Say A Prayer

If you're a praying person, please say a prayer for Tim Blair. If you're not a praying person, please send him your positive thoughts. Tim will be undergoing cancer surgery next week.

Feeling poorly for some time. Saw a doctor a few weeks ago, who sent me to a specialist, who booked me into hospital for tests.

It’s cancer.

Major abdominal surgery next week. If all goes well, the remaining non-cancerous section of me will be home by early-mid February. No idea yet how long a full recovery might take beyond then. Medical advice is very positive, but that wouldn’t count for much in the absence of care and love from family and friends. I’ve been overwhelmed. I’m lucky.

Say a prayer for his family and friends as well. They will have to be strong for him - and this is a disease that impacts more than just the one diagnosed with it.

Best of luck, Tim. Get well soon.

“We Must Rise To This Challenge”

"For reasons beyond our earthly comprehension, this opportunity, this mandate, has been placed on our generation. We must rise to this challenge," he said. "Our goal is a new Louisiana where success is shared by all Louisianians."

Governor Bobby Jindal, Inauguration address, January 14, 2008

Governor Bobby Jindal took office today, swearing to change business as usual in one of the most corrupt states in the union, Louisiana. Practically his first act in office is to call the legislature into special session to strengthen ethics laws. The special session will begin on February 10, 2008.

Jindal, the nation's first elected Indian-American chief executive and the state's first non-white governor since Reconstruction, thanked past governors for their service — but said it was time to rid the state of its reputation for corrupt government.

"We have the opportunity — born of tragedy but embraced still the same — to make right decades of failure in government," Jindal said.

"In our past, too many politicians looked out for themselves. Too many arms of state and local government did not get results. And the world took note," the new governor said.

Jindal's election puts a new public face on Louisiana politics, often stereotyped as a haven for backslapping good 'ol boys who hold office for decades. The 36-year-old son of Indian immigrants, Jindal is the nation's youngest sitting governor, and many of his top administrators are new to the halls of the Louisiana Capitol.

He takes over from Democrat Kathleen Blanco, who had defeated him four years earlier but whose image was battered by the state's response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. She did not seek re-election.

Blanco attended the inaugural ceremonies with three other former Louisiana governors. The state's only other living ex-governor is Edwin Edwards, who could not attend because he is serving a federal prison sentence on corruption charges.

Congratulations to Governor Jindal and may the people of Louisiana be better off for your efforts. I know a fair number of folks from that state and the corruption there is legendary. I suspect Jindal will have a fairly large amount of opposition. But the overwhelming victory he won says that the people are sick of the same, old ways of politics in that state.

Definitions

American Updated Political Dictionary - hyp·o·crite       (h?p'?-kr?t')  n.  

   1. Bill Clinton

   2. A person given to hipocrisy (see 1.)

The absolutely astonishing thing that he says stuff like this with a straight face - and the media continues to allow him to slide instead of going bonkers on him.

"I've got before me a list of 80 attacks on Hillary that are quite personal by Sen. Obama and his campaign going back six months that I've had pulled," he said, speaking to CNN contributor Roland Martin on WVON-AM's "The Roland S. Martin Show" based in Chicago, Illinois.

On the program, Martin played a recording of comments Sunday by Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson that appeared to criticize Obama's admitted past drug use.

Johnson later said he was referring to Obama's community organizing efforts.

"When you listen to that tone and the inflection, he was not talking about community organizing. It seemed to be very clear what he was implying," Martin said.

The former president said Johnson needs to be "taken at his word," adding that "nobody knew" what he would say and "it wasn't part of any planned strategy."

"This, to me, is another example of [the Obama campaign] wanting a double standard," he said.

Clinton went on to say comments from Obama's campaign in the aftermath of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination were "a lot worse" than what Johnson said.

Obama's campaign implied that some of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy decisions helped exacerbate problems in Pakistan.

The ex-president said his wife's way of handling attacks showed a clear difference from Obama. "She didn't complain about it," he said. "She just said, 'I disagree' and went on."

The senator from New York did respond then, saying she regretted that Obama's campaign "would be politicizing this tragedy, and especially at a time when we do need to figure out a way forward."

It really is pathological. (They have a video segment at the link with Martin discussing what is happening between the two campaigns and he is reading the situation the same way I am. It is the Clinton camp trying to provoke this.) One thing I do see going on here is that the media - while still afraid to call Clinton out on his bull - is beginning to act like it may be time to turn on him. Because they have got to be sick of covering for this man at this point.

Live By Identity Politics….

…Die by identity politics? In the political sense, that is. Matt Bai writes in the NYT Caucus blog that the Clintons are very much risking their political deaths by their all-out attacks on Barack Obama.

Just this weekend, after all the recent attacks against Barack Obama involving his kindergarten essay and cocaine, the “fairy tale” of his antiwar stance, we found out that the Nevada teacher’s union with ties to the Clintons is suing to keep workers on the Vegas Strip from being able to caucus in their workplaces, since most of those workers belong to unions that have endorsed Mr. Obama.

Meanwhile, Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, made yet another elliptical reference to Mr. Obama having used cocaine. Mr. Johnson tried to walk it back yesterday by saying that he was only referring to Mr. Obama’s days as a community organizer when he said Mr. Obama “was doing something in the neighborhood — and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book… .” Sure, because community organizing is not the kind of thing you’d want to speak of in public, with children around. Better to let people find out on their own.

What’s most confounding about this latest turn into ugliness, though, is the Clintons’ remarkable capacity to cast themselves as the victims in every fight. And so here is Hillary Rodham Clinton accusing Barack Obama of somehow injecting race into the campaign, because she found herself in a world of trouble for her own comments about Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson. Now, I really do think she was intending only to make a sensible point about the value of experience in the White House, but look, the Clintons embody the generation that invented identity politics and political correctness. If Mrs. Clinton couldn’t guess at how that comment was going to land in the black community, then she must have been suffering amnesia.

I wrote last week about how Mr. Obama was facing a perilous moment in his campaign. It seems to me that the same is true of the Clintons, and they may need to step back and briefly reflect. Both Clintons now find themselves in an unfamiliar reality, the kind of all-out war for the nomination that Bill Clinton twice managed to avoid. They will get all kinds of advice from people whose career opportunities are at stake and who will do or say anything to win. They are surrounded by overzealous politicians and interest groups willing do whatever it takes to shut down Barack Obama and deliver their states to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

She may come out of this fight as the "winner" but how much is that victory going to cost? How many burned bridges and scorched earth will be left in the wake of it? Bai offers some good advice that the Clintons will, being the Clintons, ignore. Bai thinks the risks are incredible in the path the Clintons are heading down. Their entire political legacy - such as it is - is about to come down around their ears. Bai thinks that's bad, I kind of think it's finally coming around for them.

New England Pounded By Heavy Snow

After the snowiest December on record, some areas of New England are being buried anew under up to 14 inches of snow. Schools and roads are closed all across the region.

Following the snowiest December on record in some parts of the region, and a spell of spring-like warmth, meteorologists said as much as 14 inches of snow was possible in southern New Hampshire and areas west and north of Boston.

Many communities declared snow emergencies in advance of the storm and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino ordered only essential city employees to report to work.

Snow piled up quickly with 11 inches by late morning at Winchendon, in north-central Massachusetts, and in South Casco, Maine, the National Weather Service said. Pine Plains, N.Y., near the Connecticut state line, reported 7 inches, and Burlington, Conn., had 6.5 inches. The Boston area had about 5.

"The story is it's a fast moving storm," said Bill Boynton, spokesman for the New Hampshire Department of Transportation. "Not only is it limiting visibility, but it's also coming down at a pace that we can't keep up with in terms of getting bare roads."

Kaj Munic was up at 4:30 a.m. plowing the heavy, wet snow off driveways in Columbia, Conn. "You have to hit most places at least twice," said Munic, a 59-year-old contractor.

Inquiring minds want to know if Al Gore has been up there recently. The Midwest, meanwhile, is being hit with yet another brutal Arctic cold front with temperatures expected to drop 20-30 degrees over today's already chilly temperatures. It's gonna be a three dog (plus an electric blanket) kind of night across most of the region.

Cuts No Ice

I've sent off an email to the reporter of this story in today's Washington Post as well as one to my contact at ICECAP. The report is quite lurid with a shouting headline: Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica.

Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.

While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth's ice, and until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years — as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.

"Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it's losing more," said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Without a doubt, that last statement is incorrect - according to NASA data. Last year saw the largest extent of Antarctic ice since record keeping began. There is also the physical data from the Cryosphere Today website - which uses NASA data - that says that the amount of ice is increasing with an obvious upward trend. Two pictures say it all:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg

This one says this year is deviating from the mean - but in the opposite direct of that reported in the Post:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg

There is currently about one million square kilometers more ice than the annual average for this time of year - summer down there.

UPDATE: ICECAP has a post up via Junk Science that shows a strong cooling trend in the Antarctic region supposedly suffering ice loss.

Depraved Indifference

The captain of a ship protesting Japanese whaling in Antarctic waters is openly threatening to ram any Japanese ship it catches in whaling operations. This is in brutally cold conditions where anyone who goes into the water would have little chance of survival. But he feels he has a "mandate" to threaten what amounts to premeditated murder.

Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd's ship, said the leading Japanese vessel, the Nisshin Maru, was now outside the hunting area and had not killed any whales in the past 48 hours.

"I think they're running scared really," he told AFP via telephone from on board the ship.

"When we found them originally they were down by the icebergs and as we were moving in they started running and they've been running ever since."

In response to a question, Watson confirmed he would ram the Japanese fleet if his ship came upon them killing whales.

But he added: "It is something we have to do very carefully because it's very remote and rough waters down here."

Australia, which has led international opposition to the hunt, has warned environmentalists against dangerous manoeuvres in the ice-cold conditions due to the difficulty of any rescue operation.

Sorry, pal. That crosses the line into terrorism, not activism. You do not, as you claim, have a "right" to damage their equipment and if you kill someone with your "direct action" you will very likely spend the rest of your days in prison. Or maybe you'll be the one thrown into the water to die of exposure. You might have 15 minutes or so to reflect on your actions before those actions killed you.

Forget Mall Rats

If you thought herds of teenage mall rats were causing problems, you haven't been keeping up with the latest news. The real danger is not mall rats, but herds of mall deer. They're rampaging through shopping malls, knocking over jewelry stores.

A herd of deer tore through the Trappe Shopping Center.  One of the deer crashed through the front window at Shin Brothers Jewelers.  It frantically ran around inside, slamming into a glass door and knocking over displays before finally finding its way out.

Witnesses say the deer joined the rest of its buddies and the herd ran off.  They seemed to be OK.

Obviously, the Animal Uprising™ is hard up for funds and is resorting to smash and grab raids.

EU Suddenly Awakens

The European Union has suddenly come to the realization that their biofuel mandates are causing more harm than good. They are having to completely retool their guidelines.

Europe's environment chief has admitted that the EU did not foresee the problems raised by its policy to get 10% of Europe's road fuels from plants.

Recent reports have warned of rising food prices and rainforest destruction from increased biofuel production.

The EU has promised new guidelines to ensure that its target is not damaging.

EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said it would be better to miss the target than achieve it by harming the poor or damaging the environment……

…..Since then reports have warned that some biofuels barely cut emissions at all - and others can lead to rainforest destruction, drive up food prices, or prompt rich firms to drive poor people off their land to convert it to fuel crops.

I've been pointing these things out for quite a while here at Blue Crab Boulevard. Eventually, I think the EU - and hopefully the US - will come to see that this "solution" is worse than the problem it is supposed to fix.

Chicago Tribune: Don’t Mess With The Economy

An editorial in the Chicago Tribune warns candidates - from both parties - that trying to "stimulate" the economy right now is a very bad idea. Not only will meddling likely do no good, it actually may do long term damage.

People in Washington rarely need an excuse to spend money, so when they have a particularly timely pretext, taxpayers should be even warier than usual. Like now, for instance. With the economy showing signs of a slowdown, possibly even a recession, there are growing calls for Congress to perk it up with a fiscal stimulus package. But at this point, the risks of rushing to the rescue are at least as great as the risks of holding off.

No one doubts the economy is wheezing. December retail sales were down, unemployment is rising, housing starts and new home sales are way off, and the subprime mortgage crisis hangs over everything. But there is no clear consensus that a recession is on the way.

One reason is that the Federal Reserve Board has taken steps to address the danger. Most notably, it has repeatedly cut interest rates on the loans it makes, and last week Chairman Ben Bernanke indicated it will make even deeper cuts. That course runs the risk of fueling inflation, but it encourages borrowing and spending, which should combat weakness in the overall economy.

They point out that virtually every plan being touted by the various candidates has serious drawbacks. About the only course they see as useful is to try to reform the tax code - which may do some good in the short term, but will certainly pay off in the long run.

Any of the plans that are being trotted out that rely on borrowing money will have a long term, negative impact. It won't actually improve anything, just defer the problems for a short time. Then compound them with additional government debt. That isn't a good idea, no matter how you look at it. Let the Fed handle it - that is what they are there for.

The Knives Come Out

The New York Times reports on just how ugly the battle between the Clinton and Obama campaigns is getting. And the situation is getting ugly indeed.

In a tense day of exchanges by the candidates and their supporters, Mrs. Clinton suggested on Sunday that Mr. Obama’s campaign, in an effort to inject race into the contest, distorted remarks she had made about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mr. Obama tartly dismissed Mrs. Clinton’s suggestion, adding that “the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign then attacked Mrs. Clinton for failing to repudiate one of her top black supporters for “engaging in the politics of destruction” with an apparent reference to Mr. Obama’s acknowledged drug use in the past. And throughout the day, supporters of Mrs. Clinton and of Mr. Obama each accused the other of injecting race in search of political gain.

The exchanges created apprehension among many of their supporters who viewed this moment — if perhaps inevitable, given the nature of the contest — as divisive for Democrats. At the same time, it offered a portrait of a party struggling through entirely unfamiliar terrain that has been brought into relief by Mr. Obama’s victory in Iowa and Mrs. Clinton’s in New Hampshire.

Two factors have helped create the atmosphere in which race and gender are coming to play a more prominent role. The first is that Democrats now increasingly view both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton as credible and electable candidates, given their victories.

To me, it certainly looks like the Clinton campaign is the one pushing the buttons here, Obama not so much. (The Times sees that, too. They say it is Clinton who is playing the gender card and it is obviously Clinton's surrogates who are on the attack.) But there is real danger to the Democrats in this type of divisive attack politics being played completely internally. If the Republican candidates are smart, they will steer clear of this kind of nasty infighting. If they do, they stand a chance of differentiating themselves from this kind of political madness. That will offer voters a clear choice in November.