Distractions

Charles Krauthammer weighs in on Barack Obama's definition of the word distraction and points out that Obama's "distractions" look an awful lot like character flaws - Obama's character flaws, that is.

Obamaphiles are even more exercised about the debate question regarding the flag pin. Now, I have never worn one. Whether anyone does is a matter of total indifference to me. But apparently not to Obama. He's taken three affirmative steps in regard to flag pins. After Sept. 11, he began wearing one. At a later point, he stopped wearing it. Then last year he explained why: because it "became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security."

Apart from the self-congratulatory fatuousness of that statement — as if in this freest of all countries, political self-expression is somehow scarce or dangerous or a sign of patriotic courage — to speak of pin-wearing as a sign of inauthentic patriotism is to make an issue of it yourself. For Obamaphiles to now protest the very asking of the question requires a fine mix of cynicism and self-righteousness.

But Obama needs to cast out such questions as illegitimate distractions because they are seriously damaging his candidacy. As people begin to learn about this just-arrived pretender, the magic dissipates. He spent six weeks in Pennsylvania. Outspent Hillary more than 2 to 1. Ran close to 10,000 television ads — spending more than anyone in any race in the history of the state — and lost by 10 points.

This one is a must read. The excerpt barely scratched the surface of what Krauthammer pounds on Obama for in this column. From Obama's dismissal of small town Americans to his defense of the indefensibly wrong Reverend Wright, Krauthammer nails the real distractions Obama is using. Trying to distract people from his own behavior and questionable associates.

The Smoke-Filled Broom Closet

Apparently, Harry Reid has decided that it is his duty to force the selection of the Democratic Party nominee. So Reid, Pelosi and Screamin' Howie Dean will, according to Reid, force the decision.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday that he may have to push undecided superdelegates to make their decisions in the Democratic presidential race, if the contest stretches into June.

Reid said he would consider writing a joint letter with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) demanding that superdelegates make their endorsements public.

“The three of us, we may write a joint letter [to superdelegates],” said Reid. “We might do individual letters. We are in contact with each other.”

Reid's comments suggest that the party’s top three officials are contemplating a high-level intervention if the primary season concludes in June without a nominee and many superdelegates still undecided.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.)'s 9-point victory over Sen. Barack Obama (D-ill.) in Tuesday's Pennsylvania Democratic primary means that the contentious nomination fight will likely continue into the summer. As the race continues to tighten, the decisions of the undecided superdelegates could determine the final outcome.

 

Both Dean and Reid have made no secret of their desire to see the nomination fight end by the end of June.

This is funny on so many levels. The smoke-filled room is really, really small this year, apparently. Best of all, if their chosen one fails to win the election, my prediction comes true: Reid and Pelosi (and Dean, too) will be utterly vilified by the rank and file of the party.

Carry on, Harry. By all means, carry on.

Presented With No Further Comment

warns Arctic ice melting faster than predicted

MONTREAL (AFP) - Arctic sea ice is melting "significantly faster" than predicted and is approaching a point of no return, conservation group the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned in a new study.
 
The volumes of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ice in the Arctic Ocean were estimated at 2.9 million and 4.4 million cubic metres respectively in September 2007 — the lowest ever levels recorded, the organization said Wednesday.

The sea ice shrank to 39 percent below its 1979-2000 mean volume, it said.

Cryosphere Today on this date.

The Iron Law

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal pronounces Hillary Clinton's campaign over. Primarily the defeat can be blamed on two things: what Henninger calls the "iron law of Democratic primary politics" and filthy lucre. What is the "iron law", you ask? Simple:

No centrist can secure the party's nomination in a primary system dominated by left-liberal activists. The iron law produces candidacies such as McGovern (1972), Mondale ('84), Dukakis ('88), Gore ('00) or Kerry ('04), who pay so many left-liberal obeisances to win in the primaries that they cannot attract sufficient moderates at the margins to win the general election.

But what is the other big reason, then? Why it is money. Cold hard cash and lots of it.

Money. Barack Obama's mystical pull on people is nice, but nice in modern politics comes after money. Once Barack proved conclusively that he could raise big-time cash, the Clintons' strongest tie to their machine began to unravel. Today he's got $42 million banked. She's got a few million north of nothing.

That is why Hillary will never sit in the big chair in the Oval Office. More so than even the iron law. But said law may well be enough to end the chances of Barack Obama ever sitting in that chair, either. Despite the money, he has run well left of where the majority of the country is comfortable. The protracted fight with Clinton has made him stay far to the left even as he should have been trying more for the center as people begin paying attention to the elections.

Misguided Misfires

Steve Chapman points out the absurdity of recent statements by the Chicago Police Superintendent, Jody Weis. In response to a spate of gun violence in Chicago, Weis is - for completely unknown reasons - calling for a ban on "assault weapons." How many of the shootings involved that type of weapon? Exactly one.

If there are too many guns in Chicago, it's not because of any statutory oversight. The city has long outlawed the sale and possession of handguns. It also forbids assault weapons. If prohibition were the answer, no one would be asking the question.

The recent spate of killings gives a misleading impression. Since the peak years of the early 1990s, the number of murders in Chicago has fallen by more than half. In the first three months of this year, homicides were down by 1.1 percent. No one would describe the current murder rate as acceptable, but the city has made huge progress.

It has done so despite the alleged problem cited by Weis, which is the availability of guns, and particularly one type of gun. "There are just too many weapons here," he declared at a Sunday news conference. "Why in the world do we allow citizens to own assault rifles?"

Actually, in Chicago "we" don't allow citizens to own assault rifles. Elsewhere they are allowed for the same reason other firearms are permitted. The gun Weis villainized is a type of semiautomatic that has a fearsome military appearance but is functionally identical to many legal sporting arms.

And its bark is worse than its bite. As of March 31, there had been 87 homicides in the city. When I asked the Chicago Police Department how many of the murders are known to have involved assault rifles, the answer came back: one.

Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Citizens of that state cannot get a carry permit - period. The so-called assault weapons are nothing of the sort, either. Most Americans cannot own a weapon capable of full automatic fire. Yet Weis is misdirecting on the cause of Chicago's problem. Many people have pointed out that the "assault weapon" ban passed by the Clinton administration was really nothing but an ugly gun ban. Instead of blaming ugly guns, maybe Weis could try enforcing the laws already on the books and cracking down on the criminals. Just a thought.

UPDATE: The Agenda is out on full display as Bob Owens has already noted.

Syrian Nuclear Video

This is a strange story. Remember the sneak attack by Israel on a site in Syria last year? Well, it seems that the Israelis showed Washington a video of North Koreans inside the facility - which just happens to be almost identical to the North Korean reactor facility at Yongbyon, right down to the number of holes for fuel rods.

The officials said the video of the remote site, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, shows North Koreans inside. It played a pivotal role in Israel's decision to bomb the facility late at night last Sept. 6, a move that was publicly denounced by Damascus but not by Washington.

Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core's design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows "remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon," a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video "very, very damning."…..

…..David Albright, president of Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said the absence of such evidence warrants skepticism that the reactor was part of an active weapons program.

"The United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation facilities or nuclear weaponization facilities," he said. "The lack of any such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor is part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent lack of fuel, either imported or indigenously produced, also is curious and lowers confidence that Syria has a nuclear weapons program."

Now that is one weird statement. The absence of fuel in the presence of what certainly appears to be a reactor should not lead one to conclude that there is no weapons program. Rather, it should lead one to believe that the Syrians hadn't fueled the reactor yet. Albright's statement is akin to claiming that a man carrying a machine gun isn't armed if he doesn't have bullets in it. (One doubts such a defense would work in a court.) Wikipedia had a picture of the top of the reactor at Yongbyon. Perhaps Mr. Albright could explain what in the world the Syrians could have been planning to use such a facility for if not for plutonium production.

Side note: This paints Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria in an even worse light. And kind of points to the silliness of Barack Obama's grasp of how to deal with thugs.

Losing At Winning

Charlie Cook calls the situation Hillary Clinton is in political purgatory. She can't win, she can't break even and she pretty much can't quit the game.

The good news for Hillary Rodham Clinton is that she’s winning a lot of battles. The bad news is that the war is pretty much lost. Sure, she won Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary by a strong 9 points in the face of being outspent on television ads by Barack Obama 2-to-1. She also won Ohio, Rhode Island, and at least the primary part of the bizarre “Texas two-step” primary-and-caucus combination on March 4. But today, she is 133 delegates behind Obama, 1,728 to 1,595, according to NBC News. At this point last week, she trailed by 136 delegates. Since then Clinton has scored a net gain of 10 delegates in Pennsylvania, according to NBC, but has lost a few more superdelegates, so she has made little headway.

If this contest were still at the point where momentum, symbolism, and reading tea leaves mattered, Clinton would be in pretty good shape. Everything she has needed to happen is happening now. Obama is getting tougher press coverage and critical examination. He’s also getting rattled a bit, and he didn’t perform well in the recent debate in Philadelphia. Clinton is winning in big, important places, but it’s happening about three months too late.

Cook writes that Clinton simply cannot quit while she is winning in the big states. But it is just about over for her - the win in Pennsylvania only netted her about 10 delegates after you subtract the superdelegates who jumped over to Obama. But if you think she's in a bad way right now, just wait until the fallout she will suffer if Obama gets the nomination then fails to win in the general election. She'll be blamed for that, even though the real fault is the bizarre nominating process the Democrats have in place.

Luke, I Am Your …… Worst Nightmare

Founding a new religion can be a bit rough, apparently. But then, when you base your liturgy on the teachings of a movie prop puppet what can you expect? Yes, Jonba Hehol was finally attacked by a badly-dressed Darth Vader impersonator. One wielding a metal crutch instead of a light saber.

A judge has issued a warrant for the arrest of a Darth Vader impersonator who allegedly attacked two Star Wars fans in their own back garden.

Arwel Wynne Jones, who was dressed in a black bin liner and shiny black helmet, is accused of assaulting Barney and Michael Jones while they were being interviewed for a TV documentary about their love of the films.

Barney Jones (or, as he styles himself for his priestly duties, Jonba Hehol) is one of the founders of the British Jedi Church - which I have posted about before. To update my conclusion about the last post, not only is said Jedi priest seriously in need of a life, it would appear he could also use a good suit of full plate armor.

It's not easy being a puppet messiah.

Catch 22 And A Half

Drought strikes. People, exhorted by the politicians and functionaries of municipal utilities exert themselves and conserve water. Then comes the reward for all their scrimping on water: Massive fee increases because the water authorities didn't make enough money what with people saving water and all.

ATLANTA — Many residents of the Southeast who sacrificed greener lawns and longer showers to reduce water usage during the region's historic drought are now seeing the other shoe drop: They're being hit with sharp rate increases as water utilities scramble to make up revenue lost because of conservation measures.
The drought is lessening across much of the region, and the most severe outdoor watering restrictions have been eased in places such as Atlanta, Charlotte and South Florida. Now come the heftier water bills.

Among the price hikes:

•Atlanta's water utility, facing hundreds of millions of dollars in bond debt for a $3.9 billion update of its sewer and water systems, is seeking a 15% rate increase to offset conservation losses; other water utilities in metropolitan Atlanta are likely to follow suit if usage stays low.

"We're estimating a $33 million-a-year loss because of the drop in revenue from people conserving," says Janet Ward, spokeswoman for Atlanta's Department of Watershed Management. "That's the Catch-22 that we're in. People conserve, and you're so proud of them. Then you say, 'But wait, you're going to get hit with a bigger bill for conserving.' "

(My sister lives in Atlanta. I just have to ask her her opinion about this.) Many Florida residents are seeing a drought surcharge added to their water bills that adds about 15% to their bills. That seems to be the magic number all through the story. If you did the right thing and conserved, you get hit with a penalty of 15%. If you didn't do the right thing and wasted water - you get hit with a 15% penalty.

Anyone paying attention here? What is the lesson the water authorities just sent? The next time they call for conservation, people are going to tell them where to put their pleas.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.

An Embarrassing Performance

[I bumped this for an update.] 

Yes, I'm talking about the Pennsylvania primary. No, I'm not talking about Barrack Obama.

I've had running battles (on other sites) about what I viewed as godawful polling practices by an outfit out of North Carolina called Public Policy Polling. Anyone who has had political science training could look at the crosstabs for their polls and see countless red flags. For starters, the weighting that they gave to black voters and to the Philadelphia area seemed all out of proportion to the actual demographics of the state or any historical precedent. Also, the fact they kept the raw numbers hidden from scrutiny was also troubling for anyone trying to gauge them from the perspective of the social sciences. There is nothing wrong with weighting your polls, but you should give people the opportunity to scrutinize them without having to engage in reverse engineering.

There were 39 polls released about the Pennsylvania primary since April 1st. A grand total of three of these polls had Obama in the lead, Clinton led in 35 of the others with one saying it was a tie. All three of the polls that had Obama in front were the handiwork of PPP (last of the three, a massive survey of 2338 likely Democratic voters with a +/- of only 2% -supposedly- here.) In a sense this isn't surprising after you look at the client list for PPP. I conducted searches to see who the majority of PPP clients had endorsed for the Democratic nomination. There were copious Obama endorsements, but not a single Clinton endorsement. Now, this might just be a hell of a coincidence, but given the tightness of the nomination fight that seems a little unlikely. It seems more likely that PPP as an outfit are not simply Democratic pollsters, but pro-Obama (or anti-Clinton) pollsters.

Such a view is confirmed by the actual results in Pennsylvania tonight (at this moment Clinton ahead 10% points with 96% reporting.) PPP's polls, which had Obama ahead by 3%, were not just wrong they were terrible, if the purpose of a poll is to measure a larger population accurately. Of course, if accurate measurement was not the goal of these "polls", well then maybe it is mission accomplished.

Crossposted at The Iconic Midwest

UPDATED: PPP responds to the obvious.  Where Did We Go Wrong?

The networks have called it for Hillary and I think after Florida in 2000 they're not going to make that mistake again, so obviously our polls were wrong.

First off, please do not call us or e-mail us and tell us we suck! We are well aware, and it does not feel good.

….

It's pretty easy, based on the exit polls, to see where we went wrong. We had the black vote at 18% when it turned out to be 14-15%, and we had the under 45 vote at 41% when it turned out to be 31%.

….

Looks like the two areas where we were particularly off, as might have been expected, were with white women and senior citizens. We showed the race too close with both of those groups in our final poll, and Hillary ended up winning them by the kind of large margin that would have been expected.

See, they only misweighted the black vote, the youth vote, the white woman vote and the senior citizen vote.

Otherwise they were solid.

Our Myopic Scientists

This is not encouraging: Few now doubt global warming

Among scientists in two fields that focus closely on climate—geophysics and meteorology—few now doubt that the planet is warming or that human activity is to blame, even though views diverge on the dangers posed, says a new survey released by the Statistical Assessment Service at George Mason University.

Of the 489 Earth and atmospheric scientists surveyed by Harris Interactive, 97 percent said that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years, and 74 percent agreed that "currently available scientific evidence substantiates the occurrence of human-induced greenhouse warming." The findings mark a significant increase in concern over climate change since 1991, when a Gallup survey of the same universe of scientists showed only 60 percent agreed that temperatures were up and 41 percent believed that evidence pointed to human activity as the cause.

The scientists were about evenly divided on whether they thought the effects of global climate change over the next 50 to 100 years were likely to be near catastrophic (41 percent) or moderately dangerous (44 percent). About 13 percent saw relatively little danger. About 56 percent of the scientists said that global climate change was a mature science, while 39 percent termed it an emerging science.

The subservience of science to ideology is, more or less, now complete. 

This couldn't have come at a worse time since we may be entering into an era of climate change that will actually put us into peril.  Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

Here is the current photo of the sun discussed above:

Unlike a lot of the uncertain science behind the global warming hysteria, the connection of sunspot activity and solar cycles to earth's climate is well established.  Unfortunately, in this day and age of pop media scrutiny, many scientists seem to be unwilling to challenge the "in crowd."

For that we might all suffer.

Is The End Near For Robert Mugabe’s Regime?

In what could well be a sign that Robert Mugabe's nightmarish misrule of Zimbabwe may be coming to an end, a Chinese shipment of arms to Zimbabwe has been turned away. Other African nations and organizations banded together to frustrate the planned delivery.

JOHANNESBURG, April 22 — A Chinese ship carrying weapons and ammunition for Zimbabwe's military may be headed back home, reports said, after repeated attempts to deliver its cargo were frustrated by a coalition of legal activists, union workers and human rights groups.

The region's resistance to the shipment, which drew praise from the United States on Tuesday, marks a dramatic turn from southern Africa's traditional embrace of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and its reverence for national sovereignty.

It also signals the strength of South Africa's mounting backlash against President Thabo Mbeki's traditionally deferential dealings with Mugabe. The resistance from union workers, almost all of whom are members of his African National Congress, was decisive in preventing the ship from unloading its cargo of bullets and mortars on schedule.

The 489-foot An Yue Jiang was near the Cape of Good Hope on Tuesday night, headed northwest at a modest speed, according to Lloyd's Marine Intelligence Unit, based in London. But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said that because the shipment could not be unloaded, despite being part of a "perfectly normal trade," the cargo would probably return to China. Jiang added that she hoped the incident would not be "politicized."

Too late for that, I'm afraid. It has already become a political issue. For once, Mugabe is on the short end of the deal, too. The ship is carrying some three million rounds of ammunition as well as mortars. The shipment has not left the vicinity yet, however, so it is too early to tell if this is over yet. Still, it is encouraging that other African nations are refusing to allow the shipment into their ports.

Barely Double Digit Win

CNN is now reporting that Hillary Clinton won in Pennsylvania by a 10% margin, 55% to Barack Obama's 45%. This despite huge expenditures by the Obama campaign. ABC News is asking the same thing I did last night, though: is it enough?

Clinton's Pennsylvania victory fuels questions about why Obama hasn't been able to sew up the nomination, despite having more money, having won more states and having a lead in the popular vote and pledged delegates, according to ABC News' delegate scorecard.

The pressure was on Clinton today to win by a large margin. She won 55 percent of the vote, to Obama's 45 percent, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting.

"Hillary Clinton needs a clear and convincing victory today in Pennsylvania if she wants to continue on in this nominating process," Democratic strategist Tad Devine told ABC News this morning.

With neither candidate able to get the 2,025 delegates needed to win the party's nomination, tonight's win in Pennsylvania will bolster Clinton's argument to superdelegates — the 795 Democratic party officials and members of Congress who may ultimately decide the nomination.

As the results pour in, pundits, Democratic superdelegates, and the media will characterize whether Clinton won by a large enough margin of victory. Devine and other Democrats have long argued the New York senator needed to win the Keystone State over Obama by double digits, and dig into Obama's delegate lead.

"If she wins by 10 points or more, it will be viewed as a clear and convincing victory, but if it's closer than that, it will be less than a clear and convincing victory," Devine said.

Well, she got the 10 point win despite Obama's huge investment. Hillary Clinton says she was outspent in Pennsylvania by a three-to-one margin. But for all that, the relative delegate count has changed very little. As much as the Democrat's leaders would like it to be, this is not over yet. And there appears to be little hope of a conclusion before the convention, either.

Hillary Pulls It Off

Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary, CNN reports. The margin is slim at the moment with only an 8-point lead with about 50% of the precincts reporting. But she's aliiiiive.

Clinton's victory will make a dent in Obama's lead, but the size of the dent depends on the margin of victory.

"If she wins Pennsylvania by a hefty margin, she can prove she can win the traditional Democratic constituencies needed to win the election, mostly white working-class voters," said Gloria Borger, a CNN senior political analyst.

Could a double-digit victory make Clinton the comeback kid once again?

"If Clinton wins by more than 10 points, which was her margin in neighboring Ohio and New Jersey, her campaign will have new momentum and she will soldier on," said Bill Schneider, also a CNN senior political analyst.

The Obamaniacs will, of course, go postal over this. Is this enough for her to win? Probably not unless she sweeps the remaining contests. But she is still in. Obama did not get the knockout he needed. That should be making superdelegates worried. Obama has failed to get the knockout a number of times now in the primaries. How does that portend for the general election?

Not well, I think.

Funny, this is not up over at Memeorandum yet.

UPDATE: I guess those Catholics must have clung to Hillary;

Practicing Pennsylvania Catholics (weekly massgoers, by the canonical definition) made up 17 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. They went 71 to 28 percent for Hillary over Obama. Non-practicing Catholics made up 18 percent of the Democratic vote, and they went for Hillary 65 to 35 percent.

It would appear that the jinx held in Pennsylvania. Gaffes count.

Four Thousand Holes In Blackburn, Lancashire

What does that Beatles lyric have to do with this rather odd story from Britain? Nothing whatsoever other than location, but it came to mind when I read about the battling brothers and a Shepherd's pie.

After a day spent drinking, Michael Garvin cooked his brother John the traditional English dish for dinner, expecting a grateful response.

John, however, voiced his disquiet that the pie was not topped with a layer of sliced tomatoes.

His brother, a chef, claimed a layer of tomatoes was not the appropriate way to finish off a shepherd’s pie, and responded by hitting him over the head with a shovel.

As the argument got out of control, John threatened to petrol bomb his brother’s flat and was arrested.

Apparently, he wanted the pie well done. Forget the argument over a layer of tomatoes, however. The real important thing is whether the shepherd was fresh, isn't it?