Personality Profiles and Global Warming

There have been studies where a group of volunteers was given a personality profile that was generated specifically for them based on their horoscope. Most people said that it described them very well. The trick was that everyone was given the same profile. They were sure that it was correct so they paid attention to the parts that were correct and ignored the rest.

You can see this happening with Global Warming. True believers keep seeing signs that warming has already happened and ignore the rest. Most of the country had warmer than normal weather from mid-December through mid-January. Respected columnists insisted that this proved global warming was already an accomplished fact. Thomas Freidman quoted his wife as needing a new "global warming wardrobe" - summer weight clothes in winter colors.

For the last two weeks, most of the country has had colder than normal weather. By the logic quoted above we must be heading for a new ice age. Friedman's wife had better order a new wardrobe of winter weight clothes in summer colors.

What actually happened is that a mild El Nino deflected the cold arctic air that normally dominates our weather. The El Nino has dissipated and the bottled up cold air i making itself felt.

A corollary of this effect is also happening - rejecting a document that does not meet prior expectations. It is a matter of faith among global warming believers that warming will be catastrophic. The upcoming IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report is expected to downgrade projected sea level rise. Previous projections had been for a rise of 20-55 inches. The new report is planning on cutting this to 5-23 inches. The previous low end projection is now the high end projection.

Since this does not match expectations, people are upset.

Of course, when a global warming disbeliever questions the true faith he is told that the IPCC is all-knowing. Suddenly the IPCC is as fail able as any other institution.

It is obvious that when Al Gore said that the debate on global warming is over, what he meant is that he is closing the debate. It has passed from scientific debate to religious orthodoxy.

Was 9/11 Really That Bad?

David Bell of the LA Times thinks that we over-reacted to 9/11. He points out that the USSR lost 20 million people during World War II. By implications, we are just wimps, unable to suck up the loss of 3,000 people and billions of dollars in infrastructure.

What an ass.

First, the idea that we over-reacted is not new. Michael Moore said it to former New York Mayor Ed Koch. Koch spent the next few years telling the world what an ass Michael Moore is. If he reads the LA Times he may have a new target.

Bell's analogy of the USSR during WWII doesn't hold water, either. The number of people killed after Nazi Germany invaded Russia has nothing to do with the level of injury needed to declare war. Now, if the USSR had waited until a million or so were dead before declaring war, then Bell would have a point.

Something else that Bell overlooks - al Qaeda did something that the Fascists were unable to do - kill thousands of Americans on our own soil.

Bell's comparison with WWII does have some bearing on our current conflict. The USSR lost millions of its civilians and kept fighting. We are ready to surrender after 3,000 combat losses.

Non-binding nonsense

The Senate is considering a non-binding resolution against the President's surge. Why non-binding? I can think of a couple of reasons. If they made it binding it could signal the end of the war with us the losing party. This would stamp the Democrats' name on the loss. President Bush could claim with some validity that he was prepared to continue the war and that his new strategy may have worked. All of this would make the Democrats happy in the short-run but it would be a great campaign issue for Republicans in 2008.

There is also the likely chance that the resolution would fail if it was binding. Assuming that Lieberman votes against it, it will take every Democrat plus at least one Republican to pass it. All it takes is one defector who is afraid of the consequences and it fails. The Democrats look powerless.

On the other hand, by passing a non-binding resolution, the Democrats are in much better shape. If the surge works they can say that they left the final determination to the President. If it fails, they are on record as having been against it. The best thing for them would be if Bush took them seriously and cancelled the surge. This would not only signal the end of the war, it would cast the Bush administration as a failed presidency.

So why are some Republicans talking about supporting the resolution? Apparently they think that they can take cover from the war. This may help them individually but it will hurt Republicans in general in the next election.

Here's an on-line petition to send a message to these Republicans. Here is a column explaining the point of the petition.

JFK and BHO

People are already comparing Barack H. Obama with John F. Kennedy but I'm not sure that all aspects have been considered. Lets look at the two.

First, the similarities. They are both charismatic and both are considered minorities (prior to 1960, an Irish/Catholic was considered unelectable). By 2008, Obama will equal Kennedy's four years in the Senate. They both positioned themselves as Washington outsiders who would shake things up. That's about it for similarities.

There are some significant differences. Kennedy was an anti-communist hawk. One of his major issues was the "missile gap" meaning that we had allowed the USSR to build more missiles than we had (once elected he found that this was not so). Obama is running as a dove. He was always against invading Iraq. Where Kennedy was fiercely pro-America, Obama is a multi-nationalist. Obama has been quoted that, as a post-Baby Boomer, he has moved beyond the concepts of good and evil.

Kennedy was far more conservative than today's mainstream Democrats. It's hard to imagine any modern Democrat proposing a tax cut but Kennedy did, providing Reagan with evidence that tax cuts could stimulate the economy and increase overall tax revenues. Obama's liberal voting record indicates that he is closer to Ted Kennedy.

There are several reasons that Obama might not want to be associated with JFK. Kennedy never gave much support for civil rights. His outsider status meant that he didn't really know how Washington works and most of his agenda languished.

Then there was Cuba. First Kennedy presided over the Bay of Pigs. Then he brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Plus he sent the first troops to Viet Nam.

Kennedy's personal life was nothing to emulate. Even assuming that most of the stories about his affairs are exaggerations, he did have some well-documented mistresses. This may have left him open to blackmail by J. Edgar Hoover. Kennedy suffered from Addison's Disease. Today there is a safe, effective treatment but this did not exist in the early 1960s. Kennedy covered up how ill he actually was but, between the Addison's treatments and the pain medication for his back, there is question about his mental state.

All things considered, Obama might want to run from the Kennedy comparisons.

The Price of Gas

Gas in my area is currently selling around $1.95-$1.99 a gallon. That's around 10% less than election day.

Remember when gas prices began to fall from $3.00 a gallon in the Fall? Liberals were convinced that it was an election scam engineered by President Bush acting in collusion with the oil companies. I remember one poster on Huffington who was calling for Congressional hearings on gas prices. He was sure that this was how they could finally impeach Bush.

Liberals insisted that gas prices would go up right after the election.

Obviously it did not go up. There is no conspiracy.

What else have they been wrong about?

Learning from history

I hear people talk about learning (or not learning) the lessons of Viet Nam. As formulated by Colin Powel, these lessons are that America does not have the stomach for a long or costly war so we should only fight when we can go in, crush our enemy, and get out fast. This says quite a lot about America and the former Secretary of State's view of it.

There are other lessons we can learn from recent history. Here is a short list:

The lesson of the Fall of Viet Nam.
The peaceniks said that North Viet Nam's takeover of the south would be peaceful. They were wrong. IT was a bloodbath and all of the peace activists except Jane Fonda admitted that they were wrong.

The lesson of Afghanistan and Somalia.
Failed states don't heal themselves. Failed Islamic states open themselves to takeover by hard-core fundamentalists. When we pulled out of Somalia in 1993, many conservatives jumped on the bandwagon saying that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Rush Limbaugh was quoted as saying that the military is good at killing people and breaking things, not building nations. Most conservatives have learned since than that failed states fester. We let this happen in Afghanistan and it became the headquarters for al Qaeda. Somalia is in danger of going down the same path.

The Lesson of Desert Storm
Had we overthrown Saddam in 1991, it would have been much easier to build a new government. The people of Iraq trusted us, Islamic fundamentalism was not as strong, and Iran was much weaker. Instead we held off at the instance of our Arab allies. We "put Saddam in a box" through sanctions and no-fly zones. We hoped that his government would fall on its own and our hands would be clean. Obviously, that didn't happen. Saddam used Oil For Food money to bribe other nations and we were in a continuous state of hostility with Iraq for over a decade. Deferring a problem did not make it go away. Had we continued to wait instead of invading in 2003, the problem would only have gotten worse.

The lesson of Libya
During the 1980s, Libya was a big problem. It was territorial and it supported terrorism. After we received proof of their involvement in blowing up a plane we attacked their government with a missile barrage. The problem went away.

So, here we are with the Democrats protesting a surge (or escalation as they insist on calling it) and instead proposing a retreat (redeployment to Asia). I would ask them to identify an international problem that has solved itself.

Hot Air III

Last week the Union of Concerned Scientists announced that ExxonMobil is paying people to be global warming skeptics. My wife wants to know what I did with my cut?

I'm kidding, of course. My wife is almost as big a global warming skeptic as I am. I guess that ExxonMobil owes a payoff to both of us.

Keep in mind that Union of Concerned Scientists is not a union of scientists. It is a lobbying organization. By all rights its name should be the Union of Concerned Regular Folks but then their press releases would be taken a little more skeptically.

This one needs a close examination. They assume that any grants given to any organization that ever published anything against global warming must have been given specifically for that purpose. The editor of TCSDaily has pointed out that they have received oney from ExxonMobil but global warming is only a small part of their content and some of their correspondents are warming believers.

The press release ignores the fact that many of the leading critics of global warming work for the National Weather Service and NOAA. These people get their money from the government, not the oil companies.

The press release was not designed to be accurate. It was aimed at the general public with three goals. First, it re-enforces that global warming is real. Second, it discredits anyone who is a skeptic, giving the impression that there are no genuine skeptics, only hired guns. Third, it is designed to dry up grants given to anyone who is skeptical.

I think that we need an organization to counter the Concerned Scientists. I would call it the Union of Apathetic Scientists. The organization probably would not have any actual scientists, they are too apathetic. Why are they apathetic? Because they are scientists and they know the truth behind all of the end-of-the-world claims.

Now, as soon as ExxonMobil sends me a grant, I'll get right on it.

Hot Air II

So the current warm spell is due to El Nino. What about the ice shelf that broke away in the Arctic last week? Here's something I found on the AccuWeather site:

I got a lot of comments on the story of the calving of the Ayles Ice Shelf, including a very informative one from Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College. I sent an e-mail to Dr. Luke Copland, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Copland was quoted in the article I linked and he was kind enough to respond. Here's the text of the e-mail:

Hi Laura,

Thanks for the good question - there have been many breakups of ice shelves across northern Ellesmere Island over the last century so. When these ice shelves were first discovered in about 1900, they were a total of about 10,000 sq km in area. Today they have reduced in size by about 90%, to about 1000 sq km in area. The Ayles Ice Shelf loss was the largest breakup in at least 25 years, but it is part of the long-term trend of loss over the last century.

The important point to note with all of these losses is that they are essentially permanent. There is no longer enough glacier ice flowing off the land to replace the ice that is being calved into the ocean. Hence these 3000+ year old shelves are now gone forever.

You might also be interested in looking at a media page that we've put together:
http://www.geomatics.uottawa.ca/copland/

Regards,
Luke

I'm going to extrapolate a bit from this but as I read Dr. Copland's statement, it seems that he is saying that the Arctic ice has been melting for at least a century. The ice shelves were only discovered a century ago so this might have been going on longer. That says that this is not a phenomenon caused by recent warming. If this is the largest loss in 25 years then larger sheets have broken off earlier, presumably before recent warming.

I'll even speculate that if the sheets of ice are over 3,000 years old then the conditions that caused them must have changed without human intervention and they might even have been melting for a very long time prior to human-induced CO2.

Even without my specuation, it seems that this is not something new or a sign that the world is suddenly warmer than ever before.

Then there are the polar bears. They are threatened by Global Warming. Al Gore said so and the government is investigating classifying them as endangered.

The funnt thing is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, polar bears are at a historic high. How can they be threatened? The whole thing is part of a settlement. Some Green groups sued the government to force them to classify the polar bears as threatened by GLobal Warming. Granted that warming such as some project would change the bears' environment, possibly threatening them but they are not threatened yet and Al Gore's predictions are still questionable.

The current action is akin to filing for an insurance settlement because a forecaster said that this will be a bad year for storms and your beachfront property is at risk.

Hot Air

On Friday, NBC did a broadcast segment on the current heat wave. Their expert from NOAA said that it was all due to the current El Nino warming current. Normally during the Winter, cold arctic air cools most of the central and eastern US. The El Nino blocks this, pushing the jetstream and the colder air up to Canada and allowing warming air currents to flow across the US.

I was amazed that a broadcast network would allow abit of scientific truth like this to get out. After all, everyone else is saying that this is part of Global Warming. Columnist Thomas Friedman quoted his wife as saying that she needs a Global Warming wardrobe - Winter colors but Summer weight.

I was hoping to find a link to the story but they never posted it as a text article. The closest I could find is this Washington Post article. The first page is full of quotes such as

"I think it's a bit scary. It's too warm," said Ellie Motazedi of Bethesda as she paused during a bike ride.

"Days like this, I worry about global warming, and we're not doing anything about it," said Coby Dolan, an attorney basking in the sunshine on the porch of the clubhouse at the Hains Point golf course. Let the record reflect that he did not appear to be suffering.

You have to follow the link to the second page before you get this quote

"It's very dangerous to blame climate for weather," says Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University.

And finally, at the bottom, you get this

But Dennis Feltgen, a National Weather Service meteorologist, says climate change isn't the culprit. It's El Niño. Warm water in the tropical Pacific, changed wind patterns, lots of balmy air blowing our way from the southern United States.

"We're in an El Niño, which has absolutely nothing to do with global warming," Feltgen says. "It keeps a lot of the cold air locked up in Canada, and makes the West Coast of the United States stormy, which we've seen, and makes the southern one-third of the country wetter than normal."

Meanwhile, someone at NBC must have been appalled that an opportunity passed without warning the world about Global Warming. The word from one of the nation's chief weather predictors is not enough.

Tonight they ran a sort of retraction. They repeated a bit of the original story but then cut to someone who was only identified as Stephen Schneider from Stanford. Schneider said that Global Warming really was responsible for the warming.

So who is this spokesman? A quick Google on his name turned up his web page. It seems that he isn't an unbiased scientist interested in the truth. He is an advocate. In fact, he recently led a seminar designed to teach researchers how to lobby legislators on climate policy.

This is nothing new - a network showing an advocate without labeling him as such. It is just a disappointment that they would backtrack after showig a bit of scientific courage just last week.

The Future Car?

According to a Wired News article, GM is going to try again with an electric car. The new version has an on-board electric motor that can recharge the batteries. This solves one of the biggest problems with the electric car - limited range. It also has decent acceleration with zero to sixty in 8.5 seconds.

Hybrids have their own problems. The Prius uses a dual electric/gasoline system to run the car and to charge the batteries. At slow speeds the batteries drive the car. at faster speeds the gasoline motor starts up and adds power while recharging the batteries. This requires a very complicated drive system. Other hybrids run on gasoline most of the time but use an electric motor to help acceleration. This simplifies the design but doesn't help fuel economy much.

The GM idea would simplify the drive train - it would always run on electric. The gasoline engine simply recharges the batteries (you can also plug it into the electric grid). This allows the gasoline engine to be tuned for best performance. It ca also be made to run on alternative fuels or even power cells.

This does not eliminate the financial problem with electric cars. Batteries are expensive. This car is projected to use lithium-ion batteries which are more efficient and lighter than lead acid but wll cost $10,000.

Assuming advances in batteries, I expect this to be a more viable form of car than the hybrid. If batteries get cheap enough then it could easily replace the traditional gasoline-driven car as the predominant vehicle.

Rewriting the Cold War

The Left is re-writing the Cold War. According to the new thinking, it didn't need to happen and everything bad in the world today happened because the US chose to engage the USSR instead of just letting them co-exist. They were powerless and dysfunctional and would have eventually crumbled on their own.

(Spoiler alert). In the current movie, The Good Shepherd, a defector revels to the CIA that the USSR is no threat. He is ignored because the military/industrial complex needs a strong, if imaginary, enemy to fight.

A longer dissertation on the same theme was posted to the Huffington Post last month. This one holds that Trueman was the worst president ever because he started the Cold War.

But, it was Truman who started this disastrous policy and condemned us to a phony confrontation with the Soviet Union. People talk today about the failed and skewed intelligence concerning the threat of WMD from Iraq in 2002. That pails by comparison to the skewed intelligence that was used to make the Soviet Union our mortal enemy between 1945 and 1950. The National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA was the final "nail in the coffin" concerning our post war relationship with the USSR. And although the Soviet Union was a totalitarian dictatorship, that country was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and they were not a threat to the U.S.

[...] The U.S. had the atomic bomb in 1945 and the Soviets were only interested geo-politically in protecting themselves from another invasion from Germany, something that had happened 3 times in the 20th Century. So the CIA got to work on this and fed the people with skewed intelligence about the Soviet threat. They even kept this up during the Reagan years when all of our real intelligence had shown that the USSR was on the verge of collapse. They just could not out spend us for 50 years militarily.

[...] In the 50 years that followed WW II, the CIA was busy exporting terrorism throughout the world on the false premise that so-called monolithic Communism was threatening the world. Reagan praised the so-called freedom fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting the USSR. In fact, Reagan's freedom fighters were the extreme Muslims that were responsible for the rise of Muslim extremism and 9/11. At the time, we could not conceive of the idea that the USSR was defending its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to support a secular government there that was aligned with the Soviet Union. When it came to Soviet Russia, an entire generation of Democrats and Republicans supported the idea of containment of the USSR that was expressed in NSC Directive 68.

All of this overlooks the fact that the USSR was exporting communist dictatorships to Asia and the Americas from the 1940s through the 1960s. It also overlooks the fact the the Taliban grew out of the Islamic schools in Pakistan where many Afghans were driven by the USSR.

The same writer posted a follow-up on Christmas Eve. A different writer wrote about the Military/Industrial Complex a few days later.

So, why the attack on a conflict that ended nearly 20 years ago? I can see a few reasons.

1) Parallels with the current conflict. Many including myself have argued that WWII is a bad analogy for the War on Terror (AKA the Long war or the War on Islamic Fascists). What better way to discredit the current version of the Cold war than by discrediting the one that we already won? If we shouldn't have fought that Cold War then we shouldn't fight the new one either.

2) Regret for the loss of the USSR. Communism might have been discredited but there are still a lot of unreformed progressives out there. I think that some of them miss the USSR. They think that,like a mistreated puppy that grew up mean, if the USSR had only been treated better, things would have turned out differently.

3) Blame America first. According to this reasoning, the US, specifically the CIA, set up lots of dictatorships in the name of freedom. We created the Taliban. We created everything wrong with the world today in the name of the American Empire.

One interesting point in all of this is how the CIA figures in. When they thought that the leak of a CIA agent;s name might result in the arrest of Karl Rove or Vice-president Cheney, the Left pictured the CIA as a group of heroes, quietly working in the shadows to save us from foreign threats. Now that this hope has been dashed, they have reverted to form. The CIA is back on their list of the worst institutions in the world.

The Coming Breakup

As the Democrats take power, their coalition is beginning to fracture. Ethics reform is supposed to be one of the Democrats' top priority but Cindy Sheehan disrupted their press ethics reform conference. She even took over their microphone. The Democratic Underground is pressing for immediate impeachment hearings. Others are calling for universal health insurance and an immediate implementation of the Kyoto Protocols.

As Cindy demonstrated, these interest groups are expecting big things from a Democratic congress with a tiny majority, a lot of moderate members, and a Republican president. How many others will follow Cindy's example?

In the meantime, the Democrats have to walk a tightrope. Some of their promises are self-contradictory. Their 100 hours agenda is going to be pushed through without any Republican input or even any debate. This is in direct conflict with their promise to let Republicans share in the power. They will have trouble implementing the 9-11 commission recommendations. The American public expects a "new direction" on Iraq, not an immediate surrender.

In order to do well in 2008, the Democrats have to show that they are responsible leaders. This will lead to a lot of conflict with the fringe elements that helped put them in office.

It will not take much of a shift to the Green Party for the Democrats to lose their majority again.

Lost Collegiality

Something that the older pundits have been lamenting with the death of President Ford is the loss of the collegiality that existed between the parties in Ford's time. Grated that today's politics are very polarized but a lot of things have changed in the last 30 years. These include:

A balance of power. During Ford's administration the Democrats had a 125 seat majority in the House and a solid majority in the Senate. There wasn't much that Republicans could do so there was no sense fighting over most issues. The Democrats could afford to toss the Republicans a few crumbs since they didn't have any real power. Even when Ford issued his frequent vetoes (more than any other president) he could be overridden. 25 of his vetoes were overridden.

Today the Democrats have a very narrow majority in the House and a single-vote majority in the Senate. Even when the Republicans were in the majority they never enjoyed the overwhelming majorities that the Democrats had post-Watergate.

Non-aligned parties. The parties were in the midst of new alignments. Republicans were generally conservative but not always. Some were downright liberal. at the same time, many Democrats were conservative. The south was solidly Democrat but often voted conservative. This was a left-over from the Civil War and Reconstruction. As late as the 1970s, many southerners could not bring themselves to vote for the party of Lincoln.

This was changing. The 1972 Presidential race cemented the Democrats as the party of blacks, feminists, and other special interest groups. Certain issues such as the ERA and beig pro-abortion became mandatory. Some of the older mainstream Democrats felt crowded out by the new crew.

Reagan's primary run in 1976 and his election in 1980 inaugurated the conservative/libertarian/religious alliance that became Republican mainstream. Several Democrats switches sides over the next several years. Eventually the South went from solidly Democrat to solidly Republican.

Rose-tinted Hindsight. While I don't have the close-hand experiences of George Will to judge by, there was plenty of animosity. After Ford pardoned Nixon, the Democrats held investigations into a possible deal. Many were frustrated at not being able to impeach Nixon and wanted to impeach Ford as a proxy. I already mentioned the record number of vetoes and overrides.

The collegiality was supposed to have continued on into the Carter administration but that began with an ugly fight over the Panama Canal. This was so hard-fought that the vote was carried live on network TV. In all seriousness, I'm not sure that Iraq has ignited as much general passion in Congress as the Canal.

The easing of the Cold War by both Ford and Carter also aroused strong emotions in both parties, especially Republicans.

I think that, in general, the parties may have been more polite to each other and members may have mixed more freely but that was more veneer than reality.

Hit by a Ford

One of the top stories tonight was that President Ford disagreed with the war in Iraq and disapproved in general about the Republicans' move to the right. What should we make of this? Should this be a call for Republicans to move to the center?

No.

Ford was the Accidental President. He never won a national race and he even had trouble securing the nomination as a sitting president. His time spent minority leader was under the two most liberal presidents since FDR.

Ford was not a part of the Republican mainstream since the early 1970s. This was shown most dramatically during the 1976 Republican convention. When Reagan was introduced his supporters shit down the convention for 20+ minutes with cheering. Conservative Reagan excited the delegates. Moderate Ford did not.

So why is an interview from 2004 news? Because the MSM share Ford's dislike for the Right and want to use the Ford interview as a club to beat the Republicans with.

Scrooge the Progressive

I watched the George C. Scott Christmas Carol on Christmas. Afterward I got to thinking about whose politics the unreformed Scrooge most closely matches and I came up with the Greens/Progressives.

Now I don't mean to suggest that Scrooge would think of himself as being part of either of these groups. He was what he was because he was a miser and his labor policies are diametrically opposed to the Greens and Progressives. However, Scrooge typifies many of the attitudes that these groups espouse. In fact, if they got their way, we would all be living like Scrooge.

To start with, there is Scrooge's way of life. He uses very little fuel for heat or light. In fact, he gets by on the bare minimum. I doubt that his lifetime generation of CO2 would match what Al Gore spends making a single PowerPoint presentation.

In addition to this, Scrooge probably eats local foods. There is a movement among the Greens to only live on food produced within 50 miles of where you live. While this was much easier in the 19th century, Scrooge had enough money that he could have consumed exotic spices and foreign fruits. These were available in Victoria's England if you had the money.

Scrooge's reluctance to spend money in general is echoed in the modern rejection of commercialism and consumerism.

Then there is Scrooge's reaction when asked to contribute to a (faith-based?) private charity. He thought that the poor are the government's charge, not his. Granted the workhouses and prisons of the day were far worse than modern welfare.

Scrooge's rejection of Christmas as a "humbug" fits right in with today's attack on religion by militant atheists.

Then there is is comment about reducing the surplus population. The Greens have been saying for decades that there are too many humans and wishing that something would thin the species, possibly even wiping us out. The modern Greens are often much more heartless and cold about mass human death than Scrooge ever was.

Gerald Ford

Every obituary I read for the late President Ford says that he lost re-election because he pardoned Nixon. They are wrong.

The accepted narrative is that Ford entered office with high (70%) approval rating but after he pardoned Nixon, the country never forgave him. Certainly the pardon did anger liberals who wanted nothing more from life than to see Nixon convicted. The frenzy a year ago over speculation that key Bush figures would be arrested and "frogmarched" over the Plame leak is nothing compared to Nixon hatred. The left never forgave Ford for depriving them of their moment and this shows in the obituaries.

But Ford was right. It would have been destructive to continue Watergate for months or years longer while a trial dragged on. Most of the country forgave Ford for the pardon and would have elected him had things worked out differently.

By "things" I mean the economy. The US economy in the 1970s was terrible. Nixon tried wage/price controls and tax rebates but it didn't work.

Ford came to office with stagnant economy and high inflation which was shortened to "stagflation". His main way of fighting it was to veto bills he deemed inflationary. He vetoed more bills than any other president, ever. He also came up with a program known as WIN for Whip Inflation Now. Thousands of WIN buttons were stamped but no one wore them. No one believed in WIN and it faded away without a trace.

Economic problems affected New York City and Cleveland, both of which flirted with bankruptcy. This drove home how bad the economy was.

It is a general rule of thumb that incumbents running during a bad economy lose. I have yet to see this mentioned but he was running on a platform of letting things alone and Carter promised economic changes. Had the economy been in good shape, Ford would likely have won.

Ford had other problems. I mentioned the number of bills he vetoed. This was symptomatic of his relationship with Congress. Despite decades in the House, Ford could not get along with Congress. He vetoed their legislation, they ignored his.

One of the things that Congress did during this period was cut off aid to South Viet Nam. Not long after we cut them off the North launched a renewed offensive and overran the south. This tainted the Ford presidency.

Ford also eased relations with the USSR. While Nixon could be forgiven for going to China, the right did not forgive Ford for giving up on the Cold War. The loss of Viet Nam emphasized this.

Ford also appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. Stevens was to become one of the court's most liberal members.

On top of all of these problems, Ford had to cope with SNL. After two failed assassination attempts, a fall down a staircase, and some golf games where his club went flying into the crowd he became a favorite target for SNL's first season. Many episodes started with Chevy Chase doing a bit as Ford.

I saw an early, live version of SNL under the name of the National Lampoon Comedy Tour. The opening bit was Chase walking haltingly across the stage. Someone said "Let me take you gum, Mr. President." After that he could walk normally. The bit was a reference to LBJ's statement that Ford couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. The audience got the joke.

So Ford was running with a bad economy, a record of poor leadership, and he was a joke on SNL. No one can win against all of this. Against this, the pardon is nothing.

So Jimmy Carter, a one-term governor from a small state became president. Carter had no better idea how to cure the economy than Ford did. Carter also cozied up even closer to the USSR. He talked the Shaw of Iran into leaving office then talked the democratically elected interim government into allowing Ayatollah Khomeini into the country. We are still trying to deal with the fallout of those decisions.

In all, Ford served as a place-holder between the mixed accomplishments of the Nixon administration and the total disaster of the Carter administration. He was likable but undistinguished.

A Few Final Thoughts on Christmas

Merry Christmas (a bit late).

Or should I say "Happy Holidays"? I hear a lot of that these days. People are afraid of saying The "Christmas". The multi-culturist have convinced the country that it is offensive to wish a Merry Christmas to a non-Christian.

So, how does the non-Christian world regard Christmas? I have it on good authority that it is big and growing in China. It is big enough that the Japanese version of Iron Chef featured several Christmas battles. During the lead-in to these they asked the judges what they would be doing for Christmas. None of them said, "I don't celebrate it."

In India which has a very small Christian population, Christmas is very big - literally. An artist did a huge beach sculpture of Santa.

Bottom line - there are millions of non-Christians world-wide who happily celebrate Christmas without feeling threatened by Christianity. So why do people feel threatened in the US?

Big Brother Is Looking Out For You

Ronald Reagan is often quoted as saying that the scariest words in the English Language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

This is being applied against the perceived obesity crisis. I say "perceived" because the real health threats come, not from weight, but from inactivity. As this article shows, someone who leads an active lifestyle with regular exercise are healthier than those with a more sedentary lifestyles. You don't have to lose weight for health gains.

That's too complicated for most people to understand, even people who should know better. It all comes down to weight and public officials are ready to follow the example of tobacco in trying to change public behavior.

First there is the New York City ban of trans-fats. Other cities and even the entire state of Massachusetts are considering a similar ban. This will nor change much. Trans-fats are too small a portion of the average diet. All this will accomplish is to make food taste worse.

The British want to go several steps beyond this. An article in the British Medical Journal suggests a number of measures starting with putting warnings and an obesity hotline on mens pants with a waist of more than 40 inches.

Somehow I doubt that putting a label on people's clothing saying "You are fat. Loose weight." is the ultimate solution.

The problem is that politicians are using the tobacco model on obesity. Tobacco is not as harmful as most non-smokers think. Most smokers are not harmed y their habit but enough are to make it worthwhile to try to reduce the number of smokers. There are few health benefits to smoking (ironically the main benefit is weight loss).

Food, on the other hand, cannot be avoided. Trying to separate good and bad food is meaningless. Despite titles such as "heart attack on a plate", no single serving of anything is going to clog your arteries, etc. Such foods can even be eaten regularly in small portions.

More important, just looking at someone's diet or weight is not enough. Without evaluating total lifestyle you simply do not have enough information.

Unfortunately, politicians seldom evaluate risk. They see perceived problems and they do something that will be seen as a fix. It doesn't matter in the slightest if the fix is effective.

Fear From the Huffies

I get the Huffington Post Daily Brief. This was today's featured entry - someone who is "terrified" because it is warm in December. It's 60 degrees out - is this a sign of Global Warming?

No for several reasons. One is that earlier this month we had unusually low temperatures. Unless that was a sign of global cooling then a warm spell is not a sign of global warming.

Robert Heinlein once wrote that climate is what we expect, weather is what we get. In December, in these latitudes, it is generally cold in December and snow is possible but not common. I checked AccuWeather for today's date. The record high is 63 degrees, set in 1963. The record low is -7 set in 1989. The averages are 40 and 25. This tells us that a 60 degree high is meaningless. It is within natural variability.

Like a fortune teller or a horoscope, people who believe in global warming remember the hot days and forget the cool ones. In this way they convince themselves that they are seeing global warming. Also, there was a cool period in the 1960s and 1970s. People who grew up then tend to think of this period as "normal" and the warmer period afterwards as unusual. On the other hand, my parents grew up during the warm period which caused the Dust Bowl (most of the records for things like number of days over 100 degrees, number of days in a row over 100, etc. were set then). Accordingly, the older generation thought of the 1960s and 1970s as being colder than normal. That's when talk of a coming ice age was at its height.

Bottom line, enjoy warm Winter days but don't panic over them.

 

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Rob McKay: Its Beginning To Look A Lot (More) Like Global Warming...

AP

From Rob McKay's Blog:

It is 60 degrees on December 18th in New York City. I'm hardly relieved I didn't have to bundle up my daughter and trudge with her through ice and now to go see "The Nutcracker" today. The temperature is terrifying. I want to crack some sense into the nuts who tell us there's nothing to worry about....

..Bush won't even use the term "global warming." He occasionally makes reference to the world's "climate change." Conservative politicians and pundits chalk up global warming to the next liberal bully pulpit, a rehash of "political correctness" or outcries from the "feminazis"...

...There's nothing ideological about global warming and the necessity of a policy agenda to protect the planet. We shouldn't need another call for bipartisanship to unite behind aggressive environmental protection policies that are so glaringly necessary...

Click here to read more.

The News From Iraq

Last week, Laura Bush argued with NBC News anchor, Brian Williams about how the major media has shaped public perception on Iraq. My own observation is that the major news outlets allow one story on Iraq per day. Which story is released is based on these priorities:

1. Americans killed in Iraq
2. Iraqis killed in Iraq
3. Iraqis injured or kidnapped.

In addition, local news coverage carries stories about soldiers being deployed to Iraq, soldiers returning and the hardship that their absence caused their families, and the plight of young children whose parents are in Iraq.

No other stories are carried. There in never any mention of American offensives or insurgents killed. This gives the impression of Americans acting as sitting ducks while Iraq crumbles.

The MSM does allow one story about god news from Iraq per year. Here is this year's story. Don't blink or you will miss it.

Civil war or not, Iraq has an economy, and—mother of all surprises—it's doing remarkably well. Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to a report by Global Insight in London. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 percent last year and projects 13 percent for 2006. The World Bank has it lower: at 4 percent this year. But, given all the attention paid to deteriorating security, the startling fact is that Iraq is growing at all.