News and Views

Whoopty do. Edwards finally says out loud what everybody already knew- yes, he is the father of his mistresses child. The real problem here is not his reprehensible behavior, it's the way the media (and everybody around him) threw the election by covering up for him, as this commenter says at HotAir:

John Edwards finished second in the Iowa caucuses in 2008. SECOND. Barack Obama won that caucus and vaulted into front-runner status in the Democratic race because Edwards siphoned off votes from Hillary Clinton. If his affair had not been covered up he would have been out of the race well before Iowa, and Hillary probably would have won there, and then in New Hampshire, and then the race would have been declared essentially over

Supreme Court strikes down portions of McCain Feingold

Why the President's narcissim and Pollyanna politics are dangerous:

Ben Smth flags an interesting part of an interview President Obama gave to Joe Klein:

I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that. From Abbas' perspective, he's got Hamas looking over his shoulder and I think an environment generally within the Arab world that feels impatient with any process.
And on the Israeli front, although the Israelis I think after a lot of time showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies, still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures. And so what we're going to have to do—I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.

And it took him a year to figure this out? Anybody with a remote understanding of the conflict knows that there are problems that go beyond mere leadership by the president.

The Whitehouse is no place for this level of self important naivety.

In a similar vein, Patterico passes on an interview where the President says what he didn't do enough of this year was communicate with the American people and explaining to us what our 'core values are' and how and why we have to be sure our institutions match up with the values he tells us we have. Patterico counters:

CBS reports that in his first year in office, President Obama gave 411 speeches, comments and remarks, conducted 42 news conferences, appeared at 23 town hall meetings, 7 campaign rallies, and 28 political fundraisers, and granted 158 interviews … plus trips to 30 states and 21 nations, and meetings with 74 foreign leaders.

Tom Maguire finds a gem of a letter from a Democratic staffer complaining that they have better ideas but weaker messaging.  Maguire counters with the obvious:

... whatever message the Dems want to get out will be backed by sympathetic faculty members of every major university, reported by a press that, barring Fox and the WSJ, is totally sympatico, and trumpeted by the reliably liberal Hollywood machine. 

Yet Dems just can't get their superior message out.  What would it take?

It would help if their president hadn't lived and breathed and had his being in a total echo chamber for all of his adult life.  I mentioned this before, but I find the utter contempt he has for the working class just astounding- the man made fun of Brown for driving a truck, for Marie Antoinette's sake, and then in a completely tone deaf fashion sneered that anybody could buy a truck. 

Speaking of Wall Street, did you know the Sierra Club paid its head nearly a quarter of a million dollars in 2007?

And... more jobs 'unexpectedly lost.'  Strider's is one of those. 

Thiessen and Amanpour in a 9 minute video arguing about honest reporting, waterboarding, interrogation, torture, and Gitmo.  Well, Amanpour doesn't really mention Gitmo by name.  She just wonders why we can't just capture terrorists and hold them until the war is over.  Kind of like Bush was trying to do with Gitmo (and Obama is still doing).

Arlen Specter tells Michelle Machman to 'act like a lady?'  Ew.  What a creep.

Whoa.  Pelosi says there aren't enough votes to pass the health care bill, in every meeting she's had it's been obvious there wasn't support to pass the bill as is (the Nebraska deal seems to have stuck in everybody's craw for some reason), and that while they do have to pass some bill, she's in no hurry.  Do the people who vote for her ever actually pay attention to the things she says and how she twists with the wind?

Armchair quarterbacking- the Whitehouse says that Coakley lost because the people of Massachussetts hate Bush and his policies.

No media bias, none at all:

When Martha Coakley (D) took the podium to concede the election, all three channels aired most or all of the eight-minute speech. However, Republican Scott Brown's address was cut short on CNN after just seven minutes. On MSNBC Keith Olbermann cut Brown's mic and instead attacked the Republican candidate, talked about "teabaggers", and ran commercials. CNN only ran 26% of Brown's speech, while MSNBC aired 37%.

Since when was the loser's speech more newsworthy than the winner's?

Climate Fun:

Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful.

Doesn't that bring up an image of recalcitrant schoolboys of old sitting in the corner with duncecaps, after writing "I will be more careful" fivee hundred times on the blackboard?

Nature quotes Hans van Storch incorrectly.  Indeed, the Nature author seems to have, at best, paraphrased rather liberally- including using quoting van Storch supposedly using American idioms that van Storch doesn't even recognize, let alone use.

From Bishop Hill:

 Roger Pielke Jnr has posted a particularly egregious example of IPCC authors simply making things up. When a reviewer thought that Pielke Jnr's views should be sought on a question of hurricane damage in the USA, instead of actually asking him, the chapter authors simply inserted a statement as follows:

I believe Pielke agrees that adding 2004 and 2005 has the potential to change his earlier conclusions – at least about the absence of a trend in US Cat losses.

What makes their error even worse was that Pielke had previously made it clear that he believed no such thing.
This looks very bad.

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