CASH FOR CLOTURE

Harry Reid bribed his way to cloture on the Senate healthcare bill.

Well, in Mary Landrieu’s case at least, it’s not bribery; it’s logrolling ... a time-honored Congressional tradition.

WELL SAID

The New York Times tells Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds to ”STFU.” Commenter datechguy (8:39 pm) responds “There was a time about 7 or 8 years ago when Instapundit had a quote at the top that called him the “New York Times of bloggers” ... if the New York Times wanted to regain it’s former status as an actual respected and believed source of news it should strive to become the ‘Instapundit of Newspapers’.”

More.

CLIMATEGATE

Lord Monckton calls it criminal. If the climate-controllers succeed, it should be genocide.

AL GORE WAS RIGHT

Global warming is anthropogenic – the data was rigged:

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

Is there a Nobel Prize for lying?

TEACHING IDEOLOGY

All cultural biases aren’t created equal:

Katherine Kersten wonders when ... universities began demanding ideological purity as a prerequisite to attaining a degree. The University of Minnesota will apparently demand that its education graduates, the future teachers of Minnesota, confess to their own bigotry if they believe in the American dream of equal opportunity as a means to cleanse the Minnesota education system of cultural biases.

What happened to reading, writing, and arithmetic?

[Update] FIRE has taken notice.

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

A first look at the climate model computer codes:

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU’s code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU’s climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: “I feel for this guy. He’s obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources.”

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

Maybe the codes are not as sophisticated as we have been led to believe.

BLOGGER ASSISTS NEW YORK TIMES

Mark Steyn reports on a reader's offer to help the New York Times with it's ClimateGate reporting.

Dear Mr. Broder,

Very nice article today on the upcoming Copenhagen meeting. I've heard about the cutbacks at the NYT and I guess it's gotten so bad that they no longer allow internet access to reporters. So my news tip is that apparently, there's some kind of development regarding the scientists behind the global warming data, involving emails or something like that. Some of the papers in the UK are reporting on it and even a few here. If you are not permitted to go online to find them, I could email you a few examples in pdf format. Even better, I could download the file containing the emails and other documents themselves, burn them onto a CD, mail the CD to you, and then once you had access to the primary source material you and your colleagues would be able to do your own reporting and investigating. None of this is to imply in any way that this stuff I've heard about could have any possible relevance to a meeting aimed at a global warming agreement based on conclusions based on data that may have been — let's call them ambiguous. Just thought you might be curious is all, and I'm always happy to help out when I can.

Via Instapundit.

AWASH IN FOSSIL FUELS

According to George Will, the world is awash in fossil fuel.

Such good news horrifies people who relish scarcity because it requires -- or so they say -- government to ration what is scarce and to generally boss people to mend their behavior: “This is the police! Put down that incandescent bulb and step away from the lamp!” ...[T]here is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism.

I’ve posted on the ecological insanity of environmentalism, and Will is right. The exact quantity of fossil energy notwithstanding, the world needs to generate and use more energy, not less. The choice is stark: America’s standard of living -- or Somalia’s.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Or intended?

Obamacare May Target Gun Owners.

I don’t really think so, but the text referred to is disturbing.

The Vookh Conspiracy has more:

The rules for a “Wellness Program” begin on page 87. In brief, if you participate in a Wellness Program, you can get a health insurance premium discount of up to 30%. Stated another way, if you don’t participate in a Wellness Program, you will pay a substantial insurance rate penalty for not doing so. The definition of a “Wellness Program” begins in paragraph (B) on page 88:

(B) The wellness program shall be reasonably designed to promote health or prevent disease. A program complies with the preceding sentence if the program has a reasonable chance of improving the health of, or preventing disease in, participating individuals ....

Pages 29–30 of the Reid bill mention some of items that “Wellness and Prevention Programs” “may include.”

Such as (1) Smoking cessation, (2) Weight management, (3) Stress management, (4) Physical fitness, (5) Nutrition, (6) Heart disease prevention, (7) Healthy lifestyle support, and (8) Diabetes prevention.

What’s left?

The phrasing does not appear to exclude other items.

From that, I infer the bill would in fact make it easy for a HHS Secretary to write “wellness” program regulations which penalize almost everyone.

And this is an intended consequence: the discount is not based on risk, but on the requirement that the insuree engage in ‘politically correct’ behavior. If that’s not coercion, I don’t know what is.

The text of the bill is here.

CALLING ACORN

A South Dakota couple is accused of using their home as a base for an underage sex trafficking operationThey should have contacted ACORN for assistance.

EMERGENCY “PREPAREDNESS”

Another example of the future of ObamaCare.

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA?

Stay-at-home dads are “bums.”

If they're conservatives.

STUNNING

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15% and 19% of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet — over 90% of its prior experience was in the public sector — is remarkable. The Obama administration approached terrifying - over 90% of his Cabinet have no private sector experience at all.




Democrat administrations are in blue; Republican administrations in red. The dashed lines indicate the average over all administrations of each party.

Jeff Jacoby shares my concern in another context.

The original post is here.

Via Instapundit.

SKIING ROBOT

Move over, skiers, here comes the robot. It’s confined to the beginner slope.

For now.

ELITE SNOBBERY

Elliot Gerson of the Rhodes Trust is greatly disappointed that a few Rhodes Scholars have gone into business.

How ... gauche.

On the other hand, it’s not obvious that the business world needs Rhodes Scholars. Perhaps it’s best to keep them in positions where they can’t do much harm.

Read it all.

Via Instapundit.

FINALLY!

An Afghanistan decision. Only 313 days after Inauguration Day.

Assuming Obama lives up to his announcement ....

GUNS DETER PIRATES

Who’d’ve thunk it?

HEY BIG SPENDER

My wallet is suddenly lighter. Obama has spent three-and-a-half trillion dollars in his first year alone, more that Bush and Clinton combined in their first years.

Oh, my.

TRUTH TO POWER

Lou Dobbs on WTOP radio Monday when asked what he would do following his departure from CNN: “I want to speak ‘truth to power’.” Just what the hell does that mean?

Jonah Goldberg calls it a phrase of Quaker origins adopted by campus radicals, Hollywood gadflies and establishment journalists, as something of an abracadabra slogan to justify criticizing government or big corporations.

He’s right. Every time I hear the phrase, I think of some pompous airhead declaring that he/she has an exclusive contract for the truth.

CLIMATEGATE IS NOW OFFICIAL

Late on the night of November 19, news broke that a large amount of data had been stolen from one of the major climate research institutions by an unknown hacker and made available on the Internet. The hackers released about 172 megabytes of data, and we can be sure examining it closely will take some time. But after a few days, certain things are beginning to become clear.

•The data appears to be largely, perhaps entirely, authentic.
•The emails are incendiary.
•The implications shake the scientific basis for AGW, and the scientific reputations of some of AGW’s major proponents, to their roots.

Some of the emails are here; and a searchable database of all of emails is here. Expect to see much more as bloggers continue digging.

Charlie Martin comments on the computer codes.

And, finally, because of the media's lack of interest, should it be called CLIMAQUIDDICK?