Hot! Hot! Not!

I

t’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments: They tell you this October was the hottest October ever recorded - excuse the pandering Paris photo - and you’re asking yourself, “Yeah, but wasn’t I freezing my fanny off for most of the month?” Yes you were, and you should believe your fanny, not Warmie “scientists,” who live to feed bogus data into the global warming industrial machine.

Fortunately, they don’t get away with this malarkey like they used to. Here’s Christopher Booker from the UK Telegraph, with emphasis added by Okie:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

As the Okie says,

Innocent error, or intentional manipulation of the data sets because the reality of the situation just doesn’t fit into the Anthropogenic Climate Change catechism? Shoot, I don’t know. But, the Global Warming proponents have been willing to use funny numbers before. At the very least it’s sloppy work that went unnoticed by GISS because the information was exactly what they wanted to see.

Yup. And there’s much, more more. Read the Okie’s post.

T

his week’s non-Watcher’s Council winner in the Watcher of Weasel’s weekly running of the blogs underscored the points I’ve been making in my “The Lies They Teach” series based on Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School.

Writing in American Thinker, Paul Kengor details How the Academic Left Elected Obama.  In the piece, Kengor details the youth vote:

MSNBC’s exit polling, which is consistent with other exit polling, showed that voters aged 18-29, who made up nearly one in five voters — or about 25 million ballots — went for Obama by more than two to one: 66 to 32 percent. Those voters alone well exceeded Obama’s overall popular vote advantage, which was roughly eight million.

These voting bands of Obama youth are largely parallel with the kids who are in college today, released by their parents into the tutelage of professors who can’t be trusted with American history or culture.  To illuminate the point, Kengor writes:

I’m reminded of the statement from the late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who said that the job of professors like him was “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own” and “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

To these liberal profs, Obama was the realization of a dream they have taught could never be attained in racist, classist, white-dominated America.

Thus, when the university community was presented with Barack Obama, a charismatic, impressive, seemingly excellent Democratic presidential candidate — who happened to be African-American — the reaction was nearly reverential, bordering on idolatry. The good senator’s bracing radical associations — enough to deny any other American a security clearance — and which were not coincidental to a man ranked the most leftist member of the most leftist Senate in U.S. history, didn’t matter to the academic world. Quite the contrary, those who dared to point out these associations — FoxNews, talk-radio, the McCain-Palin ticket — were deemed loathsome Neanderthals deserving of being burned in effigy from the nearest dorm.

Today’s college kids were born after Reagan confronted Communism and ended the Cold War. They have no experience with the Soviet threat and have been taught little or nothing about the horrors of Stalin, the Gulag and life under the Soviet thumb. Instead, they’ve been taught about the evils of anti-Communist crusaders in the U.S.  Kengor points out that McCain’s heroic suffering as a POW didn’t resonate with students who had been taught Vietnam was a war of American imperialist aggression, and that Sarah Palin stood opposed to the false teachings they had received about separation of church and state.

This is no longer child’s play.  Liberal indoctrination on college campuses has achieved its ultimate goal of electing an American president.  We must see that this is the zenith of that movement, and it progresses no further.

Elsewhere in the Watcher’s Winners, on the Watcher’s Council side of the slate, Joshuapundit won with a clear and helpful analysis of the challenges that face Obama’s Afghanistan policy in The Afghanistan Blues.

You can see all the winners, plus some nifty commentary, at Watcher of Weasels.

If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed. - David Brooks

D

avid Brooks writes today of the Obama valedictocracy (rule by those who graduated first in their high school class):

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This piece is a hoot; a serial killing with a keyboard of any citizens who hang onto the idea that Obama is anything but an elitist:

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C. that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.

Read it all here.

S

outh Side Barack slapped a lot of condescending smiles on his face whenever someone brought up Bill Ayres, decrying as sensational Palin’s “palling around” claims. But Bill Ayres disagrees.

In a new afterward to his memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayres writes that he and his unrepentant spouse were “family friends,” AP reports tonight.

Don’t know about you, but I pal around with my family friends. We see each other pretty often, enjoy each other’s company and see each other as, well, family.

Could it be that Obama slicked over an association with snappy patter and sappy smiles? Or put another way, that he lied and misled the American people? I’m not even going to pretend shock.

B

uried in an NY Times story lauding Prez-elect Obama for probing unmercifully into the background of anyone applying for work in his administration was this passing note:

Only the smallest details are excluded; traffic tickets carrying fines of less than $50 need not be reported, the application says. Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun. They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

Why would Obama ask this question if the Supreme Court just ruled that it’s unconstitutional for jurisdictions to ban gun ownership? Why does the inquiry extend beyond the applicant and on to “anyone in their family?”

There are only two reasons I can see:  One, Obama just loves guns and wants people in his administration who feel the same way and will work with him to protect Second Amendment rights.  Or, Obama just hates guns and wants people in his administration who feel the same way and will work with him to take away Second Amenment rights.

Given the evidence, I’ll go with the latter.

M

y Facebook friend Dan Chmielewki, a Dem with whom I happily can have intelligent conversations, informs me that 17 percent of this year’s electorate were 18-24 year-olds, and they went 68/30 for Obama.

Imagine that - a tiny six-year slice of the electorate, perhaps 10 percent of it or so in terms of demographics, making up 17 percent of the vote. And the other CSM is telling us Obama hasn’t left them at the polls; he’s still wooing them:

The president-elect gives every indication he will continue to solicit input from young voters – though not just from youth. His transition website, www.change.gov, asks visitors to “share ideas.” As president, he plans Internet “fireside chats” with the public and online town halls with the cabinet. From the millions of e-mail addresses that his campaign collected, one can imagine a mass mobilization when important votes come up in Congress.

The same article tells us this gen, unlike some of its predecessors, is actually turned on by government:

Encouragingly, this generation actually wants to interact with government, politics, and public service. That’s a reversal of the “bowling alone” years of 1990s civic apathy among youth. A fall pre-election survey by Harvard’s Institute of Politics shows that almost 60 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 are personally interested in doing some kind of public service.

Nearly half said that could include working for federal, state, or local government. A third of the total said they would consider working for a campaign, and a fifth said they would consider public office.

If nothing else, Obama is exceptionally gifted at understanding demographics, and using that understanding to connect where the connecting is most fruitful. It paid off in this election - he pulled in the poor, the young and the tired-of-it-alls and fired their engines with racing fuel, not regular.

But now comes the real test, particularly with the youth vote. Obama’s “Facebooking” them, inviting dialog, seeking input, heck, probably even posting photos. But this is a generation with a finely tuned phony-meter, and if Obama passes from grassroots to Astroturf roots, they’ll sense it and rebel against it.

Meanwhile, the always quotable (that is not a compliment) Gary Kamiya writes smugly today:

The painful truth for conservatives is that the dogs aren’t eating their dog food — and every national trend indicates that they will never eat it again. Which means the GOP faces a wrenching choice: remain true to its increasingly irrelevant and rejected ideology and fade into political insignificance, or remake itself as essentially a more moderate version of the Democratic Party.

Never say never, Kamiya. Remember, the last time youth turned out in similar numbers, 1984, they went overwhelmingly for Reagan, sending Mondale down to crashing defeat.

The Dems have the youth today, but they also have one of the most exceptional candidates in American history. Not exceptionally qualified, not exceptionally right, but exceptionally appealing. He made that appeal by promising almost everything to almost everyone, a tactic that cannot be delivered upon in the end. Someone’s bound to be disappointed - a whole lot of someones.  As Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies so nicely put it:

Give Obama his due: It is an exceptional politician who can win the support of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, and Kenneth Duberstein, former chief of staff to President Reagan; of William Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist, and Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, founder of modern intellectual conservatism; of Rashid Khalidi, an Israel-hater, and Edgar Bronfman, former head of the World Jewish Congress. Here’s a not-very-bold prediction: A year from now, someone is going to be sorely disappointed.

Combine that cold wake-up call with the risks inherent with trying to be cool and connected to several tens of millions of online friends, and you have a recipe for disappointment. Add to that the fact that in 2016, whether or not Obama wins reelection in 2012, the Dems are almost certain to nominate some old warhorse with “he’s next in line” charisma.

Meanwhile, we’ll get to study Obama from the sidelines, learning what works and doesn’t work without risking immediate consequences, and begin preparing for the return everyone but Kamiya knows is going to happen.

T

he media bias never ceases … and never ceases to amaze me. Today, President-elect Obama came to the White House at the invitation of President Bush, and how does the Washington Post headline it on its home page?

Bush Meets with Obama at the White House

I kind of thought it was the other way around. Usually when you accept someone’s invitation and go to their place, you’re meeting with them. WaPo and the rest of the Mainly Marginalized Media just don’t know when to stop. Heck, I don’t think they even know how to stop.

The actual story, BTW, has a more moderate headline: Obamas Make Symbolic Visit to Future Home: White House.

How fitting for a guy whose entire political career has ridden on symbolism.

H

ad John McCain pulled off the win, he would have been bouncing all over the stage at the Phoenician with his big grin an his stiff-shouldered thumbs-up, happy in victory, ready to move forward.

That was not the Barack Obama we saw last night in Grant Park. While his speech was, as we’ve come to expect, beautifully written, his smiles were fleeting; his oratory subdued; his gestures tight and controlled.

It was the image of a man who suddenly realizes that his meteoric rise to the top is complete and now, for the first time, it won’t be about campaigning, but about getting real work done - work he’s never done before; work that’s going to be much harder than he ever imagined. Thus, this is the line that may well have been the truest in his entire acceptance speech:

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president, and we know that government can’t solve every problem.

It stood in stark contrast to the “Yes we can!” theme of the speech and the can-do image the hasn’t-done-it candidate has projected over the nearly two years he’s been campaigning.

Obama enters office with an accomplished and cut-throat chief of staff, a 79-seat margin in the House and, as of this moment, a 56-41 margin in the Senate. He has every opportunity to drive energy costs up by banning drilling and taxing carbon. It’s in his power to change the tax code so both the do-nothings and the accomplishers get lazier. He can parlay his victory into a powerful force for radical, or at least liberal, social change.

It’s all in his power, and last night he appeared to be completely overwhelmed by it all.

He will gather strength as he pulls his staff together, and the subdued Obama is going to start prodding at limits, pushing America to the left. And as he does, we and the remaining conservatives in Washington are going to have to remember Michelle Malkin’s advice this morning after:

1) Oppose the Democrats’ next stimulus boondoggle.
2) Oppose Obama’s windfall profits tax proposal.
3) Oppose new bailouts for states deep in debt.
4) Oppose new foreclosure prevention measures that will simply provide perverse incentives for borrowers to walk away and delay a needed market correction.
5) No more federal loan guarantees for corporations (especially in light of this).

It’s not going to be a fun ride, but we’re tough and we’ve ridden through this particular wilderness before.

Saddle up, my friends.

E

veryone knows it:  The mainstream media has gambled a huge stake in this presidential election.

I recently read that 80 percent of newspaper reporters support Obama; I don’t have a cite for that, so here are a few similar stats, with cites:  WaPo-owned Slate revealed that among its staff Obama was ahead 55-1 over McCain.  Pew found there were nearly twice as many negatively toned McCain stories, and about a third less positively toned McCain stories.  I’ve come up with 102 instances of media bias with one hand tied behind my back; if I were a full time blogger, I have every confidence the tally would have easily passed 400.

And most important, three out of four Americans believe most reporters will not try to offer unbiased coverage during this campaign.

The media figure that if Obama wins, this trashing of their reputation as objective news sources will have been worth it and somehow their actions will be forgiven because they were proved right by the Obama victory. Nothing could be further from the truth.  No matter who is victorious tomorrow, the media will not be the victors; they have willfully turned themselves from the MSM to the MMM:  The Mainly Marginalized Media.

If Obama does win, we would be fools to trust the MSM to report accurately on the actions of the administration, which will only lead to further marginalization of formerly significant news sources.  Faced with continuing and growing frustration with a lack of digging into Obama’s policies and problems, more and more Americans will look elsewhere for their news:  the blogosphere, partisan publications that we can evaluate fairly because they make no bones about their editorial stance, talk radio (as long as the Fairness Doctrine isn’t reinstituted), and whatever big media haven’t marginalized themselves.

If McCain wins, it will be worse for the MMM.  The only thing worse than deliberately trying to manipulate an election is deliberately trying to manipulate an election and losing.  Based our experience with how they responded to Bush’s win in 2000, we cannot expect them to learn new behaviors and repent old ones.  Instead, they’re likely to respond viciously since their egos were caught up with Obama, and subject McCain to even greater levels of negative reporting, which will just suck them further down in public perception, circulation and viewership.

I don’t see NBC/MSNBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, AP and the rest of the yellow blue journalists seeing the light and actively recruiting for political diversity up to the highest levels of their organizations.  As  Bill O’Reilly said, the only thing more important to the media than money is ideology.

Hollyweird apparently learned its lesson this time around.  Sure, most of ‘em are in the tank for Obama and funded him lavishly, but we didn’t see a repeat of the sort of involvement they displayed in 2004.  My guess:  It hurt their earning power, just as it’s hurt the media’s earning power.  But being more practical sorts, Hollyweird dialed it back and largely stayed under the radar.  Cameron Diaz didn’t cry hysterically about rapes in the street if McCain is elected and Alex Baldwin didn’t threaten to move to Canada.

The media exhibited no such restraint, and as a result, only one in four Americans think they’ve been honest and fair in reporting the election.  Three in four don’t trust them.

Faced with this marginalization, media outlets have three choices.  They can stay the course, shrinking until they reach insignificance.  They can recast themselves as partisan players, in the European model.  Or they can recruit for political diversity from bottom to top, honestly recreating themselves as objective sources of news.

Only the latter will keep the media from becoming further marginalized, giving the traditional outlets hope for a future with significance and even profitability.  But I doubt if there are enough qualified conservatives available who would be willing to risk their futures on a profession as risky as journalism, so this option  probably is already foreclosed.

That leaves being stubborn and becoming ever more marginal, or willfully becoming more marginal by declaring sides.  Quite a predicament they’ve gotten themselves into, and for what?  To get a second-rate Democratic candidate for president elected?

They deserve what they get.

Art (both of ‘em:  Okie on the Lam)