Perfect, that is, for domestic political positioning. In all other regards, it falls short.

THE RESTRICTIONS on Iraq war funding drawn up by the House Democratic leadership are exquisitely tailored to bring together the party's leftist and centrist wings. For the Out of Iraq Caucus, which demands that Congress force a withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of this year, there is language that appears to deliver that mandate, albeit indirectly. For those who prefer a more moderate course, there is another withdrawal deadline, in August 2008. Either way, almost all American troops would be out of Iraq by the time the next election campaign begins in earnest. And there are plenty of enticements on the side: more money for wounded veterans, for children's health, for post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction.

The only constituency House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ignored in her plan for amending President Bush's supplemental war funding bill are the people of the country that U.S. troops are fighting to stabilize. The Democratic proposal doesn't attempt to answer the question of why August 2008 is the right moment for the Iraqi government to lose all support from U.S. combat units. It doesn't hint at what might happen if American forces were to leave at the end of this year -- a development that would be triggered by the Iraqi government's weakness. It doesn't explain how continued U.S. interests in Iraq, which holds the world's second-largest oil reserves and a substantial cadre of al-Qaeda militants, would be protected after 2008; in fact, it may prohibit U.S. forces from returning once they leave.

In short, the Democratic proposal to be taken up this week is an attempt to impose detailed management on a war without regard for the war itself. Will Iraq collapse into unrestrained civil conflict with "massive civilian casualties," as the U.S. intelligence community predicts in the event of a rapid withdrawal? Will al-Qaeda establish a powerful new base for launching attacks on the United States and its allies? Will there be a regional war that sucks in Iraqi neighbors such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey? The House legislation is indifferent: Whether or not any of those events happened, U.S. forces would be gone.

Well, if the Democrats are willing to risk all those bad outcomes, surely they must have put an awful lot of thought into their benchmarks and timetables, right?

Not so much. David "Idiot Liberals" Obey says:

“I don't know if these are the right benchmarks or right conditions or right timetable.... this language will change 10 minutes after it passes the house.”

Smart, tough.

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An old pussy crank himself, and keeps it fair and balanced by repeatedly calling bush and Cheney war-criminals (Cheney, specifically, should be "hanged"), but worth listening to anyway.

Why don't I talk more about Walter Reed? For the reasons offered here, by and large. A long, long, long-standing history of subpar conditions at Army hospitals is being turned into yet another "Blame Bush" ideological hit-job. And, given the ideological nature of it, I'm inclined to wait for the real facts before screaming about it.

Thanks to dri.

Correction: I misidentified Walter Reed as a VA hospital. Sgt. Seavey tells me it's an army hospital, and further, VA hospitals have been improving lately and are now pretty decent -- except for the long wait-times to get in.

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The NYT article is up. Of course it strains to say he gets "the big picture" right, opening and concluding with that sentiment. It's in the middle it gets a little off-message:

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globeÂ’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence....

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”

...

Still, Dr. Hansen [an advisor to Gore who supports his theoenvironmetnal preachifyin'] said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

“We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,” Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore....

He said “not every single adviser” agreed with him on every point, “but we do agree on the fundamentals” — that warming is real and caused by humans.

...

Some of Mr. GoreÂ’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globeÂ’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. GoreÂ’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

...

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. GoreÂ’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warmingÂ’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Thanks to BradM.

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Kilimanjaro dawn:

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It just keeps getting sillier.

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.

...

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.

And the Gore Effect becomes metaphorical, as scientists are prepared to chill Alphone's fire and brimstome warnings:

NY TIMES PLANS HIT ON GORE, NEWSROOM SOURCES TELL DRUDGE: 'Scientists argue that Gore's warnings are full of exaggerated claims and startling errors'... Reporter William Broad filing the story, 'A CALL TO COOL THE HYPE'... Developing...

Via Drudge.

Bonus! Master of None linked this story in a comment a while ago. (I missed that; got it off Drudge.) He points out the final line of the article:

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming,'' Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability.''

Does empirical evidence fail to support global warming? Ah well, no problem: Because, you see, global warming also has the insidious attribute of being too unpredictable to actually ever be proven via normal scientific processes like prediction and confirmation.

As Jim Geraghty says, "Global warming is now simply what we used to refer to as 'the weather.'"

Posted by: Ace at 04:43 PM | Comments (42)
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Patterico:

The Greatest Day of the Year

ItÂ’s the greatest day of the year: the first day of work when IÂ’ll come home during Daylight Savings Time. Plenty of time to go for a bike ride or a trip down to the beach, with daylight to spare.

I admire his plucky sunniness, but does anyone share his belief that the first working day after we lose an hour is, quote, "The Greatest Day of the Year"?

It's like he's just mocking us.

Bonus: Patterico excerpts from Beldar's blog regarding the claims Fitzgerald exceeded his authority or should have ended his investigation shortly after learning Armitage was the original leaker. Patterico disagrees strongly, noting (and I didn't know this) that Libby's original (claimed) lies predated Fitzgerald's involvement, and had been made to FBI agents fairly early in the investigation.

(It should be noted, however, that those mistatements consituted the only charge Libby was acquitted on.)

Beldars full defense of Fitzgerald -- and indictment of Libby -- is here, and probably worth reading for anyone determined to make a strong stand on the issue.

Whether I'll get around to it or not, I don't know. I respect Patterico and Beldar, which, I have to admit, makes me want to fully read them less.

Rebuttal: From Big Lizards.

Thanks to West for that.

Posted by: Ace at 04:03 PM | Comments (33)
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His mouth says one thing, his portfolio says another.

The beloved liberal moneybags made the purchase at the end of last year, according to secret public documents revealed by Foreign PolicyÂ’s blog.

Via Junkyard Blog, with the inevitable 300 connection. (Link Fixed.)

Certainly Iran is worried about the "psychological war" against it, as seen in the film. Why, they disliked the "anti-Iranian propaganda" almost as much as some leftwing movie critics.

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A man with a plan -- thrilling GOP primary voters with talk that even the nutroots' favorite candidates shy from:

In an interview appearing in April editions of Esquire magazine -- set to hit stands next week -- Hagel suggests that President Bush could be subject to calls for impeachment as the Iraq war drags on.

"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel said in the article. "Before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends on how this goes."

Only Nixon can go to China, so this is a bit inspired: Why on earth should Democrats vote for a Democrat who's too timid to talk like this, when they can vote for a real, courageous liberal like Chuck Hagel?

I'm getting so psyched about the Hagel/Rosie O'Donnell ticket my penis just had a stroke.

Thanks to Dalton.

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Dave sends this funny bit about "uncomfortable questions" raised about the "official story" regarding the destruction of the Death Star. Which is ironic, because even *I* recognize this as old. But it's still funny, and maybe some haven't seen it yet.

Of course, they miss a key piece of evidence: All records of the Death Star indicate that, as far as we know, there was not a single Jew aboard it at the time of its destruction.

In fact, the only Jew we know was there shortly before its destruction -- Princess Leia Organa (I know, I know, doesn't sound Jewish, but those people change their names, you know) -- was "rescued" from the station by four-man force employing deceptions and tactics so ludicrous as to practically scream "inside job."

Even this subversive Jewess herself noted, "It was too easy. They let us get away." Almost taunting us with the real truth behind the destruction of this wondrous symbol of Imperial power.

He also comments on Hollywood's "new" discovery of environmental villains, and notes the effect of the "more sophisticated entertainment" The China Syndrome was to increase carbon dioxide creation which now threatens our very lives.

Thanks, Hollywood! You killed us all! Nice work!

Chewbacca? Do I even have to say it?

Posted by: Ace at 03:05 PM | Comments (19)
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Leadership:

David Obey remarked the other day that "idiot liberals" discussing the Democrats' plan don't even understand what it is.

I guess he just proved his point, though perhaps not in the manner he would have preferred.

I suppose it's an improvement over the Murtha Plan, which, as far as I could tell, proposed that terrorism was so bad now in Iraq that American troops should "strategically redeploy" to neighboring Okinawa, only to return to fight if there were signs of terrorism in Iraq, which, oddly enough, are the very signs compelling them to leave in the first place.

PS: Remember how the Democrats kept selling their "over-the-horizon strategic redeployment" non-plan plans as a way to get troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan (and Pakistan), where the "real terrorists were," and where "Osama bin Forgotten" was?

Isn't it funny that all of these various and sundry plans seem to omit any, you know, plans to commit additional troops to "the forgotten war" in Afghanistan?

And isn't even funnier that not a single MSM reporter has asked them about this discrepancy?

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (26)
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