics couldn't be dismissed so easily. In interviews he has said that he isn't sure which side is true. This doesn't fit in at all with the Hysteria Machine's world view so it is never mentioned.

Also missing from the article and the Hysteria Machine's message in general is any recognition of the limits of Kyoto.

MIT's Lindzen told NEWSWEEK in 2001, he was summoned to the White House. He told Bush he'd done the right thing. Even if you accept the doomsday forecasts, Lindzen said, Kyoto would hardly touch the rise in temperatures. The treaty, he said, would "do nothing, at great expense."

This is exactly right. Kyoto was originally meant as a "first step" with most of the cuts being made by America. If Kyoto had been successfully implemented, emissions would still be higher than in 1990 because China and India are excluded from making cuts.

The Hysteria Machine does not represent science. They pick and choose. They exaggerate (remember Gore's prediction of a 20+ rise in ocean levels - that didn't come from any scientist). When a preliminary copy of the most recent IPCC report failed to be scary enough they lobbied the writers to punch it up. They also pressured the IPCC to put numbers on their estimates - a percentage of how sure the IPCC is that their figures are correct.

With this article, Newsweek established itself as a partner on the Hysteria Machine. They didn't quote scientists, they quoted Democrats. They used the Hysteria Machine's terminology. We can only be thankful that they didn't join Robert F Kennedy jr and call for skeptics to be treated as traitors - just corporate stooges.

The Long and the Short of It

Is height a good measure of health? That is the basis of a UN study written about in Newsweek. The study shows that Americans have fallen from the tallest people in the world out of the top ten. The authors of the report and the Newsweek article assume that the only factor is child health care. In order to make the report more accurate, the authors only looked at native-born whites and blacks.

The Newsweek article picks up on this and uses it to bash Americans for not instituting socialized medicine.

There are a lot of problems with the report. A big one is the assumption that Americans should have the same genetic basis for height as the Europeans. Their basis for this is sort of a shrug, pointing out that Americans were taller than Europeans for a long time. The flaw here is that, outside of genetics, the biggest factor limiting height is nutrition.  Americans may well have reached their genetic maximum decades before Europeans.

There is some indication of this in the report itself. All of the countries with tallest populations are from northern Europe. Since white Americans are from a wide mixture of Europeans, you would expect us to be a bit shorter than the tallest. The opposite is true for American blacks. Most Africans brought as slaves came from a the area close to the so-called Slave Coast. I have no idea how this sub-group compares with Africans as a whole but it could account for differences.

A second flaw in the assumptions is that the lack of insurance equates to a sicker population. The biggest factor here is childhood vaccinations.  The American rate is as high as anyone's nearly 100% and is already highly subsidized.

The final problem with the report is contained in the report itself. If universal health care is the determining factor then you would expect the British to come in at the top of the list. After all, they were the first country to institute it and are often held up as the model for the US to emulate.

Instead they come in right after the US. Even with socialized medicine and the rest of the welfare state, they are still shorter than the US population, although not by much. What does that tell you about biases in the report?

Obama Retrenches

If I didn't know better I'd think that Obama reads my blog. No sooner do I point out his potential problems in wooing the dove wing of the Democrats than he redefines his position.

Yes, he is still for an immediate pull-out from Iraq. He sees no purpose in the US troops being there. Instead he would use them to invade Pakistan - a friendly government.

I'm afraid that he lost me. Yes, there are AQ in Pakistan and they are gaining influence. The problem is that they will gain a lot more influence if we are seen pushing Pakistan's government too hard.

Then there is the whole unseemly problem of invading an ally. It would be different if the Pakistani government was inviting us in in greater numbers to fight AQ but they aren't. Instead they are incensed when innocents are killed.

I'm also a bit hazy on the idea of abandoningIraq in order to pursue AQ. What about AQ in Iraq? What if we pull our of Iraq and bin Laden moves in. Will we invade again?

Obama is making really basic mistakes, the sort of mistakes you would expect from a first-term senator with no foreign policy experience. Hillary is actually starting to look good in comparison.

Obama stakes out the pacifist wing

Obama is trying hard to position himself as the dove candidate. First he announced that potential genocide is not a good enough reason to keep troops in Iraq - or anywhere else. This is a strange attitude for the supposedly caring party but it distinguishes him from Hillary. She said, at least a few weeks ago, that she would keep enough troops in Iraq to prevent ethnic cleansing.

In last week's debate, Obama was asked if he would be willing to meet with leaders hostile to the US without precondition. He said that, yes, he would. Later in the week, he slammed Hillary as being Bush-lite for refusing to meet with leaders she disapproves of. Hillary, who knows how the White House works, knows better.

Obama is trying to carve out a position that will appeal to anti-war activists. There are dangers here.

The first problem is that some Democrats may be uncomfortable with such an iron-clad position. Since the Holocaust, the cry of the Jews has been "never again". Obama contradicts this. Will Jews vote for a candidate who would allow a second Holocaust happen?

Assuming that the strategy works and Obama gets the nomination, he faces a new set of problems. While most Americans are tired of the war, it is not clear that most Americans want a bloodbath on their hands or that they want a president who has essentially announced his surrender to terrorists and insurgents. His willingness to meet with foreign leaders who openly mock the US will make us look week.

Worse, if another terrorist strike happens on US soil, Obama has already fenced himself in. It will be hard to assure an anxious country that he will reply to terrorism with strength when he is so against military action.

John Edwards and RFK

Edwards is duplicating Robert Kennedy's poverty tour and wondering why no one is paying attention. I can think of four reasons.

1) Poverty in 2007 is not what it was 40 years ago. People were shocked to discover extreme poverty in their midst. One famous photograph showed children with their stomachs swollen from starvation within sight of Congress. Today the poor are more likely to be suffering from obesity.

2) The poverty tour didn't do that much for RFK, either. When he was assassinated, the nomination for the Democratic candidacy was still in question. Kennedy was in real danger of losing to Humphrey. Why duplicate a campaign that wasn't a winner the first time it was tried?

3) RFK was no JFK. Many people wanted to believe that Bobby had grown into his brother's shoes. Much of his support came from people who felt the loss of his brother. If he had been Bobby Smith he never would have gotten as far with his campaign.

4) Swiping another politician's shtick never works. Even if the poverty tour had propelled RFK into the White House it would not work now.
The 1960s were a different era. Voters expect a modern campaign and they want something original. The poverty tour is neither.

Sicko is ailing

After the war, Democrats are counting on health care to be the big issue of 2008. Every presidential candidate has some plan for universal coverage. Even more important, Michael Moore released a new "documentary" showing the problems in the current system and pushing for a French-style system.

The Dems and universal health care are in trouble. Moore's Sicko is bombing at the box office. In five weeks it has taken in less than $20 million. That's not bad for a documentary but it is terrible for a grassroots movement. Moore's last movie, Fahrenheit 911 was supposed to drive George Bush from office and it set box office records for a documentary. It turned out that the only people who went to see it were the true believers. The people whose minds Moore wanted to change stayed away from the movie.

The same is happening here except even the already-converted are staying away, also. It turns out that this is not the pressing issue of the day. The irony here is that Moore toned down his usual approach in order to make a more persuasive movie.

The Democrat's Dance

Seven and a half month into the new Democratic control of Congress and their new strategy on ending the war is a sleepover. Are the Democrats really serious about ending the war?

No. Granted it is difficult to push through controversial legislation with a razor-thin majority but there are reasons that the Democrats do not want the war to end.

Democratic strategists are sure that the war is why they won control of Congress in 2006. They hope to leverage the same voter anger in 2008. If the war ends before 2008 then it will be ancient history. This means that Democrats will dance around the issue but will never force Bush to withdraw the troops. At the same time, Democrats will use the issue as a fund-raiser. Their all-nighter was accompanied by action parties which mainly raised funds.

This is also being used as a wedge to try to defeat marginal Republicans. I've gotten two anti-Pryce phone messages in the last two of weeks. These are similar to the anti-Pryce calls I was getting just before the 2006 election when Pryce was almost defeated.

All of this means that the Democrats have to make war support a Republican issue. According to a Newsweek article, Democratic leaders are discouraging alliances with wavering Republicans. A bipartisan effort to end the war would ruin the Democrats' plans.

This will also cause problems for the Republican presidential candidates. It is unlikely that an anti-war candidate will win the primaries but that means that the winner of the nomination will be running on Bush's record. Most of the Republicans want to distance themselves from Bush right now.

While the Democrats have every reason to want the war to continue, they have to appear against it. If the public senses that the Democrats have been continuing the war on purpose then they lose their advantage.

They also have to keep the anti-war left from calling for their heads. Cindy Sheehan already realized that the Democrats betrayed her and announced that she will run against Pelosi. This trickle could turn into a gusher as the Democrats' most active supporters bleed away.

Maybe this is why Nader is running again. As usual, he insists that there is no difference between the parties. If the Democrats have no intention of ending the war then he is correct and he could siphon off enough support to give the election to the Republicans.

Stunts like the all-nighter are supposed to make the anti-war left think that the Democrats really are opposing Bush. In the movie Chicago, the defense lawyer is shown doing a dance as he dodges difficult questions and eventually gets two clients freed. The Democrats are trying to do this dance now - distracting people with fancy footwork while approaching their real goal.

They may well fail. There are a lot of stumbling blocks. I can't imagine the anti-war left having enough patience to wait until after the 2008 election for the war to end. They expect success by the end of the year.

A worse nightmare for the Democrats is that Iraq might stabilize. Most of the frustration against the war comes from the nightly death toll. The networks tell us how many troops died in the last 24 hours. If none died or were injured then they list Iraqi fatalities. They never mention terrorists or insurgents killed.

What if that turns around? What if the tribes continue to make peace with the US and to turn against al Qeada?

The ultimate nightmare would be for Bush to fold and start withdrawing the troops. Everyone except John Murtha is sure that this will bring an increase in violence. This could turn public opinion around. The Republican presidential candidate would not be supporting the war, he would be running against genocide.

The Republicans may own the war but the Democrats would own the defeat and its aftermath. This could lead to a Republican sweep.

So the Democrats have to make a show of being against the war but they cannot afford to actually stop it.

What Should Al Do?

Al Gore wants the developed world to cut CO2 emissions by 90% by 2050. My feeling is that I want to see Al go first. I'm serious. We just had a huge rock concert attended by celebrities who have no intention of cutting back on their lifestyle but want to send the rest of us back to the stone age. Gore made the news last Winter when his power bills came out. He burns more energy than a block of regular folks. His apologists say that he is a rich man (currently estimated as being worth $100 million) so he is entitled to live like the rich do.

I disagree. Someone who asked millions of people to pledge to push for a 90% cut in CO2 should be willing to lead the way. Here are some steps I would like to see Al make. All are doable.

Turn off the air conditioning. It makes life pleasant but people lived without it for thousands of years. Heck - I grew up without it and Al certainly didn't have air conditioning when he plowed fields behind his uncle's mules.

Turn off most of the heat. Al has a huge house but he can only occupy one room at a time (even if he has put on weight). Put in zone heating so that the room he is in has a little heat. Do the same for his wife and maybe some of the staff. He can heat the rest of the house enough to keep the pipes from freezing in the Winter but otherwise don't waste power heating rooms that aren't used. This is how the rich lived for centuries. Al can survive. He can afford heavy clothes and he's put on some natural insulation of his own.

Turn off the lights. Forget Compact Fluorescents. Our forefathers often lit a room with a single candle. Al could use one or two white LEDs per room that would more than equal a candle. He could use an LED-based book light for reading. Oh - and don't light empty rooms.

Scrap a jet. I don't know if Al owns a private jet or just leases one. If he owns one he should have it cut up for scrap. If he doesn't own one then he should buy one and cut it up. The idea is that private jets are one of the biggest emitters of CO2 that an individual can have. It's not enough to sell one so that someone else can use it. Al has to take one off of the market - maybe two.

Cut back on travel. Al travels a lot. He jets all over the world telling people to stop creating CO2 even as his travels dwarf their own emissions. Al should do more teleconferencing. If he has to travel he should be driving a Prius or a Smart Car. He should also install a governor on his cars so that they cannot be driven faster than 50 MPH. A Prius loses its advantage over other cars as it goes faster. At 100 MPH it will get terrible millage. While he's at it, Al should plan his speaking trips so that he can do one long road trip across the country per year.

Switch to Windows 98. A modern Intel dual-core chip with two gig RAM and a high-end graphic card uses a lot of power. A PC or MAC made ten years ago can do just about everything the newer PCs can do and not much slower. They just don't look as flashy doing it.

Condemn the Kennedys. At Live Earth RFK jr proclaimed that anyone who denies global warming is a traitor and should be treated as such. These are strong words coming from someone who opposes a major wind farm. His uncle Ted is against the wind farm, also. Why? Because they don't want to see it in the distance from their expensive properties. This makes them bigger hypocrites than Gore (although consorting with RFK jr raises Al's hypocrisy points). If Al is serious about cutting emissions then he should condemn anyone standing in the way of a wind farm.

Until Al does something from this list (or something similarly radical), I'm not going to alter my lifestyle. Why should I?

Losing to the Terrorists

In the next three years we could see al Qaida make a major come-back. By my count, four different countries are at risk of takeover by a Taliban-style government that is friendly to al Qaida. In order of increasing probability, these are:

Iraq.
Recently the New York Times ran an editorial admitting that a troop pull-out from Iraq would lead to increased violence, possibly even genocide. They called for a pull-out anyway. Even if Bush manages to hold against congressional Democrats, there is a good chance that the next president will order a pull-out. Al Qaida is hoping that they will be able to use the ensuing chaos to create a new Islamic government. They have invested a lot of time and effort in this project.

Somalia
This has been a failed state for decades. The closest that they have come to stability since the US pulled out was the establishment of the Islamic Courts. While some on the left insisted that this was not what it sounds like, a; Qaida says that it is. They have officially aligned themselves with the Islamic Courts and hope to re-establish themselves there.

Afghanistan
This is supposed to be the "good war" but it is dragging on. The left is beginning to call for a pull-out from here, also. All of the reasons for pulling out of Iraq can be applied here. There is a direct link between Afghanistan and 9/11 but this is often forgotten. Michael Moore insisted that we are only there to build an oil pipeline.

Worse, the left has been announcing that we already lost Afghanistan except for a small area around the capitol as part of the drum-beat calling for a withdrawal. If we leave the Taliban will be back.

Pakistan
The reason the Taliban is still active in Afghanistan is that they have a safe harbor in Pakistan. The government has ceded two provinces to them. Comparing the current government tot he Shaw of Iran, the New York Times is calling for us to withdraw our support. No good can come of this. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation.

Regardless of our support, the government in Pakistan might not be able to hold on much longer. There is a very real danger that the Taliban will take over. This is the ultimate nightmare. Pakistan has come close to a nuclear exchange with India already. It has also shared nuclear secrets with Iran. and both of those happened under a moderate government. A radical Islamic government in Pakistan will threaten world stability.

Just Sick

A few weeks ago Andrew Speaker learned that he had a rare form of tuberculosis while in Italy. Warned that he would be barred from flying back to the US, he went to Germany where he caught a flight to Canada and drove back to the US.

Square this with Michael Moore's new film Sicko which quotes a WHO study showing that the US is ranked number 37 in health care, between Costa Rica and Slovenia (and two spots ahead of Cuba). This means that Speaker left Italy (#2), and went through Germany (#25) and Canada (#30) before coming back to the US( #37). Speaker was quoted as saying that he was sure he would die if he didn't get back to the US.

Was he crazy? Or does he know something that Moore doesn't want you to know?

Well... It turns out that the WHO studies are not really based on a nation's health. There are other factors including "fairness" and payment method. In fact, the same study that ranks the US #37 overall puts us at #15 for overall health attainment. This WHO paper admits that, given the uncertainty factor, Switzerland (#2) could be doing worse than the US (#15). We lose points overall because we are ranked #54 in "fairness" (defined as government payments to health care). On the other hand, we are first in responsiveness and expenditure by a wide margin!

We are only ranked #32 in equality of child survival but this is misleading since it depends on member countries to define live birth. In the US, we rank many babies as premature live births where other countries would rank the same child as a miscarriage.

We are ranked #25 for live expectancy but, again, the uncertainty interval is big enough that we could actually be higher.

None of this is really meaningful in a policy debate. By including fairness of financial contribution as 25% of the total score, the people writing the report assured that countries with socialized medicine would score high, regardless of the quality of medicine received.

One thing that should be addressed in the US is the cost. We pay more than anyone else. While this results in high-quality care, much of this cost is wasted. Personally, I blame trial lawyers whose baseless suits have caused innumerable unneeded tests. Presidential candidate John Edwards personally raised the number of Caesarian Sections through class-action suits. Unfortunately, there has been no corresponding rise in health so this is wasted pain and money.

The last thing in the world that is likely to improve health care is a government take-over. This was tried in England 60 years ago. The result is that their medical system is overloaded and 40% of their doctors are from overseas (including a few jihadists). Canada tried this a couple of decades ago. When a bi-partisan panel looked into health care during Bush (41), they liked the Canadian system. A couple of decades later, it is showing its cracks. The waits for treatment, including life-saving treatment, are legendary. Many doctors living near the border have a thriving practice treating Canadians who don't want to wait (or cannot wait) for their number to come up at home. since health insurance is illegal in Canada, these people are paying for treatment out of their pockets.

My father was a doctor and I grew up with stories about how difficult it was to file with Medicare. Their reporting requirements are much worse than insurance companies. This is to be expected. The insurance companies have to process the paperwork on the other side so they also suffer financially if there is too much paperwork. The government has no such limitations. Converting everyone over to a single-payer system would mean putting everyone on Medicare.

The British have recently discovered something else about government-run health care. In the US we look at someone with an unhealthy lifestyle and assume that it is between him and his insurance company. When the government becomes the insurance company then this equation changes. The government has power than no insurance company will ever wield. Just look at some of the excesses done in the name of public health in the last year. New York City banned trans-fats on shaky grounds. Imagine how much more of this we will see if government officials think that it will save public funds.

A few months ago a medical center in England announced that it would stop doing certain procedures on overweight patients. They are strapped for cash and someone needed to be cut. So much for universal health care.

Tort reform and easing testing requirements for new drugs would do more for people than socialized medicine.

Why are they so upset about Libby?

The Huffington Post is buzzing. Keith Olbermann is calling for Bush's resignation. Why? Because he commuted the unusually harsh sentence given to Scooter Libby. Why so much anger?

By the standards used to excuse Clinton (everybody lies), Libby didn't do anything. Even the special prosecutor on the case admitted that no crime had been committed but he still charged Libby with having obstructed the investigation of the non-crime.

Again, why does this upset the left so much?

The left seems to be suffering from a combination of collective amnesia and an extra case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

The facts of the case - Former ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Husein was trying to buy yellow cake (unprocessed uranium) to restart his nuclear program. Months later Wilson wrote a column for the New York Times saying that he had been sent by the Vice President, that he found the reports were false, and that he immediately knew that a separate report was a forgery. This ignited a firestorm. Along the way, it slipped out that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Wilson cried foul - his wife was classified undercover and exposing her identity was a crime. Wilson went on to write a best-seller claiming that the Bush administration deliberately exposed her identity in order to put her life at risk and as a warning to others.

This is all that the left remembers. What they have forgotten is that Wilson later admitted under oath that his report indicated that he had been sent at his wife's suggestion, that Iraq was inquiring about yellow cake, and that he had never even seen the report he claimed was a forgery. It also eventually turned out that the leak came from a Bush critic in the State Department, not from the White House.

What is more, since the whole thing involves Iraq and WMDs, the left sees this as the thin edge of the wedge that will pry open the secrets about the run-up to the war.

During the investigation they were convinced that the leak must have come from Cheney or Karl Rove. They were in ecstasy over Easter weekend, 2006 when it was rumored that either Cheney or Rove was about to be arrested. The left-wing bloggers couldn't wait for one of these men to be frog-marched out of the White House.

Of course it didn't happen. The investigation ended. No charges were filed except against Libby for giving conflicting dates.

But the left wants blood. Someone has to go to jail to satisfy them. Plus some of them are under the impression that an investigation is still going on and that Libby will cut a deal if he has to serve jail time.

Yesterday Olbermann went on about Libby's victim (how can there be a victim if there was no crime?). Today he went further:

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this President decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

Again - Libby was convicted of knowingly giving the wrong dates for when he first found out what Wilson's wife did for a living and in a very unusual move, was told that his jail sentence would not be suspended while he appealed. This hardly counts as a "cooked book" or a "wild-eyed partisan". But Olbermann's rants raise the ratings so NBC encourages him.

Then there is Hillary. When asked about the pardon she insisted that it was much worse than the 140 that her husband made in his last days in office. These were unrepentant felons and at least one got on the pardon list by making a substantial donation to the Clinton Presidential Library and two more hired Hillary's brother to defend them.

This alone should disqualify Hillary from the presidency but the left has selective outrage. They don't care what the Clinton's did, only what Bush did.

Update: I had forgotten that Clinton pardoned his own half-brother who had a drug conviction.

Gore's assault on truth

Al Gore wrote an editorial for sunday's New York Times. In it he makes this claim:

Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground — having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years — and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.

As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. It's the carbon dioxide.

A lot of environmentalists make this comparison but there is a major flaw hidden in it. When Gore says that Earth's carbon was deposited in the ground over 600 million years he implies that prior to that it was in the atmosphere and that Earth had Venus-like temperatures.

Now - here's the thing. Live developed in the oceans. Without life, according to Gore, the Earth was like Venus. But if the temperature was 867 degrees, or even 300 degrees, then there would be no oceans and therefore no life. There's just no way around this.

This may not be what he meant but it is what he said. either Gore himself doesn't understand that Venus was always different from the Earth or he is willing to make mis-statements in order to scare people. Neither option is very comforting.

Scooter Libby

Obama has this to say about the pardon:

"This decision to commute the sentence of a man who compromised our national security cements the legacy of an Administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division, one that has consistently placed itself and its ideology above the law. This is exactly the kind of politics we must change so we can begin restoring the American people's faith in a government that puts the country's progress ahead of the bitter partisanship of recent years."

Obviously presidential pardons should be reserved for major campaign contributors and clients of the First Lady's brother. The presiding judge wanted to make an example of Libby so the sentence was disproportionate and the insistence on jail time while the appeal is being filed was just mean. That Bush would reduce Libby's sentence down to something more proportionate is fair but the left cannot see that. For example, tomorrow MSNBC's Keith Olberman plans to call for both Bush and Cheney to resign (conveniently leaving President Pelosi).

CAFE Craziness

Last week the Senate reached an agreement on raising the CAFE standards by 40%. This is the average fuel economy ratings of all cars and light trucks that a manufacturer sells. I mentioned this in a previous post but I want to go into more detail.

Currently the standards are different for cars and trucks with trucks getting a slight break. Also the definition of a truck is loose enough that, for CAFE purposes, my PT Cruiser is classified as a truck. This offsets Chrysler's bigger SUVs.

The new standards will establish a single standard for everything - cars, trucks, vans, and hybrids.

There are some serious problems with the new standard. There is no way to wring much more efficiency out of the gasoline motor. The only way to increase fuel economy is to make the car lighter or to give it a weaker motor.

Note - hybrids do not change this equation. Most of the hybrids on the market disguise the smaller gasoline engine by giving a short-term boost from an electric motor. The electric motor is powered by batteries which are charged by the gasoline motor. The net result is a fuel savings but nowhere near the new CAFE standards. The exception is the Prius which does average substantial fuel savings but mainly for city driving. The Prius runs on its electric motor and uses the gasoline engine to charge the batteries. During stop and go driving which is the worst for fuel economy, the gas motor doesn't even run much of the time. The Prius is not for everyone. It is slow and its expected life is half of conventional cars. Also, all of those batteries are heavy and take up a lot of room. In addition, on the highway, the Prius's economy drops and it is comparable to any other under-powered car.

This is the big problem. Current fleet economy is what it is because of consumer choices. If everyone put economy at the top of their priorities then no one would be buying SUVs.

The new standard is pretty high - 35 MPG. I just saw a Honda ad promoting their fuel economy being 34 MPG. Car makers will have trouble raising cars past 35 MPG. That means that they will have to cancel the less-efficient models.

I'm sure that ecologists are thrilled with this news. They would like nothing more than to outlaw the SUV. But they speak for a small minority of car-buyers.

Congress is dictating the the car manufacturers will have to make cars that the consumers do not want to buy and will fine the car makers if consumers buy too many of the wrong car.

This is not how a free economy works.

Worse, it probably will not save much fuel. By raising fuel efficiency, Congress is lowering the cost of driving. simple economics says that when the cost of something goes down, the demand goes up.

If Congress really wants to increase fuel economy, they should raise gas taxes. If people were paying $6/gallon they would reevaluate their car-buying priorities and driving habits. The Democrats would probably lose the next election but they would have the satisfaction of knowing that they made a real, direct difference.

Instead, the most likely result will be the death of the American car manufacturer.