questions for Andrew Revkin…

Andrew Revkin has begun blogging about Climategate. After reading his last post (Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research) I emailed him a couple of questions:

Andrew,

Two questions:

1) Why do you assume the emails (and data, which I don’t think you mentioned) were hacked and not released by a whistle blower?

2) Why don’t you take time off from the he said/she said narrative and analyze the emails and data yourself?

Thanks!

Actually, I have the same questions for all the other “prestige media” who are playing the he said/she said game with these revelations: Why don’t you pretend you’re a reporter and, you know, read and analyze the primary sources instead of relying on different people’s opinions and defenses?

I’ll post his reply if he sends one.

global warming, Eisenhower, and the danger of institutionalized science…

Eisenhower and Washington gave the two most-quoted “Farewell Addresses” by presidents. Most of these quotes, at least in my lifetime, have been offered up by isolationists, pacifists, and the like-minded. Washington’s has been creatively interpreted by subsequent generations who ignore its context and meaning within its time. Eisenhower’s has been cherry-picked to great effect. (Notice how often references to the military industrial complex fail to include the line “We recognize the imperative need for this development.”)

One important section of the Eisenhower address today seems—in light of recent revelations concerning the Great Global Warming Scare—unusually prescient. Here it is (emphasis mine):

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Does this not seem to be what has occurred? Whatever fascistic dynamic may (or may not) have taken hold of us through the growth of what Eisenhower himself viewed as the necessary evil of the military industrial complex, our core governing institutions—our universities, our think tanks, our regulatory agencies, our journalism, huge swaths of our national legislature, the U.N. (with its hydra head of related and subsidiary agencies)—all of them have coalesced around what increasingly appears to be a hoax. And in exactly the way Eisenhower described both military industry and science. I am as amazed by Eisenhower’s vision as I am appalled by what we have allowed to occur.

How did this breakdown happen and how do we keep it from happening again?

if you’re going to do opposition research…

…at least try to get the facts straight. Which includes context and circumstances.

Hotline On Call (National Journal) at least tries to be balanced on alleged partisan flip-flopping. Trouble is, they trip right out the gate as they begin with Republicans:

It’s a boon for opposition researchers as AG Eric Holder’s decision to bring terrorism suspects to trial in NYC has both parties backpeddling on previous statements.

A Dem source passes along statements from Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) praising earlier terrorist trials in the U.S. Both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions and Graham spent 11/18 blasting Holder at a Capitol Hill hearing.

Graham, a member of the House in ‘02, “was pleased with the apparent decision to seek the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui,” a press release from his office said at the time.

Meanwhile, Sessions told Gannett he backed trying Moussaoui in federal court in Northern Virginia. “‘(The White House) probably thought it might be good to try this one in public,” he said.

This is kind of sad. You see, they have the sound bites, but they get the facts behind them wrong.

I know this is hard (for some) to comprehend, but here goes…

Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota, not on a battlefield or in an Al Queda hideout somewhere, so he wasn’t brought into the U.S. He was already here.

Not to mention there was no Military Commission set up yet to try him.

The trial itself turned out to be a worst-case illustration of what all the Republicans and the few sensible Democrats fear now. At least until Moussaoui pled guilty.

We dodged a bullet on that one.

Hotline On Call is going to have to look somewhere else for evidence of Republican flip-flopping.

This one came up dry.

In the meantime, ask yourself what happens if KSM is acquitted and his lawyers file habeas. What if the case works its way up the appeals process and SCOTUS orders his release? Will the president–whoever it is at that time–will the president defy the Court or release him?

Is this a possibility serious people really want to face?

Obamacare and abortion…

John McCormack reports that “Obamacare would make public and private insurance plans cover abortion.”

In July 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama told a group of Planned Parenthood activists that he would require coverage for abortion in both his public plan and in private insurance plans:

In my mind reproductive care is essential care. It is basic care, and so it is at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose. … we’re going to set up a public plan that all persons and all women can access if they don’t have health insurance. It’ll be a plan that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services… We also will subsidize those who prefer to stay in the private insurance market except the insurers are going to have to abide by the same rules in terms of providing comprehensive care, including reproductive care.

Contacted afterward by the Chicago Tribune, an Obama spokesman said that “reproductive services” included abortions. Now, Obama plans to follow through on this campaign promise without taking the political hit for this deeply unpopular proposal….

But Obama and his administration are trying to do everything they can to obscure this fact. Asked at today’s press briefing if Obama should support an amendment to prohibit abortion funding in order to achieve his oft-stated goal of reducing the number of abortions, Robert Gibbs said that “the President and this administration agree that that’s — a benefit package is better left to experts in the medical field to determine how best and what procedures to cover.”

Why is President Obama no longer willing to say explicitly, as he did in 2007, that his plan should mandate abortion coverage? Does Obama really think it’s possible to simultaneously subsidize abortions and reduce the incidence of abortion?

okay, I’m slow picking up this blog thing…

I admit it.

Came across another great blog this morning. One that has already past the “1-million-visitors Site Meter threshold.” Last February. (For the record, the humble blog you’re reading now is scheduled to reach that threshold about the time they finish building the Starship Enterprise. The third one. Anyway…)

It’s called The Other McCain. I don’t yet know the first name of this McCain person, or whether it’s a man or woman. Or who gave him/her permission to do this blog thing.

I just know it looks like a good blog.

Anyway, this morning’s post ( SIGTARP Strikes: IG Barofsky Report Says Treasury Not Tracking Bailout Cash), reacts to a report from The Hill about a top government watchdog blasting the administration for “rejecting ‘common sense’ by not requiring banks receiving billions of dollars in government money to say how they are using the money.”

Here’s what The Other McCain has to say about it:

This SIGTARP report is a perfect example of why the Obama adminstration hates IGs. The Democrats just want to shovel money out the door and don’t care who gets it, except to be sure their well-connected friends get their share.

According to the liberal neo-Keynesian economic gospel, as long as the federal government does X-billion dollars of deficit spending, that will produce X-plus-Y amount of stimulus value (where Y = Magic Government Spending Multiplier Effect) without regard to whether the money ends up feeding orphans or supplying the mistresses of Goldman Sachs executives with bustiers and garter belts

Unfortunately for liberals, the stupid taxpayers can never seem to comprehend the nuances of neo-Keynesian theory the way Nobel Prize-winning genius Paul Krugman does.

No matter how many times they’re lectured about this “stimulus”/bailout brilliance, the idiots who pay the taxes get a little miffed to discover that their great-grandchildren’s future has been hocked to pay for new wallpaper and wainscoting in the executive lavatory of a giant banking conglomerate which — as every expert in Washington explained last fall — was so frantically in need of cash that the branch managers were sending tellers to sell plasma to the blood bank, merely to prevent a complete catastrophic meltdown in the global finance system.

Those stupid taxpayers are like that. They have a habit of remembering irrelevant minor details like those 90-point headlines on the front pages of all the newspapers:

CRISIS LOOMS: WORLD ECONOMY TEETERS ON BRINK OF FINAL APOCALYPSE; CONGRESS DESPERATELY FIGHTS TO AVERT ECONOMIC DOOMSDAY; PLAGUES OF LOCUSTS, FROGS FEAREDDamned idiot taxpayers. What do they know about economics and budgets and stuff that only people with Ivy League Ph.Ds can ever hope to understand?

Wow. I certainly agree with that…

raw power, huh? let’s try some of that…

Rich Lowry, on The Corner:

Democrats are having a tough time of it on health care and Obama’s numbers are sinking, but they still have one enormous advantage, as E. J. Dionne reminds us today: raw power. No matter how incoherent the Democrats’ health-care program is or how unpersuasive they are in selling it, they still have a lot of votes to play with.

Question:

Isn’t “raw power” an awfully risky tactic? They’d basically be passing very iffy stuff over the dead bodies of the voters.

All I can say on their behalf is that it had better work or they’ll be in the minority for the next 50 years…

found a beautiful blog this morning…

…by John Dickerson.

His topmost post today is his answer to a question about a special room:

What would you put in your room?

My friend’s mother has this wonderful studio on her farm. I’ve always wanted a small collection of rooms like this in which to write and read. If you could design a set of rooms like this what would you put in there? I’ll start: bookshelves, fireplace, record collection, map of the world, standing desk, guitars, bottles of ink, fountain pens, stationery, a gross of pencils, antique typewriters.

There would be a space for reading books that would be separate from the space for reading papers which would be separate from the writing spaces. There would be two writing spaces. One for handwriting letters another for work writing.

Oh and a chess set with weighted pieces, candles, a wall of pictures, huge chalk board….

That’s my incomplete list and there are many more questions to be figured out. For example: would there be a space for company, or would it be a solitary place?

My special room?

A large wooden desk with lots of drawers. A powerful mac w/ TWO large flat panel monitors. A small fridge with lots of Dr Pepper. As many bookcases as would fit. Lots of pictures of Carol and the kids. An autographed picture of John Dickerson (ideally, somehow, standing next to Jake Tapper). A portrait of Lincoln. Lots and lots of books, mostly biographies of great men–Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, both Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, Grant, Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan….

A Bible. A copy of Hinds Feet on High Places.

Lots of CDs. Bach, Beethoven, Barber, Vaughan Williams, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, John Adams (the composer, and the older one of those two).

A picture window looking into the woods (I know, we’re supposed to be deciding what to put in our room, but a critical part of our room is the view outside, the world outside our paradigm).

A coffee pot. Lots of creamer. Flavored.

A stack of yellow pads and a cup-full of fine-tip ballpoint pens.

A sketchpad and lots of pencils and kneadable erasors.

And a cat…

letter to David Ignatius (on Obama’s foreign policy)…

OK. Confession up front:

I was hoping your bottom line was going to be It Sucks!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you managed to include every Democratic Party foreign policy, bash-Bush talking point of this decade.

David, just as one example…do I need to point you to the dictionary definition of unilateral? You referred to “the Bush administration’s arrogance and unilateralism.” You know better than that. The accurate (and honest) descriptor would be non-U.N. sanctioned.

Here’s another, contained within the same phrase: arrogance.You are not amazed at the arrogance of a president with no foreign policy experience at all (zero, nada) thrusting himself onto the world stage filled to the brim and overflowing with the (apparently sincere) belief that his words alone could make all America’s enemies turn their swords into plowshares and we could all be friends? And the thought that, by turning his back on Bush administration agreements with Israel—agreements that Israel acted on in good faith—and by adopting the intellectually-bankrupt moral equivalence line of every Israel-basher from the U.N. to Ron Paul in telling Israel to engage in some “serious self-reflection”… This doesn’t look like arrogance to you?

The one redeeming quality I find in your well-crafted, elegantly-worded, and completely misguided column, is the opportunity it provides to write an incisive (and better-informed) retort. I’ll just publish this letter on my blog. Hey, if you’re lucky, I’ll even publish your response!

another letter to John Cornyn, this time on Sotomayor…

I am alarmed by this quote from you, provided by the AP in a story titled “GOP senators weigh options for Sotomayor”:

“Your judicial record strikes me as pretty much in the mainstream of judicial decision-making.”

The issue for me is that, in evaluating Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, are we to give more weight to what she says—on multiple occasions—are her priorities and principles, or to her judicial record, which—until this point—has been constrained by precedent and by rulings of higher courts?

I think we should judge her by her repeated statements and be cautious about giving her a lifetime appointment on a Court where there are no constraints. Yes, during the hearings, she did her best John Roberts imitation, but it was obvious, to me at least (and to some of her liberal brethren) that she was speaking words that did not reflect her own convictions.

She is clearly out of the mainstream of judicial philosophy.

Judge Sotomayor also lacks Roberts’s intellectual depth. She is clearly in over her head intellectually, as the liberal Jeffrey Rosen predicted. (And while my long-time, half-kidding wish to appoint at least one grammarian to SCOTUS will undoubtedly remain unfulfilled, wouldn’t it be helpful if our justices had a better mastery of syntax and grammar than that offered by the oft-stumbling Judge Sotomayor?)

I was shocked, reading the also-liberal Georgetown Law Professor Mike Seidman say he was “completely disgusted” by her testimony:

“If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court.”

I often look to Ed Whelan for insight into judicial nominations. Over the years I have found him to be a calm, knowledgeable, and plain-spoken champion for a Constitutionally-centered judiciary. This is what he says about Judge Sotomayor’s testimony. I hope you’ll take his wisdom seriously:

Judge Sotomayor deserves an A+ for brazen doublespeak. She emphatically rejected the lawless “empathy” standard for judging that President Obama used to select her, but she denied the plain import of her many statements contesting the possibility and desirability of judicial impartiality. She hid behind a ridiculously simplistic caricature of judging that embarrassed and disgusted her most vociferous backers, but she never recognized any meaningful bounds on the role of a Supreme Court justice. She gave a series of confused statements about the use of foreign law that are inconsistent with each other and that contradict a speech that she gave just three months ago.

The primary question that Judge Sotomayor’s testimony raises is whether her thinking is really so muddled or whether she was being savvily deceptive—or both.

In this difficult time for our Nation, we cannot afford to unleash a person who is either willing to lie in order to be confirmed or simply not intelligent enough to know the difference between her most-cherished beliefs and the hastily-memorized bullet copy the administration gave her before the hearings.

We also cannot afford to continue our long practice of blind deference to the President while the other side does everything it can to destroy our best judicial nominees.

I urge you, Senator Cornyn, to use every tool available to you to keep this radical off the Supreme Court, up to and including a filibuster. Don’t be afraid that, by doing this, you will offend Latinos. Bring to their attention the treatment given to another Latino who was a genuine legal intellectual—also an immigrant whose native language was not English—the brilliant Miguel Estrada.

Texas and the country are depending on you to be our voice and to do the right thing.

Thank you.

“apologist” in chief?

Over on Contentions, John Steele Gordon is searching for the right word. I don’t think he found it:

As far as I know, there is no word in English for the opposite of jingoist. But if there were, its entry in the dictionary would belong next to Barack Obama’s photograph. It seems he can’t set foot on foreign soil without apologizing for this country’s past sins and promising that it will sin no more under his leadership. In doing so, of course, he both disses his own country and praises himself by implication.

Judging by the title of his post, Mr. Gordon evidently thinks apologist is the word he’s looking for. How do we break it to him that an apologist is someone who explains and defends something (or someone)—not someone who apologizes for it?

Barack Obama as Apologist in Chief?

Would that he were . . .