Parsing The Polls

Mark Tapscott looks at the latest poll results from the Washington Post and finds them a bit questionable.

Reading today's edition of The Washington Post, it might appear to casual readers that the American people are depressed, fed up with President Bush and the GOP, and heading rapidly left on the issues. But look at the actual numbers behind the Dan Balz and Jon Cohen byline and a very different picture emerges from the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Any credible analysis of this survey should be prefaced with a basic caution about its usefulness for predicting how people are going to vote a year from now. The caution is the fact the survey is of adults, not likely voters.

Even so, here's how Balz and Cohen see the numbers:

"Concern about the economy, the war in Iraq and growing dissatisfaction with the political environment in Washington all contribute to the lowest public assessment of the direction of the country in more than a decade. Just 24 percent think the nation is on the right track, and three-quarters said they want the next president to chart a course that is different than that pursued by Bush."

But a veteran GOP analyst sees something else in the 24 percent right track figure:

"That’s only a one-point drop from June and a two-point drop from January. So considering the three-point margin of error in the poll, it’s reasonable to conclude that the right track/wrong track numbers are actually unchanged since January. Although unchanged this year, the right track number is down by more than a third (from 39 to 24) since right before the election when Democrats took over the Congress (coincidence?)."

And there's this as well:

"Also unchanged in the poll were the President’s approval numbers. His approval is the same as it was in the two September polls, the same as in July and the same as it was in the January poll (though the number who 'strongly' approve ticked up two points since the last poll). Some months it goes a little higher, but this is the fourth straight Washington Post-ABC poll with the same numbers, despite the summer campaign against him and his party."

Spin/counterspin? Well, sure it is to some extent. But there are real reasons for concern in the polling data. Also real reasons for optimism. Any Democrat who actually reads the poll - as opposed to the spun story in the Post - should be worried. The poll, even stinking as it does of a push poll, indicates that Democrats are not in as strong a position as they would have you believe. As always, a poll is not useful - in and of itself - as anything more than a snapshot of the day the poll was taken. The trend data, however, is of greater interest. Those trends are treading against Democrats.

Italy, Romanians And Xenophobia

Yesterday I posted about a crackdown in Italy aimed at ejecting Romanians with criminal backgrounds. I pointed out:

Italy has long allowed foreign workers and has toed the European line on tolerance and political correctness. But they are only a few crimes away from outright xenophobia and mass thuggery against an ethnic group. That must not be allowed to happen in the United States.

The situation has deteriorated in the past 24 hours and things in Italy are getting considerably worse:

ROME - Opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi urged Italy to close its borders to Romanian workers and a conservative ally called Sunday for the expulsion of tens of thousands of immigrants amid public outrage over a wave of violent crimes blamed on foreigners.

Pope Benedict XVI added his voice to the debate over the balance between citizen safety and treatment of foreigners, reminding authorities that immigrants have both obligations and rights.

The pope weighed in as lawmakers prepared to debate the government's response to recent crime, including fast-track expulsions of Romanians and other EU citizens deemed dangerous and bulldozing shantytowns housing immigrants.

"In Rome alone, 20,000 expulsions should be carried out right away," right-wing leader Gianfranco Fini, a key Berlusconi ally, said on a TV talk show Sunday.

Romanians have been detained as suspects in several recent high-profile crimes, including the rape of a woman on church steps in northern Italy, a mugging that left a Rome cyclist in a coma for weeks before he died, and the robbery of a Milan coffee bar in which the elderly owner was beaten and her daughter raped.

Other recent crimes in which foreigners are suspected include the mugging of Oscar-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore, which sent him to the hospital; the holdup of a prominent TV anchorman and the mugging of a Rome municipal commissioner.

Berlusconi told La Stampa newspaper that Italy should enact a moratorium against Romanian workers.

We must get control of our own borders in this country, unless we want a situation like this to develop. People with criminal records - and criminal intent - flooding across a border to find new pickings is a real concern. The vast majority of Romanians going into Italy are intent only on getting work - not finding victims. But the few bad actors are causing real problems for the majority. Those bad actors are, in turn, provoking a vicious backlash against all Romanians.

That must not happen here. High fence, wide gate, hearty welcome for those who play by the rules. No entry for criminals. It protects the people who live here legally; it protects the people who come here with good intentions; it is a sound policy and just good common sense.

Bobby’s Corner: Clearing The Air

Hey everyone! It's me again, your favorite socialist icon and all-around great guy, Bobby Mugabe. Yeah, I know it's been a while, but engineering a socialist revolution is time consuming work. I just thought I'd write another of my little letters about another great victory for the cause. I thought my billions of admirers would be thrilled with the latest, greatest news. We have reached a milestone today. The last foreign, imperialist, running dog capitalist lackey airline has finally left Zimbabwe! Isn't that great news?

British Airways flew out of Harare international airport yesterday, ending 62 years of service. The London-bound BA152 left with 200 passengers aboard the Boeing 777 without any acknowledgement of the occasion. The captain of the incoming flight from London had remarked over the intercom at how sad he felt not to be able to fly in and out of Harare any more.

Last month BA, the last foreign long-haul airline left in Zimbabwe, announced that it was ending its Harare service because it had been making “a considerable loss” that it could no longer sustain. The airline’s passenger numbers began to shrink in 2000 when President Mugabe launched his violent dispossession of white farmers.

“BA’s withdrawal is a major blow to what’s left of tourism,” said a tour company operator requesting anonymity. “Air Zimbabwe [the state-owned airline] cannot make up the numbers that BA was carrying. That means people will have to fly here via South Africa or one of the other neighbouring countries, and having to make multiple stopovers is a severe deterrent to travellers.”

In 1999 Harare airport was crowded with the emblems of 18 foreign airlines with Lufthansa, Air France and TAP Portugal also linking directly to Europe. BA was flying four consistently packed Boeing 747 jumbo jets to Harare four times a week.

Hey, so it's a bit more inconvenient to fly in or out of Zimbabwe right now. But I have some assurances from a wonderful holy woman that she is working on a new, never before seen technological marvel. We expect the new, goat-powered, super-jumbo people flier to be operational soon! All it will take, I am assured, is another $200 billion to get off the ground! Since $200 billion Zimbabwean is worth about 0.30 in American money, I think it's a real bargain!

Another great victory for socialism.

Dictatorially yours,

Robert Mugabe

Gordon Brown To Push Ahead With Nuke Plans

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pushing ahead with plans that lay the groundwork for new nuclear power plants in Briton, despite the Luddite opposition. (The role of Ned Ludd will be played by Greenpeace.)

Gordon Brown appears determined to press ahead with a legal framework for new nuclear power stations in Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech without waiting for the outcome of an official complaint that could derail the whole process.

The complaint concerns a consultation designed to gauge public opinion on nuclear energy, conducted by Opinion Leader Research, a polling company with close links to Labour.

Greenpeace, the environmental campaigning group, has lodged a complaint about alleged bias in the OLR public consultation. The Market Research Standards Council told the FT it was unlikely to decide whether to launch a formal investigation into the complaint until the new year.

But ministers will not wait for the council’s decision before issuing the energy bill, the government has signalled.

Officials told the FT that, should the government decide to go ahead with replacing Britain’s ageing nuclear power stations, there was no reason the bill – expected by the end of the year – should be delayed until after the ruling.

Greenpeace has already legally challenged the government over its perceived pro-nuclear bias, winning a High Court ruling in February that an earlier consultation was “manifestly inadequate and unfair”. The pressure group’s lawyers are now considering whether to issue another legal challenge while waiting for the MRSC ruling.

The fact is - regardless of what the anti-capitalists preach - that access to energy has lifted billions of people out of bleak, subsistence existences in the past century. The current scare tactic of some very mendacious people is that man is causing climate change, therefore the burning of fossil fuels must be stopped. I happen to agree that burning fossil fuels is not a great idea - mostly because fossil fuel is more valuable for other purposes. But the ugly facts of physics make it impossible to rely on the "renewable" energy schemes being pushed. So if carbon is off the table and renewables won't work (and cannot be made to work, regardless of all the wishful thinking) then there is only one thing left right now. That is nuclear power. It seems that Brown realizes that even if Ned Ludd does not.

More Squirrel Arson

Sure, everyone paid attention when the flaming Kamikaze squirrel torched a Toyota. But they called it a freak accident and laughed about it. There's something appealingly appalling about cometary squirrels that briefly got people's attention. But the fact is that the hive mind of the squirrels realize they have found a winning technique against humans: squirrel arson works.

A squirrel who apparently gnawed through some of the wiring inside a wall or ceiling is being blamed for a fire that caused significant damage to all six of the units in one building of the Twin Lakes townhomes late last week.

Sheila Kirkwood, assistant chief of the Whistler Fire Rescue Service (WFRS), on Tuesday (Oct. 30) said the incident should serve as a reminder that homeowners should have electrical systems and attics checked periodically for any problems.

“It’s a good idea to do some regular maintenance. Have an inspection of your crawlspaces and concealed spaces at least once a year,” Kirkwood said. The blaze, which was first reported on Friday (Oct. 26) at around noon, kept 30 to 35 firefighters busy for 5 ? hours. Kirkwood said fighting the blaze, which started inside the wall and/or ceiling of an upper bedroom, was challenging because of the wide variety of wall and ceiling materials used. The building was built in the mid-1980s.

Sure, it's not as spectacular as a detonating Toyota, but more people were impacted this time. Which only means the next attack will be even worse. The hive mind of the squirrels is very unhappy that their chocolate supply has been cut off.

Deer Underground

Wheaton, Maryland got an unpleasant surprise today. A deer showed up on their local metro railway system tracks. What's the big deal, you say? Well, the tracks in question are underground.

WHEATON, Md. — A deer that wandered onto Metro's underground tracks in the Wheaton area caused some delays on the Red Line.

Metro trains came to a stop for a time Sunday morning when the deer was discovered between the Forest Glen and Glenmont stations.

A spokeswoman for the transit agency said the deer frightened some passengers by coming onto the Metro platforms several times.

Why is this important? Simple. The truth is inescapable: deer have learned to tunnel.

Bipartisan Porkery

Led by the irredeemably corrupt Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the defense spending bill now pending before Congress is stuffed with more pork than a rib festival. The old unindicted ABSCAM co-conspirator leads the list of earmark spending, but many others, from both parties, are also cramming in glistening gobbets of fresh pork. About $1.8 billion worth of pork in fact.

Twenty-one members were responsible for about $1 billion in earmarks, or financing for pet projects, according to data lawmakers were required to disclose for the first time this year. Each asked for more than $20 million for businesses mostly in their districts, ranging from major military contractors to little known start-ups.

The list is topped by the veteran earmark champions Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who is the chairman of the powerful defense appropriations subcommittee, and Representative C. W. Bill Young of Florida, the top Republican on the panel, who asked for $166 million and $117 million respectively. It also includes $92 million in requests from Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, a committee member who is under federal investigation for his ties to a lobbying firm whose clients often benefited from his earmarks.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested $32 million in earmarks, while Steny H. Hoyer, the majority leader, asked for $26 million for projects in the $459.6 billion defense bill, the largest of the appropriations bills that go through Congress.

This is a real problem. Not so much for the money itself, as wasteful as that is. But the potential for corruption is immense, as Representative Jeff Flake, Republican from Arizona (and the most unpopular man in Congress because of his unyielding stand on pork) points out:

“Pork hasn’t gone away at all,” said Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, an earmark critic who cites the “circular fund-raising” surrounding many of them. “It would be wonderful if this was a partisan issue, with Republicans on the right side, but it is really not. Many of these companies use money appropriated through earmarks to turn around and lobby for more money. Some of them are just there to receive earmarks.”

They lobby for money to get more money to lobby for money. Nice. Stopping pork is a bipartisan issue, folks. The Democrats are proudly pointing to the fact that pork is down by about half this year. Get rid of it all and you'll have bragging rights. Saying you're only half as corrupt is no great thing.

US Navy Frees Two More Ships From Pirates

The US Navy has freed two more ships from pirates off the Somali coast today. Negotiations are underway to free three more ships.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Somali pirates left two boats they had hijacked in the waters off the Horn of Africa, and the newly liberated vessels — and their crew of 24 — were under U.S. Navy escort on Sunday, the American military said.

A U.S. Navy ship and helicopter were guiding the Tanzanian-flagged boats Mavuno 1 and 2 further out to sea, where naval personnel will later board the vessels and treat crew members, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. The Navy is in radio contact with pirates aboard three other ships in the region, encouraging them also to leave those ships and sail back to Somalia, she told The Associated Press.

"We're very happy with this development and hope it happens with the other ships off the coast," Robertson said. "We're very happy for the crew and their families."

Robertson said the pirates boarded skiffs after they left the hijacked ships, and headed back to Somalia. No shots were fired during the incident, she said. She gave no more details.

The U.S. has now intervened four times in one week to help ships hijacked by Somali pirates. Sailors boarded a North Korean ship to give medical assistance to crew members who overpowered their hijackers, and a Naval vessel fired on pirate skiffs tied to a Japanese-owned ship.

Robertson said that ship was still under control of pirates, although the U.S. Navy was still working to free that ship from pirates. There were no details on the other two seized ships. Hijackings in the vast stretch of water frequently go unreported.

I linked this article about the resurgence of piracy from the Smithsonian Magazine once before. Every story in the news lately mentions that the problem is growing of Somalia. That is a fact, but piracy is actually on the rise all over the world.

Today's pirates range from villainous seaside villagers to members of international crime syndicates. They ply their trade around the globe, from Iraq to Somalia to Nigeria, from the Strait of Malacca to the territorial waters off South America. No vessel seems safe, be it a supertanker or a private yacht. In November 2005, pirates in two speedboats tried to attack the cruise liner Seabourn Spirit off Somalia. The liner's captain, Sven Erik Pedersen, outran them while driving them off with a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD—a sonic weapon the United States military developed after the USS Cole was attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen in 2000.

If you enter an anonymous office 35 floors above Kuala Lumpur's lush tropical streets and pass through a secured door, you will come to a small room dominated by maps of the world taped onto two of the walls. This is the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre, which operates round-the-clock. When pirates attack anywhere in the world, this office almost always receives the first report of it and radios out the first alert. Tens of thousands of vessels depend on the IMB's information.

Red pins mark the latest attacks. On the day I visited, the pins looked like a rash covering much of the world. Another wall was covered with thank-you plaques from the admirals of many nations, including the United States. Noel Choong, who ushered me through this command center, spent more than ten years on oceangoing ships as a mariner. Now, in a dark suit, the soft-spoken Choong looked more like a corporate middle manager than a supersleuth of the seas.

The media is finally paying at least a little attention to this, but their focus is still pretty narrow.

Global Frauding

Christopher Booker and Richard North, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, detail the incredible levels of fraud and deceit behind the global warming scare. The article is a preview of their new book, Scared to Death: From BSE To Global Warming — How Scares Are Costing Us The Earth. The genesis of the entire frenzy, and Al Gores complicity in spreading it is fairly stunning when spelled out this way.

A scare is often set off — as we show in our book with other examples — when two things are observed together and scientists suggest one must have been caused by the other. In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been rising. Perhaps it was this increase that was causing the new warming in the 1980s?

Stage two of the story began in 1988 when, with remarkable speed, the global warming story was elevated into a ruling orthodoxy, partly due to hearings in Washington chaired by a youngish senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 1960s.

But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because in 1988 the UN set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion. First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was to be prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in con-sult-ation with governments and officials — essentially a political document — in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report would not appear.

This contradiction was obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming that the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established. This study came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence. But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policy-makers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, by this time US Vice-President, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing governments to drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best attempts of Mr Gore.

Not the least of his efforts was his bid to suppress an article co-authored by Dr Revelle just before his death. Gore didn't want it to be known that his guru had urged that the global warming thesis should be viewed with more caution.

Read the whole thing. It is an amazing story. I have been posting about many of the fraudulent, ineffective or outright harmful "solutions" to global warming on this site for some time now. I have also been quite clear about my belief that Al Gore is a mendacious hypocrite. Booker and North's analysis of the global warming frenzy only confirms what I have long felt. Please read this article, whether you are a skeptic or a true believer. It may open a few eyes. (I think I have another book on my buy list, too. If I can find it in the US, that is. It is not up on Amazon.)

UPDATE: Others: Neptunus Lex: "There are many things that might be true that, at the end of the day, are simply unverifiable. And therefore unfalsifiable. Which combination takes them out of the realm of science, and into the realm of faith.

Which, we are often reminded, is a poor place from whence to legislate public policy."

Flopping Aces: "Stage five also includes the fact that scientists have started to look at the sun's radiation as being involved in the warming and that the sun's radiation is now leveling off, which may very well presage a downturn in temperature."

The Island Paradise

Jeff Jacoby writes a powerful column today about Doctor Oscar Elias Biscet, a Cuban physician who is imprisoned in Cuba for daring to speak against the Castro regime. Doctor Biscet will be honored, in absentia, with the highest civilian honor of the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His day-to-day routine will not vary, though. He will still be in that broom closet-sized Cuban prison cell.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, has written that the conditions of Biscet's incarceration are like something out of Victor Hugo: "windowless and suffocating, with wretched sanitary conditions. The stench seeping from the pit in the ground that serves as a toilet is intensified by being compressed into an unventilated cell only as wide as a broom closet. . . . Biscet reportedly suffers from osteoarthritis, ulcers, and hypertension. His teeth, those that haven't fallen out, are rotted and infected."

A prolife Christian physician, Biscet first ran afoul of the Castro regime in the 1990s, when he investigated Cuban abortion techniques - Cuba has by far the highest abortion rates in the Western Hemisphere - and revealed that numerous infants had been killed after being delivered alive. In 1997, he began the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, which seeks "to establish in Cuba a state based on the rule of law" and "sustained upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." In 1999, he was given a three-year sentence for "disrespecting patriotic symbols." To protest the regime's repression, he had hung a Cuban flag upside down.

For decades, various American journalists and celebrities have rhapsodized about Castro's supposed island paradise, resolutely ignoring the mountains of evidence that it is in reality a tropical dungeon. Intent on seeing Castro as a revolutionary hero and Cuba as Shangri-la, they avert their gaze from the island's genuine heroes - the prisoners of conscience like Biscet, who pay a fearful price for their insistence on telling the truth.

Yes, the left in America performs interpretive dances to celebrate Fidel Castro. They studiously ignore any Cuban political prisoners. They imagine the suppression that they live under, while appearing on nationwide television to decry their being "silenced". They do not have a clue as to what real silencing is about:

"A screaming mass of soldiers swarming over the circular, stabbing with bayonets, crushing limbs with truncheons and rubber-wrapped chains. The panic of no place to hide, knowing you'll be beaten harder for trying to protect yourself, stomped on for clinging to a pillar or rail, thrown down the stairs for daring to hesitate. . . . The indignity of men whining, begging, whimpering before a skull is cracked, a shoulder yanked from its socket, genitals smashed with the gun butt."

For the families of political prisoners, the cruelties come in other forms, such as the humiliating strip-searches on the rare occasions when a prison visit is permitted. And there is economic privation: Oscar Biscet's wife, Elsa Morejon, is a trained nurse, but she has been barred from holding a professional job in Cuba since 1998.

Michael Moore and his fellow travelers sing the praises of the Cuban medical system, ignoring the realities of what that system is like for the people who actually have to use it. Maybe they should ask Doctor Biscet what he thinks of it.

About That High Fence

"I can be persuaded to have sympathy for people. I can't have sympathy for anyone who breaks the law."

Those are the words of John D. Jenkins, a Democrat, who sits on the Board of Supervisors for Prince William County, Virginia about his vote - along with every, single other member - to deny some services to illegal immigrants and ramp up police enforcement of immigration laws. The Washington Post article looks at the difference in organizational styles of the pro-illegal immigration advocates and those opposed to the lawbreaking. But there is more, I think, to this article.

Opponents of Prince William County's plan to target illegal immigrants tried marches, a boycott and a one-day strike. They organized protest caravans with hundreds of cars and turned out ever-larger crowds for county board meetings. When the plan went before supervisors for a final vote Oct. 16, scores of mostly Hispanic residents lined up to deliver tearful, urgent testimony during a 12-hour public comment period.

The result?

All the supervisors — six Republicans and two Democrats — voted to push ahead with the measures anyway.

The clash over illegal immigration in Prince William has placed several cultural differences on display in recent months. But perhaps none was as stark as the two competing political strategies that drove the debate and shaped public perception, one rooted in a tradition of street protests, the other largely invisible and electronic.

The strategies were deployed by the two organizations that channeled the fears and frustrations of divided county residents to emerge with the loudest voices: Help Save Manassas, which helped draft the county's anti-illegal immigrant policy and applied steady pressure for its adoption, and Mexicans Without Borders, an immigrant advocacy group that deemed the measures racist and took to the streets to say so.

Later in the article there is this, unintended, irony:

Following the defeat, Mexicans Without Borders coordinator Ricardo Juarez stood by his group's tactics, saying they were chosen democratically through community assemblies held after plans for the crackdown were announced. He rejected the idea that marches, protests and other measures were ill-suited for Prince William politics, even though the group's boycott and the one-day strike had scant effect on the local economy.

"The American people express themselves by marching," he said in Spanish. "I've seen a lot of marches in Washington, D.C., that have had nothing to do with immigrants."

"He said in Spanish." He and his group also routinely charge racism is at work. Which is the smear attempted on anyone who opposes illegal immigration these days. That's why I made it quite clear in my post yesterday where I stand. The outcome in Prince William County proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a belief in a high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for people who play by the rules is a political winner.

We do not need a permanent, unassimilated underclass in this nation. We need Americans. It does not matter where they or their ancestors came from originally. It does not matter what their physical attributes are. If they come here, legally, to be Americans then they are welcome. If they are here illegally, they do not belong here. As simple as that.

The Help Save Manassas website is here.