Landrieu's vote bought with a $100 million sweetener. Section 2006 of ObamaCare says that all states that have had a disaster area in the last seven years get a share of this money, and then... eliminates each of those states except Louisiana. So it's a straight-up vote buy, disguised, barely, as something else.

Krauthammer suggested (on Brett Baier) that Lincoln should ask for at least $250 million, as she's in deeper trouble.

How about a different job?

While she might ask for a similar home-state largesse as Landrieu, that might not suffice for someone as vulnerable as Lincoln. She more likely needs an escape hatch.

I polled some veterans of the Bush administration and the Senate who agreed with my hunch that the best way to help Lincoln is for President Obama to make her secretary of agriculture.

Call:

Mary Landrieu of Louisiana
202-224-5824

Ben Nelsonof Nebraska
202-224-6551

Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas
202-224-4843

Evan Bayh of Indiana
202-224-5623

Ben Nelson has already promised a "yes" vote but it can't hurt -- at least get him to follow through on his threat to sustain a filibuster if the abortion funding is left in the bill.

Posted by: Ace at 03:10 PM | Comments (60)
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http://www.megaupload.com/?d=003LKN94 http://www.filedropper.com/foi2009

The links above are to the AGW emails being discussed. I have not downloaded them and cannot vouch for them. I got the links from this article though and were I not on my work comp I would download them.

Zapped. No reason given.

The key to the scientific method is suppression of contrary data. Everyone knows that. Duh.

It seems the very scientific jazz musician is somewhat less open to questioning global warming alarmism than lefty German paper Der Spiegel.

Stagnating Temperatures

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

By Gerald Traufetter

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

Billions of euros are at stake? I wonder when it will occur to anyone that "billions of euros are stake" might have something to do with "the science is settled."

These people believe George W. Bush starts wars in order to goose Haliburton's stock price by half a point but they don't ever consider that billions of euros being at stake might induce someone to deliberately fudge a regression analysis.

Reached a Plateau

The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."

Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius -- in other words, a standstill.

The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory.

Mixed Messages

But a few scientists simply refuse to believe the British calculations. "Warming has continued in the last few years," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). However, Rahmstorf is more or less alone in his view. Hamburg Max Planck Institute scientist Jochem Marotzke, on the other hand, says: "I hardly know any colleagues who would deny that it hasn't gotten warmer in recent years."

Incidentally, billions of euros are at stake.

The controversy sends confusing and mixed messages to the lay public. Why is there such a vigorous debate over climate change, even though it isn't getting warmer at the moment? And how can it be that scientists cannot even arrive at a consensus on changes in temperatures, even though temperatures are constantly being measured?
...

Marotzke and Leibniz Institute meteorologist Mojib Latif are even convinced that the fuzzy computing done by [climate-stagnation denier] Rahmstorf is counterproductive. "We have to explain to the public that greenhouse gases will not cause temperatures to keep rising from one record temperature to the next, but that they are still subject to natural fluctuations," says Latif. For this reason, he adds, it is dangerous to cite individual weather-related occurrences, such as a drought in Mali or a hurricane, as proof positive that climate change is already fully underway.

"Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal," says Latif.

Perhaps you suggested that too strongly. But then, billions in euros are at stake.

The article goes on as the never-say-die Natural Climate Fluctuation Denialists posit suddenly that natural factors -- like the less-radiative sun, or the oscillations of the ocean that can store large amounts of heat, and then suddenly start releasing them -- explain the current cooling.

But what they don't explain is why it is such natural forces are able to easily explain the missing "global warming" (and the global cooling, too), and yet aren't -- the science is settled! -- able to likewise explain a 1 degree rise in temperatures from 1980 to 1998.

It seems natural factors are, bizarrely, capable of cooling only, and only when absolutely necessary to help "fix" the utterly-wrong computer models. The moment they get data suggesting some warming, there is absolutely no possibility whatsoever that these same powerful natural forces could have a thing to do with that.

Posted by: Ace at 02:07 PM | Comments (269)
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As Just a Grunt (at JWF) explains, one of the women quoted (of course!) by AP seems to be an Obama fan. In the supposedly angry crowd, you hear only one woman droning on "Sign our books" with the exact cadence of "O-ba-ma," and one heckling male.

Based on two likely lefty disruptors, the left wants to call everyone else in the crowd "angry." In fact, they all look just like looky-loos, crowding in to photograph a celebrity.

But the media is putting out the word: Don't buy her book, or you'll be very angry at how she treats you.

I can't tell, by the way, but it sure sounds like Sarah Palin comes out to address the looky-loos here, and, conveniently enough, the "angry crowd" video ends just after that.

Just a Grunt is refusing to link the video, as lefties are trying to make it viral, and I'll respect that advice. But if you're curious -- as he says, it's on every single lefty site.

Corrected: Poster "Just a Grunt" wrote that post, not JWF.

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (131)
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This is just plain wrong.

BAGHDAD - It seems that the Brett Favre-Green Bay Packers saga is such a worldwide phenomenon that it's being used by detainees in American military camps.

According to a military official, detainees at a Wisconsin National Guard camp in Iraq are using Brett Favre as a manner of getting at the guard troops there.

"They know Favre by name," said First Lieutenant Tim Boehnen, who is from NewRichmond, Wis.

"One of the big words they know now is shenanigan.  They'll constantly talk about 'Favre shenanigans,' 'He's so good for the Vikings,' and 'The Packers have got to really feel bad about that one.'  "

According to Boehnen, it started when troops there started decorating their camp in Packers colors.....

Once the decoration job happened, detainees became curious.

"They obviously then started up the conversations, and started talking about Brett Favre.  They soon learned about Favre going to the Vikings, and things just started going downhill from there."

Boehnen said soccer is the main sport that detainees pay attention to there, so there's not exactly a Vikings fan club chapter in Iraq.

"They'll hear guards talking about it, and then they pick up a lot of stuff from that, too," said Boehnen. "They're very crafty.  They learn different stuff from different ways."

On an unrelated note, my latest diplomatic initiative to make friends with more progressives in my new Obamao t-shirt here. more...

Posted by: Uncle Jimbo at 12:29 PM | Comments (26)
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Finally. The fourth fastest fall below majority support of any president, coming in just days after Reagan fell below 50%, for similar reasons.

Reagan of course became very popular, but he had an advantage Obama doesn't: Reagan installed a low-tax regime that spurred economic growth.

More interesting is Charlie Cook's report. The last time I mentioned him, he was stuck with his previous prediction of solid, but not major, Republican gains. He seems to be walking that back now, and walking towards a potential Democratic disaster.

The problem, it turns out, isn't all those moderate freshmen Democrats who won in purple districts in 2006 and 2008. The problem is the old guard of the Democratic regime, the Blue Dogs serving for years and years in red districts. They've long been considered untouchable, simply due to their eternal incumbency; but Obama is delivering some unwelcome change in this regard.

Plenty of veteran Democrats who haven't had to break a campaign sweat this decade are quickly losing their aura of invincibility. Next fall, some in this category are likelier to face tough races than many of the 42 less tenured Democrats who populate the "Frontline" list. As of today, eight House Democrats elected prior to 2006 sit in our "Lean Democratic" and "Toss Up" columns, and another 20 whom we view as potentially vulnerable sit in our "Likely Democratic" column.

This is not to say that highly influential and venerated fixtures such as Reps. Ike Skelton (MO-04), John Spratt (SC-05), Bart Gordon (TN-06), John Tanner (TN-08 ) and Rick Boucher (VA-09) are goners next year. Their eventual vulnerability is highly dependent on the quality of GOP nominees and the discipline of their "time for change" messages. But if these party elders decide to seek reelection rather than retire, the underlying dynamics of their districts suggest at least several will need to fight to survive.

Many watchers of House politics are tempted to downplay the potential for real races in these districts after taking one look at immediate past election history. How could Republicans possibly threaten the likes of Skelton or Spratt, both of whom won more than 62 percent of the vote in 2008? Or Gordon, Tanner, or Boucher, all of whom were unopposed last year? But that was before they were saddled with a sitting Democratic president who is beyond radioactive in their districts. History is history.

Less than a year out from Election Day, it's time to rethink who the vulnerable Democrats are. And if President Obama is the dominant issue of the 2010 midterms (and rarely has a midterm not been a referendum on the incumbent president), Democrats ought to be seriously concerned about districts where reliable surveys suggest voters are in open revolt against him. Democrats would rather not draw attention to their problems in these districts, but both parties recognize the sea change underway.

This is painfully obvious but I guess I'll say it anyway: After the blowout in Virginia, none of these guys can count on ObaMagic to help them out if they vote against their constituents' strong and strengthening wishes.

At the moment, the Real Clear Politics average has Obama at his lowest level of support yet, at just barely over 50%. That will change, I presume, when the silly-ass WashPost/ABCNews poll (56% -- right) drops off the average.

Dorgan In Trouble? Even Dorgan?

This is another finding of that Zogby poll I mentioned yesterday. Skepticism is warranted, because the poll was commissioned with the specific goal of threatening Democratic Senators with electoral trouble if they vote for ObamaCare. Nevertheless, there is something going on here. Maybe exaggerated or tarted up, but still, something.

Versus a likely -- but not yet announced -- challenger (Governor John Hoeven), Dorgan's behind and not by a little.

In a potential 2010 election match-up Republican Governor John Hoeven leads Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan 55% to 36% with 9% undecided. Senator Dorgan, however, leads another possible challenger, Republican Duane Sand, by a similar margin, 60% to 28% with 10% undecided.

Twenty-eight percent of likely North Dakotan voters support the healthcare bill proposed by President Obama compared with 62% who oppose the proposed legislation, including 48% who strongly oppose the bill. A plurality of respondents believe that both North Dakota Senators Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad support the proposed bill.

When asked how a vote by Senator Dorgan in support of the healthcare bill would impact their potential vote for the Senator in the 2010 election, 12% of likely voters say they would be more likely to vote for Senator Dorgan as a result, while 40% would be less likely. Forty-six percent say Senator Dorgan's vote on health care makes no difference, including 62% of likely-Dorgan voters.

As Charlie Cook noted, so much depends on what quality of opposition the Republicans recruit. But if it looks like a Republican year, possible candidates tend to become actual candidates. Giuliani, for example: Many assumed he would never want the job of Senator, and, honestly, it's probably not his dream job. But if it looks like he can actually win it -- and maybe even easily -- it's a lot more appealing.

So is Governor Hoeven a likely challenger? Well, if he can confirm this poll, he's a hell of a lot likelier to try.

One more bit of good news: I linked the Fox poll -- 46% approve, 46% disapprove -- yesterday, but failed to see the sorta-shocking data point Allah highlighted: Among independents, support for Obama is at... 34%, with 51% opposed.

His overall approval rating’s pretty grim too — 46/46, down five points since last month — but I’m highlighting the indies because (a) this is the same Fox News poll with the suspicious Republican sample that I cited earlier, and (b) a -17 among the group that’s going to decide the midterms is eye-popping, especially when you compare it to last month. In October, among indies, he was at 49/34. This month, a 15-point swing. What happened?

I'm a little skeptical of this poll. It just seems odd and doesn't make a lot of sense to me. (Democrats are only sampled by 2% more than Republicans, 38-36; and Independents are heavily against Obama, yet he still has a 46% approval rate? Lot of weird stuff.) But... again, still. One doesn't have to believe every single crosstab of every single poll to realize that something bad has turned here for Obama.

Like, for example, this:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday morning indicates that 38 percent of the public blames Republicans for the countryÂ’s current economic problems. ThatÂ’s down 15 points from May, when 53 percent blamed the GOP. According to the poll 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May. Twenty-seven percent now say both parties are responsible for the economic mess.

Every Obama promise has an expiration date -- how's that sub-8% unemployment rate working for everyone? -- and so now, finally, does Obama's go-to excuse of Blaming Bush.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff and CraigA.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:32 AM | Comments (129)
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Good news! CERN is powering up the new superconducting supercollider. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. We may all cease to exist in about 15 minutes!

Very much related to my earlier posts about the Hadley CRU meltdown: Wall Street Journal reports: "More Scientists Treat Experiments as a Team Sport."

Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II.

To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. "We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork," says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi.

As research projects grow more complicated, management becomes a variable in every experiment. "You can't do it alone," says research management analyst Maria Binz-Scharf at City College of New York. "The question is how you put it all together."

Uh huh. *cough*consensus*cough*

Aaaaah, the black holes are sending me back in time...to when I bitchslapped Rick Moran for being a neo-luddite about the LHC.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:20 AM | Comments (166)
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Ah yes, a delicious stew of questionable/fake (pseudo)hard science heavily seasoned with some dubious sociology and extra dubious gender studies. What a treat it will be to slug down that tasty meal eh? A feast of heavenly dimension for sure. (on page 69 of 104)

...Although population data are generally regarded as among the success stories of social science, their integration with the developing science of climate change and its human dimensions remains poor. This applies not only to the influence of population growth on greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change adaptation, but also to the interactions with climate change of such other population dynamics as migration, urbanization and changing age structures.

More work is also required to understand the interactions between gender and climate change. Few data sets related to natural disasters or other potential climate change impacts have been disaggregated by sex...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:43 AM | Comments (81)
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Disappointing but not in the least bit surprising.

Mr. Nelson (D., Neb.) had withheld his intentions on the test vote, saying he wanted to review the bill before deciding whether to support the procedural motion to allow debate on the bill to begin. But he made clear in recent days he did not consider a vote to allow debate on the bill to be equivalent to supporting the bill itself.

Mr. Nelson reiterated Friday that he had not yet committed to supporting health-care legislation in a final vote.

...Mr. Nelson was one of three centrist Democrats, along with Sens. Mary Landrieu (D., La.) and Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.) who had not yet announced how they would vote on the procedural motion. Ms. Landrieu and Ms. Lincoln, whose votes would likely be needed for Democrats to reach a 60-vote threshold to advance the bill, still have not announced whether they would support the motion.

Landrieu got her $100 million but it's not clear if that was for just this vote or if it also gets her cloture vote later. Lincoln, as Ace pointed out yesterday, is in real danger for any show of support for this.

Of course, the Maine gals haven't been heard from lately. They are usually good for a surprise or two.

Keep in mind, this vote tomorrow is only the vote to start debate. It's not the cloture vote to end debate and move to final passage. It would be very unusual and unlikely that we'd win at this point in the process.

A defeat here would mean Senators didn't even want to try and 'improve' the bill. Now we all know it's not improvable but these moderates need to be seen as giving the President's top priority a shot.

Also, any 'improvement' is just as likely to cost a vote or two on the back end anyway, so Reid needs to keep a tight leash on this. Given that, they still have to figure out how to deal with Lieberman's vow to vote no on cloture if there's still a public option.

It would be nice to kill it here but it's not the end of the road. Still, there are only so many spots left and we kind of have to win at some point. So, if you live in Louisiana or Arkansas, get calling!

Posted by: DrewM at 10:39 AM | Comments (42)
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I spent some time yesterday talking with a senior editorial member of an influential conservative publication. We discussed a number of things including Afghanistan, and he had some interesting thoughts I wanted to put out into play. Incidentally if you wondered about the power of the AoSHQ, he asked me if I was still guest posting here, and I had never discussed that with him. Nice to know the power brokers are reading this site.

First is that Obama will wait until after he gets the Nobel to make his announcement about a troop increase so he won't catch flak from his left for warmongering when he is accepting a "peace" prize. And also that he will make his first trip to A-stan around Xmas and after he announces some increase, he thought around 30K.

That pushes the announcement back past 10 December and makes a ton of sense when you consider that the politics seem to be driving this.

The second was an idea to marginalize the Pashtun tribes that support the Taliban by empowering the Tajiks. This makes sense as some of the only times of stability in Afghanistan have come when one group is able to suppress another and force them to play nice. The Tajiks make up 27% of the Afghan population and if you add in the Uzbeks and Hazara you have a Northern Alliance redux. Another interesting piece of that is that the leader of the Northern Alliance, until his assassination by al Qaeda just before 9/11, Ahmed Shah Masood has a son who is now 20 years old. There could be a nice Lion King Circle of Life effect if a new Lion of the Panjshir replaced the old one.

It has always made sense to train Afghan security forces to patrol areas where their own tribe lives, kind of a National Guard concept. It would not be an awful idea to try a little harder and spend more effort and energy among those who have been our allies in the past. Train up a formidable Northern Alliance based military to secure their own areas, and then use it to pacify the Pashtuns. It would surely be ugly, but it would get us out of the fray, and it just might work. Hmmmmm.

Posted by: Uncle Jimbo at 09:41 AM | Comments (60)
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It was getting a little hot in the other comments (get it? getting hot? thanks, I'm here all week), so I'm putting this here.

TGIF Edition (PDF) spoke with Dr. Phil Jones, the researcher who wrote about attempting to fit data to "hide the decline." Here's his explanation:

“In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”

Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”.

“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?”

Uh huh. Speculate, doctor. What do you think you meant when you wrote that you had "just completed MikeÂ’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for KeithÂ’s to hide the decline." What decline could you possibly be talking about?

Keep in mind that when Jones wrote that in 1999 we hadn't had a decade of global cooling yet. So perhaps he was obscuring a decline in the warming trend?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:43 AM | Comments (189)
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