PHILLY POLITICS, AS USUAL

A lengthy article in today’s Philadelphia Daily News described the political battle shaping up over the redistricting of Philly’s city council that will follow the 2010 federal census. For some years, apparently, there has been a movement to carve out a “Latino district” in order to ensure a permanent Hispanic fiefdom in the city.

What follows is the letter I sent to the Daily News.

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To the editor:

Your article about the prospect of political redistricting in Philly from the coming census was an eye-opener.

It is a measure of how far we have gone down the road of politicizing group identity that no one in Philadelphia politics objects to racial and ethnic gerrymandering on the grounds it is fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American. It is simply an accepted practice. The only battles are among politicians on how best to ghettoize their constituents into convenient demographic enclaves.

The argument, I suppose, is that creating a "Latino district" or an "African-American district" or an "Italian district" somehow empowers these groups. In fact, the opposite is true. It merely relieves entrenched politicians of the need to treat us as individual adults with differing hopes, beliefs and values, regardless of who our ancestors were. Instead, once we are divided into neat little groups, politicians can assure themselves of long careers merely by pandering to the lowest common denominator of racial and ethnic differences. Real political debate on what is best for Philadelphia goes out the window. Instead, politics is a backroom process of dividing up the cookies among "MY Latinos," "MY African-Americans," "MY white river-ward residents," etc.

There is nothing new in politics, and this method of controlling the unruly masses was described in detail by Machiavelli five centuries ago. The division of people into groups allows the prince to rule them by doling out benefits, and withdrawing them, from this group or that. The groups then fight each other for crumbs rather than demand good and fair governance from the ruler.

We are people. We are Americans. We are Philadelphians. We are much more than our skin color or our last name. We are NOT primarily Latinos or Irish or African-American or Italian or Polish, and in 2010, it is insulting that Philadelphia politicians refuse, for their own convenience, to treat us as individuals who must be persuaded to vote for them rather than be manipulated to embrace our basest instincts.

IRAN'S DESCENT INTO HELL

A few recent news items, blog entries and tweets from Iran give a flavor of the meltdown that is now occurring in this once-civilized nation:

***The price of bread has risen six fold as government subsidies were removed.

***The inflation rate is now 20%.

***Labor unrest is growing as workers cannot be paid.

***Last week, a Great-Depression-style bank run occurred, leading to rules limiting the amount that may be withdrawn from a bank account.

***The cost of electricity is about to quadruple.

Meanwhile, as the regime continues the rape, torture and murder of dissidents, it has reiterated last year’s fatwa banning all satellite dishes. In addition, one-fourth of the police have been fired and replaced with men from rural areas. It is believed these new police will be less reluctant to shoot at protesters in the streets.

While the fall of this hideous theocracy appears imminent, it may yet be able to hang on for months or even years, and as long as it does, it constitutes a continuing danger not only to its own citizens but also to the larger world.

The silence and inaction of the United States government is inexcusable. There are any number of things the Obama administration might do to hasten the end of the regime and foreshorten the ongoing bloodbath, but the very least of these is for Obama himself to publicly denounce the current government as thugs and murderers with no legitimate right to govern. As we learned in the early 1990’s, the unambiguous moral condemnation of Soviet communism, by John Paul II, Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, was an important element in the fall of the Soviet Union. This is one kind of war where words matter. To protesters longing for freedom, the knowledge there are decent people in the world who support them provides hope, and a sense of inevitability to their struggle. To the thugs and their police, the condemnation is a message that the world is watching and their crimes will no longer be overlooked.

Obama must speak out because taking the side of the Iranian people is the only moral thing to do. But there’s another reason as well---the theocracy WILL fall. Whether it happens tomorrow or next month or next year, the mullahs cannot survive for long. And no one can say what will emerge from the chaos. It is in our national interest to be on the side of the freedom-fighters now, because they will ultimately be the winners in this battle.



Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

WATERLOO

Scott Brown stressed two issues in his campaign, and they struck a chord with Massachusetts voters. First, of course, was his pledge to vote against Obamacare. The other issue, however, which got little attention in the national media, was his plain-spoken, unambiguous criticism of Obama’s conduct of the war. Brown opposes the closing of Guantanamo, opposes treating terrorists like criminals, and favors “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding.

The embrace of Scott Brown by the voters, and the rejection of Obama’s policies in one of our bluest states, gives hope to those of us who had begun to fear that nothing could stop this icy, arrogant president from dragging us into one catastrophe after another. When the news came that Brown had won, I thought of Winston Churchill’s words. “Americans will always do the right thing,” he said, “after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

HAITI RELIEF

Both France and Venezuela have charged the U.S. is “occupying” Haiti. Aid organizations from around the world are complaining that U.S. Marines have commandeered all the landing sites and won’t let them land. Looting is widespread in Port-au-Prince and anarchy reigns throughout the country.

There’s only one possible explanation for all these problems. Barack Obama hates black people.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

AVATAR

If you’re looking for a comprehensive movie review, you won’t find it here. Avatar is not really the sort of movie for which a “movie review” is appropriate.

For one thing, you’ve seen it before. It was called Dances With Wolves or a dozen other things that used the same formulaic plot. An outcast from the dominant culture (almost always the evil white guys with big guns) goes to live with beautiful, pure, primitive, native people, becomes one of them, and then leads them in battle against his own (evil white guy) people. The movie has been made so often, the plot has a nickname: it’s called the White Messiah story.

Obviously, this is a heart-warming theme for the politically-correct lefties who make all the movies in Hollywood. As a bonus, you will get plenty of unsubtle dialogue that is somehow startlingly relevant to the actions and beliefs of the recent Bush/Cheney administration even though Avatar takes place on another planet in the 22nd Century. (Actually, the left-wing political cracks are so absurd and out of place that I wondered whether they were actually written by a conservative script-doctor who was trying to spoof what liberals would do with a movie like this.)

Yet, though the story and the dialogue and various bits of business along the way are profoundly silly, the very first words I said to the wife and child upon emerging from the theater were these: “Well, I certainly feel I got my $14 worth.”

And that, in a nutshell, is my review. Go. You won’t regret it. Fourteen smackers is cheap for the 3-D extravaganza awaiting you. The foliage alone on the planet Pandora is worth the trip to the theater, even in sub-freezing weather. (NOTE: there are movie palaces that lack the 3-D projection system to show Avatar, but they are showing it anyway. Shun them.)

But none of that is what I really wanted to talk about. I want to talk about the villain.

It’s a corporation, of course. The villain these days is always a corporation. In Avatar, it doesn’t even have a name. It’s simply known as “The Company,” which makes me suspect it’s actually the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. Whatever it is, it’s very evil. It’s major-league evil. It’s much more evil than the pharmaceutical company in “The Constant Gardener” that hired mercenaries and killers and started wars and intentionally gave lethal drugs to innocent Africans. It’s even eviler than Dynacorp, the evil corporation in the Terminator movies. The Company in Avatar is so evil that movie patrons (not just me) find themselves snickering at how utterly, unrepentantly, hideously evil it is.

It’s a problem for Hollywood. When the peanut gallery can’t take the villain seriously anymore, they need a new villain. But apparently, they can’t think of one.

It used to be that anybody could be a movie villain. Then Italians started complaining about being villains so, taking the path of least resistance, Hollywood decided Italians wouldn’t be used as villains anymore. Then black people complained, so they stopped being used as villains too. Then it was crazy people. Then it was homosexuals, and Hispanics, and Muslims. For a while, the only villains you saw were semi-unidentifiable, crypto-Eastern-European, post-Soviet gangster punks, but Vladimir Putin must have complained because you don’t see them anymore either. Eventually, the deep thinkers in Hollywood decided that it was just too dangerous for the bottom line to cast any sort of identifiable person as a villain, so the villainous corporation was born.

For a while, it was a novelty. It was entertaining. But when, in movie after movie, the evil corporation is always the villain, it becomes necessary to ratchet up the malevolence. If your villain is an evil corporation, you need it to be even more evil than the previous blockbuster’s evil corporation. And then the next guy’s movie has to feature a corporation even more monstrous than yours. And then you get The Company in Avatar, and the audience starts chuckling.

We all want to suspend our disbelief so we can enjoy the show, but there comes a time when you just can’t swallow it any longer. I mean, even if you think that corporations are bad and wrong and amoral and yes, EVIL, we all know that these undesirable qualities tend to manifest themselves in activities like stealing a competitor’s technology, or trying to monopolize a market, or maybe even bribing a public official. These things happen. On the other hand, murder, nuclear conflagration, genocide and world domination tend not to be featured in the mission statement, even at Halliburton.

Hollywood thus finds itself in a bind. They have no bad guys left except for the one remaining entity their politically-correct shibboleths allow them to defame, and they have made it into a laughingstock. They need a new idea for a villain, and there are millions of dollars waiting for the genius who comes up with it.

I suggest blondes.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

THE PANTY BOMBER

There’s not much I can say about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that hasn’t been said already. He paid for his ticket in cash, he had no luggage on a transatlantic flight, he was a 23-year-old Muslim who had recently spent a lot of time in Yemen, and his daddy (a prominent banker and diplomat in both London and Nigeria) had warned the State Department that his kid had become a dangerous radical. Yet somehow he was allowed to fly from Lagos to Amsterdam to Detroit without anyone questioning his bona fides.

And you can’t take a tube of toothpaste in your carry-on.

In response to this incident, no one can go to the potty or read a book during the last hour of international flights into America. In addition, Joan Rivers got kicked off a flight from Costa Rica to Newark as a security risk and Michael Yon (America’s most respected war correspondent), got led off in handcuffs today at the Seattle airport.

I wrote about airport security four years ago, when it was a joke. (See here.) And now it’s worse. After billions spent on the TSA, do any of us have any confidence in these people? I mean, if the joint efforts of the TSA, Homeland Security and the State Department couldn’t stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a guy who practically had “TERRORIST” tattooed on his forehead, what’s the point of spending more billions on the TSA and making plane travel even more annoying for the rest of us? Why bother?

The only people you can count on, as Flight #253 proved yet again, are your fellow passengers. So why not empower them? I reiterate my suggestion from four years ago, originally voiced by Archie Bunker himself. People with concealed carry permits, cops, security guards---anyone who is normally permitted to possess a handgun---should be encouraged to take it on the plane. The pilot would be informed, he would have a look at you, and if he didn’t like what he saw, your piece would ride with him. But every flight would have armed citizens on it, and that would be the end of the problem.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

PUTTING A HAPPY FACE ON SLAVERY

I finally crossed paths with Michael Coard, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and black activist. I listened to him for years on WHAT (which doesn't exist anymore), where he dispensed legal advice to all comers on a wide array of legal topics. For a lawyer, this is a sort of circus trick. It is not at all an easy thing to do, and there was never a time in my legal career when I could have done it. Yet he was able to impart something useful to every caller, and all of it was delivered in an utterly humorless and pedantic monotone that was so humorless and so pedantic and so monotonic that I couldn't help but be entertained by him.

Mr. Coard was one stop on a walking tour in the Independence Hall area of various sites relating to George Washington. His venue was the archeological lab that had been overwhelmed with artifacts from the excavations for the Constitution Center. In particular, he was interested in the slave quarters at the "First White House," where Washington had lived during his two terms as president.

And that, among all the history to be found in old Philadelphia, was the only thing that interested him. He made this point crystal clear to us several times in several different ways. As a child, he said, he had been brought to the area on school trips and had witnessed the excitement of his white classmates as they learned about the heroes of the American Revolution, but it had meant nothing to him. Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington---all of it was irrelevant to black people, he told us. He is the kind of speaker who will pick out a word and repeat it a number of times to ram it home for the listener. "Irrelevant" was the word he chose for us day-trippers. It was irrelevant to him as a child and it was irrelevant to him as an adult.

We got fifteen minutes of the humorless and pedantic monotone I had come to love on the radio, but it wasn't quite so entertaining this time, partly because there wasn't any history in it, and that's what we were there for. Instead, it was the tale of Mr. Coard organizing his Avenging The Ancestors Coalition and confronting the Park Service, and the negotiations over what would be done with the slave quarters at the house where Washington lived. And this was all that mattered to Mr. Coard, even now. Not even his close acquaintanceship with the historic buildings and monuments and historians and guides over the past few years, had changed his view that the birth of the nation, the drafting of the Declaration and the Constitution---all of it was "irrelevant" because it had been done by people whose skin color was different from his own. The people who swept Washington's floor and cooked his food were the only ones who mattered to him, because they were black slaves.

Now, we all know that slavery existed before 1776 and for the first eighty-five years of this country's existence. Fine. But what do we really need to know about Washington's cook in order to understand the inspiring and dangerous path of the founding fathers in building this country and creating the free society we have today? What possible significance does this have? There was probably a very nice German woman who made Beethoven an omelet every morning and sewed buttons on his shirts, but who cares? Does Michael Coard? And what about the guy who cut Einstein's grass?

All of us have met a Michael Coard, or someone like him, and I expect most people feel sorry for guys like this. I know I do. After all, not every little black boy on a school trip to Independence Hall feels the way he did. Most, I'm sure, get the same whiff of the heroism and love of freedom that I did when I went there as a kid. The message is an easy one for a kid to understand, isn't it? This is your country and this is how it started, in idealism and bravery and selfless devotion to a dream of human rights that no country had ever dreamed before.

So why did little Michael Coard find all this "irrelevant"? Well, somebody had to teach him to think that, didn't they? A parent? An uncle? Somebody had to sit him down when he was four or five or six and say, "Listen, Michael. You're black. You're screwed. They're all against you out there. They hate you. White people hate you because you're black, and they always will. You're a stranger here, in a land run by white people, and you're different, and they will NEVER let you succeed."

And look at the result. Michael Coard grew up in America, went to good schools, became a successful lawyer at an important Philly law firm, hosts a radio show, and is welcomed at the table when the movers and shakers in this town get together. Among the planet's inhabitants, he is firmly situated in the top 1% of humans in terms of wealth, power, and education. Yet his skin color remains the only prism through which he can view the world. Despite the evidence all around him, despite the evidence of his own life, he is convinced there is something grievously wrong with the fundamental structure of American society. And there is nothing that could happen at this point to change his perspective.

In the recent presidential campaign, commenting on her husband's success, Michelle Obama said, "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country." Mrs. Obama is 45 years old, which means her adult life began around 1982, and there was nothing for her to be proud of for those 26 years between 1982 and 2008. Nothing, until a black man (her husband), ran for president.

Well, let's see. American entrepreneurs built an unimagined new world of information, computing and technology. No, nothing to be proud of there. Life-saving drugs and medical procedures developed in American labs? Guess not. Well, how about the fall of the Soviet Union, the most vicious and efficient killing machine in the history of civilization? We had something to do with that, didn't we? Still, I guess it's nothing you can really be proud of. Billions to fight disease in Africa? Rescuing the world's victims from earthquakes and tsunamis? Welcoming refugees from around the world? Freeing 100 million people from the sadistic rule of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein? Oops, sorry---I guess that's something we're really not proud of.

Which explains why this Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer, who has had a succession of high-profile legal jobs and whose husband was about to be elected president, believed there is something grievously wrong with the fundamental structure of American society.

I believe it was 1989 when Ricky Henderson reported to Spring training with the Yankees, where he was scheduled to play the season for $2 million. He was not happy about it. It was the last year of a multi-year contract he had signed with New York, and with baseball money exploding over the previous few years, he felt he was "underpaid" because lesser lights would be getting more money than he was, at least for the 1989 season. But he had signed his contract when $2 million had sounded like a lot of money, and he was stuck with it. And he was pissed. And he let everybody know it.

Now, there are always plenty of people who will tell you athletes are paid too much money. "Millions to play a kids' game!" they cry. We could use all that money to cure cancer or rebuild the levees in New Orleans or fight cyber-bullying, or something.

I'm not those people. I'm more of a free market guy. In fact, I think the people who say that sort of thing are communists, whether they know it or not. So I don't begrudge athletes for making $2 million or $20 million or $200 million. On the other hand, if you are making $2 million to play baseball for the New York Yankees, there is a simple rule I apply to your behavior: DON'T BITCH ABOUT IT!

Which pretty much summarizes my feelings about both Michael Coard and Michelle Obama. God bless them, I say, for their elite educational opportunities and what they have made of them. They worked for their wealth and power and celebrity, and I want them to enjoy it. It's good for everybody in America that such success is possible; let's never forget there are people in other parts of the world who are screwed from the get-go no matter what they do. Eat at the best restaurants, guys. Vacation in the Caribbean. And don't skimp on the grooming products. Just don't bitch about it.

Please note---I'm not asking anyone to put a flag pin on his lapel. I'm not suggesting Michael Coard should attend 4th of July celebrations and put his hand on his heart when they play the Star-Spangled Banner. All I am saying is that if you are Michael Coard or Michelle Obama (or any number of other people), and you cannot see that the lofty perch you enjoy in life is at least partly attributable to the circumstances of your birth and the values of the nation you live in, there is a fundamental flaw in your character. If, in a public forum, you are unable to refrain from expressing contempt for the American experiment, then you need to step back and think about your life for a minute or two. Admittedly, there was a form of child abuse at work here, by the elders who told little Michael and little Michelle their lives were hopeless, but that cannot absolve them of all responsibility for their attitudes. People recover from child abuse, and whether they can or not, they should try. Others certainly have been exposed to the same mantra of victimhood and have managed to reject it.

Slavery was not the major focus of our history walk, but it was a focus. It came up several times, and always with the semi-apologetic undergirding that seems to represent the politically-correct default position for white folks on the issue of slavery. The founding fathers were all profoundly evil, of course, and they're probably burning in hell, and we are all tainted with their immutable sins, but.... And then the guide will mention, in a hushed tone, that Washington freed his slaves upon his death, or that Robert Morris only traded slaves for a short time, or that some laws made freeing slaves a criminal offense. Not that anything can excuse the perfidy of our forebears, of course, but we're historians here, you see, so we're allowed to provide a thing us historians call "context," so long as we only whisper it. Because if we say it any louder, you see, it might hurt the feelings of the "victims."

I can't think of any other area where this judge-the-past-by-the-present standard of historical thinking is applied. Typically, when we view the progress of civilization, we see just that: progress. Let’s take a simple example. According to Black's Law Dictionary, the punishment for poison-murder in 13th-Century England was boiling. Couldn't have been that pleasant for the poor bastards, but we don't do that anymore, and I say good for us. I'm happy about it. Let’s slap a happy face on the way we deal with murderers who poison their victims. We’ve come a long way from boiling. Now we put them in prison and give them cable TV. Good for us!

I feel the same way about the oppression of women. Let the little darlings vote, I say, and drink in bars and own property and have jobs and drive cars. What the hell? It's progress! Let's slap a happy face on the whole "women as chattel" thing. We don't do that anymore. We don't kill defective infants either! More progress. More happy faces! We all feel good that civilization (at least Western civilization) has moved on from practices that today seem barbaric. None of us rend our garments and howl with grief over the brutish world inhabited by our ancestors because we don’t live in that world. We don’t work sixteen hours a day just to get enough food to make it to the next day. Instead, we work four hours a day, often on the internet, then go to the gym, then wash down our linguini and fava beans with a nice chianti. The knowledge that our past was so ugly is a source of happiness. Isn't it wonderful we don't live like that?

Well, I want to put a happy face on slavery too. Why not? After all, America did not invent slavery, which has existed in every culture, among every race and every ethnic group, since the beginning of time. What America invented, along with other Western liberal democracies, was the idea that slavery should be abolished. Good for us. Boiling murderers? A thing of the past. Oppression of women? Oh, that is so early 20th Century. And slavery? Well, it's over, you see. It still exists in plenty of nasty hellholes around the world, but we've moved on. We put a happy face on it 150 years ago.

This is the approach we take regarding every other artifact of the muck we crawled out of, so why not be proud of the history of slavery in America as well? After all, the only purpose of the apologetic political correctness around the issue is to placate the Michael Coards of the world, AND THEY CANNOT BE PLACATED. Mr. Coard et al. don't care about slavery anyway, only about their personal, imagined, seven-generations-removed victimization by it. If they had any real interest in slavery itself, there are tens of millions of slaves, in a hundred countries THAT ARE NOT AMERICA, who might benefit from their concern. But today’s slaves don't seem to interest folks like Mr. Coard or Mrs. Obama. Nor does it interest the Congressional Black Caucus, for that matter, or President Obama. For the left, real slavery is purely a t-shirt/bumper-sticker/website cause, like the Free Tibet movement.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

MORE VICK---THE COURAGE AWARD

Each year, the Ed Block Courage Award is given to 32 players in the NFL (one from each team) who exemplify “the principles of sportsmanship and courage.” Each one is a role model, in other words---someone we can all look up to. The recipients are selected by their peers, with each team voting for its representative to the Ed Block Awards Banquet, which is held in March. The banquet has raised millions for charities that fight child abuse and help its victims; it has been held for twenty-five years.

It’s a prestigious award. The work of the Ed Block Foundation has been praised by, among others, Pope Benedict.

Block himself was awarded a Purple Heart for his service under General Patton in WWII. He later worked in the US space program, and then became the head athletic trainer for the Baltimore Colts from 1954 to 1977. He died in 1983.

About two weeks ago, the Philadelphia Eagles announced their selection for the 2009 Ed Block Courage Award. By a unanimous vote, the players chose Michael Vick.

No one seeks this recognition and, as you might imagine, many recipients of the Courage Award will suggest there are others on the team who were more deserving. Vick’s reaction was somewhat different:

“I’ve overcome a lot more than probably one single individual can handle or bear. You ask certain people to walk through my shoes, they probably couldn’t do it. Probably 95 percent of the people in this world, because nobody has to endure what I’ve been through.”

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki

CARBON MONEY

If you have wondered, as I have, how carbon trading works, how money is made from global warming, the UN’s role in the process, and what they were talking about in Copenhagen, the following article is an excellent primer. It recently appeared on pajamasmedia.com.
CLIMATEGATE: HOW TO FOLLOW THE MONEY

December 23, 2009 - by Charlie Martin

There’s big money in climate.

That became strikingly obvious in Copenhagen. The conference itself cost in the neighborhood of $30 million, but that was only the visible tip of the melting iceberg. Add to that the celebrities, the demonstrators, the congressional delegations, and the corporate displays, and you can bet something closer to $60 million was really spent on the conference — along with, of course, a carbon footprint the size of Morocco’s. The one significant outcome of the Copenhagen conference was an agreement to continue the international market in carbon offset trading that would otherwise have expired in 2012 and to prevent a crash in the carbon credits market.

It appears that most of the participants saw the money spent as an investment.

To see why, we need to look at the way Kyoto has turned into cash for many of the biggest names in the climate change world, and to do that we need to understand how the whole carbon trading scheme works.

Simple Carbon Trading

Start with the simple proposition that you want, for whatever reason, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) being emitted by human activities worldwide. The reasons, of course, are all based on the idea that humans emitting GHGs are causing unexpected and unacceptable changes in the climate. Whether that’s true or not is a topic for other articles; for now, just take it as given.

There are actually a number of GHGs that could be an issue, but the largest share of human-produced GHGs is in carbon dioxide (CO2). So for simplicity, the Kyoto Protocol normalizes everything in terms of CO2 alone, using a number called the global warming potential (GWP). By definition, the global warming potential of CO2 is 1; the highest GWP is for sulfur hexaflouride, a gas used mainly in electrical equipment. Sulfur hexaflouride has a GWP of 23,900, so for Kyoto Protocol purposes, releasing 1 ton of sulfur hexaflouride is considered to be 23,900 tons of CO2.

Now, if there were a king of the world, that dread sovereign might just say: “Hey! Stop emitting GHGs!” And that would be that. In the real world, if you want to reduce GHGs, you have to come up with some kind of scheme to get people to do it (more or less) voluntarily. Governments do this, normally, with taxes. The simplest scheme is just to tax anyone who emits GHGs, charging them enough to pay for the bad effects. Reduce the amount you emit and your taxes go down.

Of course with a government program, and particularly with the UN, nothing is that simple.
Developing countries, particularly India and China, have rapidly growing economies and populations that really enjoy that their standards of living are rising toward first-world levels. These countries, as they improve their standards of living, are necessarily going to release more CO2. In the simple model, they would be expected to pay for those emissions.

Carbon Trading after Kyoto

India and China, with rapidly growing economies and populations that are really enjoying progress towards a first-world standard of living, didn’t like this scheme at all. To them, the simple carbon tax is just a massive tax, reducing their GDP and impeding their progress. Add to this the historical resentment of colonialism, and the simple carbon tax was a non-starter.

The Kyoto plan was intended to solve this — at the cost of more complexity — by using a carbon trading scheme. For example, imagine China is going to build a new power plant that would have emitted 1,000 tons of CO2 a year. If China instead builds that plant with new technology that reduces the emissions to 500 tons a year, they get 500 tons of carbon credits in the form of a certificate of emission reduction (CER). The theory is that they can then sell those CERs to other places as “credit” in place of CO2 emission reductions, something we’ll discuss below.

The devil is in the details, of course. If you can get a 500 ton CER for building the power plant better, shouldn’t you get 1,000 tons of credit for not building the power plant at all?

That could be a pretty sweet deal — you can not-build a lot of power plants in a year. If there’s a market for these CERs, that’s a license to print money. So there’s immediately a problem — you must somehow establish that you only provide CERs for projects that would otherwise have been built anyway.

The Kyoto Protocol establishes a mechanism to certify these emission reductions called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which establishes a bureaucratic process under the supervision of the UN to do this certification. The purpose of the CDM is to keep the process honest. Only certify emission reductions for projects that would have been built anyway and that would have had a greater carbon footprint if they had been built the way they would have been built.

Got that? You have a CER, with real cash value, as long as a UN organization will certify what you might have done, and the way you might have done it, if you had done it, and done it that way.

Now, let’s leave the third world and go to the developed world, the first world, or what the Kyoto Protocol calls the Annex I countries. In fact, let’s go to the the U.S., where there is a power plant that already emits 1,000 tons of CO2 a year. They can offset that emission by buying the CER from China — but why would they bother?

Of course, some people would buy CERs out of commitment or guilt — say Hollywood folks who want to continue to use their private jets — but the market in guilt is actually pretty limited.
For this scheme to work, there has to be some reason why the power plant would be forced to reduce their carbon emissions. That’s where the Kyoto Protocol come in. Part of the protocol is an agreement by each of the Annex I countries that they will reduce their carbon emissions by some amount, but that reduction can either be in actual reductions or by buying CERs.

Put together, these two parts — an enforced reduction or “cap” on carbon emission and a way to trade CERs — are the key components of a “cap and trade” scheme, which is the basis of the Kyoto Protocol.

Carbon Markets

There’s one more missing component here. There has to be a way for people with CERs to find people who want to buy CERs — in other words, there has to be a market. This market operates, just like the New York Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, or the rug merchant in a bazaar in Istanbul, as a profit-making entity. Every time Wayne in Chicago buys a CER from Wang in Shanghai, the guy facilitating the market — call him “Al” — takes a little off the top in the transaction.

Now we’ve got a picture of the whole transaction:

1. Wayne in Chicago needs to reduce his CO2 emissions by 500 tons, so he contacts Al.

2. Wang in Shanghai has a 500 ton CER.

3. Wayne and Wang agree, through Al, that the 500 ton CER is worth $1000.

4. So Al takes the CER from Wang, paying him $980 (subtracting a $20 commission from the $1,000 trade price) and gives it to Wayne in exchange for $1,020 (because Al is charging Wayne a commission too.)

Now, on paper at least, Wayne is only producing (net) 500 tons of carbon emissions.

Perverse Incentives

“On paper” is the key here. In reality, Wayne alone used to be emitting 1,000 tons of carbon. Now, Wayne and Wang together are emitting 1,500 tons in total. Wayne is out $1,020 for the CER, Wang is $980 richer, and Al has made $40.

On paper, it’s a reduction of 500 tons of CO2 emissions, but it’s only a real reduction if Wang really would otherwise have built a power plant to emit 1,000 tons. But because Wang knows he can make money on the CERs, that is going to factor into his decision to build a power plant at all — all the incentives in Wang’s case are to build more power plants and emit more CO2, as long as he can convince someone (in this case a UN organization) that he “really would have built the power plants anyway.”

Of course, Wayne could have kept his $1,020 if it weren’t for the government forcing him to reduce his “carbon footprint.” So this is effectively a tax. The effect is that Wayne is paying $1,020 in taxes, of which $40 goes to Al and $980 goes to Wang in China, and there is a net reduction in carbon output only if the CERs really represent carbon that “would have been emitted anyway.”

And this all managed by the paragon of incorruptible altruism, the United Nations.

Follow the Money

The frightening thing, at least for Al and Wang, is that this was all set to go away. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and without an agreement to extend it, new Chinese power plants would have to be built without cash coming from the developed world and carbon trading markets would have nothing to trade.

The amount of money involved isn’t trivial. According to Richard North at the Daily Mail, the carbon trading market last year was worth about £129 million (or about $205 million U.S.) and was heading toward trillions of dollars by 2020. So it’s probably not a coincidence that, for all the discord in Copenhagen, the one thing to which all the parties did agree was to extend the Kyoto cap and trade system. The market in carbon offsets or CER would continue.

Who benefits from this?

An interesting question. Of course, it’s well known that Al Gore is heavily involved in the carbon offset market and in other environmental ventures. There is speculation that Gore could be the world’s first green billionaire.

Another beneficiary is the UN itself. All of these international processes happen under the supervision and control of the UN and UN-chartered nongovernmental organizations.

The most interesting connection that’s come out in recent days is Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri — the chairman of the IPCC. Pachauri, an engineer and economist by training, joined the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) in April of 1981 as managing director and continues to be employed there to this day. TERI was renamed in 2003. According to the Science and Public Policy Institute, at the time of the name change TERI communications director Annapurna Vancheswaran said:

"We have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas. It [the name-change from Tata Energy Research Institute to The Energy Research Institute] is only for convenience.
Pachauri, and TERI, maintains close ties with the Tata Group."

Pachauri, it turns out, has a number of interesting connections. Beside the connection to Tata — TERI insists it has terminated the official connection — Dr. Pachauri is a director or advisor to many other organizations involved in the “climate industry.” The Telegraph puts it like this:

"What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr. Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organizations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations."

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies, and investment funds heavily involved in “carbon trading” and “sustainable technologies,” which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr. Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international “climate industry.”

Roger Pielke Jr. looked at the conflict of interest policies at the UN and concluded that Dr. Pachauri’s business connections appear to conflict with the normal UN policies, but that it’s not clear that the IPCC is covered:

Based on the WMO and UN discussions of conflicts of interest, it seems clear that Dr. Pachauri has, at the very least, several associations that raise the appearance of a conflict of interest in such a way that does not preserve and enhance “public confidence in their own integrity and that of their organization.” Since we do not have details on Dr. Pachauri’s activities or compensation from these various organizations and businesses, it is impossible to tell what, if any, conflicts actually may exist.

It is perfectly reasonable to expect high-ranking IPCC officials to follow the WMO and UN guidelines for conflict of interest and disclosure. Apparently, they presently do not follow these or any other such practices. If the IPCC does not have any policies governing these issues, it certainly needs to develop them, lest they give the impression that climate scientists play by different rules than everyone else.

Lord Monckton, in an open letter to Dr. Pachauri and the IPCC, made another point. In one specific instance, Tata industries owns Corvus Steel, which owns a steel mill in the UK. Monckton wrote:

"The Tata group is now owner of Corus Steel, which, not long ago, closed down the steelworks in Redcar, UK, putting 1,700 workers out of their jobs. Corus stands to make billions by cashing in on now-surplus EU “carbon credits” given to the steelworks. It stands to make a great deal more, via the Clean Development Mechanism that is one spin-off from the IPCC process, by transferring steel production from the Redcar works to India."

Tata stands to gain from the Clean Development Mechanism by receiving credits for notional carbon “savings” obtained by investing in a new steel plant in the Indian province of Orissa, which will initially produce 3 million tons of hot rolled steel — exactly the capacity of the now-closed Redcar plant.

From the discussion above, it’s clear what happens here. When they close the still mill in Redcar, that is a lot of carbon emissions they no longer make; that’s a large CER. At the same time, they open a new steel mill in Orissa that produces exactly as much steel. If they can convince some UN functionary that this new mill “would have” been built anyway, and “would have” produced much more carbon emissions had they hypothetically built it in that alternate world, they can realize more CERs that can be exchanged for real cash in the carbon markets. At least, they can if they can convince the UN. Remember that you need a UN certification of what you might have otherwise done, and how you would have done it, if you had done it and done it that way.

And Dr. Pachauri, with his extensive ties to Tata and his leadership position in the IPCC, seems likely to have substantial influence in the UN.

Who Benefits?

At the conclusion of the Copenhagen talks, what was the actual result? The Obama administration hoped for an agreement with developing countries, particularly India and China, that would include binding targets for GHG reductions and verification procedures to ensure that carbon credits represented “real” reductions.

What they got was a non-binding agreement that basically has no effect except that the existing Kyoto agreement for cap and trade continues. This seems unlikely to limit carbon emissions much — after all, the theoretically binding agreements of Kyoto weren’t particularly successful. (In fact, the U.S. has been closer to meeting its announced goals than the EU, even though the U.S. didn’t ratify the treaty.)

What’s interesting is that carbon offset prices collapsed along with the collapse of the Copenhagen talks. It’s pretty straightforward to understand what this market is saying. Up to the last gasp in Copenhagen, the betting had been that there would be even more restrictive limits on carbon in the developed countries and so greater demand for offsets. The markets didn’t get those and so “decided” offsets were worth less. On the other hand, with no agreement at all, the value of a carbon offset would be near zero, and China, India, and people who invested in the carbon markets would be seriously hurt.

This eleventh-hour non-binding agreement, made by just a few participants, seems to have primarily had the effect of preserving the carbon market’s existence.

Which means that the existing carbon trading scheme continues. China, India, Tata Group, Rajendra Pachauri, and “Al” are still in business.

Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, Duke University Medical Center. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com/.

DING DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD! (ON BEING AN EX-ENVIRONMENTALIST)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
----“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

     As I write this, the environmental conference in Copenhagen is beginning, and the cover-up of “Climategate” is continuing. The major networks are not covering it at all---not a word has been broadcast on the news shows at ABC, NBC and CBS. Elsewhere, on cable channels and in a few major newspapers (and at the White House), it is being given the “move-along-nothing-to-see-here” treatment.

     I remain gleeful. I’m confident no amount of spin can succeed. This particular genie will never go back in the bottle, and most ordinary folks (the kind who don’t sell carbon credits for a living) were pretty skeptical about global warming even before this.

     The emails are bad enough. They reveal the fanatic advocacy of supposedly objective scientists, efforts to silence their critics, discussions of how to massage data so the answer comes out the way they want it, and even criminal conspiracies to destroy documents. Ugly stuff. But the real problem is the computer code itself, which is now revealed to be so muddled from repeated manipulation that the results it generated, the “proof” of global warming, cannot be replicated through any rational process. At this moment, finally, there is nothing to back up their claims. Not that there ever was, of course, but now the world can at last see the truth.

     I quit smoking about three years ago. It’s not really “difficult” or painful, but it does require you to invest some emotional energy in the process. It distracts you from your normal routine and you find you think about smoking (or not smoking) rather more than you want to. You even dream about smoking. I still have those dreams occasionally.

     I quit because smoking is bad for you. It’s not nearly as bad as the zealots will tell you, of course, but there’s no question it’s an unhealthy practice. (I think the anti-smoking propaganda probably kept me smoking five years longer than I otherwise would have, just because it was so false and politically correct and infuriating, and I felt I would be goddamned if I was going to knuckle under to the smoking fascists. The “second-hand smoke” mania was especially grating since there has never been any real evidence that second-hand smoke does anything more deadly than annoy people who don’t like cigarette smoke.)

     The result is that now, though I am an ex-smoker, I don’t disapprove of smoking. In fact, I like smoking. I like to be around it. Smoking is fun. Smoking is cool. On the rare occasions when I find a bar where smoking is permitted, I settle in for a long stay. Smoking, to me, says “party.” Bars where smoking is permitted are a lot more fun than bars where smoking is banned.

     When smokers come to my house, I set out ashtrays for them. “No, I’ll go outside,” they say. “Seriously,” I say, “I don’t mind. I like it.” They go outside anyway.

     The point I’m trying to make here is that I’m not one of those ex-smokers who HATES smoking and smokers, and also has to lecture you on the evils of the filthy practice and tell you stories about somebody I know who died young from smoking and show you pictures of diseased lungs. I’m not that kind of ex-smoker.

     As an ex-environmentalist, however---well, that’s another matter.

     I imagine a lot of people who know me would be surprised to learn I was once a liberal. Actually, that may be overstating it. I always understood the link between private property and liberty, for example, and how capitalism creates wealth, and the need to respect the Constitution and protect our freedom to speak and assemble and worship as we please, and---O.K., I was never a liberal. But I WAS an environmentalist.

     I went to seminars and teach-ins and meetings about clean air and clean water and the rain forests, and I worried about all these things. I gave money to PIRGIM at a time when I really didn’t have any money.

     I remember lying awake at night contemplating the coming ice age. In the 1970’s, all the books and articles and TV specials about Global Cooling scared the bejesus out of me. I believed every word of it. I thought it was “science.” I was convinced we were doomed.

     Then came April 1972. I guess I have EPA Chief William Ruckleshaus to thank for opening my eyes to what “environmentalism” had become.

     As a result of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and a decade’s worth of activism by those who believed her, the EPA held an administrative trial to determine what deleterious effects could be attributed to DDT use. Did it harm wildlife? Did it interfere with reproduction in birds by causing a thinning in eggshells? Was it a carcinogen for humans? For seven months, biologists testified about their studies; and all the available science on the effects of DDT was reviewed. Then, in April 1972, the administrative law judge delivered his verdict:

“DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. ... The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. ... The evidence in this proceeding supports the conclusion that there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT.”

     Two months later, Ruckleshaus overturned the judge’s decision, declared DDT a “potential human carcinogen,” and banned it for virtually all uses. He had never attended the administrative trial, and he admitted he had not read the transcript either. The effect of this unilateral declaration was that DDT disappeared not only in the US, but around the world.

     Malaria has been a scourge of mankind throughout recorded history. In 1939, DDT was synthesized as a mosquito-killer by Swiss scientist Paul Muller, and was first put to widespread use in 1943. It was instantly successful, and Muller received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1948. In the US, malaria was endemic in southeastern states and the Mississippi Valley until the CDC launched a DDT spraying program (in 1947) that eradicated malaria by 1951. By 1967, malaria had been effectively beaten in every developed nation, all of South America and large swatches of Southeast Asia. It remained a problem in Africa, though significant progress had been made. In 1972, that progress abruptly ceased.

     Since 1972, there have been more than 100 million (mostly avoidable) deaths from malaria, almost all of them in impoverished developing countries that are least able to defend themselves. According to the World Health Organization, 90% of the deaths are of pregnant women or children under five years old.

     The DDT fiasco was the end of my career as an environmentalist. There was probably a time when “environmental science” was primarily a matter of learning about nature and using that knowledge to find ways in which human society could live in harmony with it, but at sometime in the 1960’s or 1970’s, that changed. I doubt that the banning of DDT by the EPA was the moment it changed---it had happened before that---but the DDT ban made it clear that science was not very important to those who ran the EPA or who identified themselves as environmentalists.

     There is a tendency to dismiss the sillier aspects of environmental activism as harmless excesses of those who only want to do good, to help out. All of us have walked through a forest and felt renewed thereby. The chatter of birds, the sound of icy clear water rushing over rocks, the unexpected sight of a deer in a clearing, the feel of fresh air in the lungs---all these things return us to some primal memory. At the right place, in the right moment, all of us are tree-huggers. It’s easy to understand the impulse, and a love of nature and its glory is not a bad thing, but a fundamental human response to the world.

     But as the banning of DDT teaches us, “environmentalism” is something else. It’s a hundred million dead mothers and children without a peep out of those who were responsible for it. The pursuit of these feel-good ideals while ignoring the truth---well, it’s lethal. If you’re “saving the planet,” or if you can persuade yourself that is your goal, the consequences don’t seem to matter very much. But they should. If they don’t, you’re a moral idiot.

     Of course, not every campaign of environmentalists is deadly. Some are just extremely expensive and wasteful. The modern recycling binge began with a single article by a man named J. Winston Porter in 1988. Mr. Porter, of the EPA, captured the public imagination with his claim, which is demonstrably false, that the United States was in danger of running out of landfill space. Now, twenty years later, most of us are subject to draconian recycling regulations and the nation spends hundreds of billions a year more than it needs to on waste disposal, for no discernable benefit other than the “feeling” some folks have that it’s the right thing to do. It certainly cannot be defended on economic grounds, though its acolytes try to, since any economically viable recycling would (and does) occur on its own in response to market forces. It’s only the useless and wasteful kind of recycling that gets mandated by governments since otherwise, no one with any sense would do it. Still, I don’t suppose it has killed anyone.

     Remember alar on apples? Acid rain? Electro-magnetic fields from power lines? Cancer clusters? Brain cancer from cell phones? Radon? All of them have spawned minor industries and made a few people rich. Some of them are still around. As far as I know, these mini-manias haven’t killed anyone either. They just waste our time and the resources of our society which are, after all, not infinite. In addition, they degrade our culture by fostering an insidious deconstructionist ethic---that reality doesn’t matter; what matters is how we feel.

     But there are plenty of environmental ideas that DO kill, though not always so directly and coldly as the ban on DDT. Generally, these are the movements that reduce the supply of commodities essential for human survival, like food and energy.

     At any given moment on earth, there are a billion people who, while they may not be starving, are not entirely certain where their next meal is coming from. Until the rise of the democracy movement and capitalist institutions in the 18th Century, this was the lot of almost everyone on the planet---long hours of physical labor every day to secure the means by which one might survive to do it all over again the next day. While the developed and semi-developed world is now spared this life of unrelenting toil, it still exists in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The weakest and poorest of these human beings are the ones who die when the price of survival rises.

     They are easy to ignore. We don’t know their names and we never will. They are simply anonymous wogs and colored peoples, the sort that get slaughtered en masse from time to time in local genocides that we don’t pay any attention to either. Still, they die, and it’s the fault of our fashionable environmental ideas. It’s cause and effect.

     When Western elites in Europe and the United States decide (without any scientific justification whatsoever) that GMO foods are suspect or somehow spooky, those GMO plants are no longer grown, and an acre that could have produced forty tons of food now produces only twenty. Who do you think this hurts? Not me, or anyone I know. If a bag of flour or corn meal costs half a buck more, I don’t even notice it. But other people do. Halfway around the world, there are people for whom that half dollar is the difference between living and dying.

     For sixty years, organic food enthusiasts have been trying to persuade us that organic food is better for you, healthier, more nutritious. There is not a scintilla of evidence this is true despite billions spent on research, but their belief is unshaken. What we DO know is that most of the food-contamination scares (the e. coli and salmonella outbreaks) are attributable to organic farming practices, but somehow this never makes the front page. And of course, organic farming also makes less efficient use of agricultural land, driving up the price of food in ways that elites don’t care much about but starving people do.

     Then there is the mandated production of ethanol, which illustrates what happens when you take one-fourth of a basic subsistence food and turn it into bio-fuel. Two years ago, food riots broke out (in Mexico, Haiti, Cameroon, Egypt, Pakistan, China, and other nations) as the soaring price of corn forced all basic food prices higher. All of this was driven not by market forces but by tax subsidies in the EU and the United States ($8 billion in 2007).

     There are plenty of complaints about ethanol, among them that it uses more energy to create than it yields in the gas tank. In addition, it is far from certain that burning ethanol produces cleaner air pollution than gasoline does. Add in the food riots, and one might well ask, “What the hell was Congress thinking?”

     And the answer is: what they always think. There is nothing particularly unusual about environmental initiatives having disastrous unintended consequences. After all, it’s not like our legislators actually KNOW anything about food or energy or the environment. (Two years ago, Nancy Pelosi casually remarked that natural gas is not a fossil fuel, but a renewable energy source, like wind.) All Congress is equipped to do is respond to groups like the Sierra Club, which hates gasoline, and Archer-Daniels-Midland, which grows and processes corn. Groups like this have a loud voice in Washington and are able to direct large contributions to politicians, so there is nothing at all surprising or unusual about our ethanol policy. In fact, if you are one of those people who thinks the US government should have an “energy policy,” ethanol subsidies are exactly the sort of thing you’re going to get. It’s the lesson of DDT repeated in a different guise. Neither scientific considerations nor concern for the environment have anything to do with the process. The words “science” and “the environment” are just key elements in the public relations template used to sell the idea. The real agenda is always something else.

     And what is the agenda? Well, it varies, of course. It varies from issue to issue and from person to person. Sometimes, the motivation is simply greed. Al Gore is reputedly the world’s first green billionaire, for example. There may also be a larger political agenda such as the desire (evident on the streets of Copenhagen), to resurrect international communism as a world government.

     Then there are the genuine tree-huggers, who are also in Copenhagen. These are simple-minded folks who feel strongly that every fence, every plowed field, every building and every oil well is an assault upon the good green earth. Similar are the Luddites, who arrive at the same conclusions though they do not so much love nature as hate the modern world. Luddites want to destroy all the machines and return to a simpler age. No one is stopping them from putting their beliefs into action by building themselves a hut in the woods, of course, but somehow they never quite do.

     Even more disquieting is the small but noticeable segment of the political left for whom the deaths of poor and vulnerable third-worlders is not a bug, but a feature. They’re convinced the world just has too many of these sorts of people, and if some should drop into the void because of environmental programs, it’s something of a bonus. Back in the 1920’s, when Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood, she did so to further the cause of eugenics by discouraging undesirable people (like Negroes) from reproducing. Nowadays, reducing the population of black and brown peoples is put in terms of the “population explosion” (another myth) rather than more overtly racist reasons. Back in the 1960’s, one argument made for banning DDT was to ensure that children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the US Agency for International Development stated, “Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.” And today, you never hear feminists object to coercive contraceptive programs involving sterilization, or China’s forced abortions and one-child policy. The ghost of eugenics survives on the left, hidden under environmental and other fashionable facades.

     Even though there are many agendas in the global warming movement, I suspect the primary motivation is as primal and human and ancient as it gets---the seductive allure of doom. Purveyors of the end-times have always found a ready audience because there is something in all of us that longs for oblivion, that makes us stare, fascinated, into the abyss.

     As we face swelling prostates, aching knees, failing eyesight and dimming intellects, it’s the uncertainties around our deterioration that drive us mad. It’s one reason we worry, because worry is comforting. It allows us to narrow the focus of our existential despair. Am I eating too much cholesterol? Am I getting enough exercise? What if my heart stops? Silly, of course. Pointless. (It’s always something else that gets you.) But we all do it. Recently, on a radio show, I heard a woman tell the story of a horrible accident she had had several years before. She was hit by a truck, and as she was laying broken on the ground, in tremendous pain, her last thought before she passed out was this: “If I don’t survive this, I sure wasted a lot of time worrying about breast cancer.”

     If global warming were real, and the oceans were to rise, and we all fried---well, there would be no escape, would there? We would all be toast, literally. And compared to the myriad of unknown minor and major woes we all must endure, the certainty of a specific and universal doom can be almost irresistible. The doom-sayers are never correct, but they don’t seem to have any trouble attracting a flock. And it doesn’t matter whether a particular pastor actually believes his revelation or is merely in the game to fleece the suckers. Not all of us will fall for it, of course, but enough will.

     Al Gore is every preacher who ever picked a date for the end of the world and gathered his acolytes on a mountaintop to await the apocalypse. Is he sincere? Does he, in his heart, think he is speaking the truth? Well, considering his conduct, I find that difficult to believe, but ultimately it makes no difference. What matters is that others believed him, and that we were on the brink of shutting down much of the machinery that keeps me warm and well-fed and keeps untold millions of others, less fortunate, alive.

     I thank God he has failed, and that the Copenhagen conference will be a fiasco. The exposure of global warming as a fraud has been an unexpected and wonderful development. It came out of nowhere, like the news that the Soviet Union had fallen. And for those of us who have had little to celebrate the past year, the news was every bit as welcome.


Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

LET'S JUST LEAVE

There are ten or twenty points I could expound upon in Obama’s mishmash of a speech on his war strategy in Afghanistan. The absence of the words “victory” or “triumph” or some similar term was striking, especially considering this was the Commander-in-Chief talking to the students at West Point. In addition, there was the complaint about the cost the war from a man who, in the first six months of his term, has spent far more money (on what, exactly?) than was spent in BOTH Iraq and Afghanistan over the past eight years. Then there was the nonsensical statement that, as part of his Afghan strategy, “I have prohibited torture and will close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.” Huh?

But let’s cut to the chase, as they say. For me, the speech was neatly encapsulated by a passage buried in the middle of the address:

“This review is now complete. And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

A little bit for the left, a little bit for the right. A little bit for these guys, a little bit for those. The entire speech was like that, which perhaps explains Obama’s lengthy lucubrations (the “dithering period”)before delivering the goods. It took forever, apparently to craft a war speech that was equal parts pro-victory and anti-victory. And in the struggle he faced between finding a way to win the war and balance all his private political concerns, the politics seem to have won.

It can’t work, of course. If you set a date for your exit, it doesn’t matter how many soldiers you send. The enemy will simply wait for you to leave. After all, they’re not going anywhere. In addition, a departure date makes it impossible for your potential friends in Afghanistan to support you since, if they do so, they will be the first to face the firing squad eighteen months hence.

If we’re going to lose the war in Afghanistan, as Obama seems intent on doing, let’s lose it now. What is the point of having hundreds or thousands of American men and women lose their lives over the next year and a half if our defeat is already preordained? How, in good conscience, can we send them to die not for the security of their country but merely to slow the decline in Obama’s poll numbers, and push the issue of the Afghan war off beyond the 2010 elections?

There is one way to win a war. You kill the enemy and destroy all their assets. It’s not a pretty sight, and it’s not a task to be undertaken half-heartedly or cavalierly, but if it has to be done, that’s how you do it. It has always been that way. It’s what we did with Germany and Japan in WW II, back when we understood that the only effective way to deal with a totalitarian or genocidal regime is to crush it completely. America has forgotten that lesson.

My conclusion that we should leave Afghanistan now is made only because it is the better of two terrible choices---lose now or lose in eighteen months. If I had my druthers, I would want us to win the war, but with this president, and the current political climate, I don’t see how that can happen. And it is immoral to ask soldiers, all of whom volunteered in good faith to defend their country, to lay down their lives for nothing.

You can’t lose a war without paying a terrible price. We are still paying the price of our defeat in Vietnam, and this will be far worse. The North Vietnamese were never going to confront us on Market Street during the Mummers Parade, but the jihadis are already here, and there will be a lot more of them once their pals have defeated us halfway around the world. Our defeat will be a recruiting tool for them, with horrific consequences for us. And yes, we will have to fight them again, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and it will be even more difficult in the future. By then, however, we will have a different Commander-in-Chief.

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

UPDATE: SCOTT HARSHBARGER

I recently wrote about Scott Harshbarger and recounted the story of his disgraceful treatment of the Amirault family in Massachusetts (see here). The occasion for that story was the appointment of Harshbarger to conduct an internal investigation of ACORN in the wake of various unsavory revelations about it (e.g., facilitating the prostitution of minors, money-laundering, etc.).

The report is now complete, and guess what? It turns out ACORN really did nothing very wrong at all. At worst, there were some growing pains caused by ACORN’s rapid growth, and perhaps an accounting error or two.

BIGGOVERNMENT.COM reports that in Harshbarger’s review, he spoke to no one outside of ACORN---no former employees, no ousted board members, no independent auditors, no disgruntled clients. Thus, everyone interviewed was either employed by ACORN or currently affiliated with the organization.

Copyright2009Michael Kubacki

HIDE THE DECLINE

Now come the excuses, and the curious silences. This is the real proof of the fraud behind the global warming industry.

Now that the databases and emails of Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and other “top climate scientists” have been laid before us, we can see how the scam operated. First, hide the raw data, and if it is demanded by those with a right to see it, destroy it. Second, fix the peer-review process in scientific journals by shutting out any global-warming skeptics and exerting pressure to fire editors who won’t toe the party line. Finally, agree (secretly) on how to deal with troubling issues like the absence of global warming for the past thirteen years, and actual cooling for the last nine.

If this had ever been a scientific issue (rather than a left-wing political movement), wouldn’t those who had been sucked in by the fraud be upset they had been duped? What about Al Gore, for example? He’s a believer, right? He won a Nobel Prize for his activism and he featured Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” in his movie. He is reportedly close to becoming a billionaire through his environmental efforts. Yet Al doesn’t seem to be very concerned about the recent revelations. According to his blog, he’s still looking forward to Copenhagen and the imposition of a worldwide tax on energy use.

If Al actually cared whether the earth’s climate was warming, don’t you think he would be a little---I don’t know. What’s the word? IRKED??? I mean, if your entire reputation, and various extremely prestigious awards, were based in your devotion to a particular point of view, and it turned out that point of view was founded on a deception, wouldn’t you howl a bit? Wouldn’t you condemn the guys who had tricked you and made your life a lie? How about a press release, Al? Or maybe an op-ed in the New York Times?

Guess not.

Then there’s Prince Charles, who told us a couple months ago that we only had 96 months to fix the planet, which leaves us with only 93 or 94 left. What’s Charlie thinking these days? Odd. He’s strangely silent all the sudden.

Global warming believers in the world of journalism and punditry (and politics) ignored the story for about two weeks, but eventually realized they had to say SOMETHING. It’s their business, after all, and the story just wouldn’t stay buried. And were there then demands for prosecution of criminal acts or calls for resignations of various dishonest academics? Of course not.

Andrew Revkin may be the most prominent American journalist in the “it’s-all-settled” school of global warming advocacy. He has published dozens of articles in the New York Times and his blog supporting cap-and-trade, carbon emission laws, worldwide energy taxation schemes, and the like. Yet noticing the scandal appeared to be beneath his dignity: “The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all matter of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”

This from the newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers! Later, he called the release of the documents an act of “cyber terrorism.” (Barbara Boxer, heading down a similar path, has called for criminal prosecution of the whistleblower who revealed the scam to the world.)

Other excuses from those in the game have been equally lame.

From the blog “Real Climate”: “More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.”

CRU Director Phil Jones, about his now-famous phrase: “The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste.”

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin, after first dismissing the story as a routine hacking story: “But this affair will surely change things: From now, scientific teams and peer-review groups will be much more cautious about how they word e-mails.”

As Rand Simberg has pointed out, science is accomplished through a well-established process of refining theories to conform to the data, including new data as it is acquired (Ptolemy to Copernicus to Kepler to Newton to Einstein), and not the other way around. Climategate exposes a betrayal, by some of the world’s most famous scientists, of this most basic precept. And based on this fundamentally fraudulent scheme, politicians hoped to create the beginnings of a world government in Copenhagen this month, with enormous new power to impose taxes worldwide, control energy markets and manage the environment.

Any objective person who had been taken in by this fraud should be angry at its perpetrators and relieved it has finally been exposed. In addition, they should be thrilled that the apocalyptic sword hanging over all of us has been sheathed. SHOULDN’T THEY?

But they’re not. Instead, there is silence, and excuses, and even anger that the truth has come out. There is only one explanation for this reaction. They’re sad that the illusion of doom has been punctured. They’re disappointed that the path to a world government has been lost. For Al Gore, Andrew Revkin, Phil Jones, Barbara Boxer and thousands of other journalists, writers, politicians and environmentalists, global warming was never about the earth. It was never about science. All of them, for money or prestige or a thousand other reasons, were a part of the scam.

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

WORRY

A couple days ago, I was listening to a radio show (The Dennis Prager Show), on the topic of worrying. It’s something we all do (some of us more than others), even though we know it’s a waste of time. That, in fact, was the theme of the broadcast---how useless it is to spend our lives worrying.

One caller was a woman who described a terrible accident she had had several years before when she had been hit by a truck. Thrown from her car, she was crumpled on the ground bleeding, in pain, unable to move, with various bones broken.

“As I was lying there,” she said, “wondering if I was going to live, a thought popped into my head. I thought: if I don’t survive this, I sure wasted a lot of time worrying about breast cancer.”

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

REPUBLICANS 101: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

[Note: “Republicans 101” is a continuing series designed to help my liberal friends understand what conservatives think.]

No one put it better than Chief Justice John Roberts in PARENTS INVOLVED IN COMMUNITY SCHOOLS v. SCHOOL DISTRICT, a 2007 Supreme Court case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Few conservatives would disagree with this sentiment. We’re just sick of it. All of us believed that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the end of government-approved race discrimination in America, but now, with quotas in education and hiring, and “racial balancing” plans and “diversity,” it seems there’s just no end to it.

Clarence Thomas made the same point in a different way in his brilliant dissent in GRUTTER v. BOLLINGER (2003), the case concerning race-based admissions at the University of Michigan. The University had admitted using race discrimination in admitting minority students (without this finding, there would have been no case), but Justice O’Connor ruled it was permissible for an agency of government (the U of M) to discriminate on racial grounds even though race discrimination is outlawed. The pursuit of diversity on campus, she ruled, was MORE important than the ban on discrimination. Thomas began his dissent by quoting Frederick Douglass, from a speech in 1865:

“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us…. I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! … And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.”

Douglass’ message, wrote Thomas, had been lost on the majority of justices in the Grutter case.

But while all of us low-brows would agree we’re sick of race discrimination, and disgusted by the way it has been rehabilitated (as a positive good!) by leftists, the effects of affirmative action are viewed somewhat differently by white conservatives and black conservatives.

White conservatives focus primarily on those whom affirmative action programs discriminate against---its direct victims. The two most often mentioned are Asians and Jews, who (on average), tend to do well in school but lose positions at university to African-American students with lower grades and lower test scores. The other victims are poor white children who may live in dangerous neighborhoods and go to bad schools, but nevertheless somehow manage to excel. They too will lose out to African-American children who had many more advantages but did not do as well in their studies.

Men like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly, however, tend to decry affirmative action programs for their effect on the minority students they supposedly benefit. In particular, the stigma that now attaches to all black college graduates and professionals is often referred to as a modern version of Jim Crow. Since there is no way of telling whether a particular person was an “affirmative action student,” the suspicion falls on ALL black students and follows them through life. The brilliant black student who would have succeeded under any circumstances becomes difficult to distinguish from the student who was underqualified to begin with and then was eased through school to satisfy a quota.

For black conservatives, the inescapable nature of this stigma is the true horror of affirmative action, for it undercuts the public perception of everyone with a dark skin and an education. And the fact that polite people do not mention such concerns makes the situation worse, because it can be almost impossible to allay the suspicion. If you ever require brain surgery and you are referred to a specialist who happens to be African-American, you will have at least a nagging doubt about that person’s competence. This will happen no matter what color you are yourself, and it is an inevitable result of affirmative action programs in education.

It is somewhat ironic that, before affirmative action, the opposite was true. In the 1950s and 1960s, when you met a black professional, college professor, or the like, you would assume from the outset that this was probably the smartest person you had ever seen. The question of how he got his degree was not a concern. On the contrary, you would think, “Wow. Considering all the crap you probably had to put up with, you must be pretty damn good.”

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

FORT HOOD: A GUN-FREE ZONE

The very first question that occurred to me when I heard about the shootings at Ft. Hood was this: how is this possible? How does a guy on a military base manage to shoot 45 people before someone puts him down? Where were their guns?

In “Virginia Tech and the Massacre,” I explained why gun-free zones are the most dangerous places in America. Trolley Square was a gun-free zone, as were Columbine and Virginia Tech, the Nickel Mines School, various post offices, and a dozen other sites of mass killings. For a determined killer, a gun-free zone is a target-rich environment full of helpless victims. If you want to kill as many people as possible, a gun-free zone is the best place to do it. By contrast, you never see anyone “go berserk” at an NRA convention or a gun show because there are always a hundred people walking around with loaded weapons at the ready.

We now know the answer. American military bases are gun-free zones (or more precisely, ammunition-free zones). Regulations issued in March 1993 forbid military personnel, including officers, from carrying loaded weapons. And the exceptions are few. A soldier will be issued ammo at the firing range, and then will have to return any unused rounds before leaving the range. MPs can carry, but most MPs get deployed to combat zones, so there are very few such people in a place like Ft. Hood. That is why the person who finally shot Major Hasan was a civilian police officer.

There will be many lessons from Ft. Hood, and we can only hope that those in charge of our military are not so blinded by their political biases that they are incapable of learning them. One lesson is the utter irrationality of the gun-banners’ belief that rendering people defenseless makes them safer. At Ft. Hood and on other US military installations, this idea has been carried to its ultimate absurdity when those with the duty of defending all of our lives are disarmed and made targets for a mass murderer. If the soldiers at Ft. Hood had been armed, it is unlikely Major Hasan would even have undertaken his deadly mission, but if he had, there is no way he could have claimed as many victims as he did.

The wife of one of the soldiers shot at Fort Hood said it more eloquently than I can. In an interview on CNN Monday night, Mandy Foster was asked how she felt about her husband's upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. She responded: "At least he's safe there and he can fire back, right?"

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

UPDATE: FORT HOOD

My previous article was, in large part, inspired by my annoyance at being told not to “jump to conclusions” about Major Hasan and not to beat up Muslims or attack mosques. I’ve never attacked a mosque in my life and I’m not going to start now, so it’s an insult when I’m told not to do something evil that would never occur to me in the first place. I mean, I’M NOT A MEMBER OF A DEATH CULT, OK??? That’s the other guys, the ones who want to kill us, like Major Hasan.

But “annoyance” no longer describes my feelings about what I’m reading in the papers and seeing on TV. Now that we have another two days of news, we know he tried to call al-Qaeda. How do you do that? How do you even start to think about how you would do that? How do you go about discovering what the area code might be? (And by the way, if you happen to know what al-Qaeda’s area code is, don’t even THINK about coming over to my house for Christmas.) We also know he was in regular contact with his terrorist Virginia imam, who now lives in Yemen. And various army doctors and students have come forward with new tales of his rants and anti-American rage.

You would think this would be the end of the diversity blather and the “unsure-about-his-motives” idiocy. Ah, the chattering classes would say, now we see. He’s a jihadi, a terrorist, and he wanted to kill infidels. That’s what they do, all over the world, and this time it happened at Ft. Hood, in Texas. Maybe we need to look for these guys and try to stop them before they flip on the kill switch. You would think EVERYONE would now see what we are facing.

Apparently not. Instead, we get Chris Matthews on “Hardball,” saying, “It’s not a crime to call up al-Qaeda, is it?”

Much more revealing was an opinion column by Elmer Smith in the 11/10 Philadelphia Daily News:

“There is little evidence that Hassan (sic) and the two 9/11 terrorists had been seen together at the Falls Church mosque or that they had ever spoken with each other or had ever conspired to do anything except pray facing the East.
“That trail will go cold. The [investigators] will find only the most tenuous connections between Hassan (sic) and terrorist affiliations just as it has found no terrorist links on his computers.”

Get it? It only counts as terrorism if Osama told you to do it. I have found the commentary on the shootings bizarre, and offensive, and mystifying, but Elmer Smith gives away the game. The enemy, the ONLY enemy, is some guys who live in caves in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and you can only be a “terrorist” if you have gotten your marching orders from them or from somebody who has been in touch with them and who told you what to do. An ideology can’t be the enemy because a lot of people have ideologies and, you know, who are we to judge another man’s ideology? This is the view EVEN IF THAT IDEOLOGY GLORIFIES THE MASS MURDER OF INNOCENTS.

The frightening thing is that Elmer Smith’s view is shared by General George Casey and the others who run our military. And it is frightening because it renders them (and us) helpless against the next Major Hasan. If you’re going to tolerate (and promote!) people with this jihadist ideology, you are going to have more of them.

In fact, Hasan was far from the first.

* In 1998, Army Sergeant Ali Mohamed stole military secrets for al-Qaeda and helped plan the bombings at three US embassies.

* Army Specialist Ryan Anderson was convicted in 2004 of passing military intelligence to al-Qaeda terrorists.

* In 2008, Navy Signalman Hassan Abujihaad was convicted of giving sensitive information regarding troop movement to al-Qaeda.

* Army Reservist Jeffrey Battle in 2003 confessed to waging war against the US, and said he joined the military to receive training he could use against America.

* Army reservist Semi Osman was arrested in 2002 for providing support to al-Qaeda, and testified against other terror suspects.

* Sgt. Hasan Akbar, in Iraq in 2003, attacked 17 fellow soldiers, killing two. He did so because he was opposed to the Iraq War and the killing of Muslims. Sound familiar?

It’s not like the military can’t find guys who harbor dangerous ideas and get rid of them. There are programs in place to weed out supremacists and other hate-group members, gang members, etc. They have been in place for years, and have been very successful. But they won’t go looking for jihadists. It would be insensitive, you see. Somebody might be offended.

The enemy we face is not a nation. It is not a hierarchical military organization. It is not even the religion called Islam. It is an ideology that justifies and even celebrates the murder of any innocent person who is not a Muslim. And this enemy is here in America just as it is in every nation on earth. The guys in the caves are symbolic, and important, and to the extent the enemy is capable of building an actual military organization with dangerous weapons, that is where it may get done, so those guys must be stopped.

But the guys in the caves are not coming down Broad Street anytime soon. Major Hasan, and the many like him, are here now.

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

GENERAL GEORGE CASEY TALKS ABOUT FORT HOOD

So the bodies were not even cold before we were all being warned not to blame Islam and take out our rage on our Muslim brothers. The real horror, you see, was not the dead and the wounded, but the possibility of us good folk erupting in the anti-jihad jihad that always seems to be in danger of happening but, of course, never happens. As one blogger (Seraphic Spouse) put it, “[The media and Muslim] groups suspect us of wanting to attack mosques now, even though we didn’t the last ten times a Muslim killed innocent people in the name of Islam. What are they afraid of? Graffiti?”

Meanwhile, as military officials tell us the motive behind the shootings “remains unclear,” and Chris Matthews reports that “We may never know if religion was a factor at Ft. Hood,” the basics of Major Hasan’s thought patterns seem obvious enough.

His students in the master’s program at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences complained about his “anti-American propaganda,” but no formal complaint was ever filed for fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim. Various colleagues also report hearing him rant against the war on terror and the US government. Internet postings under his name praise and justify suicide bombers. Even patients complained because he tried to convert them to Islam.

In 2001, he regularly attended the notorious Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, along with two of the 9-11 terrorists. The preacher there was the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who was recently barred from England for advocating attacks on British soldiers.

The day before the shootings, he cleaned out his apartment and gave various of his possessions, including a new Quran, to a neighbor, saying he was being “deployed” the next day. And on the morning of his rampage, he dressed himself in traditional Muslim robes and prayed. Shortly thereafter, shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”), he methodically emptied 100 rounds, from two handguns, into more than three dozen human beings.

Why are we not allowed to say the word “Muslim?” Why are we not allowed to say the word “terrorist?” When a Pashtun warrior kills American soldiers in Afghanistan, we have no such taboo. But when Major Hasan, who says and believes the same things as that Pashtun warrior, kills American soldiers in Texas, we are not allowed to say these terrible words.

If the foolishness of politically correct speech and thought were confined to the Chris Matthews and Katie Courics of the world, I wouldn’t be writing this article. But of course, it is not so confined. It has infected the US Army as well, and with fatal consequences. Major Hasan, in a time of war, openly expressed his solidarity with the enemy. He did it often, with colleagues, with subordinates, and even with superior officers. He was vehement about it. He wouldn’t shut up about it apparently. And yet, none of it mattered. In May of this year, he was promoted from Captain to Major. Hey, we’re all Americans, right? Admiring suicide bombers? Well, that’s just free speech, I guess.

And the frightening thing is that even now, in the aftermath of Ft. Hood, nothing will change. Today, George Stephanopolous interviewed General George Casey. Asked about the motive for the shootings, General Casey said this:

“Speculation could heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. What happened at Ft. Hood was a tragedy. It could be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

Get that? Read it again. Thirteen people are dead and probably twenty more will be living with terrible wounds for the rest of their lives, but losing the Army’s “diversity” would be a GREATER tragedy. General Casey is the Chief of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in the US Army. He is the man responsible for allowing a culture to exist in the Army where the anti-American rantings of Nidal Malik Hasan are tolerated and even rewarded. Hasan was a Muslim, after all, and thus a testament to the rich tapestry of the Army’s multicultural wonderfulness. And whatever the blowback here, General Casey certainly would never want to jeopardize THAT.

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

IRAN TODAY

Huge demonstrations continue across the country, as reported by Michael Ledeen and others, and the pro-democracy forces are being met by even greater violence from the regime. I urge you to visit this link (here), which contains a selection of blogs, twitter feeds and so on from the protesters reporting on the beatings, gassings and other outrages.

Meanwhile, AS THE BEATINGS WERE GOING ON, President Obama today issued a statement on (and to) the Iranian regime which did not mention the protests and the government’s response to them. Rather, he begs the regime for some kind, any kind, of deal. Here's a piece that gives you the flavor of it:

“I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.

“We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power. We have demonstrated our willingness to take confidence-building steps along with others in the international community. We have accepted a proposal by the International Atomic Energy Agency to meet Iran’s request for assistance in meeting the medical needs of its people. We have made clear that if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.”

POST-ELECTION POLITICAL NOTES

I.

Sure, it would have been nice if super-nerd carpetbagger Doug Hoffman had won New York's 23rd congressional district, but it would hardly have changed Congress. Much more important were the results in the proxy war between the good old boys and the conservatives in the Republican Party.

The biggest winner was Sarah Palin, whose endorsement of Hoffman made him a real candidate, brought him hundreds of thousands in campaign dollars, and led ultimately to Scozzafava's withdrawal from the race. Potential candidates for 2010 are already lining up to get her blessing. Who would have thought that Palin's role would turn out to be "kingmaker?"

The biggest loser was Newt Gingrich, of course, who now has NO prospects in the 2012 presidential race. Others who have hurt themselves severely include Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney, all of whom tried to vote "present" on NY-23. For Romney, this is especially damaging since it reinforces his genteel, polite, milquetoast image (that everybody hates). If he couldn't "man up" for Scozzafava, he probably never can.

Another guy with serious problems now is Michael Steele. The head of the RNC can't really be blamed for supporting a nominated Republican, but it's not like he raised any questions about her either. He's simply a guy who is in the wrong position at the wrong time, and he probably won't have his job much longer. He's unacceptable to the conservative forces that now have all the momentum in the party.

II.

A puzzle.

There are about 40 Democrats in the House who can't support Obamacare because it contains public funding for abortion. Repeated attempts to get a straight-up vote on eliminating abortion funding have been rebuffed by Pelosi et al.

Public funding for abortion has always been a minority position in America---it has never had the support of more than 30% of the public. Yet the Democratic leadership seems unwilling to give it up, even if it means their beloved national healthcare bill will fail.

Why? In terms of the politics, wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate public funding for abortion from the bill, get it passed, and then sneak it in later?

III.

The last time conservatives took over the Republican Party, it was a reaction to another left-wing, anti-Israel Democratic president. The result was eight years of Ronald Reagan.

In my darkest hours of despair for America, this is the thought that sustains me.

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki