A Gem of Extraordinary Worth

More from the tree-ring circus of Climate Research Unit "peer-reviewed" computer code:

Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid the decline that affects tree-ring density records)

Hmm. All sounds very scientific. By the way, the CRU may be in East Anglia but it gets money from the U.S. Department of Energy and the EPA — which means you, Mr. and Mrs. America. Which makes it a domestic news story. Sadly, many U.S. newspapers evidently lack the resources to cover the story, but a reader copies me a letter he sent to the New York Times offering to help out:...

That's the headline in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The reference is to the attack on Kenneth Gladney by thugs from the SEIU, although if you didn't already know that, I'm not sure you could glean it from the Post-Dispatch's account. One of those charged is a Post-Dispatch reporter who allegedly failed to obey police commands to leave the scene of the disturbance.

The union thugs are charged only with misdemeanors, so I assume it's unlikely they'll go to jail. But they should.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that if these union thugs had been Navy SEALS apprehending a terrorist mass murderer of Americans, rather than agents of the Democratic Party trying to suppress expression of a political view with which the Democratic Party disagrees, they would have been treated far more harshly. Why do you think that is?

the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

Narrator

Our very planet depends on them. Yet they remain nature's most elusive scientific species, inhabiting some of the world's most delicate and daunting academic environments. But thanks to new breakthroughs in high speed cameras and email files, metascientists are finally beginning to understand their mysterious behaviors and complex social interactions. Tonight on Iowahawk Geographic: step inside the Secret Life of the Climate Researchers.

French Horn Fanfare Theme

Mr Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticising the US President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban.

A “period of hiatus” in Washington - and a lack of clear direction - had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said.

Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan

Some of the nation's top political commentators, legislators and intellectuals offer some insight into the biggest question burning up the blogosphere today.

Today's question:

Is the rush toward a jobs bill an implicit admission that February's $787 billion economic stimulus failed?

Daniel J. Mitchell, senior fellow at The Cato Institute, said:

The so-called stimulus was a massive waste of tax dollars, but this should not be a surprise.

The $787 billion spending spree was based on the discredited Keynesian theory that did not work for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s and did not work for Japan in the 1990s. It also did not work for Bush last year, so it is baffling that anybody would think it would work this year. Borrowing money out of the economy’s right pocket and then having politicians put the same money in the economy’s left pocket was the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. The only surprise was that the White House was foolish enough to make specific claims of the good results that supposedly would flow from all the pork-barrel spending. In part, this is the absurd notion of claiming 600,000-plus “jobs saved or created” when total employment actually has fallen by more than 3 million. But the bigger mistake was claiming that the faux stimulus would keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent and that failure to squander $787 billion would cause the jobless rate to climb to 9 percent. The politicians got their wish, yet now the unemployment rate is above 10 percent. Brilliant.

Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com, said:

However, two sectors of the economy seem relatively immune from the devastation that followed the bursting of the Greenspan bubble: first, Wall Street, where massive infusions of freshly-printed dollars are raining down on the banks and the corporate elite, who will be getting big fat Christmas bonuses this year. And of course employment in the Washington, D.C. area is up because the ranks of government employees are swelling. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported:

“College graduates are now looking toward government to start their careers, since there aren't a lot of other places to look. Unemployment for government employees is about half the rate of almost all private industry workers, and Washington, D.C., is a rare U.S. city that seems recession-proof.”

As the productive private sector sinks, the least productive sectors – empowered by their friends in Washington – rise in power, influence, and income. In the interest of truth in advertising, the “Jobs Now Caucus” needs to rename itself the “Jobs for My Cronies Now” caucus.

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy's elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral's mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named "Objective Amber," told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

If Timothy Geithner were a Broadway show, the producers would shut it down.

Treasury secretaries get attacked all the time and have to take it with aplomb. It's in the job description. The criticism serves a purpose: A secretary who can withstand the withering attacks of congressmen has what it takes to manage a real crisis.

Against this backdrop, Geithner's performance last week was the most pitiful by a major economic policy maker in ages. Geithner broke the cardinal rule for Treasury secretaries. He lost his cool.

On the ropes at a hearing at the Joint Economic Committee on Nov. 19, Geithner defended himself with the only weapon in the Obama administration's playbook: whining.

It is an iron law of Washington that policy makers lose their cool when they are on shaky ground in terms of substance. Geithner must know in his heart that he, far more than Brady or Burgess, is responsible for the financial crisis. That's why minor political theater sets him off.

Look at the facts. Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the five years leading up to the financial crisis. The crisis occurred, in part, because Wall Street firms spun out of control. The New York Fed is the cop charged with patrolling Wall Street, the eyes and ears of the financial regulatory system. It fundamentally failed on his watch.

Why did the Fed fail? Might it have been because it was run by a man who misunderstood the circumstances?

The fanaticism of the antinuclear forces, however, has not been without a cost. After all, we’ve used all that fossil fuel and delayed the building of any nuclear plants for more than a decade. The former head of Greenpeace in Britain announces: “Like many of us, I began to slowly realize we don’t have the luxury anymore of excluding nuclear energy. … We need all the help we can get.”

Of course, we didn’t have the luxury of doing so back then either, but the politicians were cowed by groups like Greenpeace. Now we’ll have to scramble to catch up, if in fact the iron grip of anti-nuclear-power activists is broken. Perhaps next we’ll get around to developing domestic supplies of oil and natural gas. But let’s not get carried away.

A vast majority of American women plan to ignore controversial new recommendations about mammograms, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows. The poll also shows that most women sharply overestimate their risk of developing the disease.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of government-appointed experts, suggested last week that most women don't need routine mammograms until age 50. The panel had told women to begin breast cancer screening at age 40.

Women across the USA have reacted angrily to the recommendations and expressed concern that delaying the tests could endanger their lives. In the new survey of 1,136 women, 76% of women say they disagree or strongly disagree with the recommendations.

And 84% of women ages 35 to 49 say they plan to get mammograms before age 50 despite the independent panel's advice.