Meanwhile, Out In The Real World

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has - again - told the world to get bent.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Negotiations over Iran's nuclear enrichment activities would be meaningless because the country has a legal right to pursue the technology, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying on Sunday.

The West suspects Tehran is developing its nuclear program to produce atomic weapons but Iran says it is only pursuing a means to produce electricity for civilian needs.

Tehran has defied U.N. resolutions calling on it to suspend uranium enrichment, and on Sunday Ahmadinejad rejected the idea of holding talks on the issue.

"It is meaningless to hold talks over Iran's obvious and legal right to nuclear technology," the news agency ISNA quoted him as saying.

The American left continues to push for taxpayer-funded handouts for anyone who is in the country - legally or not - and ignores the real threats in the world. Politics as usual, I suppose.

Australia: Cane Toads Gone Wild

The Australian reports that cane toads - the exotic poisonous reptiles that are virtually eliminating all native species they come in contact with - are spreading uncontrollably into western Australia.

Despite the culling of an estimated 200,000 toads and millions of tadpoles over the past two years, a new report says the toads continue to head west across the Northern Territory at a rate of up to 80km a year.

As scientists battle against time to find biological controls to stop the pest, including plans to map the cane toad genome, experts predict the toad may cross the border into Western Australia as early as next year.

The report's author, Tony Peacock, head of the invasive animals co-operative research centre at the University of Canberra, has called for a national cane toad plan to co-ordinate research, culling and other eradication efforts.

Cane toads are found throughout Queensland, the Territory and northern NSW.

Once again, the cane toads kill virtually every native species they contact - they are extremely poisonous - even to humans. But the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals takes great exception to any "cruelty" - or even humor about cruelty - toward them. The RSPCA is apparently less worried about other, native species then they are by an invasive species that is overrunning the continent. Here's a video.

Burma: Junta Storms UN Offices, Demands Computer Hard Drives

The Times of London is reporting that the military junta that rules Burma with a bloody iron fist has stormed local UN offices demanding the hard drives from their computers. The government believes they can get valuable information on where dissidents might be from the data so as to be able to hunt them down more easily.

Burma’s ruling junta is attempting to seize United Nations computers containing information on opposition activists in the latest stage of its brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, The Times has learnt.

UN staff were thrown into panic over the weekend after Burmese police and diplomats entered its offices in Rangoon and demanded hard drives from its computers.

The discs contain information that could help the dictatorship to identify key members of the opposition movement, many of whom have gone underground. UN staff spent much of the weekend deleting information.

The stream of dramatic images of tens of thousands of monks parading through Rangoon inspired condemnation of the Government across the world. On Saturday, demonstrations denouncing the regime were held as far apart as Sydney, Singapore, London and Washington.

Many of the images were disseminated through e-mail by Burmese bloggers who used software to outwit attempts to block them. Even after the Government shut down the internet altogether ten days ago, photographs and films were smuggled out on tiny storage drives and memory cards by travellers to Thailand.

Some of the demonstrators have reportedly been arrested after being identified in footage of the rallies. The junta is going after the UN, in the belief that its officials allowed images to be transmitted through their own internet links – channelled via satellite phones and therefore less vulnerable to interference by the authorities.

Just on general principle it is a good time to remind folks that computer records are not erased when you hit the "delete" key. If you want to really wipe files, you need something like the irreplaceable Darik's Boot and Nuke program. (Which I have used for quite some time to recover hard drives.) Even with this program, I would run it over and over using every option the program has to really clear a drive. Better yet, burn the drive outright to really destroy it. The DBAN site also recommends the Heidi Eraser program for really erasing just files without wiping the drive and the TrueCrypt program for encrypting files. Both of those programs are for Windows environments only.

Drunk On Money

A blistering article on Hillary Clinton's fundraising machine - from the BBC, believe it or not. This is not a paean to Hillary or her campaign by a rather long shot. In fact, It's pretty damning.

This election is being sewn up by a team of hard-nosed, big money brokers in the splashily wealthy salons of Georgetown, Washington's equivalent of Chelsea in London, where the streets are cobbled, the houses are painted in pinks and yellows, and the gardens are tended daily by teams of Mexican manicurists.

This is where Cindy calls Daisy, who once raised a cool $1 million (£500,000) for someone by getting a bunch of wealthy lawyers in a hotel ballroom and charging them $10,000 each for "surf and turf" (seafood and steak).

Cindy, who is already on the campaign, tells Daisy (who is probably resting on a chaise longue only three doors down the street), "I've spoken to Hillary or to someone close to her - and we must have you on board."

Daisy rather fancies the dashing young challenger, Barack Obama - fancies him literally and metaphorically - but is now reeled in by the thought of the social exclusion that could result if Hillary were to win and acts of disloyalty were to be punished.

The upshot is that the Hillary campaign is the biggest show in town by a long, long way. She reeks of money and power.

A recent party for Hillary people - a book launch - was held at the Corcoran art gallery in the centre of Washington, literally across the road from the White House.

Wonderful news - part of the proceeds from the book sales were going to this already staggeringly well-endowed gallery.

This in a city where infant mortality is at Third World levels.

It's a great, snarky read. Meanwhile Flip Pidot has not lost interest in Norman Hsu even if the MSM is doing its best to.

Two seizure warrants signed by a federal magistrate in the $63 million fraud case against Norman Hsu offer some new information about the finances of the Democratic fundraiser, convicted felon, and serial fugitive.  The warrants authorized the seizure of funds in four bank accounts in the name of Hsu and three of his companies at Bank of America and Philippines-based Metropolitan Bank and Trust.

• Metrobank Warrant (pdf)
• Bank of America Warrant (pdf)

An attachment to the Metrobank warrant shows the bank recently turned over an official check for just under $73,000, a small fraction of the tens of millions of dollars investors are hoping to recoup (and slightly less than the $83,000 said to be in one of Hsu's Bank of America accounts).  They must be feeling a little like Geraldo, circa 1986.

(Links removed - you'll have to visit Flip to read the documents.) Yes, Hillary's campaign is very much a fundraising machine. Not all of it is clean, however. That may come into play yet.

Why My Family Needs SCHIP

Hi, my name's Timmy. My friends the Democrats sent me here to tell you about me and my family and why the Democrats are so good and the Republicans are so evil. You see, my mom and dad work really really hard but they barely make enough to make ends meet. And things are really tough around our house. Dad's always complaining about how expensive everything is. Why, do you realize how much caviar costs these days? (Dad says that a lot lately.) And really, there isn't even enough money for us to have a garage for our cars.

And the house always needs something. The jacuzzi broke just the other day and the espresso machine is on the fritz, too. Dad says it is awfully hard keeping the place up on their income.

And the wading pool always needs work, that's why dad had to hire the two full time pool attendants. Things are tight, we might have to let the upstairs maid go.

And dad always grumbles about how much school is costing for me and my sister. And the commuting costs! Do you know what a round trip flight to Switzerland costs?

The other day I came down with a wicked attack of tennis elbow at the club and had to be rushed to the emergency room. The chauffeur made record time, though and I had the free health insurance my friends the Democrats made sure I got. So you see, that's why dad and mom wanted me to talk to you about how good the Democrats are. And those evil Republicans want to take that insurance away from poor kids like me. Ouch! I just hurt my hand when I slammed it down on this stack of bearer bonds. Mom! Call the chauffeur!

(Apropos this post.)

UPDATE: Had to close comments - a commenter kept posting some sort of bad tag over and over. It was screwing the sytem up and I have already had enough problems here today.

UPDATE: No, don't flatter yourself, I closed it because someone could not figure out how to tag properly and kept causing problems. That simple.

Oh For Pete’s Sake

This is one for the record books. The "poor" child who read the Democratic radio address turns out to be nothing of the sort. Mark Steyn at The Corner:

President Bush, are you smarter than a seventh-grader?

Apparently not. Graeme Frost of Baltimore is 12 years old, a seventh-grader at the Park School, and he understands why children need health care and their parents need help paying for it. He explained it during a rebuttal to the president's Saturday radio address. Yes, we know, Senate staffers wrote the speech for Graeme. That doesn't take away from the message. Does anyone really think President Bush writes his own material?

Of course not. And nor does The Baltimore Sun, which did a nice fluffy soft-focus story typing out the Dems' press release and not querying a word:

Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work.

If it ever occurred to Matthew Hay Brown, the Sun's "reporter", to look into just what kind of "woodworking" Mr Frost did, he managed to suppress the urge.

"icwhatudo" at Free Republic, however, showed rather more curiosity than the professional reporter paid to investigate the story and did a bit of Googling. Mr Frost, the "woodworker", owns his own design company and the commercial property it operates from, part of which space he also rents out; they have a 3,000-sq-ft home on a street where a 2,000-sq-ft home recently sold for half a million dollars; he was able to afford to send two children simultaneously to a $20,000-a-year private school; his father and grandfather were successful New York designers and architects; etc. This is apparently the new definition of "working families":

Here's the Frost's Wedding Announcement. From the New York Times. (This one comes right up on Google if you search his name.)

Mr. Frost, also 26, is known as Halsey. He owns Frostworks, a woodworking and furniture-design studio in Baltimore. His mother, Randy Frost, is a quilt artist. His father is the deputy director of design and construction for the City University of New York in Manhattan. The bridegroom's late grandfather Frederick G. Frost Jr. was an architect responsible for several public buildings in New York, including Martin Luther King High School in Manhattan..

Here's more of what "icwhatudo" dug up:

What the article does not mention is that Halsey Frost has owned his own company "Frostworks",since this marriage announcement in the NY Times in 1992 so he chooses to not give himself insurance. He also employed his wife as "bookkeeper and operations management" prior to her recent 2007 hire at the "medical publishing firm". As her employer, he apparently denied her health insurance as well.

His company, Frostworks, is located at 3701 E BALTIMORE ST. A building that was purchased for $160,000 in 1999. The buildings owner is listed as DIVERSIFIED INDUSTRIAL DESIGN CENTER, LLC whose mailing address is listed as 104 S Collington Ave which is the Frost's home. The commercial property he owns is also listed as the business address for another company called Reillys Designs which leads to the question of whether rental income is included in the above mentioned salary total

The current market value of their improved 3,040 SF home at 104 S Collington Ave is unknown but 113 S COLLINGTON AVE, also an end unit, sold for $485,000 this past March and it was only 2,060 SF. A photo taken in the family's kitchen shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass front cabinets.

Why in the world do these people need SCHIP? And how does a $45,000 a year reported income manage to send two kids at once to a $20,000 a year private school? This is a blatant fraud by the Democrats and easily checked. So why in the world did they do this? And what the heck is wrong with the media? They look like utter fools here. They have been rolled and rolled badly. If I was the reporter or the editor, I'd about have smoke coming out my my ears about now.

UPDATE: Others:

Brutally Honest: "Bush's political machine needs to get the message out that when the government is spending money on those who really don't need the help, the truly needy are passed over."

Don Surber: "This business of “affordable insurance” is socialistic. The Frosts found an “affordable” business building and an “affordable” 3,000-square foot house and an “affordable” private school. Why couldn’t these yuppies afford to cover their own damned kids?"

Wizbang: "Yet, hardworking taxpayers who sacrifice many things such as expensive private schools and expensive houses in order to buy their own health care for their families are supposed to subsidize this family's health insurance premiums."

Protein Wisdom: I’m glad little Graham and his family were able to get help, and I hope he reaches full rehabilitation.  But perhaps the Democrats ought to take more care in the spokespeople they choose, if they wish to tug at our heartstrings.

Five Feet of Fury: "Times have changed and now the poor get fat."

The Shotgun: Does that look like the home of someone who can't "afford" health care and needs everyone else to pay for it for them?

Democracy Project: "All aboard the dole train(-wreck)"

Wake Up America: "You do not have to be a math wiz to figure out that the numbers do not add up."

Gateway Pundit: "…a child who suffered injuries in a car accident, was the prop this week for democratic leaders Reid and Pelosi (Pelosi also has another prop on her lap) to use in their SCHIP's Campaign to expand the federal governmenT."

Powerline: "Why is it that the chance of any mainstream media reporter doing easy internet research to check the accuracy of the Democrats' story, as this Freeper did, is exactly zero?"

Just Barking Mad: "Maybe he ought to use some of that money to take care of his family instead of using the government’s boot to force us to pay for his."

Mark Tapscott:And wouldn't it be wonderful if all journalists would greet all claims by all politicians and advocates with a healthy dose of Mencken-esque skepticism - i.e. as requiring verification before publication?"

Say Anything: "A little investigative reporting from the media could have fleshed this out, and put the use of Graeme as a Democrat propaganda public out as a gross falsehood, but they didn’t."

STACLU: "Looks like a little backfire is on the horizon."

Sister Toldjah: "Bbbbbut so what if the story doesn’t exactly fit the liberal narrative, right? As long as they succeed in demagoguing the opposition … "

American Pundit: "A half-a-million dollar home, $190,000 in commercial property, successful architect grandfathers, owning his own design company, a beautiful kitchen complete with what appears to be granite counter tops, an estimated $1,200 a month mortgage, personal injury auto insurance required in Maryland, but the Frosts couldn’t afford an estimated $452? Hmm."

Flopping Aces: "This is the family the Democrats chose to represent SCHIP?  If there was a more perfect family why SCHIP should not be expanded its this one."

The Hedgehog Report: "Which One Of Edwards’ America Do They Live In?"

Doug Ross: "In other words, Democrats want to pay for a childrens' healthcare program by expanding the percentage of poverty-stricken smokers."

Prairie Pundit: "It is surprising that Democrats would show so much compassion for small business. Perhaps they can offer the Frosts' a tax cut with which they can buy their own health insurance."

Newsbusters: "They tried to drop the absolute moral authority bomb on it big time and paint him as not caring about children. Now it looks like a little backfire is on the horizon." (Kind of a double there - the post is from John at STACLU.)

Instapundit: "Question: If business owners with half-million-dollar-plus homes and kids in expensive private schools now count as "working families," does this mean they'll get tax cuts?"

Mac's Mind: "Personally as one with a 1200 square foot pad in over priced South Florida and who pays 500 bucks to insure his wife (I’ve got the VA), I’m a little miffed at these upperly brats crying over benefits they damn well could afford to pay for."

Miss Beth's Victory Dance: "….once again, it's the Dems, playing a partisan game for politics, parading the wealthy in the guise of the poor, refusing to check facts and attempting to force their socialization on us, the taxpayer."

I kind of feel obligated to throw in the only two left-leaning blogs who have even come close to addressing this particular toxic mess:

Matthew Yglesias: "More dispatches from the continuing conservative war on adorable children." (Ed Note: Are those the adorable children who's parents are sitting on a (conservative) half a million dollars in assets and asking for a government handout? Just asking.)

Whiskey Fire: "The point is, health care costs can make it impossible for hardworking middle class families to have a decent life. This is a problem. SCHIP expansion would help to solve it at a moderate cost." (Ed Note: One reasonably should ask why, if the children were hurt in an automobile accident, the automobile insurance magically did not cover them and SCHIP was the only alternative - much less why the parents were relying on other people's taxes to pay for this.)

And yes, I did a pretty darn snarky new post about this.

The War Of The Squirrels

The war of the squirrels is heating up in Britain. The other day I posted about an article by Robin Page in the Daily Mail urging the killing and eating of gray squirrels in order to save the native res squirrels. Today I stumbled across this article by DT Max in the New York Times Magazine. It's about another project to eradicate gray squirrels. And yes, one of the participants is planning on a nice meal when he gets the time to do it.

The situation has now reached a crisis point: there are only an estimated 160,000 red squirrels left in Britain, whereas there are more than 2 million grays. Without human intervention, reds could be gone from England in 10 years. The red squirrel is a national icon, and the British government is trying hard to save it. Deliberately killing a red squirrel or disturbing its nest, called a drey, is a crime. Last year the government set up more than a dozen refuges for red squirrels in the north of England. The country’s National Lottery granted £626,000 to a group called Save Our Squirrels to run the reserves. Save Our Squirrels, or S.O.S., is a who’s who of British conservation organizations, among them the Mammals Trust and Natural England. It has a toll-free number for reporting sightings of grays and reds and works to raise public awareness of the red’s plight.

Redesdale, too, has planted his standard on behalf of the red army. Last year, with a grant of £148,000 from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, he founded an organization called the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership. The work of Redesdale’s organization is different from that of S.O.S. It shoots, or traps and then smashes on the head, every gray it can find. It currently has 20 core members, with another 150 or so irregulars.

The day I met Redesdale, he had broken off the long summer holiday from the House of Lords to try to enlist new recruits. A woman named Sue Southworth, the proprietor of the Squirrels Pantry Tea Room, was holding a meeting in her home in Cockermouth on the red squirrel. Redesdale had driven two hours to be there. He told me he knew the crowd would not be big, but his organization practices retail species elimination — he says he wants a trap in every backyard from Carlisle to Newcastle — and every pair of hands counts. He is enthusiastic and unapologetic about his work and does not use euphemisms the way the S.O.S. organizations do. “What is this ‘method of cranial concussion’?” Redesdale asked Southworth and the two other women who met him in Southworth’s high-ceilinged living room, quoting something he had heard at a red-squirrel preservation conference. “Why not just say ‘hit on the head’? Sounds better.”

It is an interesting look at a quirky Brit and the effort he is leading. There is almost a comic opera quality about it, but Max also does a nice job explaining the convoluted history of the gray invasion and the intermittent attempts to stop it. By the end of it, you'll doubt that the British have enough fortitude to eliminate the grays - and therefore have very little chance of ultimately saving the reds.

Paranoid Conspiracy Theories

Frankly, I've ignored the insanity going on over in Britain at the moment with the new coroner's inquest into the death of Princess Diana. It is one of those sad little conspiracy theories that has some people titillated but ultimately only causes agony for the families involved. Mark Steyn puts the entire thing into perspective, including the paranoid mindset that is one of the key drivers of the whole mess.

Last week, a London court began pondering the vexed question of whether Diana, Princess of Wales, was, ahem, murdered. There was so much public suspicion, declared the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, that it was time for the rumors to be either "dispelled or substantiated."

So who killed her? On the night of Diana's death in 1997, there were apparently two top agents for MI6, the British secret service, on the loose in Paris, and possibly a third, if you believe that Henri Paul, the chauffeur, was also on the spooks' payroll.

That's the theory of Mohammed Fayed, Monsieur Paul's employer and father of the princess's last boyfriend, Dodi. Fayed asserts that Diana was at the time of her death carrying Dodi's baby, and thus the car crash was arranged because Buckingham Palace decided it would be unacceptable for Prince William, the future king, to have a Muslim stepbrother, a Muslim step-dad, and a soon-to-be-Muslim mom.

The Princess of Wales' fortuitous demise was, as Fayed puts it, "murder in the furtherance of a conspiracy by the Establishment, in particular His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who used the secret services to carry it out." It is not thought His Royal Highness will be called to testify.

Look, I like a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, and I'm entirely prepared to consider the possibility that Di got whacked. But not because she was dating a Muslim.

On hearing the news that the princess' new beau was a Mohammedan, the British establishment would have been more likely to pop the champagne than order up a hit team.

One can easily picture the calculations: Excellent! Sums up the new Britain. A Muslim in the Royal Blended Family, just the kind of dynamic multicultural rebranding we need. Di will be a role model for Muslim women in northern England. Show the bloody Yanks a thing or two as well: Anyone can grow up to be president? Ha! In Britain, any old Muslim can grow up to join the Royal Family, etc.

The entire theory was shot to hell when it came out that Diana was taking birth control pills and had the substances in her bloodstream. So, again, too much detail at the expense of other people. The insidiousness of this is that the conspiracy theory is accepted as gospel truth in the Middle East according to Steyn:

Reality is more humdrum: In multiculti Britain, everyone was indifferent to Di's Muslim lover. Could have been a Hindu, could have been a Buddhist. Who cares? But, instead, Fayed has retreated into the paranoia and victim mentality that stunts so much of the Muslim world. A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous Western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family's assassination of Dodi Fayed. And so, in a London courtroom, a freak one-off celebrity death becomes just another snapshot of the big geopolitical picture.

That is the real danger of these ridiculous conspiracy theories. The disinformation, speculation or downright dishonesty becomes accepted by at least some people as absolute truth. That in turn leads to other real consequences. And eventually to real pain for real humans. She's been dead ten years now. Stop digging her up and parading her about for the amusement of conspiracy theorists.

Litmus Tests

Steven Calabresi, cofounder of the Federalist Society and a professor of law at Northwestern University, has an op-ed up over at the Opinion Journal that's worth a read. He discusses what he believes is the correct - and only - litmus test that should be applied to Supreme Court justices: originalism.

I submit that the proper basis on which we should evaluate the court's performance in this term and in the future is not whether it reaches "conservative" or "liberal" results in constitutional cases, but whether it reaches results that are faithful to the Constitution as written and understood at the time of its adoption. Likewise, the test for presidential candidates on the judiciary should be whether they can be trusted to nominate justices who will follow our written Constitution.

The belief that judges and justices should decide constitutional cases on this basis is known in academic circles as "originalism." This approach may seem so obvious that it should hardly need a name, let alone a defense.

Nevertheless, analysis of whether this was or was not what the justices did was strikingly absent from most of the discussion about the court's last term. Indeed, the possibility that judges and justices can even decide cases on the basis of the Constitution as written is the view only of a small, though growing, minority in the legal academy. Originalism is often dismissed either as hopelessly naive or as cynical obfuscation.

Here are a few reasons why, notwithstanding academic skepticism and the desire for the court to reach outcomes that the Constitution will not support, we all ought to hope that the Roberts court and the justices appointed by the next president will be originalists.

For starters, the long-accepted rule for interpreting legal texts is to construe them to have the original public meaning that they had when they were enacted into law. This is the way we interpret statutes, contracts, wills and even old Supreme Court opinions.

No leftist ever says of Roe v. Wade: Let's let President Bush's lower-court judges construe that opinion in light of the "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." Leftists and indeed all non-originalists would be utterly outraged if this were to happen.

Calabresi points out that the next President may appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices. (That is why I have and will continue to point out to conservatives that committing political suicide by running a third party candidate or opting out of the election is a really bad idea.) Sadly, I do not think Calabresi's litmus test stands much of a chance of acceptance by the politicians in Washington. Mind you, he's quite correct. The last thing this nation needs is a court packed with activists who make law rather than interpret law.

“It’s Anti-Washington.”

David Broder has an interesting column out today. The title will give you a bit of a pause: "Why Is This GOP Strategist Smiling?" The column is a profile of Tom Cole, the head of the Republican Congressional campaign. It is quite a read.

So how could he be reasonably satisfied with his party's prospects? The answer: The Democrats are also looking like dogs.

The approval score for their party in Congress has sunk to 38 percent — down 10 points since a similar poll taken just before the 2006 election that gave the Democrats their first congressional majority since 1994.

Congress as a whole rated only 29 percent approval, down 14 points from its start in January. The reason: People think it has been spinning its wheels. By 82 percent to 16 percent, those polled said it has accomplished little or nothing this year. Half blame Bush and the Republicans; a quarter, the Democrats; and a separate fifth, both parties.

Cole, who admits Republicans hurt themselves in 2006 with scandals and out-of-control spending, said the poll confirmed for him a comment he heard this week from a Republican colleague. Speaking of the Democrats, he said, "My God, they're dragging themselves down to our level."

It all adds up, Cole said, to a political environment reminiscent of 1992 — a tough year for entrenched incumbents of both parties who suddenly saw their margins shrink or disappear. "The American people are rising up in disgust," Cole said, "and incumbents will pay. It's not anti-Republican anymore. It's anti-Washington."

Which is something I have said before. (It's kind of nice to hear one of the senior strategists say the same thing.) The Democratic leadership in Congress has been busily pandering to their extremist fringe and it is likely to hurt them in 2008. I've been predicting that the Reid-Pelosi regime would come to be vilified by the rank and file in the near future. If Cole's optimism is correct, that future may be just over a year away. Cole is predicting a very bad year for incumbents - he is not painting a rosy picture for Republicans by any means. But the efforts of the media to write off the Republicans and to hold a coronation for Hillary this early should be viewed with suspicion.

After all, Tom Cole is smiling.

Media Millions For America

Jonah Goldberg eviscerates Media Matters for America in today's New York Post.

October 7, 2007 — In the parable of the million monkeys banging on typewriters for a million years, the reward is supposed to be the complete works of Shakespeare. But have you heard the parable of the million interns? Here, the prize is Rush Limbaugh's head, and Bill O'Reilly's, and Brit Hume's, and pretty much any other prominent conservative or non-leftist who doesn't kowtow to the Democratic Party and its “netroots" army of Lilliputian cannibals. This, in a nutshell, is the vision behind a group most people have never heard of, at least not until this week, Media Matters for America.

Nearly every day, I get e-mail spam from this alleged “media watchdog" group. It's slightly less formal than the usual son of a Nigerian oil minister with erectile dysfunction and a great stock tip giving me a head's-up about a problem with my eBay account. This spam comes from some earnest p.r. flack letting me know that I might be interested in the latest Very Serious Finding by Media Matters for America. When you actually check out the item, it's usually very stupid or silly or, sometimes, slanderous.

For example, on Sept. 25, Media Matters sent out a note announcing “Fox News panelist Mort Kondracke recently made several racist comments regarding the Jena 6.

Here are some examples of racism on Fox News." What were the racist comments? Simply this: Kondracke said in reference to the racial turmoil then brewing in Louisiana, “It looks as though the people of Jena can solve this on their own." It's a wonder Kondracke even bothered to take his Klan hood off while on camera.

Read it all. It is enormously entertaining stuff. Goldberg points out the background of the organiztion's founder, David Brock. Especially Brock's credibility self-destruction. Goldberg also highlight's the close ties to Hillary Clinton that Media Matters has. The picture that emerges is one of a left-wing industrial smear factory. Not that this comes as any surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. But Goldberg has now put it out into general circulation.

A Briton Looks At Queen Hillary

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a British writer, looks at the sudden media coronation of Hillary Clinton and asks a simple question: why? His rather jaundiced view of America and American politics provides a glimpse into how Hillary is perceived by some Europeans. It isn't a flattering take.

What a contrast Hillary Clinton presents! Everyone recognizes the nepotism or favoritism she has enjoyed: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. And yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn't seem to have impinged on Americans.

Seven years ago, she turned up in New York, a state with which she had a somewhat tenuous connection, expecting to be made senator by acclamation (particularly once Rudy Giuliani decided not to run against her). Until that point, she had never won or even sought any elective office, not in the House or in a state legislature. Nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband's health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.

No doubt she has been a diligent senator, even if the cutting words of the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier about "the most plodding and expedient politician in America" ring painfully true, and no doubt her main Democratic rivals have only quite modest experience themselves: Obama's stint in the Illinois state legislature before entering the U.S. Senate in 2005, John Edwards's one term in the Senate. But both men are unquestionably self-made, and no one can say that they are where they are because of any kin or spouse.

Predictably enough, Sen. Clinton's husband has tried to defend her with his quicksilver tongue, speaking recently on BBC Radio here, where he's plugging his new book, and on television back home. Dynasties mean the kings of France, Bill Clinton told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," whereas Hillary has had "a totally different career path" from his, "from a different political base" to a different "set of expertise areas."

To people like Wheatcroft, looking in at America from a European perspective, this is an extraordinary turn of events. Most other democracies shun dynastic successors. Wheatcroft is not exactly unbiased, mind you. He's written quite a few articles that are less than glowing in their description of things American. (He was labeled an "annoying Tory prat" by William Sjostrom - heh. Read the comments, too. They paint an interesting picture of the writer.)  But it does give a view most Americans seem to miss looking at the presidential horseraces this year. There's a value to that.

Why The True Believers Hate Him

Bjorn Lomborg, a man who firmly believes in anthropogenic global warming, is one person that the aggressive true believers hate with a passion. They have tried to smear him and silence him even though he believes, as they do, that man is causing global warming. Why? Because he also believes most of the true believer's dire warnings are bogus. More importantly, he keeps pointing out that the true believer's draconian "solutions" to the problem won't do a darn thing to avert the problem. Today he has an op-ed up over at the Washington Post that should elicit howls of outrage from the sycophants of Al Gore and company. Because he points out what isn't going to work and instead proposes more sensible things that can be accomplished and would actually do some good.

All eyes are on Greenland's melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.

Curiously, something that's rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat — perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it's caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we're headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it's all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It's wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we're causing it. But that's not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don't stack up.

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn't ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

Environmental groups say that the only way to deal with the effects of global warming is to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions — a project that will cost the world trillions (the Kyoto Protocol alone would cost $180 billion annually). The research I've done over the last decade, beginning with my first book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," has convinced me that this approach is unsound; it means spending an awful lot to achieve very little. Instead, we should be thinking creatively and pragmatically about how we could combat the much larger challenges facing our planet.

Sensible people already know that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth conveniently skips over the truth in a number of areas. Gore won't even debate any experts about his film and famously refused to a newspaper interview where Lomborg was asked to sit in and ask some questions. Please read the whole thing, Lomborg makes some sensible suggestions. Ones that make sense whether you are still skeptical of man's overall impact on global warming or not. He points out a lot of absurdities in the fanatic's dire predictions and also points out where they are simply not in touch with reality.

Wherever you look, the inescapable conclusion is the same: Reducing carbon emissions is not the best way to help the world. I don't point this out merely to be contrarian. We do need to fix global warming in the long run. But I'm frustrated at our blinkered focus on policies that won't achieve it.

In 1992, wealthy nations promised to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Instead, emissions grew by 12 percent. In 1997, they promised to cut emissions to about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2010. Yet levels will likely be 25 percent higher than hoped for.

There are a lot of things that Lomborg suggests that would be good for the planet - regardless of global warming. Reducing the use of fossil fuels is a basically good idea . The trick is not to be hoodwinked into feel-good, short-sighted fixes that actually cause more harm to the planet. Yet that is exactly what the true believers are forcing governments into. There has been much howling about Kyoto from the true believers, but the governments that signed on to it have not reduced global emissions. Those have continued to grow. So if man is actually going to have an impact on greenhouse gasses, real, workable solutions must be developed. The ones being pushed right now - by people who stand to make money from them - are not the right answer.

Read the whole thing, his ideas are good for the planet - regardless of whether you are a skeptic or not. They also won't kneecap economies and actually limit the ability to accomplish real positives as the Gore crowds "solutions" would.