Tracinski's Rule of American Politics states that the left must be suppressed, hounded, mocked, vilified, and made to feel ashamed of itself. That was the way things were when I first started following politics, as a young man in the early 1980s—a golden era of revulsion at Jimmy Carter and the whole spectacular failure of the Great Society welfare state. And it's starting to happen again.
The best story on this is about pollster Frank Luntz trying to find pro-Coakley voters for a televised focus group on the Massachusetts Senate election. According to Tucker Carlson:
As of late this afternoon, Luntz was still scrambling to balance his focus group with supporters of Democrat Martha Coakley. "I just lost another one," Luntz growled over his cell phone from a hotel ballroom at Logan Airport. In the last 24 hours, six Coakley voters have dropped out. By contrast, Luntz hasn't lost a single supporter of her opponent, Scott Brown.
The best story on this is about pollster Frank Luntz trying to find pro-Coakley voters for a televised focus group on the Massachusetts Senate election. According to Tucker Carlson:
As of late this afternoon, Luntz was still scrambling to balance his focus group with supporters of Democrat Martha Coakley. "I just lost another one," Luntz growled over his cell phone from a hotel ballroom at Logan Airport. In the last 24 hours, six Coakley voters have dropped out. By contrast, Luntz hasn't lost a single supporter of her opponent, Scott Brown.
The problem isn't money. "They're getting paid well," Luntz says, "probably more than they're making at their jobs. And they still don't want to do it."
Instead, says Luntz, they're ashamed. "They don't want to be on television defending Martha Coakley. It's passé. It's socially unacceptable. I never dreamed I'd see Democrats in Massachusetts embarrassed to admit they're Democrats."
That is Tracinski's Rule in action.
It's starting to hit Obama, too. Emboldened by public dissatisfaction with the administration, Washingto Post correspondent Dana Milbank has begun openly criticizing the snide, condescending manner of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Oh yes, and "ObamaGirl," the bikini-clad young beauty who proclaimed in a 2008 YouTube video that she had "a crush on Obama," has admitted to falling out of love. Somehow, it just doesn't seem cool any more.
Behind all of this is a very clear and really shocking shift in public opinion against the Democrats. When Scott Brown won his unexpected victory in the Massachusetts special election, I expected this would cause panic among 50 or so conservative "blue dog" Democrats, mostly in Southern congressional districts. Instead, it has caused panic among all Democratic members of Congress.
How bad is it? Scott Brown won Barney Frank's district, meaning that a Brown-like challenger could even threaten the long-time far-left congressman in November. And if Barney Frank isn't safe, who is?
The latest poll numbers, for example, show Republican candidates making a strong challenge, or even leading the race, for current Democratic Senate seats across the country, not just in North Dakota and Arkansas, but in Colorado, Missouri, Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania. Don't forget Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's seat in Nevada, and Joe Biden's old Senate seat in Deleware, where Biden's son has just wisely decided not to run for the seat the Democratic establishment was keeping warm for him.
The message of January 19 is that no Democratic seat is safe. Or as the article below puts it, "every state is in play."
"Dems Fret: Every State Is in Play," Manu Raju and Lisa Lerer, The Politico, January 21
The Republican victory in Massachusetts has sent a wave of fear through the halls of the Senate, with moderate and liberal Democrats second-guessing their party's agenda—and worrying that they'll be the next victims of voters' anger.
Instead, says Luntz, they're ashamed. "They don't want to be on television defending Martha Coakley. It's passé. It's socially unacceptable. I never dreamed I'd see Democrats in Massachusetts embarrassed to admit they're Democrats."
That is Tracinski's Rule in action.
It's starting to hit Obama, too. Emboldened by public dissatisfaction with the administration, Washingto Post correspondent Dana Milbank has begun openly criticizing the snide, condescending manner of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Oh yes, and "ObamaGirl," the bikini-clad young beauty who proclaimed in a 2008 YouTube video that she had "a crush on Obama," has admitted to falling out of love. Somehow, it just doesn't seem cool any more.
Behind all of this is a very clear and really shocking shift in public opinion against the Democrats. When Scott Brown won his unexpected victory in the Massachusetts special election, I expected this would cause panic among 50 or so conservative "blue dog" Democrats, mostly in Southern congressional districts. Instead, it has caused panic among all Democratic members of Congress.
How bad is it? Scott Brown won Barney Frank's district, meaning that a Brown-like challenger could even threaten the long-time far-left congressman in November. And if Barney Frank isn't safe, who is?
The latest poll numbers, for example, show Republican candidates making a strong challenge, or even leading the race, for current Democratic Senate seats across the country, not just in North Dakota and Arkansas, but in Colorado, Missouri, Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania. Don't forget Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's seat in Nevada, and Joe Biden's old Senate seat in Deleware, where Biden's son has just wisely decided not to run for the seat the Democratic establishment was keeping warm for him.
The message of January 19 is that no Democratic seat is safe. Or as the article below puts it, "every state is in play."
"Dems Fret: Every State Is in Play," Manu Raju and Lisa Lerer, The Politico, January 21
The Republican victory in Massachusetts has sent a wave of fear through the halls of the Senate, with moderate and liberal Democrats second-guessing their party's agenda—and worrying that they'll be the next victims of voters' anger.
"If there's anybody in this building that doesn't tell you they're more worried about elections today, you absolutely should slap them," said Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)….
Several Democratic incumbents said later that none of the 19 Democratic seats up this year are safe—and that fundamental parts of the agenda need to be re-examined to win over voters back home.
"Every state is now in play," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who faces the toughest reelection battle of her career—most likely against wealthy Republican Carly Fiorina….
"I think part of the problem is the agenda itself," said [North Dakota Senator Kent] Conrad, who doesn't face voters again until 2012. Instead of spending so much time on health care reform, Conrad said Democrats should have focused first on reducing the national debt and a bipartisan energy bill—and that President Barack Obama should have done a better job of explaining that the economic situation he inherited was "far worse" than he'd originally thought….
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the more conservative members of the caucus, said some in the Democratic Party were "overreaching" and "advocating more government" than her constituents want.
2. Surrender
The White House and congressional Democrats are still trying to come up with a way to push through their health care bill, despite losing the 60th vote they needed to approve a final bill in the Senate. Their latest plan is to pass the Senate version through the House with no changes, thus getting around the need to send an amended bill back through the Senate. Then they will take the amendments demanded by the House and sneak them through in a budget bill that needs only 51 Senate votes to pass.
It pays to be vigilant and act forcefully to prevent this, but I also think a lot of this is posturing. The Democratic leadership knows that the failure of the health care bill—and the impending failure of cap-and-trade and many other parts of the Obama agenda—will be an enormous disappointment to their "base" on the far left. So they are trying to talk tough and show that they did everything they possibly could, so that their "base" will blame the American people (see item #3 below) and not the Democrats.
Behind all of that bluster, the Washington Times reports that the Democrats have quietly shelved the health-care bill and are moving on to other priorities. Which is kind of shame, actually, since I think the congressional paralysis of the past six months has been enormously beneficial.
But the real sign of Democratic surrender is President Obama's proposal for a federal spending "freeze." It is a bogus and dishonest proposal, a "freeze" that only affects one-eighth of the budget, as the article below points out. But that's not what is important. What is important is that this concedes the high ground to President Obama's critics on the right.
While Obama's proposal fails to actually do anything to control runaway government spending, it accepts the assumption that doing so would be good—which immediately cuts off any ideas about socialized medicine or a second stimulus bill. It is not as obvious as Bill Clinton's 1995 proclamation that "the era of big government is over," but this is the surrender forced onto the administration by the election of Scott Brown and the success of the tea party movement.
"Phony Freeze," Investor's Business Daily, January 26
We try not to be too cynical about politics, but the White House's proposed freeze will do nothing to address America's budget problems.
Last year alone, the U.S. deficit hit $1.4 trillion on record spending of $3.7 trillion. The freeze will apply only to $447 billion in spending—just 12% of the total. Next year, if the freeze goes into effect, it will save just $15 billion—and $250 billion over 10 years. Compared with the $9 trillion in new debt and $43 trillion in spending expected over the next decade, it's a pittance—not even a down payment on our gaping shortfalls.
We'd also feel better about a "freeze" if it weren't for the fact that nondefense discretionary spending surged 17.4% in President Obama's first year…. "At best," says Dan Mitchell, a Cato Institute senior fellow, "the administration's spending-freeze proposal is akin to going on a monthlong binge in Vegas and then sleeping off the hangover."…
All this does nothing to address the real problem of runaway entitlement spending. That's the part of the budget that is least under control and that is set to swamp the rest of the budget very soon.
3. "People Aren't Stupid"
The left is Platonist at its root. It does not begin by observing the actual requirements of human life or the means by which much of the world has risen from mass poverty to opulent wealth in the past two centuries. Instead, it begins with a whole series of moral and philosophical preconceptions—that self-interest is evil, that money-making is corrupt, that achievement in the material world is morally suspect, that the independent individual is dangerous—and then tries to bend the real world to fit these preconceptions.
Or to put it in more philosophical terms, instead of starting with observation and moving up to concepts, the method of Aristotle, the left starts with concepts and projects them onto the world, the method of Plato.
In keeping with this approach, the left is also Platonist in its attitude toward the minds of others. Like Plato's philosopher-kings, the leftists like to imagine themselves as endowed with a superior mental faculty which entitles them to look down on the fact-bound reasoning of the unenlightened masses.
In practice, this translates into an attitude of contempt for the governed on the part of our imagined "elites." And a lot of this has been on display in the days after Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate election.
In Newsweek, Anna Quindlen sneers: "If elected officials are supposed to act based on the wisdom of ordinary people, they're going to need ordinary people to be wiser than [this]."
Time's Joe Klein thinks we're "Too Dumb to Thrive." His lordship sniffs that the benevolence of the aristocracy is wasted on the peasants. "[N]early three out of four Americans think the [stimulus] money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it's been wasted on them." He concludes that "It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens"—though one gets the impression that he would like to try.
At the New York Times, Charles M. Blow looks down from the Palatine hill and sees the howling mob of decadent Rome: "an angry, wounded electorate, riled by recession, careening across the political spectrum, still craving change, nursing a bloodlust."
There is a scene in the movie Gladiator where two Roman senators are discussing the games that the emperor has revived. One laments: I think the emperor "knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate. It's the sand of the coliseum. He'll bring them death. And they will love him for it."
Blow's pretended superiority would be more convincing if he didn't coin bad puns like "dread and circuses" and "the emperor has no cloture"—and if he didn't get his Roman history from Ridley Scott.
A perceptive TV critic for the Miami Herald notes a similar strain in MSNBC's coverage of the Brown victory.
If you watched CNN or Fox News last night, you got a balanced analysis of how Republican Scott Brown pulled off the political upset of the century (or, if you prefer, how Democrat Martha Coakley blew a dead solid electoral lock). Yes, I said Fox News, without irony. To be sure, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity made it clear they were rooting for Brown. But their shows also included a steady parade of liberal-leaning guests—former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, former Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich, Democratic Party strategist Mary Anne Marsh, NPR commentator Juan Williams, and radio host Alan Colmes. And pollster Frank Luntz interviewed a panel of two dozen or so Massachusetts voters, most of them Democrats, about how they voted and why. Practically every conceivable perspective on the election was represented.
And on MSNBC, you got practically every conceivable expression of venom against Brown and anybody who voted him. From Maddow's dark suspicions that the election was rigged—she cited complaints about a grand total of six ballots out of about 2.25 million cast—to Olbermann's suggestion…that the same Massachusetts voters who went for Barack Obama by a 62-28 percent margin had suddenly realized they helped elect a black guy and went Republican in repentance, the network's coverage was idiotic, one-sided, and downright ugly.
Which may explain why Fox News Channel is trouncing everyone else in the cable news ratings, while MSNBC languishes in a far-distant third place. Oh yes, and Air America, the left's attempt to launch a talk radio network, has just gone bankrupt and shut down its operations.
Below, Scott Brown himself summarizes the meaning of his election in a simple aphorism: "people aren't stupid." Or in philosophical terms: they are capable of drawing valid conclusion from observation of the facts. They are certainly smart enough to reject the politicians and pundits who treat them as if the are incapable of thinking.
"Scott Brown: 'People Aren't Stupid'," John Fund, Wall Street Journal, January 29
"People out there are disgusted," [Brown] says, shaking his head. "Especially with any one party dominating government and talking down to them. They want straight talk, no BS. A focus on jobs and what really creates them. They want problem solvers in office, and it helped me that I was able to show I could work with Democrats in the legislature."…
Mr. Brown's election has touched off a debate among Democrats about the direction their party should take, as populists tangle with moderates over how or whether to play the class-warfare card. So why does he think Democratic attacks on him for opposing Mr. Obama's bank tax didn't seem to gain traction? "People are mad at banks and the TARP money. But the banks are paying off that money with interest," he says. 'They get that a bank tax will be transferred down to individuals through ATM fees and the amount of money they can lend to create jobs will also be reduced."
Mr. Brown says it frustrates him that too many politicians still believe that people will be fooled by what they're proposing. "People aren't stupid, and leaders should figure out they're better informed now than ever."
4. The Gates Break Open
Another key breaking point in the defeat of the left is the moment in President Obama's state of the union address when he referred to the "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change"—only to be greeted by laughter from the Republican side of the chamber.
This is the impact of Climategate. It has now become laughable to say that there is no legitimate scientific dissent on global warming. And Climategate is a scandal so big that we are only now beginning to get a feel for its vast outlines. As I predicted last year, "The code of silence which says that you cannot doubt global warming is being broken down, and the floodgates of skepticism are about to open."
Indeed, the "gates" are opening in the sense that there is a whole series of "gates" that form subsidiaries within the Climategate scandal. There is Glaciergate, in which a claim about melting glaciers rmade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was shown to have no scientific basis, and the originator of the claim admitted that it was "included purely to put political pressure on world leaders."
Another IPCC claim, about thinning ice on mountaintops, was shown to be based only on anecdotal reports in a magazine for mountain climbers and in a Swiss graduate student's dissertation. What will they call this one, Matterhorngate?
There is Amazongate, which reveals another false IPCC claim about how global warming will affect the Amazon jungle, and the Daily Telegraph's report reveals there are many more such cases on the way.
A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages—when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
Several Democratic incumbents said later that none of the 19 Democratic seats up this year are safe—and that fundamental parts of the agenda need to be re-examined to win over voters back home.
"Every state is now in play," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who faces the toughest reelection battle of her career—most likely against wealthy Republican Carly Fiorina….
"I think part of the problem is the agenda itself," said [North Dakota Senator Kent] Conrad, who doesn't face voters again until 2012. Instead of spending so much time on health care reform, Conrad said Democrats should have focused first on reducing the national debt and a bipartisan energy bill—and that President Barack Obama should have done a better job of explaining that the economic situation he inherited was "far worse" than he'd originally thought….
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the more conservative members of the caucus, said some in the Democratic Party were "overreaching" and "advocating more government" than her constituents want.
2. Surrender
The White House and congressional Democrats are still trying to come up with a way to push through their health care bill, despite losing the 60th vote they needed to approve a final bill in the Senate. Their latest plan is to pass the Senate version through the House with no changes, thus getting around the need to send an amended bill back through the Senate. Then they will take the amendments demanded by the House and sneak them through in a budget bill that needs only 51 Senate votes to pass.
It pays to be vigilant and act forcefully to prevent this, but I also think a lot of this is posturing. The Democratic leadership knows that the failure of the health care bill—and the impending failure of cap-and-trade and many other parts of the Obama agenda—will be an enormous disappointment to their "base" on the far left. So they are trying to talk tough and show that they did everything they possibly could, so that their "base" will blame the American people (see item #3 below) and not the Democrats.
Behind all of that bluster, the Washington Times reports that the Democrats have quietly shelved the health-care bill and are moving on to other priorities. Which is kind of shame, actually, since I think the congressional paralysis of the past six months has been enormously beneficial.
But the real sign of Democratic surrender is President Obama's proposal for a federal spending "freeze." It is a bogus and dishonest proposal, a "freeze" that only affects one-eighth of the budget, as the article below points out. But that's not what is important. What is important is that this concedes the high ground to President Obama's critics on the right.
While Obama's proposal fails to actually do anything to control runaway government spending, it accepts the assumption that doing so would be good—which immediately cuts off any ideas about socialized medicine or a second stimulus bill. It is not as obvious as Bill Clinton's 1995 proclamation that "the era of big government is over," but this is the surrender forced onto the administration by the election of Scott Brown and the success of the tea party movement.
"Phony Freeze," Investor's Business Daily, January 26
We try not to be too cynical about politics, but the White House's proposed freeze will do nothing to address America's budget problems.
Last year alone, the U.S. deficit hit $1.4 trillion on record spending of $3.7 trillion. The freeze will apply only to $447 billion in spending—just 12% of the total. Next year, if the freeze goes into effect, it will save just $15 billion—and $250 billion over 10 years. Compared with the $9 trillion in new debt and $43 trillion in spending expected over the next decade, it's a pittance—not even a down payment on our gaping shortfalls.
We'd also feel better about a "freeze" if it weren't for the fact that nondefense discretionary spending surged 17.4% in President Obama's first year…. "At best," says Dan Mitchell, a Cato Institute senior fellow, "the administration's spending-freeze proposal is akin to going on a monthlong binge in Vegas and then sleeping off the hangover."…
All this does nothing to address the real problem of runaway entitlement spending. That's the part of the budget that is least under control and that is set to swamp the rest of the budget very soon.
3. "People Aren't Stupid"
The left is Platonist at its root. It does not begin by observing the actual requirements of human life or the means by which much of the world has risen from mass poverty to opulent wealth in the past two centuries. Instead, it begins with a whole series of moral and philosophical preconceptions—that self-interest is evil, that money-making is corrupt, that achievement in the material world is morally suspect, that the independent individual is dangerous—and then tries to bend the real world to fit these preconceptions.
Or to put it in more philosophical terms, instead of starting with observation and moving up to concepts, the method of Aristotle, the left starts with concepts and projects them onto the world, the method of Plato.
In keeping with this approach, the left is also Platonist in its attitude toward the minds of others. Like Plato's philosopher-kings, the leftists like to imagine themselves as endowed with a superior mental faculty which entitles them to look down on the fact-bound reasoning of the unenlightened masses.
In practice, this translates into an attitude of contempt for the governed on the part of our imagined "elites." And a lot of this has been on display in the days after Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate election.
In Newsweek, Anna Quindlen sneers: "If elected officials are supposed to act based on the wisdom of ordinary people, they're going to need ordinary people to be wiser than [this]."
Time's Joe Klein thinks we're "Too Dumb to Thrive." His lordship sniffs that the benevolence of the aristocracy is wasted on the peasants. "[N]early three out of four Americans think the [stimulus] money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it's been wasted on them." He concludes that "It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens"—though one gets the impression that he would like to try.
At the New York Times, Charles M. Blow looks down from the Palatine hill and sees the howling mob of decadent Rome: "an angry, wounded electorate, riled by recession, careening across the political spectrum, still craving change, nursing a bloodlust."
There is a scene in the movie Gladiator where two Roman senators are discussing the games that the emperor has revived. One laments: I think the emperor "knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate. It's the sand of the coliseum. He'll bring them death. And they will love him for it."
Blow's pretended superiority would be more convincing if he didn't coin bad puns like "dread and circuses" and "the emperor has no cloture"—and if he didn't get his Roman history from Ridley Scott.
A perceptive TV critic for the Miami Herald notes a similar strain in MSNBC's coverage of the Brown victory.
If you watched CNN or Fox News last night, you got a balanced analysis of how Republican Scott Brown pulled off the political upset of the century (or, if you prefer, how Democrat Martha Coakley blew a dead solid electoral lock). Yes, I said Fox News, without irony. To be sure, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity made it clear they were rooting for Brown. But their shows also included a steady parade of liberal-leaning guests—former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, former Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich, Democratic Party strategist Mary Anne Marsh, NPR commentator Juan Williams, and radio host Alan Colmes. And pollster Frank Luntz interviewed a panel of two dozen or so Massachusetts voters, most of them Democrats, about how they voted and why. Practically every conceivable perspective on the election was represented.
And on MSNBC, you got practically every conceivable expression of venom against Brown and anybody who voted him. From Maddow's dark suspicions that the election was rigged—she cited complaints about a grand total of six ballots out of about 2.25 million cast—to Olbermann's suggestion…that the same Massachusetts voters who went for Barack Obama by a 62-28 percent margin had suddenly realized they helped elect a black guy and went Republican in repentance, the network's coverage was idiotic, one-sided, and downright ugly.
Which may explain why Fox News Channel is trouncing everyone else in the cable news ratings, while MSNBC languishes in a far-distant third place. Oh yes, and Air America, the left's attempt to launch a talk radio network, has just gone bankrupt and shut down its operations.
Below, Scott Brown himself summarizes the meaning of his election in a simple aphorism: "people aren't stupid." Or in philosophical terms: they are capable of drawing valid conclusion from observation of the facts. They are certainly smart enough to reject the politicians and pundits who treat them as if the are incapable of thinking.
"Scott Brown: 'People Aren't Stupid'," John Fund, Wall Street Journal, January 29
"People out there are disgusted," [Brown] says, shaking his head. "Especially with any one party dominating government and talking down to them. They want straight talk, no BS. A focus on jobs and what really creates them. They want problem solvers in office, and it helped me that I was able to show I could work with Democrats in the legislature."…
Mr. Brown's election has touched off a debate among Democrats about the direction their party should take, as populists tangle with moderates over how or whether to play the class-warfare card. So why does he think Democratic attacks on him for opposing Mr. Obama's bank tax didn't seem to gain traction? "People are mad at banks and the TARP money. But the banks are paying off that money with interest," he says. 'They get that a bank tax will be transferred down to individuals through ATM fees and the amount of money they can lend to create jobs will also be reduced."
Mr. Brown says it frustrates him that too many politicians still believe that people will be fooled by what they're proposing. "People aren't stupid, and leaders should figure out they're better informed now than ever."
4. The Gates Break Open
Another key breaking point in the defeat of the left is the moment in President Obama's state of the union address when he referred to the "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change"—only to be greeted by laughter from the Republican side of the chamber.
This is the impact of Climategate. It has now become laughable to say that there is no legitimate scientific dissent on global warming. And Climategate is a scandal so big that we are only now beginning to get a feel for its vast outlines. As I predicted last year, "The code of silence which says that you cannot doubt global warming is being broken down, and the floodgates of skepticism are about to open."
Indeed, the "gates" are opening in the sense that there is a whole series of "gates" that form subsidiaries within the Climategate scandal. There is Glaciergate, in which a claim about melting glaciers rmade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was shown to have no scientific basis, and the originator of the claim admitted that it was "included purely to put political pressure on world leaders."
Another IPCC claim, about thinning ice on mountaintops, was shown to be based only on anecdotal reports in a magazine for mountain climbers and in a Swiss graduate student's dissertation. What will they call this one, Matterhorngate?
There is Amazongate, which reveals another false IPCC claim about how global warming will affect the Amazon jungle, and the Daily Telegraph's report reveals there are many more such cases on the way.
A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages—when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
Where was the IPCC's chief, Rajendra Pachauri, while all of these bogus claims were being sneaked into his agency's reports? He was penning a novel, which seems to be a fictionalized version of his own sexual exploits, and tending to his vast business interests in companies that would profit from global warming regulations.
But the biggest scandal within Climategate ought to be called Datagate—the ongoing revelation that the chief sources of global temperature records have systematically tampered with the data, dropping out records from rural weather stations, which record cooler temperatures, in favor of stations whose results are biased toward warming by the urban heat island effect. See the summary below.
And a British court has just ruled that the Climate Research Unit implicated in the original Climategate scandal violated Britain's Freedom of Information Act when it withheld its raw data on global temperatures.
As for the political consequences, Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts has been described as "the Scott heard 'round the world," but I didn't quite believe that until a reader sent me a link to an article from The Hindu—I guess that's India's version of The Scotsman—which describes how the UN has sent out a letter giving countries like India and China more time to sign on to the global warming agreement from last year's Copenhagen summit. The article then adds:
"That letter, and the defeat of the Democrats in the Massachusetts by poll, has forced the UN to postpone the deadline indefinitely," an [Indian] official said. "With the Democrats losing in one of their strongholds, the chances of the climate bill going through the US senate have receded dramatically. "So if the US is not going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, which was a very weak target anyway, why should we make any commitment even if it does not have any legal teeth?" the official said.
When good things happen, they reinforce one another. The combination of Climategate and the Massachusetts Miracle may kill any possibility for a broad global agreement to choke off the world's supply of energy.
"A US Climategate?" Investor's Business Daily, January 22
We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.
But the biggest scandal within Climategate ought to be called Datagate—the ongoing revelation that the chief sources of global temperature records have systematically tampered with the data, dropping out records from rural weather stations, which record cooler temperatures, in favor of stations whose results are biased toward warming by the urban heat island effect. See the summary below.
And a British court has just ruled that the Climate Research Unit implicated in the original Climategate scandal violated Britain's Freedom of Information Act when it withheld its raw data on global temperatures.
As for the political consequences, Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts has been described as "the Scott heard 'round the world," but I didn't quite believe that until a reader sent me a link to an article from The Hindu—I guess that's India's version of The Scotsman—which describes how the UN has sent out a letter giving countries like India and China more time to sign on to the global warming agreement from last year's Copenhagen summit. The article then adds:
"That letter, and the defeat of the Democrats in the Massachusetts by poll, has forced the UN to postpone the deadline indefinitely," an [Indian] official said. "With the Democrats losing in one of their strongholds, the chances of the climate bill going through the US senate have receded dramatically. "So if the US is not going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, which was a very weak target anyway, why should we make any commitment even if it does not have any legal teeth?" the official said.
When good things happen, they reinforce one another. The combination of Climategate and the Massachusetts Miracle may kill any possibility for a broad global agreement to choke off the world's supply of energy.
"A US Climategate?" Investor's Business Daily, January 22
We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.
In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.
As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."
Joseph D'Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA "systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude, and rural locations." The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35….
Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA's data and conclusions suspect. D'Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.
5. What Part of "No" Don't They Understand?
For years, my response to campaign finance controls has been to quote the First Amendment prohibition that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press"—and then to ask "What part of 'no' don't you understand?"
That is basically what the Supreme Court asked in a recent decision striking down campaign finance controls that were used to block the release of a polemical documentary on Hillary Clinton during an election season.
For a longer analysis of the decision, see here and here, but the report below describes what I remember as the pivotal exchange during oral arguments on the case: the point at which the government's lawyers, in defending the controls, admitted that they would allow the government to ban books. What should have been obvious all along was suddenly made crystal clear: campaign finance controls had endowed the federal government with the power of political censorship.
The article below is also notable for naming the key underlying premise behind the various campaign finance control laws: the idea that the Federal Election Commission's job is to manage the way in which citizens behave during election campaigns. This is the sign of the deeper inversion wrought by the modern concept of "democracy."
In the original American system, representative government was instituted in order to protect individual rights. Or to put it differently, we have elections so that we can have freedom of speech. But in the distorted concept of "democracy," liberty only exists so that it can help the people express their collective will. So we have freedom of speech only so that we can have elections. Campaign finance controls exploited that premise by concluding that we can therefore limit freedom of speech in order to "improve" our elections.
But the campaign finance controllers couldn't write the First Amendment out of existence, and now the whole edifice of campaign laws may be about to collapse.
"First Amendment 451," Robert Costa, National Review Online, January 21
"Our argument in the case wasn't complicated," says Bossie. "It was about freedom, and it ended up hinging on a very simple question: If the FEC is comfortable banning political films, like Citizens United's Hillary: The Movie, around election time, would it also be fine with banning political books financed by corporations? The Justice Department's attorney answered yes, the government did have the power to prohibit the publication of a book. When they admitted that, everything changed."
"I think that answer sent a chill through the Court," says Bossie. "It was that moment that was a catalyst for us, and gave us the opportunity to win on much bigger constitutional grounds than we anticipated. It became apparent that the government believed that they could ban anything: movies, books, pamphlets, the Kindle, you name it. It was a shocking revelation."…
"The FEC believed that they have a mandate to tell the American people what they can and cannot do when it comes to an election," says Bossie. "We've always been under the impression that the FEC believes that it's not necessarily an inherent right for the American people to speak during an election; it's only by the grace of the FEC. The oral arguments in this case proved that all to be true. As they've taken more and more power, which Congress, via John McCain and Russ Feingold, has happily given them, they've encroached on the First Amendment." Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy agreed, quoting a previous case that called political speech "indispensable to decision-making in a democracy and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation."
6. VA-5 and NY-23
Last Tuesday, I wrote about the Republican primary in Virginia's fifth congressional district, where I have played a small role, and its implications for the tension between the tea party movement and the Republican Party establishment. (This edition of TIA Daily seems to have been bounced back by some subscribers' service providers; if you didn't get it—the main title was "We're Comin' to Get You"—then let me know and I will re-send it.)
About the same time, the Washington Post picked up on the story with an article that is fairly accurate but has much less detail.
Meanwhile, in the main article linked to below, the New York Times has more on how this conflict is playing out on a national scale, as does the Associated Press. The best line: the tea partiers want to the Republican Party "to work for them—not, they argue, the other way around." Amen.
In my article, I also mentioned my skepticism of anyone who claims to represent a "national" tea party organization, and particularly of a self-styled National Tea Party Convention. That event—run as a for-profit venture at $500 a head, the sure sign of a scam—seems to be collapsing with the withdrawal of speaker Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman who has been very friendly to the tea party movement.
"Republicans Strain to Ride Tea Party Tiger," Kate Zernike, New York Times, January 22
When Scott McInnis appeared on Fox News last month underneath a title calling him the "Tea-Party-backed candidate" for governor, he triggered a tempest. Tea Party leaders fired off angry e-mail messages and public statements insisting that he was not their choice.
"Let it be known that we will not be used by any party or candidate!" Lu Ann Busse, the head of a coalition of Tea Party brethren known as 9/12 groups, declared at a "Defend the Republic" rally where she was invited to set the record straight after Mr. McInnis's appearance.
Mr. McInnis said it was Fox that gave him the description without consulting him. But he was quick to try to make amends, issuing a statement on his Web site, and in the weeks since he and the head of the state Republican Party have toured Colorado meeting with Tea Party groups.
Across the country, many Tea Party activists believe that they have to work within the Republican Party if they want to elect fiscally conservative candidates. But they want the party to work for them—not, they argue, the other way around.
For Republican officials, managing the tensions between the two parties—one official, one potent—can be something like a full-time job….
Some Republican Party officials say privately that they are not yet certain whether the Tea Parties will prove to be a real force or simply the loudest voices. But the Tea Parties have proven their populist rage can be a power, whether to destroy Republicans—driving one out of a special Congressional election in upstate New York—or elect them in the most surprising of places, like Massachusetts.
So publicly, Republicans are trying to make nice with Tea Party groups, particularly in states like California, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky and New Hampshire, where Tea Partiers are upending Republican unity with primary challenges to establishment candidates.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."
Joseph D'Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA "systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude, and rural locations." The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35….
Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA's data and conclusions suspect. D'Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.
5. What Part of "No" Don't They Understand?
For years, my response to campaign finance controls has been to quote the First Amendment prohibition that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press"—and then to ask "What part of 'no' don't you understand?"
That is basically what the Supreme Court asked in a recent decision striking down campaign finance controls that were used to block the release of a polemical documentary on Hillary Clinton during an election season.
For a longer analysis of the decision, see here and here, but the report below describes what I remember as the pivotal exchange during oral arguments on the case: the point at which the government's lawyers, in defending the controls, admitted that they would allow the government to ban books. What should have been obvious all along was suddenly made crystal clear: campaign finance controls had endowed the federal government with the power of political censorship.
The article below is also notable for naming the key underlying premise behind the various campaign finance control laws: the idea that the Federal Election Commission's job is to manage the way in which citizens behave during election campaigns. This is the sign of the deeper inversion wrought by the modern concept of "democracy."
In the original American system, representative government was instituted in order to protect individual rights. Or to put it differently, we have elections so that we can have freedom of speech. But in the distorted concept of "democracy," liberty only exists so that it can help the people express their collective will. So we have freedom of speech only so that we can have elections. Campaign finance controls exploited that premise by concluding that we can therefore limit freedom of speech in order to "improve" our elections.
But the campaign finance controllers couldn't write the First Amendment out of existence, and now the whole edifice of campaign laws may be about to collapse.
"First Amendment 451," Robert Costa, National Review Online, January 21
"Our argument in the case wasn't complicated," says Bossie. "It was about freedom, and it ended up hinging on a very simple question: If the FEC is comfortable banning political films, like Citizens United's Hillary: The Movie, around election time, would it also be fine with banning political books financed by corporations? The Justice Department's attorney answered yes, the government did have the power to prohibit the publication of a book. When they admitted that, everything changed."
"I think that answer sent a chill through the Court," says Bossie. "It was that moment that was a catalyst for us, and gave us the opportunity to win on much bigger constitutional grounds than we anticipated. It became apparent that the government believed that they could ban anything: movies, books, pamphlets, the Kindle, you name it. It was a shocking revelation."…
"The FEC believed that they have a mandate to tell the American people what they can and cannot do when it comes to an election," says Bossie. "We've always been under the impression that the FEC believes that it's not necessarily an inherent right for the American people to speak during an election; it's only by the grace of the FEC. The oral arguments in this case proved that all to be true. As they've taken more and more power, which Congress, via John McCain and Russ Feingold, has happily given them, they've encroached on the First Amendment." Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy agreed, quoting a previous case that called political speech "indispensable to decision-making in a democracy and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation."
6. VA-5 and NY-23
Last Tuesday, I wrote about the Republican primary in Virginia's fifth congressional district, where I have played a small role, and its implications for the tension between the tea party movement and the Republican Party establishment. (This edition of TIA Daily seems to have been bounced back by some subscribers' service providers; if you didn't get it—the main title was "We're Comin' to Get You"—then let me know and I will re-send it.)
About the same time, the Washington Post picked up on the story with an article that is fairly accurate but has much less detail.
Meanwhile, in the main article linked to below, the New York Times has more on how this conflict is playing out on a national scale, as does the Associated Press. The best line: the tea partiers want to the Republican Party "to work for them—not, they argue, the other way around." Amen.
In my article, I also mentioned my skepticism of anyone who claims to represent a "national" tea party organization, and particularly of a self-styled National Tea Party Convention. That event—run as a for-profit venture at $500 a head, the sure sign of a scam—seems to be collapsing with the withdrawal of speaker Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman who has been very friendly to the tea party movement.
"Republicans Strain to Ride Tea Party Tiger," Kate Zernike, New York Times, January 22
When Scott McInnis appeared on Fox News last month underneath a title calling him the "Tea-Party-backed candidate" for governor, he triggered a tempest. Tea Party leaders fired off angry e-mail messages and public statements insisting that he was not their choice.
"Let it be known that we will not be used by any party or candidate!" Lu Ann Busse, the head of a coalition of Tea Party brethren known as 9/12 groups, declared at a "Defend the Republic" rally where she was invited to set the record straight after Mr. McInnis's appearance.
Mr. McInnis said it was Fox that gave him the description without consulting him. But he was quick to try to make amends, issuing a statement on his Web site, and in the weeks since he and the head of the state Republican Party have toured Colorado meeting with Tea Party groups.
Across the country, many Tea Party activists believe that they have to work within the Republican Party if they want to elect fiscally conservative candidates. But they want the party to work for them—not, they argue, the other way around.
For Republican officials, managing the tensions between the two parties—one official, one potent—can be something like a full-time job….
Some Republican Party officials say privately that they are not yet certain whether the Tea Parties will prove to be a real force or simply the loudest voices. But the Tea Parties have proven their populist rage can be a power, whether to destroy Republicans—driving one out of a special Congressional election in upstate New York—or elect them in the most surprising of places, like Massachusetts.
So publicly, Republicans are trying to make nice with Tea Party groups, particularly in states like California, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky and New Hampshire, where Tea Partiers are upending Republican unity with primary challenges to establishment candidates.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
1 comments:
"We've told so many lies, young scientists are totally confused"
http://climaterealists.com/?id=4960
(a video spoof of climate science)
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