Conservatives are still apoplectic about his appointment of an African-American Democrat to the Florida Supreme Court this year; but he's expected to remind them about the two dyed-in-the-wool conservatives he appointed before that.That's right, just like I oppose socialized medicine because one of the people pushing for it is black . . .
These details are obnoxious not merely in and of themselves but because they tell us the truth about where we’re headed: Think of the way almost every Big Government project bursts its bodice and winds up bigger and more bloated than its creators allegedly foresaw. In this instance, the stays come pre-loosened, and studded with loopholes. Because the Democrat operators — the Nancy Pelosis and Barney Franks — know that what matters is to get something, anything across the river, and then burn the bridge behind you.
My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.
As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.
Looking at the millions of Americans it leaves uninsured, and the millions it leaves with worse treatment and reduced access, and the millions it makes pay significantly more for their current health care, one can only marvel at Harry Reid’s genius: government health care turns out to be all government and no health care. Adding up the zillions of new taxes and bureaucracies and regulations it imposes on the citizenry, one might almost think that was the only point of the exercise.Nicely said.
Privacy advocates, for example, have tried to stop or at least slow the introduction of advanced checkpoint screening devices that use so-called millimeter waves to create an image of a passenger’s body, so officers can see under clothing to determine if a weapon or explosive has been hidden. Security officers, in a private area, review the images, which are not stored. Legislation is pending in the House that would prohibit the use of this equipment for routine passenger screening.And I guess this is the rub in wanting to treat Jihadism as a criminal matter. Innocent until proven guilty falls short in a war context. But it surely fits the squishy, soft-headed mindset of today's Left. Not to mention it's an awfully easy pose to strike for the party who is not sitting in the Oval Office. But let's be clear that we dodged a bullet in this instance.
To date, only 40 of these machines have been installed at 19 airports across the United States — meaning only a tiny fraction of passengers pass through them. Amsterdam’s airport has 15 of these machines — more than just about any airport in the world — but an official there said Sunday that they were prohibited from using them on passengers bound for the United States, for a reason she did not explain. (emphasis added)
Another significant factor is the report that the bomber was an engineering student at University College London. Dr Leivesley said that al-Qa'ida was recruiting people with engineering qualifications as well as highly placed scientists, particularly in the nuclear field.Whuh?
"Al-Qa'ida is finding it difficult to recruit young people," she said. "And, interestingly, the election of Barack Obama is a factor in that, because, whatever you think of him as a president, the fact of him shows young people that there is an alternative to killing yourself. Al-Qa'ida is, however, targeting more highly skilled people." (emphasis added)
Liberals cite medical horror stories from the very states they once cheered for enacting universal health care in order to argue for a national health care plan that will wreck the entire nation's medical care the same way liberal states already wrecked their own medical care.
Only Democrats could propose fixing one Bernie Madoff-style scam with an even bigger Bernie Madoff-style scam.
Green-values-oriented Nike is sticking with Woods for the moment, appearing to be rehabilitation-minded and comeback-oriented in other instances too. This fall, Apple, Excelon, and other companies dropped their memberships in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in disagreement with what they saw as the Chamber's foot-dragging on climate change policy. Nike kept its membership while resigning from the Chamber board in order to work for change from within, executives said. But the Chamber incident, too, is evidence that companies increasingly see that their values must be reflected consistently in every decision they make, every marketing campaign they run, and every partnership they form.
Some of them are no doubt vaguely cognizant of the fact that they might have way overbet this hand and that there's now something much more important in play than the plight of the planet. And that of course would be their reputations and standing in the herd of man.
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In lieu of having the facts (i.e., the thermometer!) bear out their hypothesis, they are now going to have to get creative. They are going to have to press the bet now and steer into the delusional skid, and that sort of desperation makes for a really unsavory individual no matter how much good they are ostensibly doing for their fellow man.
Deniers will be disparaged, data will be fudged and theories will be advanced that are, if possible, even more wing-nuttier than some of the claptrap currently out there. If heretofore depictions of Manhattan under water in the year 2057 were shown to sixth-graders, they're going to have to drop it down to preschoolers in deference to the Gullibility Expansion Joint.
Added Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations: “If Bush had said these things the world would be filled with violent denunciations,” said “When Obama says them, people purr. That is fine by me.”
[Democratic Congressperson] Ed Markey said he would welcome the Republicans in Copenhagen because they would be “exposed to the consensus the world has reached…They are in a very, very, very small minority on the planet.”"Hey Ed, this purported "consensus" is built on the purportedly learned, unbiased, scientific conclusions of purportedly unbiased, honest scientists . . . premises all of which are severely in doubt based on the Climategate disclosures. What's there to "hide," Ed? What's there to "trick"erize? Since when does a scientist bury/destroy/misplace(!) data from which he's drawing conclusions?
The N.C.A.A. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into the University of Tennessee’s football recruiting practices, according to interviews with several prospects, their family members and high school administrators. A significant part of the investigation is focused on the use of recruiting hostesses who have become folk heroes on Tennessee Internet message boards for their ability to help lure top recruits.Ever since watching Hoop Dreams way back when, I have been intrigued by the recruiting process, and Tennessee's program seems rather innovative . . . and less carnal than is implied in several recent reports I've seen.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A House subcommittee approved legislation Wednesday aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system to determine a national champion, over the objections of some lawmakers who said Congress had more pressing matters.
The bill, which faces long odds of becoming law, would ban the promotion of a postseason NCAA Division I football game as a national championship unless that title contest is the result of a playoff.
"In fact, one skeptic raised [a concern about drawing conclusions from two sets of data grafted together] in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:I love how Mann writes "to our knowledge." Sounds like a press secretary's resort to plausible deniability.
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.
Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium."
