Obama? So...January

Now here's a man who knows what to do and wastes no time in doing it. A man of action!

How to Fix the U.S. Economy? Stop Tinkering With It!

Richard W. Rahm's column in the Washington Times nails it. From creating too much easy credit to creating artificial scarcities of important commodities to over-regulation, government meddling gets it wrong all too often. It's a credit to American ingenuity and entrepreneurship that this country creates so many small businesses each year despite all of the obstacles that continue to be placed in the way.

Are there any candidates running from either major party who understand this? Doesn't seem that way, although McCain promised that he would work to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Das Gesundheitssystem Nicht in Ordnung!! Entweder rein oder raus!!

Betsy Newmark summarizes a story about Hillary Clinton's most "notable" qualification for the Presidency, her leadership of the failed "health care task force" during the Bill Clinton's first term. Here's the money quote: So they had a plan that they weren't quite sure would actually work but they were contemplating making personal attacks on leaders of interest groups who dared to oppose them. And Jay Rockefeller knew exactly what the relationship was between the media and the Clinton administration. The media “are anxious and willing to receive guidance (from the Clinton administration) on how to time and shape the (news) coverage.”

As the man says, read the whole thing.

A unique result, guaranteed

Rick Brookhiser raises an important point in this post entitled "What Next?" at The Corner.

This election is unique; it has been many years since the nominees for both parties will not be either the incumbent President or Vice President. The country is going to take a leap of faith with little evidence as to the winner's executive skills and leadership ability, no matter who wins the election.

It's about time

As reported in The New York Times, the F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent

Instapundit forwards a link to one of the silliest articles on "global warming" ever. I especially enjoyed his assertion on the timeline of the catastrophe.

The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

It may well occur within the lifetime of his two cats, but not, perhaps, before his mother finally gives up and makes him move out of the basement.

The post at Commentary magazine entitled, " Who Owns the Vietnam War? " tells some uncomfortable truths that the left doesn't want to hear.

Democrat party pols and environmental politics are discussed in this post in The Corner on National Review Online. Would they embrace an Al Gore presidential candidacy? Would they really take up and pass the Kyoto treaty? It's not Gore Agonistes; he'd have to give up his "Father Theresa" demigod status with the gaia movement to descend to the level of a mere President of the United States.

Not to mention having to move to poorer living quarters than this.

James Lewis writes in American Thinker: NASA's Hansen Reaches Escape Velocity

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago."
In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes
"If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose."For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. "Several meters" is only about 9-15 feet. That's the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen's predictions come to pass.

Steve McIntyre of Toronto operates http://www.climateaudit.org/ as a hobby, essentially. I discovered the site accidentally a few years ago. Steve has waged an often lonely campaign to examine the accuracy of the data and methods behind the "consensus" view of climate change.

Steve has uncovered a whopper of an error, one that calls the "consensus" into question and the diligence of all those so-called scientists who shared the consensus. True scientific progress relies upon open sharing of experimental data--the inputs, the data, the environment, etc.--and the scientist's proposed theory is only considered proven if the experiment can be repeated successfully by any other scientist acting independently. Steve has fought to obtain the data and methods used by "the team", the scientists who Crazy Al relies on most to bolster his claim that we only have 10 years left to act. "The team" admitted an error that invalidated their claim for a hockey stick in Congressional testimony this year. Now NASA and their famed muzzled scientist (who's been muzzled into giving perhaps hundreds of tiresome interviews) admit a key error that calls more of the "consensus" view into question.

Al Gore's Global Warming Hysteria the Result of a NASA Programming Error (Wizbang)

In "Trial in Error," Victoria Toensing "indicts others who were not indicted by a grand jury, but could have been.

Now that the "Libby trial about process not outing an agent" is over, what will the media write about the outcome? Libby would seem to be the loser either way due to the massive costs of his defense.

In "Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists," Astrophysicist Nir Shariv describes his passage from man-made climate change believer to his present opinion. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. "In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

The article continues: Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Move along, nothing to see here: "Hurricane predictions off track as tranquil season wafts away."

Betsy Newmark links to and expertly fisks a column in the Washington Post by Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska who seems to have lost his will. I commented beneath the article; I repeat my comments below for those who don't care to visit the WaPo.

Mr. Hagel, Mr. Hagel. I can't understand how members of Congress who supposedly understand American interests and geopolitics can spout this drivel over and over again.

1) "They will decide their fate and form of government." Mr. Hagel, the Iraqis have voted in election after election, with overwhelming support and in numbers greater per capita than our republic.

2) "Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism." This is the only true statement in the article.

3) Apparently Mr. Hagel depends on the NYT headline writer for in-depth analysis of the news. Here are Dr. Kissinger's most recent and celebrated comments on Iraq in full,

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible....A dramatic collapse of Iraq - whatever we think about how the situation was created - would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region." It appears that Mr. Hagel and his allies would have argued against the occupation of Japan and Germany and against the many efforts in the Cold War that cost lives--including the Korean War--to restrain the Soviet Union. There were many setbacks during that period, and peaceniks and "know nothings" argued for rapprochement since the West could not defeat the Soviets and the ChiComs. Truman understood US national interests, as did Kennedy. Why can't today's Democrats?

3) "We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build." This is high comedy. During the 90's, the "Clinton peace dividend" was used to shrink the number of troops, ships, air squadrons, etc. I think that counts as more deliberate destruction of force structure in my book.

4) While the cost of the war is high, and the loss of any member of the armed forces is one too many, the cost and losses compared to WWII is insignificant on a per capita basis. The bulk of our population carries on virtually untouched by the war. There are no war bond drives, no rubber drives, no gas rationing, no draft. The strongest argument against our policy in Iraq is that we are not fighting hard enough. We are lawyered up and in a politically correct straitjacket. During WWII, Patton's third army would bypass tough opposition and use artillery and air power to neutralize it. "Rubble causes no trouble."

If Mr. Hagel believes that validating OBL's assertion that America lacks the will to defend its interests over the long term, as Europe has shown, then he must be willing to spend fantastic sums at home to attempt to defend every possible avenue for attack and strengthen every possible vulnerability. If Mr. Hagel spent time listening to the speeches given by Islamofascist leaders and reading and watching their media, he would understand how badly that they want to follow us home. Utter defeat is the only lesson these people understand. We owe future generations of free peoples everywhere to defend liberty at all costs. We cannot defend it by running from the hot point of the conflict of ideas and ideals.

Glenn compiles a list of interesting articles about outgoing Secretary of State Rumsfeld and the U.S. military's loss rate during the current war on terror versus historical loss rates since the beginning of the republic.

Here's an excerpt from a TCS daily article that Glenn includes in his post:

In the full sweep of U.S history, from the commencement of the Revolution on Lexington Green in April 1775, until the sunny morning of September 11, 2001, our average daily sacrifice has been between 14 and 15 military fatalities (1,217,000 fatalities/83,461 days = 14.6/day). Since 9/11, the average daily sacrifice has been 1.7 per day (3200/1900=1.68).

From the Revolutionary War until the American entry into World War I, the average daily rate was about 11 per day (578,000/52,231=11.07). From World War I through the break up of the Soviet Union, the rate was over 16 per day (636,000/38,811=16.39). Or in our long running confrontation with Soviet communism following World War II until the collapse of the Soviet empire, the rate was over between 6 and 7 per day (112,400/16,892=6.65).

As things stand, the conflict with Islamic radicalism involves the lowest average daily military fatality rate of any long run national security era. It may worsen, it may improve. If Congress had been asked on September 12, 2001, to endorse a national defense posture against Islamic radicalism that traded up to 2 military fatalities per day over the subsequent five years in return for no additional homeland attacks, the deposing of terror friendly regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ending of Libya's nuclear program, what would they have done? Would Congress accept that bargain today?

As the man says, read the whole thing

"That means killing the bad guys. Not winning their hearts and minds, placating them or bringing them into the government. Killing them."

This military blog post is well worth reading. It concludes as follows, "Here's one soldier whose morale is not being ground down by the enemy he faces. If it's being eroded, it's by the people who putatively support him."

Schadenfreude at the expense of members of the Democrat party today. First we have former Senator and former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards issuing a lame explanation for an attempt to obtain a Playstation 3 from...Wal-Mart, bane of the left's existence.

Next we have Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi failing in her first effort to place her loyalists in key positions that will be controlled by the Democrat party. "The Democratic caucus voted 149-86 for Hoyer."

Perhaps the other members of her party believed Rep. Pelosi when she promised the "most ethical Congress in history." They knew, apparently better than she, that placing an unindicted co-conspirator from the ABSCAM scandal in the 1980's in the Majority Leader's chair was not consistent with that promise.

The Democrat party wins, and "Voters gain faith in American elections." Nice to see that in print.

The whole notion of attempting to accuse the other (winning) party of nationwide election fraud is ridiculous, and is dangerous to the republic. We still need to find out what ACORN has done, but this election appears to have been generally fair overall.

I hope that any efforts to circumvent the Electoral College have been put aside forever. Otherwise, we would have large groups of disenfranchised states and wholesale opportunities for voter fraud nationwide.

The post-election and Rumsfeld resignation aftershocks continue.

I am more concerned about the impact of Secretary Rumsfeld's departure on force morale and enlistment/reenlistment rates than on the possible political benefits during the just completed election cycle. Still, it appears that his departure was handled so badly that there is a distinct possibility of negative impact on both aspects of the issue.

Ann Althouse has one of the best post-election takes I've read yet.

Read the whole thing. I especially like this part:

"What I'm concerned about is national security and, consequently, the way the election was fought and is being interpreted. I'm upset because I think we have sent a terrible message to our enemies: Just hang on long enough and continue to inflict some damage, and the Americans will lose heart and give up. You barely need anything at all. You might not be able to hijack a plane with a box cutter anymore, but you can take back a country -- a country we conquered with overwhelming military power -- merely by mercilessly and endlessly setting off small bombs in your own town day after day.

How much harder it becomes ever to fight and win a war again. Only pacifists and isolationists should feel good about the way this election was won."