What Kyoto Is Turning Into

Indications are that it may well be being used as a wedge issue to force UN control over what nations do. Headline: "Canada faces U.N. grilling over Kyoto abandonment". The story is about the fact that Canada can not meet the targets that the former, Liberal party, government agreed to. And this is very important - the article says the (now) opposition party wants binding targets put in place.

The minority Conservative government, which says Canada cannot meet emissions cuts mandated by Kyoto, last month proposed clean air legislation that ignored the protocol and promised to impose binding cuts only by 2020-2025.

Ambrose, the focus of attacks from the media, opposition parties and green groups, flew to Nairobi on Sunday for U.N. climate change talks on finding a successor to Kyoto, the first stage of which ends in 2012. Signatories to the protocol are gathered in the Kenyan capital for a two-week conference.

Ambrose is the outgoing president of the talks but rather than attend the opening last week she sent a video of remarks instead, to the irritation of some delegates.

Opposition politicians, saying the planned clean air law would damage Canada's international reputation, demanded Prime Minister Stephen Harper stick to the first stage of Kyoto and also agree to binding long-term targets.

"What we are asking is that (he) change a course which is a disaster for our environment, a disaster for our foreign policy and a gross abandonment of our responsibility for the world," said Liberal leader Bill Graham.

Canada's three opposition parties have a majority of seats in Parliament and say they will block the clear air bill. All three are sending legislators to Nairobi and vow to openly criticize Ambrose.

HYPOCRISY ACCUSATIONS

The Conservatives, who won power in January, paint the Liberals as hypocrites who did nothing about Kyoto after winning an election in 1993.

"Now (they) have the gall to actually suggest they would go to Nairobi and commit us to even more targets while we are still waiting to see their plan after 13 years," Harper said.

While the US is embroiled in internal politics, the far left in the world are proceeding to push their agendas. That that agenda wants the West to shut down its industry is pretty obvious. People should be rightfully suspicious about the motivations behind this. One rather suspects that the environment is a handy excuse.

What Loyalty Is Worth

By all reports, Steny Hoyer did a very good job of helping marshal the Democrats into a unified front in the House. Today, he found out what all that hard work did for him.

It did Jack.

Because the person he helped, Nancy Pelosi, slid the shiv right into Hoyer's back and is supporting Jack Murtha for Majority Leader.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in line to become Speaker in January, is throwing her support to Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) in the race for Majority Leader, a move that will be an early test of her influence and will weigh heavily on Murtha's contest with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) for the post.

Pelosi, in a letter distributed Sunday to newly elected House Democrats, wrote that Murtha's outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq helped change the electoral campaign for the House this fall. Murtha began calling for a U.S. pullout from Iraq a year ago, and his open opposition to the war made him a focus of intense criticism from Republicans and the White House.

Pelosi, though, credited Murtha, one of her closest allies in the House, with changing the national debate on the issue and helping provide Democratic challengers and incumbents with a winning argument for the mid-term elections.

"With respect to Iraq in particular, I salute your courageous leadership that changed the national debate and helped make Iraq the central issue of this historic election," Pelosi wrote in a personal letter to Murtha. "Your leadership gave so many Americans, including respected military leaders, the encouragement to voice their own disapproval at a failed policy that weakens our military and makes stability in that region even more difficult to achieve. The enthusiastic response of Americans all across this nation gave an enormous lift to our Democratic efforts, and your unsurpassed personal solicitations produced millions of dollars which were new to the effort. Those resources made a huge difference and particularly for the candidates on whose behalf you campaigned."

So long, Steny. And thanks for all the fish. Really. Honest. And it will all be different on Capitol Hill, honest. Really.

Live Down Under Zombie Located!

We told you about the zombies stealing cars from law-abiding citizens of Australia expressly for the purpose of drag racing around the countryside. The authorities are, of course, trying to pin the blame on actual, living Australians since living people have more money. But now, those folks under pressure from the government about unpaid speeding tickets have found a real live living zombie person to blame the zombie speeding tickets on!

A SOUTH Australian businessman has been inundated with traffic fines from NSW after hundreds of alleged traffic fine evaders claimed he had been driving their cars. NSW police have found his name on at least 140 statutory declarations sworn by drivers between the end of 2002 and May last year.

The 53-year-old man said last night he had received at least 300 demands from the NSW State Debt Recovery Office.

"They are still turning up at my parents' home, only last week one arrived," he said.

The victim believes the scam started when he rented a car.

"I hired a sports car in Sydney and had to hand over my personal drivers licence," he said, speaking on the condition his name was not published.

The scam had taken its toll on his elderly parents, he said.

"I live with my Mum and Dad who are both in their eighties and it has been very stressful.

"How would you feel if you were their age and all these letters kept arriving at the house saying pay up for this speeding, parking or traffic camera offence? Since all this has happened, my father has suffered a stroke and my mother has not been well."

Isn't that a heartwarming tale? Folks giving the dead a chance to drive as fast as they want all over the Australian countryside! It's like Shaun of the Dead meets MOPAR!

(More than 50 people have been arrested over the weekend for these claims, by the way. More arrests are expected. Bad enough trying to hang it on the dead, going after the innocent who are still alive is really underhanded).

Don’t Do This

The trial balloons have been coming fast and furious and are now reaching epic proportions. As Powerline explains:

How's that for multilateralism? The report's conclusions apparently are being cleared in advance by Middle Eastern intelligence officials.

The proposals reportedly include an approach to Iran and Syria — a policy that Robert Gates, a member of the commission, has argued for.***

Rarely has a government report been more eagerly awaited than the one being prepared by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat, about how the U.S. can leave Iraq.

I would have said the question is how the U.S. can win in Iraq.

The commission’s discussions are said to be focused on an option presented by a panel of experts that the United States concede that the situation in Iraq cannot be stabilized and make plans for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Iraq "cannot be stabilized"? That strikes me as a ridiculous statement. One can legitimately ask whether Iraq can be stabilized at acceptable political, military or financial cost. But that would require some hard analysis of what the stakes are and what those costs may be. Notwithstanding the results of Tuesday's election, I think the American people are adult enough for such a discussion.

All I can say is that if this is done, this may be the first administration in history to reach a negative number on its approval rating. Do not do this. Do not.

What Potty Did You Want To Vote For?

A woman working at a polling place in Poland got into a verbal confrontation with other poll workers about alleged irregularities with the voting. She demanded that the polling place be closed. When the others refused, she grabbed all the ballots and locked herself in the rest room.

Witnesses, quoted by the Polish news agency PAP, said the woman had argued with her colleagues over alleged irregularities and had demanded that the polling station at Lysowice in southwest Poland be closed.

After the verbal fireworks, she telephoned the local police, grabbed a pile of unused ballots and locked herself in a toilet cubicle.

Officers who later arrived at the scene were able to convince her to end her protest and return the ballot papers.

Local police spokesman Slawomir Masojc said the woman was detained.

It sounds like she was stalling for time. Can we say that the winner was flush with victory?

Mirror, Mirror

All the way back in January, I noted a plan to install a giant mirror so that sun would shine into the village square of the tiny village of Viganella, located deep in a valley in the Italian Alps. It seems that the village gets no direct sunlight for three months out of the year. Well, it seems the plan is actually coming to fruition.

A VILLAGE in the foothills of the Italian Alps that sees no sun for nearly three months a year is to brighten its winters by using a giant mirror to reflect sunshine onto its main square.

This week, the 197 mostly elderly inhabitants of Viganella, which is buried in the narrow Antrona valley, north of Turin, will gather for the arrival of a tailor-made sheet of steel 26ft wide and 16ft high. It will be flown by helicopter to a designated spot on the mountainside.

The mayor, Pierfranco Midali, who is spearheading the project, is confident that the hamlet will no longer have to suffer from a complete absence of direct sunlight for 83 days a year, from November 11 to February 2.

Midali, a train driver, first set the ball rolling with a throwaway comment seven years ago after he commissioned a sundial for the bare facade of the parish church.

“I told Giacomo Bonzani, the architect who made the sundial, not to bother with November 11 to February 2, to leave it unfinished so people would understand there is no light then,” Midali recalled.

“Then I told him that if he could bring me a project to bring the sun to Viganella, I would back it to the hilt,” he said.

The plan was at first greeted with disbelief by many locals and the local council, who argued that it would never work. “I was a bit sceptical at first,” admitted Franco, owner of the Cafe Bar delle Alpi. “But now I’m all for it. It’s freezing here and we have to keep the light on all the time.”

As I said when I first reported this, you could just move. But still, this is the first thing I thought of when I saw the story.

Saving The World….

….One ultra-luxury hotel resort at a time. The folks in Europe will be thrilled at the news that some 70 members of the European Parliament will make the tough and dangerous trek to study what to do about world deprivation. Their journey will take them to the Island of Barbados where they will slum in super luxury resorts with names like Amaryllis Beach, Tamarind Cove and Turtle Beach (not to be confused with Turtle Bay) and the Colony Club. They will wrestle the developing worlds problems by sliding down the 70-foot water slide that is installed on one of their prime meeting locations: the good ship Harbour Master. The vessel, 100 feet long, is billed as “the longest floating bar in the Caribbean”. Oh, the humanity!

The assembly kicks off with a “project visit” next Sunday. According to sources at the Barbados embassy in Brussels, this is an EU euphemism for a four-hour chartered cruise aboard the Harbour Master — a 100ft ship billed as “the longest floating bar in the Caribbean”.

The four-deck-high “floating entertainment centre” also sports a 70ft waterslide and an onboard craft village. “It will be a relaxed thing. They shouldn’t have to work too much on it,” said an embassy official.

Delegates will also be able to choose between three “workshops” on Tuesday afternoon — one on the rum industry. MEPs who miss out on the trip will be handed a goody bag containing rum and other Bajan specialities.

Samuel Chandler, permanent secretary for foreign trade in Barbados, said this weekend that he believed the trip was scheduled to visit the West Indies rum distillery.

Later that evening the Bajan parliament will host a reception complete with local dancers and calypso singers.

The politicians’ spouses will have plenty to do too. Their programme includes water sports and a trip to the “eighth wonder of the world”, Harrison’s Cave, a ¾-mile-long limestone cavern. “We can’t just have them sitting round. While their husbands are at work, the spouses can play,” said Chandler.

However, he declined to give details of the rest of the entertainment programme. “We consider our hospitality private. We do not need to publicise it because it can give the wrong impression with different audiences,” he said. Despite the free hospitality, MEPs are entitled to claim a further £90 a day in expenses.

All this will only cost £200,000. But it is worth any price to give a fabulous junket to a bunch of bureaucratic slugs solve the world's most pressing problems. Hey! now we can understand the article about the giant snail invasion of Barbados! They are actually misidentified! They are just EU Parliament members!

Just In Case You Forgot

Iran is still busily pursuing nuclear weapons. And Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has absolutely no respect for - or fear of - the UN Security Council.

"It is most embarrassing that the U.N Security Council, which should be the defender of nations' security and rights, threatens countries pursuing nuclear fuel under the law to provide fuel for peaceful purposes," Ahmadinejad said.

Addressing the seventh conference of the general assembly of the Asian Parliaments Association for Peace, Ahmadinejad criticized the U.N. for applying a double standard, noting that "countries, armed with nuclear weapons, deny the rights of other countries to produce nuclear fuel and exploit it for peaceful purposes."

Ahmadinejad made the comments following the meeting Saturday in Moscow between Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Unfortunately, he is also not all that worried about the United States since he's cheering the election results and sending drones on overflights of US warships.

The television's anchor said the film, the property of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, showed a vessel from "the US fleet in the Persian Gulf".

"A source in the Revolutionary Guard said the drone carried out its mission without US fighter pilots reaching it," the television said.

It said there were 10 such films taken by the drone which showed "more precise information and details about military equipment, foreign forces, and their activities in the Persian Gulf."

The station did not name the vessel nor did it say when the footage was shot.

UPDATE: Lawhawk from A Blog For All pointed, in comments, to this Confederate Yankee post that casts serious doubts on the Iranian claims.

Menendez Still Under Investigation?

It would seem the the US attorney in New Jersey is still very much interested in looking into Robert Menendez's real estate dealing. New subpoenas have been issued in the case.

Federal investigators have resumed their inquiry into a rental deal between U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and a nonprofit agency, issuing new subpoenas in the days after he was elected to a full six-year term, according to a government source.

The subpoenas sought documents related to the more than $300,000 in rent Menendez collected from the North Hudson Community Action Corp. between 1994 and 2003, the source said. It was unclear what records were sought or who was subpoenaed.

"More are coming," said the source, who declined to be named because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.

Matt Miller, a spokesman for Menendez, said neither the senator nor his campaign or congressional office has been contacted by federal authorities. He said Menendez is unaware of any new subpoenas and maintains he did nothing wrong.

"We're confident that when the U.S. Attorney's Office completes its review it will come to the same conclusion as the House Ethics Committee, that the transaction was completely appropriate," Miller said.

The latest development cuts short Menendez's political honeymoon as he prepares to head back to Washington next week as part of a new Democratic majority in Congress. Menendez's victory Tuesday was critical to Democrats taking control of the U.S. Senate by 51 to 49.

I think the US Attorney had no choice but to ease off the investigation through the election to avoid charges of political motivations for the inquiries. I rather suspect this will get a lot more attention in coming weeks and months.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

About Donald Rumsfeld, according to a person familiar with him. Douglas J. Feith worked closely with Rumsfeld for four years. He refutes a lot of the popular myths about the man. Especially the cartoonish figure that his political opponents have drawn.

I know that Don Rumsfeld is not an ideologue. He did not refuse to have his views challenged. He did not ignore the advice of his military advisers. And he did not push single-mindedly for war in Iraq. He was motivated to serve the national interest by transforming the military, though it irritated people throughout the Pentagon. Rumsfeld's drive to modernize created a revealing contrast between his Pentagon and the State Department, where Colin Powell was highly popular among the staff. After four years of Powell's tenure at State, the organization chart there would hardly tip anyone off that 9/11 had occurred — or even that the Cold War was over.

Rumsfeld is a bundle of paradoxes, like a fascinating character in a work of epic literature. And as my high school teachers drummed into my head, the best literature reveals that humans are complex. They are not the all-good or all-bad, all-brilliant or all-dumb figures that inhabit trashy novels and news stories. Fine literature teaches us the difference between appearance and reality.

Because of his complexity, Rumsfeld is often misread. His politics are deeply conservative, but he was radical in his drive to force change in every area he oversaw. He is strong-willed and hard-driving, but he built his defense strategies and Quadrennial Defense Reviews on calls for intellectual humility.

Those of us in his inner circle heard him say, over and over again: Our intelligence, in all senses of the term, is limited. We cannot predict the future. We must continually question our preconceptions and theories. If events contradict them, don't suppress the bad news; rather, change your preconceptions and theories.

Read it all, it is a very different picture than is routinely presented in the media or especially by his enemies. I like the way Feith presents the way Rumsfeld has been portrayed:

What Rumsfeld believed, said and did differs from the caricature. The public picture of him today is drawn from news accounts reflecting the views of people who disapproved of his policies or disliked him. Rumsfeld, after all, can be brutally demanding and tough. But I believe history will be more appreciative of him than the first draft has been. What will last is serious history, which, like serious literature, can distinguish appearance from reality.

That's actually a good thing to remember about all media coverage on any subject.

Voting Ourselves Off The Island

Mark Steyn looks at the threat to the nation that a withdrawal from Iraq would entail. His assessment is exceedingly bleak.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson — that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia — a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election — you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections — 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada — but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.

Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.

Make no mistake, this would be seen as a victory for the Islamists and a major defeat for not George Bush, but for America. As Steyn says, we can vote ourselves off the island and go back to watching television. Unfortunately, there are other people in the world who will not let us do so. Go read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Others: Fausta, A Large Regular, Cold Fury,

Comment Database Problems

My hosting company is working on a problem on their end that is causing problems in the Crabitat. At the moment, commenting will not work. They promise to get it fixed promptly.

UPDATE: And they did, indeed fix it very quickly. Everything should be working again.

An Inconvenient Voice, Round Two

It seems that the first part of Christopher Monckton's assault on the conventional wisdom on global warming has started a major ruckus. Which is what I predicted, not that it was hard to foresee. But many of the emails he received over the past week have been from scientists who agree with his article and disagree with the much-vaunted consensus. In the second part of his article, he attacks the economic assumptions of the global warming activists. This should garner even more reaction. Because Monckton claims outright collusion in preparing the global spin.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on climate-change economics says the world must spend 1 per cent of GDP from now on to avert disaster. The current draft of the UN's 2007 report says up to 5 per cent. Sir Nick's team tell me: "We are confident that the UN will publish a range for costs next year in which ours will be centrally placed." So some quiet high-level co-ordination is going on. The oddest thing about Stern's curious report was its timing. Publication of the UN's next major science assessment is only months ahead. Why not wait and base the economics on that?

The UN needed Stern more than he needed the UN. Its 2001 report had numbers more extreme than anyone else's, so sceptics abounded. This time, an international spinfest is shutting off dissent in advance. First, the damage done by the hockey-stick graph had to be repaired, so a series of papers supporting its conclusions quickly appeared, many written by associates of its authors.

Next, the failure of temperature to rise as the UN projected had to be explained. Hence another flurry of learned papers, this time about the "ocean notion" – the maritime heat-sink into which the missing temperature rise might be vanishing.

My calculations last week had to be rubbished. Separately, The Sunday Telegraph's letters editor and I received emails saying I'd wrongly assumed the Earth was a "blackbody" with no greenhouse effect at all (I hadn't). The www.realclimate.org website, run by two of the "hockey-stick" graph's authors, said the same in a blog entitled "Cuckoo science".

On Thursday, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, compared climate sceptics to advocates of Islamic terror. Neither, she said, should have access to the media.

At whom is this spin aimed? At the Chinese, the Indians and the Brazilians. China has 30,000 coal mines. It is opening a new power station every five days till 2012. The Third World is growing. It won't be told it can't enjoy the growth we've already had. It wouldn't sign Kyoto till it was exempted, so, under President Clinton, the US Senate voted unanimously to reject Kyoto. Whatever the West does to "Save the Planet" is mere gesture unless the developing world agrees to give up its right to grow as we've grown.

Read the whole thing. Monckton pulls no punches. The obvious spin machine techniques of attempting to discredit him are right out in the open. The crushing of dissent is right there. There is much more going on here than meets the eye. There are political power plays going on, and a world carbon market controlled by the UN is a step in a direction that people had better understand.

On The Other Side Of The Aisle

The last post looked at an analysis of the likely Republican candidates for president in 2008. The Washington Post balanced that op-ed with one looking at the two presumptive front-runners in the Democratic party. Benjamin Wallace-Wells looks at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but really frames the entire thing in terms of racism and sexism. In other words, is America ready for a black candidate or a woman?

Their candidacies — coming after elections resulting in the presumed first female speaker of the House and the second black governor since Reconstruction — suggest that the next elections may play in ways that are more cultural and symbolic than tactical and political. Are Americans ready to put a black man or a woman in charge of the country? And does the hefty symbolism that Obama and Clinton would bring help one of them more than the other — in other words, is the country more racist or more sexist?

Democracies are awkward like this. Despite incessant polling, we really get only one moment every two years, at best, to measure how Americans feel about things, and these elections must stand as imperfect proxies for a mess of subjects: what we think about religion, whether we like being included in the international conversation, whether Northeast bluebloods would tolerate a Texan as their leader.

But when it comes to race and sex, this seems a slightly more legitimate game: The question that remains for black Americans and women isn't whether prejudice has diffused to the point that they can participate in the United States, it's whether they can legitimately hope to lead it.

Today, they may have reasons to be optimistic. Poll numbers for Clinton and Obama are among the strongest of any presidential hopefuls. It now seems nearly as common for political leaders in television shows and movies to be women or racial minorities as white men. Recent polls have found that the percentages of Americans who say they would not vote for a hypothetical black or female presidential candidate, long formidable, have dwindled into the single digits. And last Tuesday's elections put House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on the brink of becoming speaker and Democrat Deval Patrick, who is black, in the Massachusetts governorship.

Oddly, the author admits that the strongest contender to overcome any of these supposed biases is Condoleezza Rice, so I am not exactly how much of an issue this really will be in an election. This is almost more like setting up a storyline for why either of these two candidates may fail in the future. It makes no mention at all of the many other factors that will come into play as the campaigns progress.

The Once And Future Election

Already, the handicappers are analyzing the playing field for the 2008 elections. They started doing that before the ballots were cast in the 2004 election, of course. But now that the midterms are over, it becomes less of a hobby and more of an obsession. Ed Rogers takes a look at the Republican candidates (the Democrats are almost an afterthought with very little information). It is an interesting field.

Phew, I'm glad those elections are over . . . (pause for four seconds).

Now we can focus on obsessing about the results and extrapolating their meaning over two long years to predict who will win the presidency in 2008.

On the Republican side, some party faithful delude themselves that losing is winning — that the GOP benefits because now the nation will see Democrats at the wheel. Sure, confronted with a lie detector, the GOP candidates would prefer to run against Washington in '08 than defend a stale Republican leadership. But it's never good to be out of power.

The GOP nominating process, perhaps now more than ever, favors front-runners and candidates with a national fundraising base. With the first voting just 14 months away, a contender will probably need at least $60 million before the balloting even starts.

This year's midterm results are just a fraction of what will decide '08. Questions about character, issues of peace and war and surprise events may all still arise. At this point, as good a predictor as any is the contenders' performance and progress over the past year. So who's up and who's down after 2006?

Interestingly, when Rogers begins listing he starts with Romney, not McCain. Go over and take a look, It's an interesting analysis of people's relative chances with the primary voters - who are very different than the general public.