Quasiblog

Crystal Balling the Election

Download your JOM Haruspicy spreadsheet below!  I'm afraid I didn't know how to embed it so that it would be visible in the body of this post.  It's pretty big!

Let me know in the comments if you spot any errors (probably worth reminding me to check over at JOM too).  The results are all Romney/Obama, which meant transposing results from folks who put the winner first.  Ditto for the voter breakdown which I've recorded as R-D-I, so I may have erred in some of the translations.  The predicted Obama victories are in red, instead of the usual blue.  Just because, that's why.  Wish I could have figured out how to include more of the editorial comments, some of which were quite amusing, but I ran out of steam.

Otherwise, I hope it's pretty much self-explanatory.  Have fun!

Download JOM Haruspicy

Saturday Morning

It's Groundhog Day all over again!

Generic Electioneering

Cautionary words from Michael Barone:

[H]ere in Ohio, the outlook is more cautious. Republican gains will be significant, but analysts who expect a blowout across the state and nation often aren't looking at individual races....  [W]inning generic races is easier than winning specific races.

We're not just talking Ohio.  The zeitgeist and the issue polls may favor the GOP case by wide margins, but the GOP itself hasn't made substantial inroads at all.  It's long been our impression that actual election results confirm that generic polls exaggerate the split between parties.  Even in pre-election polling, when you plug actual names into the equation, the split usually narrows considerably.  Party registrations are also a lot less predictive.  Such surveys  give pollsters something putatively useful to do in between campaign seasons, and the results are the kind of cheap "news" which now substitutes for more expensive, experienced based, gum shoe reporting.

The much touted enthusiasm quotient may narrow the numbers gap in ever shifting party affiliation, but a lot of voters are going to revert to familiar patterns when they are actually marking their ballots, not simply sharing their opinions with pollsters.  There's also a major, structural, GOTV gap to overcome -- and it gets wider when folks are confining their contributions to specific, individual campaigns, being run by newbies at local, unaffiliated levels.  Money helps, of course, but the "tidal wave" is fundamentally generic.  It's going to take a lot more boots on the ground to translate it into the margins at the polls that a substantive change in Congress will require.

Irritating "Don't get cocky" admonitions now bouncing off walls in the blogosphere aren't worth the ether they're written on, if the purveyors of such pedestrian conventional wisdom aren't manning phone banks, knocking on doors and gassing up their cars to pick up volunteers and bring voters to the polls.

 

Advice & Dissent

Fresh from a Hot Air headline, QB responds to Matt Lewis:

5 Things Conservatives Should Be Wary of in the Tea Party

In the interests of brevity & fair use, we will supply the bullet points and trust you to follow the link, if you'd like to know what we're talking about.  Surprising how many folks don't do that.....

 

1. Lack of reverence for conservative leaders and organizations.

We could start with a paragraph on political "reverence" alone, but never mind. Considering the average age of tea party activists, conflating old with establishment seems an unlikely pitfall.  The problem with the "establishment" is not age, it's a Republican leadership which will tacitly endorse a Murkowski campaign against the duly elected Republican candidate by refusing to to strip her of ranking status on the most important committee an Alaskan can lay claim to.  In passing, we would note that there is a great deal of accumulated wisdom on inherently conservative constitutional principles which is not exclusively Burkean in origin.  

 

2. A move away from social conservatism.

QBlogger is a political, economic, conservative and a social liberal who has been sharing what feels like an increasingly confining tent with social conservatives for a long time.  We have no small regard for their positions, but it is also no small relief to be sharing the field with "independents" who have been mobilized to the political, economic cause -- a natural coalition which might have been mobilized long ago, save for reservations about the ever expanding width of socially conservative planks in Republican platforms.  If that statement raises hackles, QED.

Part of the phenom worth considering, as Mr. Lewis suggested, is the fact that the tea "party" appeared nearly spontaneously of its own accord.   Its revolutionary impact didn't require the decades of laborious, controversial, brick by brick construction  that a socially conservative Republican party required -- a party which remains an uneasy coalition which social conservatives still routinely threaten to dissolve.  Those who issue caveats about longevity have no more idea about how enduring a presence the movement might have, or what form it might take, than anyone else.  Convenient analogies (for a welcome change!) are in short supply.

 

3. Anti-Intellectualism.

Beware of conflating "intellectual" and "intelligent," or populism with its opposite.  It is intellectual pundits speaking eloquently amongst themselves who have trouble effectively communicating their philosophy to "the masses"  -- a term which, itself, is prima facie evidence of elitist advocacy.  Indeed, Barack Obama's success seems to suggest that a caution againstostensible eloquence might be more salutary.

Some of the accumulated wisdom deserving of respect, per Item #1, is, in fact, popular wisdom.  There may be no more emblematic American exclamation than, "I know my rights!"  Whether or not the ordinary American "masses" can enumerate those constitutional particulars correctly, the resurgent interest in founding principles is a profoundly populist phenomenon -- one which derives from a profoundly American culture over which the political class has less sway than it might please them to think.  

 

4.  Purges.

Where was Mr. Lewis when Republicans from the Republican wing of the Republican party were being purged by Conservatives?  If any two terms have been thoroughly conflated to the detriment of public discourse,  it's those two identifiers.  In any case, QB has no idea why ousting folks for "philosophical apostasy" constitutes a higher order of purging than wanting to boot those who seem reluctant to play on the same side of field -- or who lay claim to the field from the philosophical sidelines.   

There's a certain irony in this complaint, when it was the tea parties who were so recently being admonished to leave Castle be and take one for the team in the Delaware.  

 

5.  The Victim Card. 

Most recently played in Cautions #1-4.  Jeri Thompson was the only prominent conservative we heard launching the sexist charge against Karl Rove.  If there were more, their impact was effectively nil, so let's call Caution #5 a quibble.  Considering the treatment conservative women have often received in the press, their very modest apparent sensitivity on the sexist front deserves admiration not warnings.  Mr. Lewis could almost be playing the victim card on Rove's behalf, which would leave him 5/5.

 

We expect the masses will make up their own populist minds as to who should be wary of whom.  Oddly enough, it rather looks like they already have.

 

Political Classics: Pete Du Pont

Unfortunately, the article below is no longer available at the Wall St. Journal, so we have taken the liberty of posting it here:

 

 

You Reap What Rousseau

Blame French philosophers for Europe's miseries.

By Pete Du Pont

Wednesday, May 16, 2001 12:01 a.m.

 

In the autumn of 1799 a market-oriented French economist and legislator whose name I share fled from the romantic promise of Robespierre's revolution, correctly fearing that his head was about to be separated from his shoulders in the name of liberté, égalité and fraternité. He was further burdened by President John Adams's belief that "We have had too many French philosophers already." President Jefferson ultimately took a different view and let him into the country, so the story had a happy ending for your columnist.

 

Two hundred years later the philosophy M. du Pont fled still haunts Europe. French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed, and Europe still insists, that the rights and opportunities of the individual must be subordinated to the overall public will as determined by bureaucrats. Thus the nations of the socialist-leaning Continent are fundamentally different from market-based, limited government nations such as the U.S. and Britain, where the rights of the individual are superior to and protected from invasion by the state.

 

The current edition of American Outlook magazine presents an excellent series on the differences. Irwin Stelzer identifies two crucial ones: the right and freedom of the individual to pursue his own dreams and opportunities, and the requirement the government to obtain the consent of the governed before launching substantial economic or social policy revolutions. The lack of these two principles has brought about disastrous public policies on the Continent. 

 

Holland now allows doctors not only to assist in a suicide, but to kill patients they don't think deserve to live. Even before the new euthanasia law was passed, national health service physicians--yes, physicians--were taking 16 lives a day without the consent of the victims, perhaps the ultimate denial of individual rights for the convenience of the state.

 

A medical scandal in France involved transfusions of HIV-tainted blood to some 4,000 hemophiliac hospital patients. Hundreds of patients died because the government banned the use of an American blood-screening test that could've detected the incurable disease. The ministers who made the decision weren't held accountable because--well, because they were privileged ministers working for the public good.

 

Just last week the French government reacted to the layoff of 570 French workers at the Danone SA, a food company, by proposing legislation to double severance pay and require companies to consider "the social consequences" of any restructuring. The Communist Party wants to force companies to get government permission before laying off any worker, and the Greens want the government to have total control of companies. These are more than just the predictable rants of the left, for in France it is the Socialist-Communist-Green alliance that controls the National Assembly.

 

High government spending and tax rates are a part of "social justice," too. In Sweden the government spends 57% of gross domestic product; the average of European Union nations is 50%. The U.S., including state and local governments, spends 31%. The top marginal tax rate is 50% or more in seven of the 15 European Union member states, which may explain why the underground economy is estimated to be 20% of the economy in Sweden and Denmark and more than 15% in France and Germany.

 

Even the Brits, the originators of the Magna Carta and the rule of law, have the ruling Labour Party, with its odd egalitarian policies. An April discussion paper on social mobility from the Performance and Innovation Unit discusses measures to assist "downward social mobility for dull middle class children" and policies to level the playing field among middle-class British citizens. Taxes could be raised, especially on investment income, death taxes increased to 100% to end inherited advantage, and education policies changed "to counteract the scope for middle-class families to buy a good education for their children by moving to the right area." One would hope the unit is joking, but apparently it isn't.

 

But it is the EU's Brussels government that is continually applying Rousseau's philosophy to public policies. Last June it began a round of criticism of the 35 nations that have "harmful tax practices," which means lower taxes than in the EU. European socialists believe they have an inalienable right to tax revenues, and thus they must restrain "mobile investment from one location to another."

 

In February the EU launched an attack on Ireland's fiscal policies, specifically its decision to cut taxes to increase growth and enhance living standards. Ireland, likely because of its lower taxes, has the highest growth rate and the lowest unemployment rate in the Eurozone, and Irish citizens have more purchasing power than do German citizens. The success of such market policies enrages EU commissioners, for as American economist Arthur Laffer wrote in The Wall Street Journal Europe, "How could the repressive bureaucrats of Europe keep a lid on its citizenry if Ireland keeps fanning the fires of tax revolt?"

 

Then came the ultimate Rousseau policy, a March decision by the European Court of Justice that the EU can lawfully suppress political criticism of its bureaucracies and their leaders. There is no First Amendment in Europe, but the decision, making criticism of the EU government illegal, runs counter to the fundamental notion of open discussion. Nevertheless, the court held that the European Commission could punish individuals' speech to "protect the rights of others." This is important because the EU government sees "a clear responsibility to regulate the dissemination of ideas, because opinions can bubble up from individuals' selfish personal interests and create social disturbances," as S.T. Karnick explained in American Outlook magazine. 

 

None of this pervasive EU activity has been blessed by the consent of the governed; it has instead been undertaken by governmental bureaucracies in pursuit of the greater good. Rousseau's belief in "the social contract, which serves within the state as the basis of all rights," is still the governing philosophy of Europe.

 

On this side of the Atlantic we are blessed with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that elevate individual rights above those of the government. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, we are "endowed by [our] Creator with certain inalienable rights . . . [and] to secure these rights governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers form the consent of the governed."

 

Two hundred years later, President Adams's suspicion of French philosophers remains well founded. The peoples of Europe would be better off with the individualism of the U.S. Constitution than the statism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

 

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears Wednesdays.

 

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

 

 

 

 

Alone on the 4th of July

Tomorrow, I will unfold my father's flag, stitched before Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union, nearly transparent in some places.   It is as long as I am tall, so it takes some care to keep it from sweeping the floor of the porch, where I will hang it between the white wooden columns which I'm glad I finally got around to washing a mere week or so ago.

I will look back on the first time I brought it out, after my father's death in 2000.  I was living in Boston, and I tacked it to a window frame looking out on Commonwealth Avenue in the erie quiet of September 12, 2001.  My upstairs neighbor slid a note under my door, thanking me.  I always kept my windows open, despite having to sponge sooty grime off my houseplants now and then.  It took a long time before I had the heart, or perhaps the courage, for such cleaning after 9/11, because I found all those green leaves overlain by a thin, gritty, layer of white dust.  Funeral ashes blown to me on the wind, horrifying and sacred.  I struggled with the how of wiping them away.

This year my flag, our flag, will wave out in the country, at the end of a long driveway, unseen from the road.  My children are off on their own adventures, I have no guests en route.  I will contemplate, again in quiet, the monumental history of our founding, and the pleasures of a garden, and the sacrifices large and small of others, which allow me to sit here counting my blessings, as so many will be doing across and beyond this immense country we call home. 

I will also think, as I have ever since that September, and its flags, and my plants in Boston, about the conquest of South America, when the Spanish melted down and carried away so much bullion, that even now there will be Peruvian gold in the necklace or the rings you wear.  Some things persist in the most extraordinary ways.  Just so, I will celebrate our Independence alone, and not alone.

 

 

Sunday Brunch, Vol. X

This was the week that was

QB's scroll 'em or click 'em menu 

The New Improved Fight Club Obama

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Deep into the Messianic Messaging Weeds

Rhetorical tics, tips, tricks and trips

Promises, Promises

We insinuate.  You decide!

Appetizers

We're all nihilists now!

~

May 16, 2009.  Obama responds to a question about the movies he's seen:

Now, movies I've been doing OK [with] because it turns out we got this nice theater on the ground floor of my house. 

July 22, 2009.  Obama tells the press what he doesn't know about the Gates arrest:

I don't know all the facts. What's been reported though is that the guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house. There was a report called in to the police station that there might be a burglary taking place. So far, so good, right? I mean, if I was trying to jigger into -- well, I guess this is my house now, so...  (LAUGHTER)  ... it probably wouldn't happen. But let's say my old house in Chicago.

Brown +4, 2010.  Obama winds up a list of his first year achievements:

[F]or the first time in history, we have publicly disclosed the names of lobbyists and non-lobbyists alike who visit the White House every day, so that you know what’s going on in the White House – the people’s house.

~

Grim milestone for Obama, otherwise, the Best Week EVAH:

~

Back when we were on the doorstep né precipice of health reform, Obama assured the Democratic Caucus that:

[Y]ou have nothing to apologize for when it comes to talking about deficit reduction.  The irresponsible thing would have been to do nothing, and that's not what you've decided to do. This represents the biggest step towards deficit reduction in years.  

So, I know everybody in the media is all in a tizzy -- "Oh, what's this going to mean politically?"  Well, let me tell you something.....

.....tizzy is the new wee wee'd up! 

~

Obama insider hired to give outside advice to Obama:

David Plouffe, the man who managed President Barack Obama's campaign, will be taking on an expanded role as an outside adviser to the White House, according to sources familiar with the plan, a move that comes just days after a stunning defeat for Democrats in a Massachusetts Senate special election.

 

Plouffe diagnoses the source of Democratic pain in 2010, none of it self-inflicted, of course:

With few exceptions, the first off-year election in a new president's term has led to big gains for the minority party -- this was true for Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. After two election cycles in which Democrats won most of the close races and almost all of the big ones, Democrats have much more fragile turf to defend this year than usual. Add to that a historic economic crisis, stubborn unemployment and the pain that both have inflicted on millions of Americans, and you have a recipe for a white-knuckled ride for many of our candidates.

So, here's the 7 Point Plouffe Prescription:

** Pass a meaningful health insurance reform package without delay.

** Show that we not just are focused on jobs but also create them.

** Make sure voters understand what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did for the economy.

** Don't accept any lectures on spending.

** Change is not just about policies.  [Drain that swamp we inherited!]

** Run great campaigns.

** No bed-wetting.

Plouffe apparently didn't get the tizzy memo, but welcome to the new plan, same as the old plan, now with Fight Club Obama!  

~

First sighting of Albatross reported in Massachusetts.

Brown’s Senate campaign is already being studied by party strategists as a model. “He’s making healthcare a front-and-centre issue in the most liberal state in the country and it’s working for him,” said Whit Ayres, co-founder of Resurgent Republic, a group of conservative strategists.  “It’s the albatross around the Democrats’ necks.”

First Tweet from Space: 

 

~

QB jumps on the Yearly Review bandwagon.  Can you date stamp this?

On Iran, one of our trickiest foreign policy challenges, we have held the international community together, both in our engagement strategy, but also now as we move into a dual-track approach. Which is, If they don't accept the open hand, we've got to make sure they understand there are consequences for breaking international rules. It's going to be tough, but I think the relationship we've developed with Russia will be very helpful. The outreach we've done to our traditional NATO allies will be very helpful. The work that we've done with China — including the work we've done with China to enforce sanctions against North Korea — will help us in dealing more effectively with Iran.

Would you believe last Thursday?  Yeah, it surprised us too.

China balks at Iran sanctions

Russia warns against new Iran sanctions

~

Vladimir Putin does Irony, attempts Metaphor:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday warned against the dangers of totalitarianism and despotism but said Russia must not adopt a similar political system to its neighbour Ukraine.

Speaking at a major meeting chaired by President Dmitry Medvedev and attended by Russia's political elite, Putin called for cautious reform of the Russian political system. "We need to bring in necessary amendments but we need to act extremely carefully," he said, speaking at a meeting of leaders of political parties.

"Any effective political system needs a healthy level of conservatism. A political system shouldn't wobble like liquid jelly every time it's touched," he said.

We can't touch that!

 

~

The New Improved Fight Club Obama

No more Mr. Nice Guy

 

QB gets the scoop from a reliable insider:

The First rule of Fight Club is:  

You do not stop talking about Obama. 

The Second rule of Fight Club is:  

You DO NOT STOP talking about Obama! 

The Third rule of Fight Club is: 

If someone yells "STOP!" -- you do not stop talking about Obama.

The Fourth Rule:  If Obama says "This isn't about me," he cannot stop talking about Obama:

[T]his isn't about me. It's about you. I didn't take up this issue to boost my poll numbers or score political points - believe me, if I were, I would have picked something a lot easier than this....

I'll never stop fighting for you. I'll take my lumps, too. 

I'll never stop fighting to bring jobs back to Elyria.... 

I'll never stop fighting for an economy where hard work is rewarded.... 

So long as I'm President, I'll never stop fighting for policies that will help restore home values.... 

I'll never stop fighting to give our kids the best education possible....

I'll never stop fighting to give every American a fair shake....

So long as I'm President, I'll never stop fighting to protect you from the kind of deceptive practices we've seen from some in the financial sector....

I'm fighting for a tough Consumer Financial Protection Agency....

I'll never stop fighting to open up government....

So long as I'm President, I'll never stop fighting to cut waste and abuse in Washington....

I'm going to keep up the fight for real, meaningful health insurance reforms.... 

 I'll continue fighting for reform that will hold the insurance industry accountable....

These are some of the fights we've had. And I can promise you, there will be more fights in the days ahead.  

It's on!  White House caught in Dem crossfire. 

Deep into the Messianic Messaging Weeds

Rhetorical tics, tips, tricks and trips

Assessments of Obama's first year in office routinely kick off with the question of how he managed to fall so far, so fast. After unsurprising observations on campaign promises and the exigencies of governance, everyone, unsurprisingly, agrees that Obama has a messaging problem. Apologists insist that's the extent of his predicament (we are so tempted to digress!), but we've lost count of the pundits who segue to the question of how this President's public presence differs from his predecessors, by way of a little statistical summary which goes something like this:

Alas, he has accelerated the deflation of hope with his extraordinary volume of public appearances. In his first six months, he gave three times as many interviews as George W. Bush, four times as many prime-time news conferences as Bill Clinton, and more interviews than both combined: 93 for Obama and 61 for his two immediate predecessors.  He appeared on five Sunday talk shows on the same morning, followed the next day by David Letterman, the first-ever presidential appearance on a nighttime comedy show. In another week, he squeezed in addresses to the U.S. Climate Change Summit, the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Security Council, and a variety of press conferences.

What surprises QB is that President Bush apparently sat for so many interviews!  Barebones numbers do little to explain why Obama's footprint looms, if a footprint can loom, so much larger.  Oddly enough, preemption attaches to Obama, not Bush in this instance.  It seems fitting, however, that Obama commandeered the airwaves for a his own reality show.  You already know there's more to this numbers game, don't you?

QBlogger's imaginary intern would be adding a slew of stats to the hopper. We would know many times 44 was simulcast on major networks, and how many interviews hit the airwaves in primetime, with more or less prominent, viewer rich, hosts. We would be comparing the relative duration of Presidential face time, and the hours devoted to discussing him, or interviewing surrogates, when he was elsewhere in the flesh.  We would be developing a formula to calculate value added in YouTube videos, and wall-to-wall clips of Presidential sound bites in the news, along with an unending stream of popularity polls on 24/7 cable. We would note a tidal wave of coverage, analysis and political speculation in print and broadcast op-eds. Then there's the tabloids' devotion to a celebrity White House which differs only in style from naval gazing pundits' fascination with a Messiah of their own creation.

Overexposure?  We feel our irony meter revving up!  Is there a candidate or an advertiser on earth who doesn't dream about that kind of market saturation?  So what's the real messaging problem here?  

The problem is the same mind numbing, egocentric, stump speech delivered over and over and over again, regardless of venue.  It's the same tired tropes, tattered strawmen and rhetorical tics which the President no longer seems able to enliven or escape.  QB once suggested that Obama's adoring constituency was mesmerized as much by the seductive rhythms and rising intensity of evangelical exhortation [irony, indeed!] as by the power of the sentiments he expressed, which in text form are notable for the sloppiness of their construction.  Where Obama, himself, once thrilled to his own dramatic effect, the erosion of hope and change so many sense is also reflected in the downward trajectory of his sentences and finger thumping punctuation at the podium.  

Pitch perfect no longer, it's the content, stupid!

Even Obama was compelled to admit that his Nobel Prize came too soon, not as a measure of achievement, but of aspiration.  His  devoted followers are only now beginning to acknowledge that he was also elected President too soon.  It is easy enough to replace the language of aspiration with the rhetoric of achievement.  Obama has yet to understand that it is not so easy to disguise the disparity between the claims and the realities.

UPDATE:  More Stats!

The president gave only 411 speeches during his first 365 days in office; that's barely more than one a day. Maybe if he'd given two a day, the American people would have gotten through their thick skulls that he knows what's good for them, even if they don't like it.

Promises, Promises

We insinuate.  You decide!

We're just going to tuck this little one in here.  If you're looking for texts and transcripts of a Presidential speech or a Weekly Address, they show up fastest in the White House Blog.  QB originally suspected that the WH was trying to disappear them into the archives as quickly as possible, but they do eventually appear on the official Speeches & Remarks page. All of which we mention because we had to rely on the Washington Post for the full Monty in Elyria, Ohio, where Obama's town-hall meeting got decidedly tepid reviews..  The WH, itself, is only serving up this tidbit:

I didn’t take up this issue to boost my poll numbers or score political points – believe me, if I were, I would have picked something a lot easier than this. No, I’m trying to solve the problems that folks here in Elyria and across this country face every day. And I am not going to walk away just because it’s hard. We’re going to keep on working to get this done with Democrats, Republicans – anyone who is willing to step up.  Because I am not going to watch more people get crushed by costs, or denied the care they need by insurance company bureaucrats, or partisan politics, or special interest power in Washington.

An interesting, typically self-involved choice!  We feel comfortable assuming that the WH considers this the most important paragraph in his message to Ohio (swing state alert!) and the wider web, which alone speaks volumes.  It's intriguing that this modest excerpt was posted on Friday afternoon with assurances that: 

We'll post the video and the full transcript shortly.  

As of noon today, the poor thing sits there unadorned.  We're pretty sure the White House had a copy of the prepared remarks that they released, before the post went up.  You can already get the Weekly Address, recorded a day later, in your choice of video or text.  So were they trying to skate over the rest of the speech, or eliminate distractions?  The headline?  "I am not going to walk away just because it's hard."  And the URL? "www.....ill-never-stop-fighting."

If this isn't an Obama Hail Mary, QB will wager that it's his idea of winning advert -- which he'll be pushing everywhere.  If so, our great week just got even better.

Thomas Friedman in Love

Who's your daddy's sputnik now? 

Friedman's new purpose in life seems to be shopping "greater China" to the world from his perch at the New York Times, with fewer second thoughts and more open envy from one apparently frequent visit to the next.  QB notes the latest in China Travel Trends:  

The aphrodisiac counter is always the most arresting section in the menageries that are Chinese medicine shops. Among the eyes of newts and toes of frogs are mounds of dried seahorses.....  For most of the past 1,000 years, only the richest Chinese patients could afford to include seahorses in their love potions. But with industrialisation, rapacious modern fishing techniques and China’s economic renaissance, dried seahorses have become widely available and are even sold pre-packaged by the dozen in supermarkets across the country.

In Friedman's latest Ode to China, we'll ignore the tired tropes on the futility of nation building and making war on terror, yada yada, and go straight for the cognitive dissonance (not to mention fanciful analogies) that such conventional wisdom seems to engender.  Friedman breathlessly points us to "the most important peace breakthrough on the planet" and credits a hands-off approach for "the new calm in the Strait of Taiwan." 

For decades, this was considered the most dangerous place on earth, with Taiwan and China pointing missiles at each other on hair triggers. Well, over the past two years, China and Taiwan have reached a quiet rapprochement — on their own.  No special envoys or shuttling secretaries of state. [Emphasis Friedman]

We're not sure when Friedman started sailing east, but his token recognition that, sure, "our Navy was a critical stabilizer," ironically misses one of the most important diplomatic breakthroughs on the planet.  Reversing a binding tradition of pacifism that extends back more than half century to the end of WWII, Japan signed on to the U.S. defense of Taiwan.  This stunning achievement was accomplished by the terror obsessed Bush Administration; whether it will survive its successor remains to be seen.  Perhaps that's why we find Friedman working barren ground under the nearest lamppost instead:

A key reason is that Taiwan has no oil, no natural resources. It’s a barren rock with 23 million people who, through hard work, have amassed the fourth-largest foreign currency reserves in the world. They got rich digging inside themselves, unlocking their entrepreneurs, not digging for oil. They took responsibility. They got rich by asking: “How do I improve myself?” Not by declaring: “It’s all somebody else’s fault. Give me a handout.”

In this self-seducing argument for Friedman's peculiar brand of putatively non-isolationist disengagement, the U.S. nuclear umbrella is simply an historical distraction.  Fans of distributive justice in Europe have similarly discounted the benefits of being freed from the burden of self-defense -- and spending -- for decades too.  Friedman goes one better:  

And what does the war on terror give us? Better drones, body scanners and a lot of desultory T.S.A. security jobs at airports.

Where to begin with the spin-offs from military/industrial R & D?  We'll just note that there's a lot to be said for better drones, and suggest that there's irony in Friedman's simultaneous complaint about our support for bad governance -- overseas:

Our presence, our oil dependence, our endless foreign aid in the Middle East have become huge enablers of bad governance there and massive escapes from responsibility and accountability by people who want to blame all their troubles on us. Let’s get out of the way and let the moderate majorities there, if they really exist, face their own enemies on their own. It is the only way they will move. We can be the wind at their backs, but we can’t be their sails. There is some hope for Iraq and Iran today because their moderates are fighting for themselves.

We were right to quit enabling Saddam!  No, wait. We shouldn't have interfered, because responsible moderates could have done perfectly well on their own devices.  Just look at the Marsh Arabs.  No, wait.  Just look at the moderates now.  Was the surge a wind or a sail or an AGW tornado?  Is the governance we are currently enabling the better kind or worse? Is Iraq a potential U.S. ally vis a vis Iran, where years of brutal suppression haven't killed off the self-starters yet?  Or is Iraq to be a Shia branch of the Islamic Revolution next door?  Or the Green Revolution.  Or all of the above.  Friedman makes it look so easy, but these multiple choice questions are confusing!

Vanishing Marshes of Mesopatamia, August 2001 

Let no one say that QB isn't an equal opportunity critic when it comes to cognitive lapses, though.  Support for both democratization and convenient dictators have often issued from the very same political quarters.  While that hypocrisy has largely been ascribed to Republicans, Jimmy Carter is a walking executive summary as a self-annointed humanitarian ethicist who once observed that it's so much easier to deal with dictators who speak for all their people.   While Carter has been busily endorsing fraudulent elections, the New York Times' pundit has made his own great (jolly green!) leap forward over that shark.  

In Friedman's brave new economic Flatland, (make that flat and green!) the only thing worse than Chinese autocracy is autocracy American style, which lacks the "enlightened" leadership of our soon-to-be Sino overlords.  If you think he has Democratic hegemony in mind when he bemoans "one-party democracy" in Washington, you're not trying hard enough.  In a logical pretzel of the first order, Friedman casts Democrats as the enlightened and Republicans as the reactionary One-Party-of-No autocrats standing in the way of progress.  

Friedman is not the only anecdotal tourist who has been making the rounds.  Candidate Obama declared Olympian admiration for China's Potemkin Village: and asks, "Why aren't we doin' the same thing?"     

We'll let the Boston Globe fill in that blank slate:

 

Just this week, Just One Minuteman, Tom Maguire helpfully pointed out Paul Krugman's Springtime in Paris:

Europe’s economic success should be obvious even without statistics. For those Americans who have visited Paris: did it look poor and backward? 

Not to be outdone at the Help Desk, QB points out that there are places where your Parisian car and driver just won't go.

 

The praise of Democratic Socialism is an old familiar song.  Friedman's  embrace of a putative lesser totalitarian evil is a far stranger romance.  Not that he doesn't lack for companions on the right for mercantile-based fantasies.  If one thing has become increasingly clear, it's that capitalism and democracy are not flip sides of the same coin.  Friedman hardly seems to mind and dispenses with the slippery, inconvenient, Charles Freeman slope in token disclaimers.   

While QB does not dispute the fundamental benefits of capitalism, or the synchronicity of free markets and liberty, we look to Google's recent awakening (long may it last!) to suggest that the sine qua non of democratic advancement and human rights is the free exchange of ideas, not goods.  Business (not an enabler of bad governance in Friedman's world, it seems) may have opened the door to China, but it's the intellectual door to a world of ideas and China's current attempt to close it ex post facto which will ultimately upend the Chinese model that the brightly lit, but unenlightened, Friedman so admires.

Al Qaeda Scores New Recruitment Tool

We crystal ball the future so so you don't have to.

Al Qaeda Surging in Wake of Guantanamo Closing.

'Terrorist' sources, speaking off the record because they are not authorized to reveal their identities till they are scraped off the tarmac, report that al Qaeda is meeting its recruitment quotas for the first time in years.  Its latest franchise, al Qaeda in the Heartland (AQH) has had to expand its training facilities.  

Years spent in the jihadi wilderness planning a comeback paid off in late 2009, only a short time after the President reiterated his vow to close the infamous prison in Cuba.  As an underserved minority with a shovel ready biofuel project, AQH qualified for expedited stimulus funding

Renewed outrage over U.S. treatment of so-called Gitmo detainees is now  "spreading like a sandstorm," according to another nameless high value target.  "The evil doers will soon regret burying our brothers in the unconsecrated hell hole they call SuperMax."  

Guantanamo prisoners rose up in metaphorical arms over the move, demanding to see their lawyers, to no avail.  Detainee #42 is said to have shouted at the Marine assigned to carry his prayer rug, "We will not suffer living death in the frozen north alone!" 

In an audio tape delivered by AQH and authenticated late last night, Osama bin Laden, his voice trembling in rage, or ill health, declared, "The Great Satan in Washington believes he can isolate extremists. His teachable moment is at hand!"

DNI vs NSC vs CIA vs POTUS vs Take a Number

Mix and match at the reassurance microphone.

The National Intel Director did his turn at as post Flight 253 apologist last week, with a letter to "the employees of the U.S. intelligence community."  If you find the players and the talking points as confusing as we do, here's your aide memoire.  In the world according to Dennis Blair:

The Intelligence Community should be proud of its role in weakening al Qa'ida’s ability to plan, organize, finance, and carry out highly orchestrated attacks conducted by well trained teams, like those on 9/11. Al Qa’ida is diminished as evidenced by the fact they are sending inexperienced individuals without long association with al Qa’ida, but susceptible to jihadist ideology.

Because any terrorist organization worth its salt would be blowing up its most sophisticated operatives.  It's appalling if the DNI really doesn't know that the poor bastards dying for al Qaeda are mostly useful Rage Boys who require minimal investment -- like Abdulmutallab, or the youngsters shipped into Iraq from Syria who were strapped in after a month or two of pep talks, or, in a pinch, the mentally and physically disabled -- not to mention the occasional child.

In a devastating irony, while the DNI's letter was being delivered, a Jordanian endorsed double agent was blowing away the CIA -- and Blair -- in Afghanistan.

The Khost attack showed that al-Qaeda was capable of mounting a sophisticated deception operation that required months of planning – across borders and among multiple adversaries of the West, judging by the newly-released video of al-Balawi with the Taliban's leader in Pakistan.

Leon Panetta stepped up in the Washington Post today, where he agrees that his officers deserve our gratitude and respect.  He parts company with the DNI on almost everything else, and without even needing to name names, delivers the back of his hand to the C-i-C:

The horrible news Dec. 30 that a suicide bomber had taken seven American lives in Afghanistan may have been for some a stark reminder that we are at war. But the men and women of the CIA, whose colleagues these seven were, needed no reminder.

Qblogger believes that Panetta's heart is in the right place, but we can only hope he doesn't continue whiffing gimme opportunities to make the case for substantive change.  It's nigh on conventional wisdom that the intelligence superstructure which issued from a morass of political maneuvering after 9/11 is not helping, but the systemic problems pre-date that folly by decades.  In what's become a sorry, regular, phenom,  we have to return to the Brits for the backstory: 

Alas, the reality is that most CIA employees are bureaucrats and since it was infiltrated by the KGB during the Cold War the rules governing counter-intelligence are so stringent they have created a culture of paranoia and navel-gazing.

CIA officers have to submit a multi-page electronic form to be signed by three levels of supervisor each time they have contact with a foreigner. Entry background checks last more than a year and many recruits fail if they have foreign relatives or have travelled to places like Cuba or Iran. All CIA officers have to take regular lie-detector tests.....

After 9/11 a behemoth in the form of the Directorate of National Intelligence was created to oversee the CIA and the myriad other US spy agencies. Initiative and creative thinking are stifled; form-filing and rear-covering are rewarded.

Security has become a CIA obsession. In Iraq, its officers lived in their compound within a compound in the Green Zone and very few ever ventured outside the wire. Instead, potential sources were brought inside.  This meant they had little chance to develop contacts or experience Iraqi culture. Most CIA officers in Iraq and Afghanistan spend only a few months in country and for many their spell is just a career tick in the box. Only a handful speak Arabic, Pashto or Dari.

Ironically, in the instance of Khost the very security concerns about meeting al-Balawi outside the base led to the catastrophic decision to let him inside.

Every Presidential seminar yields less in the way of encouraging correctives than the one before the one before....  Even the learning curve seems to be bending in the wrong direction.

UPDATE:  Via Tom Maguire,  we get yet another installment on our intel turf wars from....the Telegraph, adding Eric Holder and the FBI to the witches' brew.

 

Your Sunday Scroll, Vol. VIII

'Tis the season for a Metaphorical Sports Section!

Scott Brown's formerly low key campaign may now be paying off in Massachusetts, as the Special Election Super Bowl heats up.  Brown, now running neck and neck with Martha Coakley, may even be heading into win/win territory:

A GOP upset — or even a close loss by Scott Brown — could likely trigger a new wave of Democratic retirements. Likewise, a smashing victory by Martha Coakley might slow the bleeding.

Allahpundit probably settled on a Red Sox/World Series metaphor* here because he's young, and presumably doesn't hail from MA -- or Harvard.   We know better and will, with a certain cruel irony, let the Yale alumni magazine take us back to 1968: 

[Charles McGrath, Yale ‘68] recounts how Yale’s football team that year came into the Game (capital G when it’s against Harvard) “nationally ranked and riding a 16-game winning streak” and had a commanding lead for much of the contest. With only 42 seconds left, in fact, Yale was leading Harvard 29-13, but then in those last 42 seconds….

We can proudly report that we were not among the folks who decided to skip the last few painful minutes in order to get a jump on the crowds leaving the stadium.  This is what win/win looks like in Massachusetts:  

   

Even the half-time show that year brings back warm memories of long lost politically incorrect college days.  The Harvard Band, running out onto the field in its famously unique willy nilly way, formed itself into an amoeba and a paramecium, and proceeded to act out a tale of star-crossed lovers by morphing into.... a Star of David and a Greek Cross.   The Game itself, of course, lives on, in hearts, minds, history, and a 2008 movie, airing almost as we speak, on cable.

  

So, Fight Fiercely Scott!  And Rocco & Jane!

*Science fiction buffs will find their metaphor here.

~

Back to our down-to-earth future, this week's prize for bizarre metaphorical choices goes to Obama's NSC chief, James Jones:

“That’s two strikes,” Obama’s top White House aide on defense and foreign policy issues said, referring to the foiled bombing of the Detroit-bound airliner and the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in November....  Jones said Obama “certainly doesn’t want that third strike, and neither does anybody else.”

We'd say Obama fouled out some time ago, but as Kori Schake, at Foreign Policy, observes:

Jim Jones chose an unfortunate metaphor for the administration when he said the two recent attacks were strike one and strike two, but he has the political calculus right.

~

 

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, the Majority Leader is working up to three strikes of his own.  Folks on the right have thoroughly covered the if-Harry-Reid-were-a-Republican ground, but QBlog thinks Geraldine Ferraro deserves a shout out too.  The emphasis below is for you, Gerry!

Harry on Obama, in 2008:

He was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," as he said privately.  Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama's race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

How quickly we forget Strike One.  Harry on Clarence Thomas in 2005:

"I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written."

Those would be the strikes we know about.  Open season on Harry Reid is still in the offing.

UPDATE:  In which we discover that we were late to the Clarence Thomas party.

~

Not to worry, along with the bowling, and the pitching, and the goal post moving, there's always a Golf metaphor to be had!

 

Grab That Sunday Popcorn, Vol. VII

The Quasi  Commemorative Presidential Yearbook

In lieu of New Year's Resolutions, QB mined the White House photostream for this Sunday's entertainment. 

 

Scroll 'em or click 'em:

Honey, I Shrunk the Prez!

Compare and Contrast

Desperately Seeking the Iconic

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

Plus ça change...

Honey, I Shrunk the Prez!

Slip sliding away.....

 

Sufficient to the task:

          
 
 
 

Bow to your partners, Allemande left:

 

 

Compare and Contrast

 

 
  
 

Desperately Seeking the Iconic

The White House photostream suggests the search is not going well.

The button-challenged President sporting a purple tie?   We don't think so!

 

It's the posturing, stupid!

 

Napoleonic red, peeping Tom?  You've got to be kidding.  

 

How's that symbolism thing working out for you?  Next!

 

FLOTUS suggests PLOTUS.  Her mirror says, "Get serious!" 

 

You'd think the folks who are all about branding would have a feel for the optics, wouldn't you?  Not so much!  Tell TOTUS to get his sorry ass in here, and give the Prez some pointers!

O.K.  So here's the concept:

 

Now, hold that thought, Mr. President,

while we turn over a new leaf below the fold:

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

 

"I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."

 

You just can't make this stuff up:

White House Doorman

 

Plus ça change...

 
 

We will bury you!

 
  

TSA A.K.A.

Tough Shit America

Volokh Conspiracy has the new TSA Security Directive, complete with double screenings and "thorough" pat-downs at the gate; Vodkapundit has the executive summary of the touchdown prep:

Janet “The System Worked” Napolitano does, in fact, think we’re cattle. One hour prior to landing, we are to sit there, doing nothing. You may not get a Kleenex out of your bag. You may not hold a book or magazine in your lap. You may not get up to pee.

For an hour.

Because her agency failed to stop a terrorist, but passengers like you and me succeeded. She failed. You pay. Typical.

Plenty of folks have observed that it was the passenger who left his seat who saved the day.  Personally, we think a blanket in the lap would be more useful for smothering flames than lighting them, but we see a larger irony in this mix.  The in-flight confinement of passengers assumes that all this new excess of TSA zeal on the ground will, in fact, fail.

Mullahs and Milquetoast

Vapid response from the Obama Administration

Compare and contrast official reactions to the violence in Iran from the BBC's shortlist.  We have strongly worded condemnations from:

British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband

German Chancellor, Angela Merkel

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, Lawrence Cannon

Our President and Secretary of State were apparently MIA, so it fell to the NSC spokesman to do the witness bearing duties:

We strongly condemn the violent and unjust suppression of civilians in Iran seeking to exercise their universal rights. Hope and history are on the side of those who peacefully seek their universal rights, and so is the United States.

History in on the side of those with powerful allies, like, say, the French who roused themselves to action in time to save the American Revolution.  It's a sad day when the Russian response could have been written by the Obama Administration:

We are worried about the events that have taken place in Iran in recent days. In our opinion, the main thing in this situation is to show restraint, look for and find compromises on the basis of law, undertake political efforts to prevent further escalation of the internal confrontation.

Neither government saw fit to put a name to the bad actors in this drama, but at least the Russians' statement issued from their Foreign Ministry, not the KGB. 

Sunday Drive-bys, Vol. VI

The abbreviated Holiday Edition

We weren't short on ironies this week; we were just short of time.  Fortunately, John "Travel Czar" Kerry and the Democrats are always food for a laugh.

Not only did Harry Reid have to bribe Democrats to vote for their own Healthcare bill, the most popular payoff was exemption from their own healthcare bill.  We're puttin' that in our pipe and smokin' it. When it comes to spin, however, Schumer and Reid play in the Pravda league:

"This is a happy day.... Mitch McConnell said on the floor that we're going to go home and hear our constituents rail against this bill. I don't believe that. I believe that the negativity that Leader McConnell and others have continually displayed on the floor has peaked, and now when people learn what's actually in the bill—and all the good it does—it is going to become more and more popular because it is good for America, good for the American people, and a true symbol of what we can do if we all pull together," said Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer.

On the floor before the vote, Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "We're going to hear an earful, but it's going to be an earful of wonderment and happiness that people waited for for a long time."

No word on how Harry felt on hearing that Obama wasn't looking for a healthcare fait accompli before his SOTU.  

~

Talking Points Memo previews the Democrats' campaign strategy for 2010:  Tar the GOP as the unchanged Party of Bush.  They're not going to get any points for originality, but it's pretty gutsy politics when 44% of voters already wish they had Bush back.  

The Permanent Democratic Majority.  ROTFLMAO!

 

The Caucus has your Reapportionment Roundup.

~

From the Washington Times:  Obama the Party Crasher.  QBlog scooped 'em by three days:   Gate Crashers.

~

Coming to us from the reality based community, Georges Benjamin (Exec. Director, American Public Health Association) deserves a special award for  confidence in benevolent governance: 

Today's Senate vote to advance health reform in the Congress is the prologue in an important final debate concerning how best to extend coverage, improve quality, and make more affordable health services for Americans. The conference with the House will be where this bill actually gets made and the hope is that the conferees will pick and integrate the best of both bills in a way to make a more coherent and effective plan.

We don't think prologue means what Benjamin thinks it means, nor debate, coverage, affordable, coherent and effective.  If you think a better bill will emerge from a conference process, which may or may not actually occur, you might be a liberal.

~

Hamid Karzai heads up an anti-corruption conference, which is part one of this week's unintended ironic twofer:

"I know corruption exists in the government and elsewhere. Let's be realistic," he said. Large-scale reforms were required to root out the sort of graft that enabled officials, "after one or two years' work for the government, to get rich and buy houses in Dubai."

As far as we know, none of the 237 millionaires in the U.S. Congress were in attendance.

~

This just in, from the Russian Front:  Has Alina Kabaeva given birth to Putin’s Son (again)?   Does she look like Mom material to you?  QB doesn't see Putin stepping up to the mike, stalwart wife by his side, any time soon.  That seems to be a distinctly American phenom.  Alas.

John Kerry, Transnational Junket Czar

Do as I say, not as I do.

If you have trouble sleeping on those interminable overseas flights. John Kerry has a travel tip for you!  "When I'm flying, I usually take an Ambien and listen to one of my own speeches on my iPod. I'm out in seconds."  He should know.  His Foreign Policy Committee set an annual record for global jaunts.

Democrats and their staff members on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have spent more on international travel in 2009 than they have in any other year, reflecting a greater focus on up-close tours and investigations in foreign countries by its new chairman, John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, according to a Globe analysis of expense reports filed in Congress.

Next up, Kerry Floats Plan to Visit Tehran:

Sen. John Kerry has suggested becoming the first high-level U.S. emissary to make a public visit to Tehran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, a move White House officials say they won't oppose.

The offer comes as mass protests against Iran's regime are resurfacing and a U.S.-imposed deadline nears to broach international sanctions against Iran.

"This sounds like the kind of travel a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee would -- and should -- undertake," said a White House official, adding it would be at Sen. Kerry's own behest....

Per the Journal, that's not what it sounds like to Hossein Askari:  "The wrong message would be sent to the Iranian people by such a high-level visit: The U.S. loves dictatorial regimes." It also sounds like emblematic Kerry timing to us, as Iran's Green Movement Reaches Out to U.S.  In fact, it seems like just yesterday, Mr. Kerry was voting against the Kyl Amendment, to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard as terrorists.  That would be these guys, who have quite a history.

As Basij ideology and influence enjoy a renaissance under Ahmadinejad, the movement's belief in the virtues of violent self-sacrifice remains intact. Since 2004, the mobilization of Iranians for suicide brigades has intensified, with recruits being trained for foreign missions. Thus, a special military unit has been created bearing the name "Commando of Voluntary Martyrs." According to its own statistics, this force has so far recruited some 52,000 Iranians to the suicidal cause. It aims to form a "martyrdom unit" in every Iranian province.

Kerry has clearly got his diplo mojo on, "forging ties" with Syrian President Bashar Assad  and telling us that Syria willing to help achieve Palestinian unity!  Then there was the "rare" Darfur visit where the Senator. discovered that diplomacy has chance in Sudan too!  We're partial to the AF/Pak tour de force, just because it clearly chaps Richard Holbrooke to see Kerry taking credit for for the Karzai run-off election.  Where to next, you ask? We can only point out that the Senator thinks it's time to Open Cuba to U.S. travelers.

But wait, what's this?   Kerry blocks DeMint trip to Honduras.  

None So Blind

Legislative corruption and the death of good faith governance

The problem with earmarks was never just the money. It was the Congressional practice of bribing constituents and each other.  Now, at last, we see the inevitable result.  One of the most brazenly corrupt pieces of legislation in American history will soon be passed by a Congress so morally compromised that bribery now includes exempting themselves and favored states from their own laws, on a scale which defies belief.  The cynicism which now infects us will ultimately be the hardest enemy to fight.

 

 

 
 

 
 

 

There will be more.  

Sunday Funnies, Vol. V

We recommend scrolling this week, but you can jump around for more.

Obama for Dummies

TOTUS does double duty.

Gore Puts the Scarlet in the Pimpernel

We'll take our apocalypse with a side  of poesy, thanks 

Coming to a Theatre Near You

We're all refugees now

Your Sunday Morning Danish

Tapper's got the video, QB rounds up your backstory

So, let's get started!

The eloquent (aspirational!) Gordon Brown in Copenhagen Friday (QB watches the tube so you don't have to):

There are turning points when history is expected to turn but fails to turn.  I want this conference to be a turning point where history does turn.

~

Time magazine runs a story by Bjorn Lomborg, the original skeptics' skeptic, who has long argued that money for climate remediation would be far better and more effectively spent on saving millions of lives right now.  Take a look at Time's companion photo and the parenthetical links between the paragraphs!

~

Healthcare:  Taxes first.  Benefits later.

 

Federal Employees:  Taxes later.

Feds owe Uncle Sam $3B in unpaid taxes

~

Today in History, from Russia's leading newspaper: 

There was a time when the world was split in two, imperialist/colonialist regimes on one side holding down entire nations and peoples so as to gain control of their wealth (see for example statistics on the literacy rate in Mozambique at the time of its independence from Portugal: 97 per cent of the population was illiterate) and the Soviet Union on the other, spreading freedom and socially progressive governments, bringing education, industrialization and development where none had existed before.

~

Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes reduced to three:

Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe plan to address negotiators at international climate talks in Copenhagen next week. The three leaders are listed in a line-up of more than 180 government officials published in a United Nations schedule of speakers. Each head of state will have up to three minutes to address roughly 700 delegates, reporter, observers and civil society groups.

We were thinking Feiler Faster Thesis, till Hugo "Climate Justice" Chavez took the stand.  Fundamentalists aren't the only ones waiting for the Rapture.

~

The B+ Obama accorded his job performance to date, had us musing about all those missing transcripts from his college days again, and yes, we thought about poor Sasha and Malia when he claimed he gives better gifts than he gets.   What amused us, however, was a disclaimer that a David Axelrod might write.  While the President's apologists are hard at work explaining the polls, he himself, of course, is unconcerned:

"It was inevitable," he said. "We have 10% unemployment. I told Michelle when we got here that in six months my poll numbers will start crashing, so we can't play to the polls. I'm concerned with where we'll be in two to three years."

 

It's not like it hasn't happened to other Presidents.  Oh, wait. 

~

The President's Weekly Address takes the honors, and the cake:

Simply put, the protections currently included in both the health insurance reform bill passed by the House and the version currently on the Senate floor would represent the toughest measures we’ve ever taken to hold the insurance industry accountable.  Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn’t read the bills. Just open these proposals at random and you’ll find on almost any page patient protections that dwarf any of those passed by Congress in at least a decade.

We'd love to take you up on that challenge.  Really, we would.

~

Holiday Spirit

We have to sympathize with Garrison Keillor's complaint about Unitarians' revisionist Christmas Carols.  Most of them substituted Social Justice for Christianity, and political action for spirituality long ago.  We suspect it's the  "cultural elitism" that offends him more than the "spiritual piracy," though. 

The real attention getter, of course, was this:

And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck....Christmas is a Christian holiday - if you're not in the club, then buzz off. 

Keillor is talking about degrading Christmas......at the Mall.  Christian Muzak while we shop till we drop, please.  As John Steele Gordon observed, "Dreck is certainly an interesting word choice in this instance."

Your Sunday Morning Danish

Tapper's got the video, QB rounds up your backstory

Gate Crashers!

    

Jake Tapper posts the priceless 30 second video and the Friday night COP15 caption:

At about 730 pm Denmark time – the president was supposed to have left an hour before -- he learned that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, with whom he was supposed to meet, was meeting with the leaders of India, South Africa, and Brazil – the main players holding up any sort of political agreement.

A senior administration official says the president “barged into the meeting,” where he joined China’s Wen, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and South Africa's President Jacob Zuma.

The President probably regretted his hasty decision not to blow off the final days of COP15, before Air Force One even hit the Copenhagen tarmac.  Having contemplated the high powered guest list, QB suspects he had feared looking irrelevant on yet another signature issue, but by the time he arrived, the Conference was in a shambles. No carefully orchestrated Kabuki theatre here!  This was the real, messy, nitty gritty -- with the world looking over his shoulder.   

Obama, who had been skittish about coming to Copenhagen at all unless it could be cast as a foreign policy success, looked visibly frustrated as he appeared before world leaders.

The Guardian reports that his first "lackluster" speech to the collective body managed to offend just about everyone. He singled out the Chinese, already balky, only to be surprised by the entirely predictable results:

The tense US-China relations came to a head mid-afternoon, when Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton were left sitting in a meeting with three low-level Chinese delegates. According to a source, the US President clearly regarded Mr Wen's absence as a major diplomatic insult, and snapped: "It would be nice to negotiate with somebody who can make political decisions."

[At 6:00 PM] Mr Obama attended only his second meeting of the day with Mr Wen. He was forced to leave the Bella Centre and drive to the Chinese Premier's hotel.

The President's deus ex machina Denmark arrival apparently didn't win him any points with his fellow heads of state from Brazil, Russia, India and China (sound familiar?) who had their own agenda, and a schedule which didn't include Obama. The rest is the stuff of international farce.  Obama had already had a face to face with Wen, and Medvedev had flown the coop for a pressing engagement in Kazakhstan. Obama, desperate for that "foreign policy success," and looking for a late night meet up with the other key players, was told that India was on the way to the airport, that Brazil didn't want to meet without India, and that South Africa didn't want to meet without India and Brazil.  QB would like to have been a fly on the wall when the President discovered that just such a meeting was in the works.  Back on this side of the pond, a blogger asks:

Does it concern anyone else that anger is the only emotion that President Obama has displayed in public over the last month?

You know what happened next.  The President, with his now emblematic gracelessness "burst in," and in our second favorite video, Robert Gibbs & crew had to fight their way through the door.  Obama emerged, at last, with a paper he could metaphorically wave, and a story he could spin.  It's worth noting at this juncture that Lula da Silva earned his chops as a trade union negotiator, and that the Chinese proficiency at something-for-nothing deal making in any sphere is unsurpassed.  We suspect that, at the end of the day, the BRIC was perfectly happy to let Obama take center stage -- and official ownership -- of their worthless three page accord:

Today we've made meaningful and unprecedented -- made a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.

[Insert the usual litany of Obamaworks leading up to this cusp of a precipice of achievement.]

To continue moving forward we must draw on the effort that allowed us to succeed here today -- engagement among nations that represent a baseline of mutual interest and mutual respect. Climate change threatens us all; therefore, we must bridge old divides and build new partnerships to meet this great challenge of our time. That's what we've begun to do here today.

For a look on the bright side, Jennifer Rubin points to the Club for Growth:

When politicians call something ‘meaningful,’ that means it isn’t. Without even reading the accord, pro-growth, limited government conservatives can celebrate the word, ‘meaningful.’  Today that adjective probably saved thirty million jobs.”

Andy Revkin gives us the Saturday after the night before.  Despite his AGW sympathies, QB thinks his actual reporting is far less biased than his Climategate detractors give him credit for.  If you want a blow by bloody blow rundown of international complaints, Revkin is your man.  Scenes from a Climate Floor Fight:

Around dawn, managers of  climate talks here sought to get final approval of the Copenhagen Accord, a climate agreement shaped by the United States and four partners in the final days of climate talks.

They faced blistering opposition from representatives of half a dozen countries, some banging their desks and one, from Venezuela,  bloodying her hand while trying to be recognized.

The real irony here will fully flower next time Obama touts the benefits of tough diplomacy.

Coming to a Theatre Near You

We're all refugees now

Quasiblog brings you a taste of the film that set COP15 on fire!

Think melting arctic ice caps are the biggest threat from global warming? Dangers to polar bears? Think again, and think fast.

To hear film director Michael Nash and others talk, bigger issues are national security and the prospect of millions of refugees displaced due to world weather changes. And they are not problems for the future, they are issues today.

If you've decided to give Sundance a miss this year, here's the trailer for "Climate Refugees."  We think you'll agree it's a sensational 6:29 minutes.

We've got your irony up front this week.  We are introduced to the looming refugee disaster by none other than Paul "Population Bomb" Erlich, who has apparently learned how to hedge his bets, in part, since his last apocalyptic prediction:

We've had lots of civilizations collapse in the past, in part, all of them from environmental causes.  And now for the first time we have totally global civilization that is moving towards collapse for environmental causes, in part, and we don't have any system of governance to deal with the entire planet.

Not to worry worry Paul!  Herman Van Rompuy has gotcha covered.  No one can accuse the new EU of letting a climate crisis go to waste.  In the first and last public statement that anyone will bother listening to, the token EU President used his inaugural soapbox to announce that we are on the cusp of a precipice:

2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.

We hear entirely too much from Newt Gingrich, who seems to have trouble picking his bandwagons these days.  It's no surprise to find John Kerry along for the ride:  

Climate change is on a complete collision course right now with civilization as we know it.  The threat of refugees as a consequence of climate change is an enormous national security issue.

Nancy Pelosi, however, does Erlich one better, in the political mother of all teachable moments.  Having polished off Catholicism during campaign season, she goes global:

 

I think if you trace the basis for conflict in many countries, you can go back to some environmental reason, a natural resource reason, and when you do that, it makes almost every environmental refugee a political refugee of one kind or another.  

We find we have nothing to add. Among the cautionary powerpoints:  25 million people on the run!  50 million climate refugees by 2011!  Helpful, now familiar, advice from Gandhi: "Be the change you wish to see in the world."  And in case you just don't get it:

We have only one earth

This just in:

 

Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet 

Found 

Right Next Door

Gore Puts the Scarlet in the Pimpernel

We'll take our apocalypse with a side  of poesy, thanks 

Our Choice does a literary slide from #206 on Amazon's list, to #361, and the only thing that's making news is Al's debut as a poet.   Perhaps he didn't include his poem in the Young Reader's Edition, which shows up at 14,613 -- but then it's more expensive than the adult version.  

    Pimpernel:  Anagallis arvensis 

    "Poor Man's Weather-Glass"  

    

    (1st class irony, right there!)

    

    We see him here, we see him there,

    Alas, we see Gore everywhere.

    Can't be from heaven --  Looks like hell.

    Damned MSM don't ask, don't tell.

    

    Photo:  Forest Starr and Kim Starr 

We couldn't just paste the original Pimpernel  in there, now could we?  Having set the doggerel stage for Gore's own pome™ [See: Whitman, Walt] we'll send you over to YouTube for an interpretive reading: 

by the Bard himself.

or the Bard himself.

or the Bard himself.

You know how you just wake up one day and realize that the passion is gone?

Obama for Dummies

TOTUS does double duty.

If you didn't get around to slogging through Obama's official 4100 word Nobel lecture, Thorbjørn Jagland, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee supplied a tidy little executive summary in his own presentation remarks.  He danced quite ballet on the President's behalf, and didn't get nearly the notice he deserved for it! 

In pre-Oslo editorials, the what-Obama-needs-to-do commentariat agreed that he faced the daunting task of reconciling war and peace, not to mention explaining away the gap  between actual achievements and the road he's paved with good intentions.  Jagland clearly devoted a great deal of thought to the matter himself, and did his best to give the Prez a running start.

The prize is "an instrument for peace in the world," Jagland advises us, not a "belated stamp of approval."  [Insert list of previous aspirational prizes.] " It is now, today, that we have the opportunity to support President Obama's ideas."  He zeroes in on the presidential advances so perceptively anticipated by the Nobel Committee:

Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play...... The U.S.A. is now paying its bills to the U.N. It is joining various committees, and acceding to important conventions. International standards are again respected. Torture is forbidden; the President is doing what he can to close Guantanamo. Human rights and international law are guiding principles.....

There's more!  "Under Obama's leadership, the U.N. Security Council gave its unanimous support to the vision of a world without nuclear weapons."

On Iran:  "If the outstretched hand continues to meet a clenched fist, the global community will then stand more united in its further response."

On climate change:  Obama, per Desmond Tutu, has already "lowered the temperature in the world"

In the piéce de resistance of irony, Jagland runs interference on Afghanistan!

The struggle against violent extremism in Afghanistan rests on broad international foundations and is supported actively by many governments around the world. In the long run, however, the problems in Afghanistan can be solved only by the Afghans themselves. This is also the basic logic behind the President's new strategy there.

Woodrow Wilson may not figure in Obama's usual pantheon, but Jagland comes through with FDR, JFK and RR.  Is it because "Time Magazine recently described the decade that is coming to an end as the worst since the end of World War II," that even Reagan now looks good enough to quote in international circles?

Obama's diplomacy rests on the idea that whoever is to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population. That was how they put it, those earlier American presidents who, above all others, were seen as world leaders also outside the United States: Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. America's ideals were the world's ideals: they lived, in Reagan's words, "not only in the hearts and minds of our countrymen but in the hearts and minds of millions of the world's people in both free and oppressed societies who look to us for leadership".

He pays his respects to MLK, of course:

When Martin Luther King, Jr., received his award, he had proclaimed his dream that "my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character", but there was still a long way to go from dream to reality. Mr. President, we are happy to see that through your presence here so much of Dr. King's dream has come true.

Obama agrees! 

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak –nothing passive  – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

He's a King/Lincoln twofer.  Will the Mall be big enough for his Memorial? 

Jagland squares the circle nicely:

Obama has the audacity to hope and the tenacity to make these hopes come true.

TOTUS couldn't have said it better himself.

Ironic Sunday Drive-bys, Vol. III

Scroll the main page, or click the links, listed first to last here:

Not Tonight, Dear

Harry Reid can't catch a break.

Sufficient to the Day, Evil Thereof

To each his own.

Death Panel Hokey Pokey

You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out....

Always Look for the Union Label

My, how things have changed

Just for good measure, we'll reach a little further back in the week:

COP15: Emerging Emergencies

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Welcome to COP15!

Where everything old is new again

This Is Not Your Daddy's WW III

News from the Danish front

Always Look for the Union Label

My, how things have changed

Scanning TimeWarner's erstwhile movie channels, we came across a blurb for  "Blue Collar," a 1978 flick:  "Autoworkers (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto) find corruption in a uinion local's safe."   That set us pondering shifts in public perception of unions, bosses, and the corruption that Hollywood spent generations making movies about:

Fast forward from 1953:  Tales of Andy Stern's SEUI expansion ain't pretty, he probably visits the White House more often than most of Obama's Cabinet Secretaries, and he makes no bones, so to speak, about threatening the Senate.  SEUI enforcers lean on everyone from nurses to political protesters, and there's barely a ripple in the force. What's up with that?  Now the UAW did cross the public's radar this year, and card check is meeting resistance, but what we find ourselves contemplating is Stern's White Collar.  In fact, we're looking at a lot of white collars:

In case you can't read the fine print, that's the American Federation of Government Employees.  At 600,000 strong, they're the largest union in the nation's biggest, fastest growing industry.  Excluding the Postal Service, the Federal government clocks in at 1.8 million civilian employees.  The American Federation of Teachers, whose newly conceived mission is teaching social justice, counts 1.4 million members, but where were we?

You'll be pleased to know that in these tough times, Obama is holding the line on federal pay increases.  AFGE provided a handy link to the President's August letter to the Speaker of the House, in which he determined that exigent circumstances existed, and, per Title 5, invoked his power to countermand statutory pay increases for Federal employees.  [We note, passing, that the PDF is titled "PayParity."]  The President as required, assessed the impact of the 2% across the board increase proposed in his 2010 budget: 

I do not believe this decision will materially affect our ability to continue to attract and retain a quality Federal workforce......  Moreover, the GS "quit" rate continues to be very low (2.1 percent on an annual basis), wellbelow the overall average "quit" rate in private enterprise.

NSS!  Maybe that's because we're talking about barn doors and horses:

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time -- in pay and hiring -- during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector, according to a USA Today analysis of federal data.

Federal employees making $100,000 or more jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent during the recession's first 18 months -- and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries of $170,000 or more.

The six-figure salary trend is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

Now this isn't Sunday any more, but it was, when we struck ironic never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste gold in the President's letter.  

Title 5, United States Code, authorizes me to implement an alternative pay plan if I view the adjustments that would otherwise take effect as inappropriate due to "national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the "general welfare."

We defy you to guess just what emergency he had in mind!  It's not just the economic crash and burn:

A national emergency, within the meaning of chapter 53 of title 5, has existed since September 11, 2001.

Death Panel Hokey Pokey

You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out....

There's a whole lot a shakin' going on, too:

The internet is buzzing today with the news that Harry Reid quietly inserted a loophole in the Senate health care bill that would let insurance companies put limits on medical care for folks struggling with costly illnesses — angering patient advocates, and in apparent violation of a promise made by Obama this fall.

Asked for comment, Reid spokesman Jim Manley justified the shift in an email:

“We are concerned that banning all annual limits, regardless of whether services are voluntary, could lead to higher premiums. We continue to work with experts on how best to accomplish our goals of preventing insurance companies from imposing arbitrary coverage limits while providing the premium relief American families need and deserve.”

QB would say Obama jumped the "apparent violation" shark, a long time ago. You'll get your insurance, you just won't get your coverage.  Because we're all about saving you money.  There's irony in that mix somewhere.

Sufficient to the Day, Evil Thereof

To each his own.

If you like your mondo bizarro, you can graze the eco art appetizers at COP15.   We think the CO2 cube is AbFab:

 

Alfio Bonanno and Christophe Cornubert

So, do we believe there's actually a ton of CO2 in that box, or do we need to put the box in context?  Let's go with context, provided by Scientific American: 

Could Cleaning Up Air Pollution Actually Speed Up Global Warming?  Taking the haze out of the atmosphere may make plants less efficient at absorbing and storing carbon dioxide.

We let our fingers do the walking over to the American Museum of Natural History where we found an online Climate Change exhibition, primarily devoted, it seems to the Great Satan of coal.  Having waded deep into the Danish weeds, QB found this evil metric ton oddly reassuring:

 

Get a clue, AmMuNatHist! Coal withdrawal has been trending upward for quite some time.  Here's the ironic Last Hopper from..... the Denmark Mine, in Claridge, PA:

 

Photo: "History of Penn Township." by John W. Mochnick

You'll probably lose patience with the Science Museum's primitive navigational tools, so we'll highlight our favorite Changing Atmosphere page:  "Intense Storms Have Become More Common," with a lovely photo of a hurricane taken from above. 

Over to NOAA:  2009, Slowest Hurricane season since 1997!

Not Tonight, Dear

Harry Reid can't catch a break.

 

We're going to make you work™ for the irony in this one!  If the machinations in Washington hurt your head, cheer up!  Things could be worse.  You could be that wan, phlegmatic, cipher of a Senator we call the Majority Leader. In this QB exclusive, we can now confirm that Harry Reid's problems are, indeed, all in his head.  Unless your own brain can take a lot of abuse, you'll want to take your clicks in small doses -- or just go for the cumulative effect.

Students of politics and the human psyche will not be surprised to learn that Harry's problems started at home.

 

Reid's Real ID headache may be sooo last year, but it should have been a cautionary tale:  If unfunded mandates don't cut it in Nevada, more imaginary money probably won't help.  

Exacerbating Reid’s health care headache [more to come on that front!], 52% of Nevada says nada to government-run health care.

He's got a $30 Billion Nuclear Waste Storage Headache.

(Which is small potatoes when you see Harry's other headache: The $245 Billion Medicare Payment Fix To Buy Off The AMA)

Alas, a Nevada Supreme Court headache didn't stand in the way of his election last time around. 

But QB is keeping hope alive!  If Harry's Jobless-in-Nevada headache gets any worse, we're looking at a career on life support already.  Yes, we went dumpster diving in a column on New England for that one.  

Even Harry's own son gives Harry a headache: 

In 2002, [Rory Reid] ran for a County Commission seat against the wishes of his father, who considered the chamber a political graveyard. Five years later, as Nevada prepared for its first-ever early presidential caucus, Reid gave his father a political headache by taking the chairmanship of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Sen. Reid had pledged to remain neutral in the contest — and his son’s endorsement risked being seen as a pass-through nod from the Senate majority leader. The move created problems for Sen. Reid in Washington, where he had to assure the three other Democratic senators in the race that he was, in fact, keeping his powder dry.

We're sure that real estate exposés don't help, but we're off to DC.

Ethics probes, especially in tough election years, are a headache!

New Jersey and Virginia get into the act.  Let's hope that headache proves chronic.

Giant egos in the Senate are a headache!  Who knew?

Lieberman's Defection Just The Beginning Of Reid's Headaches.  We don't think so!  We knew Harry was a carrier the first time we saw him at a podium.

Shoot, way back in January, it was hard to tell whether Dianne Feinstein was becoming "the conscience of the Senate" or Harry Reid's biggest headache.  In logic, that's called a false dilemma.

There's the Roland Burris headache, and the Congressional Black Caucus Hangover.

Senator Specter is a multi-tasking migraine, a plague as a Republican, a plague as a Democrat.  We're pleased to report, however, that it's a lose/lose propostion for Specter too:  Another Headache for Specter as FEC Allows Refunds to Republicans

Et tu, Firedoglake? The Democracy headache.

We can stop any time.  But then we'd have to ignore the pounding compound headache that is Healthcare.

Bernie Sanders of Vermont may be the headache that sends Reid and his 60 votes to sickbay. 

Pelosi barely passes health care bill; Reid's headache gets worse!

There's the Public Option headache.

It will come as no surprise to QB readers that the public option is not Reid's only healthcare  headache!  We'll just note what an affliction Senator Dorgan can be.  Ditto for the Stupak headache.

We know you've suffered enough at Congressional hands, so we'll just break it down to the essentials.  We're not convinced that Landrieu will stay bought, are you?  

Reid's 6 Biggest Headaches

Joe Lieberman, Conn. 

Blanche Lincoln, Ark.

Mark Pryor, Ark. 

Ben Nelson, Neb. 

Evan Bayh, Ind. 

Mary Landrieu, La. 

That's what's known as a Cluster Headache: 

A cluster headache is one of the most painful types of headache. A striking feature of cluster headache is that the attacks occur in cyclical patterns, or clusters — which gives the condition its name.

Bouts of frequent attacks — known as cluster periods — may last from weeks to months, usually followed by remission periods when the headache attacks stop completely. The pattern varies from one person to another, but most people have one or two cluster periods a year. During remission, no headaches occur for months, and sometimes even years.

Why did we go to the Mayo Clinic to get the scoop?  Glad you asked!  President Obama wants everybody going Mayo.  He does not want you ending up in Texas:

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is famous for some of the best quality and some of the lowest cost. People are healthier coming out of there, they do great. And then you’ve got places — there’s a town in McAllen, Texas, where costs are actually a third higher than they are at Mayo, but the outcomes are worse.

He told Virtual Town Halls that, "People fly in from everywhere to go to Mayo Clinic to get treatment."

He told Greenbay:

[T]he key for us is to figure out, how do we take all the good ideas in the Mayo Clinic and spread them all across the country so that that becomes the dominant culture for providing health care? 

Our thoughtful Prez even wrote a letter to the Senate:  Harry, go to Mayo!  

Oh, wait.....  

If Obama’s feeling a little sick to his stomach this morning, blame the Mayo Clinic:

"Although there are some positive provisions in the current House Tri-Committee bill – including insurance for all and payment reform demonstration projects – the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite.

"In general, the proposals under discussion are not patient focused or results oriented. Lawmakers have failed to use a fundamental lever – a change in Medicare payment policy – to help drive necessary improvements in American health care. Unless legislators create payment systems that pay for good patient results at reasonable costs, the promise of transformation in American health care will wither. The real losers will be the citizens of the United States."

Mayo's CEO was trying to tell anybody who would listen that Medicare needed a best practices upgrade, back in July.  Alas, nobody wanted his advice, after all.

"A Medicare model is a catastrophe,” he said. “Why don’t we give instructions to the Health and Human Services Secretary to start value-based purchasing right now in Medicare?” he said.

It looks like Harry's brilliant Medicare Expansion curative is about to turn into yet another blinding headache too.  Thanks, Mayo!

Proposal Would Not Increase Access to Health Care Services or Control Costs

The current Medicare payment system is financially unsustainable. Any plan to expand Medicare, which is the government’s largest public plan, beyond its current scope does not solve the nation’s health care crisis, but compounds it.  We need to fix Medicare by moving it to a system that pays for value – quality health outcomes that are affordable over time – and ensure its success, before bringing more people into a broken system.

Expanding this system to persons 55 to 64 years old would ultimately hurt patients by accelerating the financial ruin of hospitals and doctors across the country. 

QB can't think of a better place for Harry to get his head examined, but since the Mayo model has been sucked into the Congressional black hole, we're thinking there are plenty of folks in Texas who are more than willing to put him in the hospital. 

COP15: Emerging Emergencies

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. 

In case you've been too busy to notice, BRIC-bat has a whole new meaning too.  The BBC laid out the biggest COP15 backstory last June:

The world's newest economic grouping has ended its first major summit by calling for a more diversified international monetary system.  But the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China stopped short of criticising the world's dominant currency, the US dollar.....

"The summit must create the conditions for a fairer world order," they said in their final statement. The leaders of the four countries said they were "committed to advance the reform of international financial institutions, so as to reflect changes in the world economy. "The emerging and developing economies must have a greater voice and representation in international financial institutions."

This is not your Daddy's Fairness Doctrine either, this is your Distributive Justice Doctrine, more accurately described as redistributive blackmail -- now playing at the COP15 theatre.  QB suggests that it's time to revisit the definition of "emerging economies" and "developing countries."

China is now the world's third-biggest economy, while Russia, India and Brazil are catching up with many key European economies.

What's developing is a new international steamroller of alliances, in somewhat uneasy, shifting iterations for now, but rapidly coalescing as shared interests and opportunities are identified.  Forget the Academic/Green/Science coalition, and look at the BASIC plan laid out for COP15:  

Four of the world’s major developing countries on Saturday agreed on a substantive draft declaration listing their “non-negotiable” demands ahead of next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen.

The 10-page draft, which has been signed by China, India, Brazil and South Africa, is being conceived as a counter to the text that will be released by western countries next week as a possible basis for negotiations, when talks begin on December 7....

Particularly, it underscored what were, for India and other developing nations, four “non-negotiables”: The countries would never accept legally binding emissions cuts, unsupported mitigation actions, international measurement, reporting and verification of unsupported mitigation actions, and the use of climate change as a trade barrier.

The protagonists in the new Cold War will not be the haves and the have nots.  It will be haves vs. haves & everybody else.  The alarm with which we used to view the prospect of a Sino-Soviet bloc may have moderated, but their expansionist dreams remain intact.  QB suggests that both political and economic rapprochement, on an even larger, more complex, scale, demand our close attention now. 

There is no status quo to maintain or foster with China (note NKorea in its sphere), whose appetite for oil is unconstrained by the slightest concern for human rights, and Russia (note Iran), whose mafioso outreach extends to Latin America where it feeds Chavist ambitions -- which Brazil appears to regard with a certain equanimity.  India may still be skittish, but the U.S. is not the only country inclined to seek influence through engagement. Alas, we may be adding that special relationship, so assiduously cultivated by the last administration, to an ever growing list of partnerships which Obama, himself, has destabilized since  January.  

The world is busy rearranging itself, while we vote present. We don't think global climate change means what the President thinks it means.

We Interrupt This Broadcast

You've got mail.  Or something.

Allahpundit thinks this is just a freeky-deeky phenom.

But we know better!  Don't be misled by the folks saying, "Norway.  Obama. Hello?"  That is just a distraction.  The Russians may be denying responsibility, but what's going on is clear:

*Audio made possible by the Internet Archive

This Is Not Your Daddy's WW III

News from the Danish front

The War of the Worlds heats up.  Copenhagen is not just an overcrowded amusement park any more.

From the Guardian, we have escalating conflict, pitting nation against nation: 

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.....

The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".

The NYTimes reports from the other side of the gulf between carbon rich and carbon poor:

A negotiator for a large bloc of developing countries meanwhile challenged rich countries to make far deeper cuts in emissions than they have proposed so far. The negotiator, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping of Sudan, said President Obama should be willing to spend far more to limit climate dangers in the world’s most vulnerable regions.

“We have to ask him, when he provided trillions of dollars to save Wall Street, are the children of the world not deserving help to save their lives?” he said.

Gauntlets have been thrown!  Maginot lines are being drawn!  Left flanks are exposed!

Welcome to COP15!

Where everything old is new again

This just in, from our own Carl Phillips, former anthropologist, now veteran reporter, on the front lines in Copenhagen: 

Ladies and Gentleman:     It's all too evident that these creatures have scientific knowledge far in advance of our own. It's my guess that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute no conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition.......   

We'll have to send you to the transcript for the full smoke and mirrors, because the latest email dump at QB HQ included the code for Carl's latest AGW video update.  We suspect our man in the Danish trenches may have been carbonated when he filed this report, but given the trails he's chasing, we don't blame him.

QB will keep posting news from the front as it comes in, as long as our connec

Siren vs. Canaries in the Christmas Coal Mine

Wobbly warbling from the nightshift shaft

The siren flew into DC for an unpresidented dinner at the Gridiron Club. Alas, journalism's most Prestigious Washington Establishment collective proved, once again, just how deep into the pit its standards have fallen.  Tom Maguire excavates the damning evidence.  If you've ever wondered what reporters talk about amongst themselves, just check out their contribution to the witless Twelve Days of Christmas parodies that plague us, year after yada yada year.   Surely the nation's leading wordsmiths could have served up something better than this bourbon soaked fruitcake of lyrics:

On the first day of Christmas, Rush Limbaugh gave to me: 

A Marxist in a dead tree.

Two tea-bag goons.

Three hell-no's

Four bawling Becks

Five Sarah swoon-ins

Six health care death squads

Seven bug-eyed birthers

Eight Cheney boomlets

Nine ACORN busters

Ten thundering mossbacks

Eleven loony liberals

Twelve flaming liberals, hunted down in the wild and field dressed, medium well-done, seared on the fatty edges—“

Do not pass a shield law for these people!  We'd rather face solitary confinement with the original pumped in 24/7:

Twelve drummers drumming, 

Eleven pipers piping, 

Ten lords a-leaping, 

Nine ladies dancing, 

Eight maids a-milking, 

Seven swans a-swimming, 

Six geese a-laying, 

Five golden rings, 

Four calling birds, 

Three French hens, 

Two turtle doves, 

And a partridge in a pear tree! 

What a relief!  Duty compels us, of course, to hoist ourselves upon our own uncredentialed petard.  Do not try this at home:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Ø.gov sent to me:

Tax payer drubbing

POTUS piping TOTUS

FLOTUS lead a-leaking

Gibbs fancy dancing 

Rahm milking Congress  

Slush funds and skimming

Likely voters naying 

As - tro - tur - f'ing

Geithner calling banks

Screwed French friends

Date night in New York

And Tarp, triage, bad money from trees. 

If you've gotten this far you probably don't need the token content that QB's self-respect requires. Nevertheless, we'll share this internet rundown of deeper meanings which, after struggling through a lifetime of what we thought was an infernal carol, we discovered as new today.  We're not licensed to confirm that the symbolic hens came before the 12 Day eggs.  Indeed, given the infamous pagan roots of the season, it's conceivable to us that the rewriting may have been going on for centuries. 

1 True Love refers to God

2 Turtle Doves refers to the Old and New Testaments

3 French Hens refers to Faith, Hope and Charity, the Theological Virtues

4 Calling Birds refers to the Four Gospels and/or the Four Evangelists

5 Golden Rings refers to the first Five Books of the Old Testament, the "Pentateuch", which gives the history of man's fall from grace.

6 Geese A-laying refers to the six days of creation

7 Swans A-swimming refers to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven sacraments

8 Maids A-milking refers to the eight beatitudes

9 Ladies Dancing refers to the nine Fruits of the Holy Spirit

10 Lords A-leaping refers to the ten commandments

11 Pipers Piping refers to the eleven faithful apostles

12 Drummers Drumming refers to the twelve points of doctrine in the Apostle's Creed

The missing partridge seems suspicious, and it's hard not to notice that the thing doesn't scan.  We could milk this litany for all it's worth, but the beatitudes would not be pretty, so we'll leave you to your own ironic exegesis and say Joy to the World!

Your Sunday Bonfire of the Ironies, Volume II

You can hit the Main Page and scroll, if you're not already there, or you can pick and choose, oldest first below.

If you're maxed out on Climategate, it's slim Uncultured Corruption pickings.

If you've only got time for quickie, you're looking for Gaming the System.

Don't click Forensic Fandango, unless you like ending up in the thick of thin things.

Attention Deniers!

We've got your Anthropogenic Global Warming right here

Uncultured Corruption

In which we find ourselves in quasi-agreement with Zbigniew Brzezinski for the first time in thirty years.

Foul Play in Denmark

Do we even need to mention the I-word?

Inconvenient Truths

Mining the TimesOnline Sidebar

Gaming the System

More fun with Rajendra! 

Who Me?

AGW's big man on campus test drives denial

Timeline Syndrome

It's epidemic.  Or endemic. Or academic, Watson.

Forensic Fandango

Fancy footwork at the University of East Anglia.

Forensic Fandango

Fancy footwork at the University of East Anglia

If extended trivialities bore you, this would be the post you'd scroll on by.

We have, however, decided to spare you the really, really long winding road through East Anglia's website in search of the disappearing Dr. Phil below, although perhaps we'll  add the complete, colorful, Techno Log one day.  Watt's Up's original link to the professor's leave of absence text (just like everyone else's links, oh suspicious one) now takes you to a Page Not Found:

 

www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews?notFound=true:

Sorry, but the page you requested does not exist.

Based upon our site structure, this page is the closest match. 

Alternatively you could search our site using the search box below.

The only reason we spell out the URL is to share our chuckle over the UEA combo of "site structure" and "notFound=true."  Call us shallow.

We're happy to report that we finally located the full text of his press release, which on its own is not worth reading.  It's the institutional defenses mounted on his behalf which follow that may one day end up in the QB Ironic Hall of Fame.  Professor Jones contributed his own personal remarks in an apologia which gives us the warm fuzzies:

In the frenzy of the past few days, the most vital issue is being overshadowed: we face enormous challenges ahead if we are to continue to live on this planet.

One has to wonder if it is a coincidence that this email correspondence has been stolen and published at this time. This may be a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks.  

We'll share the secret of our success, if you'd like to read the rest.  The erstwhile professor's original http is now https.  We're sure this is just a standard operating trick, not intended to hide the CRU decline.  Quite the contrary:  Dr. Phil, if not his data, has been secured!

Postscript #1:  Along the way we happened across the Review Revue page, for anyone interested in the particulars of Inspector Russell's mandate -- also secured, but get it while you can. 

Postscript 32:  The AP's coverage of the step-down hoe-down winds up with  the familiar Dr. Phil familiar: 

A group of scientists who run the RealClimate Web site — including Gavin Schmidt at the NASA space agency and Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University — have now begun posting links to their data sources online in the stated interest of making the science "as open and transparent as possible."

The ever helpful AP directs those interested in further exploration to other sources "On the Net."  No, wait.  They direct us to:

• RealClimate: http://www.realclimate.org/  

Now QB wouldn't want you to get lost in a sea of believers, so we'll  send you in a little more specific direction. Gavin wants to make you aware "of what and how much data is actually available," and he wants you to help him find it.  

Ordinarily, we'd just leave that little irony dancing in the wind, but every once in awhile, we feel compelled to pause for a constructive moment.  RealClimate is, in fact, putting together a Data Sources page.  This civilian must admit, we are easily impressed by long lists of links, and, for now at least, you can actually get there from here.

Timeline Syndrome

It's epidemic.  Or endemic. Or academic, Watson.

The show will go on at the University of East Anglia, with or without its star player:

Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.

Once upon a timeline, you could have read the entire UAE press release, (a little story unto itself).  Reuters has more, if you want more.  Prof. Jones must have taken UAE's PR Dept. aside for a teachable moment on cropping things short. Truncated timelines seem to be a UEA specialty, so stay tuned for the review revue lest it slip right by you:

Sir Muir Russell will head an independent review into the e-mails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, UK.  UEA has asked for the review to be completed by the Spring of 2010 and this will be made public along with the university's response.

We're pleased to see that the Brit's Meteorological Office wants in on the fun:

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

Poor Brit.Gov should take a lesson from Dr. Phil over at the UEA clinic on fast forwarding as well as backing up.  Or not backing up.  We're hoping that a long consult between the coroners, will put Dr. Phil on ice till 2012 too.  Yes, we know we're getting too cute by half.

Bonus point goes to the TimesOnline (again!) for headlining a photo of the "fast-reducing glacier in the Indian state of Sikkim."  This just in, from both sides of the equator:

Imminent Demise of Glaciers Due to … a Typo!

Gore Wrong on Snows of Kilimanjaro!

Who Me?

AGW's big man on campus test drives denial

Gavin Schmidt, Climategate's Apologist in Chief, takes a revisionist shot at Political Science:

The phrase “the science is settled” is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what ’some scientists’ are supposed to have said.....  The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don’t know everything, we know nothing.

We note the tin ear for irony implicit in almost any AGW scientist's "almost 100%" confidence in almost any proposition, and point to our first Google hit on the AGW Messiah, himself, Al Gore, testifyin' to Congress, 2007 style:

The science is settled, Gore told the lawmakers. Carbon-dioxide emissions — from cars, power plants, buildings and other sources — are heating the Earth's atmosphere.

Gore said that if left unchecked, global warming could lead to a drastic change in the weather, sea levels and other aspects of the environment. And he pointed out that these conclusions are not his, but those of a vast majority of scientists who study the issue.

Members of the committee, Democrats and Republicans alike, listened very carefully to Gore, as they seemed to take to heart his final message: that in a few years this whole debate will look very different.

QB sez Gore's closing prophesy is looking almost 100% right.  On the evangelical nuts and bolts side, we think he was just playing catchup ball last week on Sat. Night Live when he announced that he planned to "out-crazy the crazies."  Mixed nuts and mixed metaphors, we can stop anytime.....

Gaming the System

More fun with Rajendra! 

Dr. Pachauri reacts to allegations of CRU data manipulation, Nov. 26:

This thoroughness and the duration of the [IPCC] process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.

Dr. Pachauri reacts to allegations of data manipulation on Dec. 4:

UN body wants probe of climate e-mail row.

Dr Pachauri told BBC Radio 4's The Report programme that the claims were serious and he wants them investigated. "We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it," he said.  "We certainly don't want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail."

There's more than one game afoot here, no?  Understated mainstream kudos to the BBC for "e-mail row."  We like "UN body" too, in our own twisted way.

Inconvenient Truths

Mining the TimesOnline Sidebar

HuffPo isn't the only outfit just begging for an update.  Is time too short for correctives at the UK's Timesonline pre-conference ReadMe?

COPENHAGEN

 

Cheat sheets: your Copenhagen guide

How to sound intelligent about the big climate change pow-wow

Here's your C'hagen ToDo List and your ironic plat du jour.  You can check out the mini-reviews online, but we'll credit you with the wherewithal to fill in your own editorial comments:

BOOK:  Our Choice, A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
BOOK:  Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet 

FILM:  The Age of Stupid

FILM:  The Truth About Climate Change

FILM: An Inconvenient Truth

EXHIBITION: Prove It! All the Evidence you Need to Believe in Climate Change
EXHIBITION: Breathing In 

EXHIBITION: Ghost Forest

EVENT: The Wave — The UK’s march for action on climate change
EVENT:  A.C. Grayling in conversation with Rajendra Pachauri

We're awarding a bonus point to TimesOnline for their little gem of a take away from  Bryan Lovell:  "Governments should recognise that oil companies can be heroes as well as villains."  We'll call that the glass half full Lovell:

BOOK: Challenged by Carbon: the Oil Industry and Climate Change

[Lovell]  argues that governments need to turn to geologists and the oil industry to nail carbon capture and storage....  Lovell explains how the oil industry could effectively waste-manage carbon, but nothing can be done without government intervention. Both state and private oil companies demand a clear regulatory framework to expand into this field. Businesses recognise that there is profit in carbon capture and storage. Politicians, Lovell argues, must realise this as well. 

Politicians scoped out the regulatory possibilities before we were born, Bryan! And we weren't born yesterday.  Fortunately, Qblog is too small for government recognition.

Foul Play in Denmark

Do we even need to mention the I-word?

Mere days before the U.N.'s Climate Change Conference convenes in Copenhagen, news of major fraud in Denmark's CO2 quota register -- the largest of such exchanges in the world -- surfaces in the press. 

Et tu, NASA?

Uncultured Corruption

In which we find ourselves in quasi-agreement with Zbigniew Brzezinski for the first time in thirty years.

Over at Top of the Ticket, Andrew Malcolm quotes HuffPo's Sam Stein quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski scolding America for scolding Hamid Karzai for corruption. We note, in passing, the irony of Jimmy Carter's former right hand man opining on the subject of Afghanistan. We have watched Brzezinski's phoenix-like rise from the ashcan of history with a depressed amazement which only sounds oxymoronic.  Huffpo's unsparing headshot accords with our nightmarish vision of the man whom Stein, alas, describes as "one of the most respected foreign policy voices in Democratic circles." 

While we appreciate Brzezinski's appreciation of hypocrisy, his boilerplate roster of the usual suspects -- greedy financiers, special interests, campaign donors -- seems decidedly uninspired. Malcolm did slightly better, putting the Chicago machine which produced Obama on the table. He scored a point for originality too, throwing the general public into the hypocritical mixer, not for personally suborning officials, but for countenancing money based campaign fundraising!  

QB thinks more than a little ironic fodder has slipped through the cracks here. 

Civilized corruption is a far more complex beast than the rudimentary exchange of money for favors or protection which our political classes deplore overseas.  Earmarks which went unmentioned, for example, turn primitive bread and circuses into high art.  Ordinary citizens do not bribe their government.  Congressmen bribe their constituents and thoroughly corrupt their own legislation by bribing each other. 

Look and learn, Afghanistan!  

The American system of buying votes and trading influence transcends the petty polling larcenies and primitive payoffs common to all cultures. We funnel our baksheesh through the IRS, and our functionaries take their cut of the demographic distributions which we have institutionalized as a civil society requires.  Until you evidence such sophisticated subtleties, our government will not be bribing yours. 

Attention Deniers!

Fortunately, Instapundit does the legwork today, so we don't have to. We've got your Anthropogenic Global Warming right here:

In 1985, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey found a giant hole in the ozone layer of Earth's atmosphere over the South Pole. This discovery prompted a largely successful international effort to ban CFCs, the chemicals largely responsible for man-made thinning of the ozone layer.

Unfortunately, a new analysis from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) suggests that stopping ozone depletion may actually increase global warming and speed up sea level rise. This discovery pits two important environmental missions against each other, while highlighting the complexity of our effect on the planet.

SCAR's findings indicate that the extra radiation allowed through the atmosphere by the depleted ozone above Antarctica created wind patterns that cooled the eastern, more densely ice-covered, section of the continent. Those weather patterns partly protected Antarctic ice from the ravages of global warming.

Now, as the hole in the atmosphere heals, those wind patterns will shift, fully subjecting the Antarctic ice to the effects climate change. According to SCAR, that means a rise in sea levels up to 4.6 feet greater than earlier predictions.

Sometimes the irony just writes itself.

Dancing with the AGW Stars

The Anthropogenic Ballet, Day Six

From Instapundit through Megan McCardle to Rajendra Pachauri on the CRU scandal:

The head of the U.N.'s panel of climate experts rejected accusations of bias on Thursday, saying a "Climategate" row in no way undermined evidence that humans are to blame for global warming.

McCardle nabs the underlying irony: "He responds to concerns about the peer review process being stacked by saying . . . all the work was peer reviewed."

Pachauri said a laborious selection process, using only articles approved by other scientists, called peer review, and then subsequently approving these by committee had prevented distortion.

"The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments," he added in a written statement to Reuters.

"There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed."

"This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental."

QB nabs the postcript.  On the Reuters web page we see the expected legal notice:  © Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved.  Pull up the handy print version, and after the yada yada copyright details, you'll find a reassuring addendum:

Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

The irony of finding such a stipulation on a Reuters page is picayune potatoes in the larger AGW scheme.

"It is unfortunate that an illegal act of accessing private email communications between scientists who have been involved as authors in IPCC assessments in the past has led to several questions and concerns," said Pachauri.

NSS.  Mixing metaphors with abandon, misfortune is a snowball from hell.