Things fall part, the centre cannot hold

Readers of this feature know that I love William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet. One of his most famous poems is The Second Coming, in which he declaims as follows:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

When you listen to the acolytes of AGW, it seems as if they are providing this sort of dystopian vision:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This is Yeats providing an early template for Pete Townshend's similar observation, which came some 40 years later: Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.

Sometimes that is what the AGW debate seems like to me. We have been told for years now that the science is settled and we are on the brink of doom. The rough beast is coming 'round, mainly because the worst, and I assume I am part of the worst, are full of passionate intensity. It's easy to believe such things if you listen to the likes of our local state representative, the orange-clad green acolyte Kate Knuth, or Al Gore, or IPCC honcho Rajendra Pachauri, who all fear that the falcon is not listening to the falconer. They are trying to save us from our base impulses by jetting round the world to declaim against our base ways. And for the most part, Kate, Al and their pals aren't challenged on any of these assumptions, at least in America. It's just these crackpot bloggers who nip at their heels with their passionate intensity.

There are things that are relevant to the discussion that we just don't hear very much. You really need to get your news from places where there's still some intellectual curiosity. Take this example from The Daily Mail in London, which lets us know that The Second Coming may not be at hand after all:

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

The dog ate his homework, I guess. But we should trust Jones, as Kate Knuth does, because the science is settled. Well, maybe not:

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Really? Huh -- good to know! Glad we had this little talk, Professor Jones. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail makes this wry observation:

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

I suppose that might be possible. We are full of passionate intensity.

So besides selection bias and the dog eating the homework, what else might account for the warming reported that makes the science "settled?" Let's ask the Times of London:

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

And why would that be?

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

So the weather stations have moved? Or maybe a weather station that was in a field in 1950 now has a power plant 100 yards away? Didn't they tell us that?

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Those are human factors, of course, but unless we pave over entire continents, it's likely that the numbers aren't going to skew that much. There's always been an easy way to test changes in temperature yourself; you can always step out from underneath a tree into a sunny area. Oddly enough, it's warmer in the sunny area. Put a weather station in the middle of an asphalt parking lot and it might skew the numbers a bit.

Is the earth warming? Maybe. Is it warmer now than before? Maybe not. The point is, we don't know and the science is not "settled." In fact, the science is just beginning. Someone better tell Kate Knuth.

Professor Reynolds Explains

Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor who runs the highly successful and influential Instapundit, went to the Tea Party convention in Nashville. His excellent report in the Wall Street Journal is must reading and makes what's happening comprehensible, if you're willing to listen to what is being said. In fact, it's easy to understand:

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren't the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

I don't know how many Tea Party folks voted for Barack Obama, but certainly some did. I do know that a lot of people took Barack Obama's promises seriously. And I'd bet there were some Obama voters in Nashville.

So when promises are broken, what do you do? Sulk? Or take matters into your own hands? Reynolds finds citizens who are doing the latter.

Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack.

One thing that Reynolds noticed is that while there is anger involved, especially directly to the insiders who control both major parties in varying ways, this isn't an especially angry mob.

Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry—and they are—but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause.

But is Breitbart a Tea Party leader? Not especially. Is Sarah Palin? Not necessarily. Reynolds:

Press attention focused on Sarah Palin's speech, which was well-received by the crowd. But the attendees I met weren't looking to her for direction. They were hoping she would move in theirs. Right now, the tea party isn't looking for leaders so much as leaders are looking to align themselves with the tea party.

And when the leaders aren't available, others from the ranks are stepping up.

It's easy to see why. A recent Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll found that three-fourths of independent voters have a favorable opinion of the tea party. This enthusiasm, however, does not translate into an embrace of establishment Republicanism. One of the less-noted aspects of Mrs. Palin's speech was her endorsement of primary challenges for incumbent Republicans, something that is already underway. Tea partiers I talked to hope to replace a lot of entrenched time-servers and to throw a scare into others.

That's exactly right. I've long argued that the turn against the GOP in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles was fueled by the sense that Republicans, especially the Tom Delay/Dennis Hastert money-grubbing types, deserved to be fired. It never meant that the Nancy Pelosi/Steny Hoyer money-grubbing types were suddenly in favor. Democrats wanted to believe that and because they received a lot of votes in those two election cycles, it seemed plausible. But it was illusory.

I get the sense that a lot of Republicans, especially those in the establishment, are just waiting for the tide to come in. But they too will be challenged and deserve to be. Reynolds finds an example:

One primary challenger is Les Phillip. He is running against Republican Parker Griffith in Alabama's fifth congressional district. Mr. Phillip, a black businessman and Navy veteran who immigrated with his parents from Trinidad in his youth, got his start in politics speaking at a tea-party protest in Decatur, Ala., last year.

"Somebody had to speak," he told me, "so I stepped up." He did well enough that he was invited to speak at another protest in Trussville, Ala., after which things sort of snowballed. Of the tea partiers, he says, "Their values are pretty much mine. I live in a town in North Alabama where there are plenty of blacks driving Mercedes and living in big houses. Only in America can someone come from a little island and live the dream. I've liked it, and that's what I want for my children. [But] I saw the window closing for my own kids."

If you want to understand what's going on, you need to listen to Les Phillip. More importantly, you need to listen carefully. It's easy to dismiss what he represents as just another spasm of populism. It's not. This isn't a selfish movement fueled by resentment, although it could seem that way, especially given the dismissal of elites and elitism that is a common theme. Elitists certainly read things that way. The key statement Phillip makes is the last one:

Only in America can someone come from a little island and live the dream. I've liked it, and that's what I want for my children. [But] I saw the window closing for my own kids.

It's easy to dimsiss the American Dream, but it holds power precisely because so many people have lived their own version of it. And people are willing to fight for their children to have the same opportunity. And they will be heard on November 2.

They say you better listen to the voice of reason

Update: Mitch Berg, who actually has a successful radio program in this market, has much more.

Big news on the local media front, as KSTP, once the go-to place for conservative talk in the Twin Cities, will become the local outpost for ESPN. Brad has a lot of the details and David Brauer from MinnPost has more. A few thoughts:

• Radio is a strange business, but the slow motion immolation of KSTP has been a sight to behold. A few years back they had a lineup you could listen to all day long, with all of it but Rush Limbaugh local. Now they are ceding pretty much everything but the afternoon drive to other stations, at least in terms of local content.
• One of the signal dangers (bad pun, sorry) of listening to consultants is that you can get very bad advice, and the advice that the Hubbards got about the death of conservative talk radio was terrible advice. What the consultants never understood was this: while conservative talk radio was by necessity on defense during the Bush years, there was never any question that at some point the Democrats would return to power and the audience for alternative viewpoints would again increase. Rush Limbaugh's greatest successes have come during the Clinton era and now. KSTP took that success to the bank in the 1990s, but they let Limbaugh go and now a competitor is enjoying the ratings.
• The guys that KSTP brought in, who were supposed to be a better alternative to conservative hosts like Jason Lewis and Bob Davis, were abysmal. Willie Clark was just about unlistenable and "Prebil and Murphy," whatever they were, were boring. And the ratings reflected this. It's awfully tough to do much in morning drive in this market, given the unparalleled success of Tom Barnard at KQRS, but a good morning show with a consistent format could have had a chance. These dudes weren't any good.
• The remaining signature voices at KSTP are Joe Soucheray and Patrick Reusse. They can certainly do sports and are great together. It will do Reusse in particular a lot of good to stay within a tighter format. Reusse is a gifted storyteller and can be funny as hell, but his politics are cookie-cutter leftism of an especially dim variety and it made his morning drive show just about unlistenable. The question is whether or not Joe and Pat's shtick, which has been on the air here for 20 years, is past its sell-by date.

There's more to say about this and I'll get back to it in the coming days.

The Teacher Appears

Too many sad posts lately. Unfortunately, here's another.

When I was in 7th grade, my teacher was a guy named Dave Balliet. Dave died this week. He was only 60 years old and he had suffered from a rare form of cancer for a long, long time. You could search the earth looking for someone who had a bad word to say about Dave Balliet. You would never find that person.

There are some tough jobs in the world, but teaching 7th grade has to be right up there. Your students are not really children any more, but they are hardly adults yet. Kids that age are a dog's breakfast, a tangled mess of emotions and partial understandings of how the world actually is. The typical 7th grader can figure get play the notes, but only rarely does a 7th grader understand the music of life.

In the fall of 1975, I met Dave Balliet. I was a new student at St. Mary's School in Appleton, having spent the previous two years attending a public school in town. I was supposed to go to St. Mary's, but the school didn't have ay available space, so I had cooled my heels at the public school, enduring two largely unhappy years. Before that I had attended another Catholic grade school, St. Therese, but we had moved across town in the summer between 4th and 5th grade. When I finally arrived at St. Mary's as a 7th grader that fall, I was generally a stranger on the playground and being the new kid in school is rarely much fun.

When you are a new kid in school, you have two learning curves -- the academic one and the social one. The second one is much more difficult, especially if you are even the tiniest bit awkward socially. Dave Balliet understood that and looked out for me. He kept an eye on the other kids and made sure that I was welcomed into the school. He also helped me to understand some of the social mores and gave me advice on how to handle some of the "knuckleheads." It took a while, but eventually I figured it out and Dave's counsel made a huge difference.

My great friend Mark Miller compared Dave Balliet's classroom to the televison show "Welcome Back, Kotter," which was airing at that time. It's a pretty apt comparison. Dave had been a student at St. Mary's in the 1960s and was still a young teacher in 1975, with only a couple of years of experience. But even then, he seemed a lot older and experienced than he was. And because he'd been a student, he understood the school and its history. And since it was a Catholic school, he might have gone to school with older siblings of students that were in his classroom in 1975. He understood exactly the kinds of kids he was dealing with -- generally good kids, mostly middle class, but with a few tough stories here and there.

Dave's manner was unlike any other teacher I've had, before or since. The best way I can describe it is enthusiastic gruffness. He had a touch of the curmudgeon in him and sometimes his comments would have a little edge, but the edge was never directed at the students. And he loved to teach. His specialty was social studies and during that 7th grade year he made a semester-long project of following the 1976 presidential primary season. His classroom was filled with handmade posters for the various candidates -- Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Morris Udall and eventually Jerry Brown, who got in late in 1976. I think Dave even tried to talk some kid into making a Milton Shapp poster, but that was a pretty tough sell. We would spend significant class time talking about the race, handicapping the results, making predictions about the next week's slate and studying the history of previous elections. He would ask us to make predictions, but would also ask us to explain why we thought something would happen and wouldn't accept "that's what I think" as an answer. You had to think through the issue. There were more than a few political thinkers who emerged from his classroom.

And beyond the classroom, Dave was a coach. He coached football, basketball and fastpitch softball at St. Mary's and since it was a small school, most of the kids were involved in teams in one form or another. During my 8th grade year I was the student manager of the basketball team and played on the fastpitch softball team.

The enduring memory I have of that team was something that couldn't happen today. We played a season-ending tournament and the games were played at Holy Angels, a parish on the outskirts of town. Dave had to get the team to the games but there wasn't a school bus or other transportation available. So Dave improvised. His dad had an old Chevrolet pickup truck, probably about a 1951 or thereabouts. It was huge and dirty, since its primary use was at the family tree farm about 40 miles west of town. The picture I've included here is about what it looked like, except this one is a lot cleaner. Dave took Dow, the biggest kid on the team, and had him ride shotgun, while the rest of us rode out to the games in the truck bed. Since it was a 3-day tournament, we made multiple trips in the back of that truck. We were very fortunate that a cop didn't stop us, especially since all of us in the back were standing up half the time, hanging on the truck rails and yelling stuff at pedestrians while we rode down College Avenue, the main drag in town. It must have been quite a sight. And because Dave was a very good coach, we ended up winning the tournament.

A few years later Dave moved on to teach at the local technical college and stayed there for the rest of his career. But he never forgot his students from St. Mary's. I'd see him around town from time to time and he'd always want to know what was happening in my life and would have a story about someone I knew. He was genuinely interested in making sure that his students were coming along and continuing to learn.

The old saw has it that when a student is ready, the teacher appears. In the 7th grade, you couldn't have asked for a better teacher than Dave Balliet. At a time in my life when I needed both a teacher and a mentor, Dave was there for me. I have had some remarkably good teachers in my life, but I'm not sure I ever had a better one. Rest in peace, Dave. And thank you.

A Floor Wax AND A Dessert Topping

If you really want to know why AGW is such a great theory, here's why -- it can do ANYTHING.

Consider today's breathless dispatch from Time Magazine concerning how Global Warming is causing the string of snowstorms that has crippled the Eastern seaboard:

Brace yourselves now - this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter - in December and during the first weekend of February - are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.

But there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, the intensity of those storms has increased. That's in part because of global warming - hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall.

Okay, let's hold that thought. Do you remember other recent winters and the effect that Global Warming was ostensibly causing? Tell you what -- see for yourself, based on the testimony of various people who spend a lot of time in the Washington, D.C. area. Click the link and come back: I'll wait.

Hey, Robert Byrd, Barbara Boxer, Amy Klobuchar, Dianne Feinstein and Jay Inslee were quite worried about the lack of snow, which Global Warming was causing then. Now, apparently, it causes massive snow. It's a regular Perpetual Motion Machine of a theory. It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

I suppose I'm just being provincial or close-minded here. After all, we've been able to share in the fun, too -- the 5-foot tall snowbanks from this year's snowfall (which the local meteorologists have assured me are just at the yearly averages) have turned my driveway into a luge run. This is the 13th winter we've lived in this house and the snowbanks are higher now than they've ever been. Then again, I remember 1979, which was snowier than this year by rather a lot and significantly colder, too. I think one thing is clear -- average doesn't mean much.

There is good news for Amy K. -- the ice fishermen have had no trouble getting their ice houses out on lakes this year. That Global Warming will kill us all and solve all our problems. I just wish everything was as efficient.

Lunch break

It pays to have intelligent friends. A few things I've learned from my friends and colleagues over the lunch hour:

• Night Writer shares the impressive record of the Newspaper of Record.
• Brad Carlson explains how the team doctor of the Miami Dolphins helped to determine the champions of both college and pro football this year.
• Bike Bubba cuts the Gordian Knot.
• And last but hardly least, Mitch Berg announces the social event of the season (aside from Night Writer's Super Bowl Party, of course.)
  

Miss Me Blind

It had been up for more than a month and my Grumpy Old Men colleague K-Rod had noted its existence some time ago, but yesterday the rest of the world discovered the billboard on I-35 up in Wyoming, with the simple question: Miss Me Yet?

The "Me" in question is George W. "Chimpy McHitlerburton" Bush, one-time Leader of the Free World, a/k/a The Decider. Few presidents have left office as unpopular as Mr. Bush, who left as our current financial downturn really got going. This has earned him the nearly daily scorn of the administration that succeeded him.

So do I miss him? For a simple question, there's no simple answer.

• I do miss his administration's foreign policy, especially in its general tough-mindedness. We have attempted to curry favor throughout the world on President Obama's watch and most of what has been returned has been scorn.


• I don't miss his administration's fecklessness, especially on spending. He did very little to stop the relentless ratcheting of spending in Washington and ended up kicking the hard decisions down the road. He's hardly alone in this, of course.

Much of what was said about President Bush was unfair, or even stupid. He wasn't a moron. He disappointed many of his supporters on many issues -- all presidents do that. I guess the way I feel is this: I don't miss him so much as I regret what is happening now.

What say you?

John Murtha, RIP

John Murtha, the old Pennsylvania bull who symbolized what is right about America but equally what is wrong with Congress, died yesterday at the age of 77. A few thoughts:

• It's difficult to remember now, given everything that has happened since then, but Murtha and the rest of his colleagues came to Washington as reformers in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Murtha was unusual in that he was a Vietnam veteran and had served with great distinction and there was much hope that he might be a leader of the group, a group that also included a Norbertine Order Catholic priest named Robert Cornell, who represented my home district, WI-8.


• Fr. Cornell left office in 1978, but John Murtha stayed on. And he soon became involved in the Abscam scandal. He managed to survive that and ended up serving 18 full terms in the Congress, becoming a porkmeister extraordinaire who survived by funneling ample federal largesse to his home district, while making occasional social conservative noises to deflect attention to the larger reality that he was part of the gang.


• Murtha came to prominence late in his career when he became an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. Because he was a Marine, his words carried far more weight than the typical Congresscritter. Unfortunately, his words were thoughtless and, in the case of his fellow Marines at Haditha, outright slander. My friend Leo Pusateri and his colleagues have amply documented Murtha's career at the Murtha Must Go blog.

So what do we make of this American life? I do not know the condition of Murtha's soul and must presume that a merciful God will welcome the Congressman. The larger issue is that a man can spend nearly 40 years in the Congress. He's hardly alone -- there are plenty of old bulls roaming the halls there. John Dingell has been there for over 50 years. Congressional seats should not be sinecures and it's up to the voters to look for new leadership from time to time. Congressman Murtha came to Washington to reform it, but instead he became part of the thing. His nearly 40-year career deformed him, deformed his district and further impoverished our politics. That's a legacy I'd wish on no one. I pray for his family and thank Congressman Murtha for his long service to the nation, but I regret the results of it. RIP.

We Won't Get Gout Again

Back in late 1965 or thereabouts, Roger Daltrey sang the lyric:

Hope I die before I get old.

Last night, we found out why.

So which superannuated Baby Boom era rock act ought to get the call for next year's Super Bowl? The floor is open.

Lightning Round - Super Bowl Sunday

Gotta go fast.

• The game itself was satisfying, especially since the Saints played very well at the end and perhaps gave the rest of the world the formula for slowing down Peyton Manning. Sean Payton is one gutsy coach; the onside kick to start the 2nd half was perhaps the biggest roll of the dice I've ever seen in a Super Bowl. And Drew Brees was magnificent.
• I've already seen some speculation that Manning's costly interception might hurt his overall legacy as a quarterback. I don't see it. He's done way too many good things in his career and he'll have a decent shot at getting back to the Super Bowl in the next year or two. Most people will tell you that the gold standard for quarterbacking in the modern era is Joe Montana. The league is different now; there are a lot of of really good quarterbacks playing right now and Peyton Manning is still the guy you'd want to have in the clutch.
• Probably should say a few things about the ads. The Focus on the Family/Tim Tebow ad was pretty innocuous and it's amusing in retrospect to see how much fuss it created, although the fuss was awfully revealing. The most interesting ad by a long shot, at least from a political perspective, was the Audi "Green Police" ad. Audi seems to figure that it will sell cars by getting people ahead of the curve, but I think a lot of people won't see that sort of behavior as amusing. We are hectored all the time about our environmental sins and this is just a reminder of why the backlash against the greener than thou is coming.
• Also, if I never see dudes in underwear again, or screaming chickens, that would be a good thing, too.

Proof that President Obama reads the blogs

Much has been said and noted about President Obama being internet-savvy. And we now have conclusive proof that he is an avid blog reader and certainly ahead of the curve.

Over the last few days a massive snowstorm has crippled the mid-Atlantic region. Mr. Obama took note of this yesterday:

WASHINGTON — "Snowmageddon" – that's what President Barack Obama calls the storm that's shut down Washington.

His motorcade made it a few blocks through deserted streets so he could speak at the Democratic National Committee's winter meeting on Saturday.

That's a pretty clever quip. Obama must have found it somewhere. Could it have been in the blogosphere? Why yes. Yes it could.

As I mentioned in my Friday post, my son Ben absolutely loves camping and the Phillipo Scout Reserve may be his favorite place in the world. The camp itself is typical of most Boy Scout installation, a sprawling, beautiful site on the south bank of a dammed up section of the Cannon River known as Lake Byllesby. We arrived on Friday night a few hours prior to the onset of SNOWMAGEDDON. We set up in our cabin and then repaired to the Gwin Center, where we visited with our fellow campers.

So this feature had the term back on February 26, 2007. Back then I hadn't made much effort to publicize the blog at all; outside of my family, about the only regular reader of Mr. Dilettante in early 2007 was the lovely and talented Picklesworth, who in those days went by the name Hammerswing*. I didn't even have a Sitemeter back then to monitor blog traffic. Who could have known that an aspiring presidential candidate was already monitoring this feature and would later mine its vast archives for a quip describing the weather? I appreciate your patronage, Mr. President -- be sure to tell your friends!

Early forecasts indicate that the storm that is approaching Minnesota today will later make its way to the Beltway around mid-week and that it could be similarly ferocious. If President Obama needs a name for the second storm, we've got him covered.

* As alert readers of this feature know, Picklesworth/Hammerswing is of British ancestry, which might explain why he chooses blog handles that sound like bizzaro world London neighborhoods.

Benster and D Pick Your Game -- Super Bowl HYYYYYPPPPE Fest Edition

It's Super Bowl week! I think you know there's a lot of HYYYYYYYYPPPPPPE! And just in case you weren't sure, I'd be happy to supply a little extra HYYYYYYYYPPPPPE!

No, really? Imagine that, Seabiscuit!

I know there are a lot of commercials at the Super Bowl, but we're not here to rap about $5 Taco Bell boxes like Charles Barkley, who should (a) not be rapping at this stage in life and (b) probably ought to be advertising for Jenny Craig or something. Nor are we here to re-enact the Super Bowl Shuffle with the '85 Bears, which doesn't work so well when the participants are all in a nursing home. I can hear it now -- "I'm Otis Wilson and I have no teeth/I keep 'em in a glass that's beyond belief!"

Didn't realize you had these mad rapping skills, Youngblood.

There's a lot of things you don't know, Decrepit! Like where you left your socks! But enough of the trash talking, there's a game to pick. So let's do this.

New Orleans Who Dat? Saints (+5) vs. Indianapolis Mannings. New Orleans has come a long way since Katrina turned the Superdome into the world's largest hospital/refugee camp. Now the Saints are no longer the Aints, who inspired their fans to wear bags over their heads. It was a really good look when combined with Mardi Gras beads. But that's done now. Drew Brees, besides being my fantasy league quarterback supreme monster scoring machine, is at the controls of the NFL's best offense. On the other side, you have Peyton Manning, who was Decrepit's star fantasy league quarterback, and his cast of castoff receivers, and Tom Moore, who looks old enough to be the nursing home roommate of Otis Wilson. My belief is that whoever wins the turnover battle will hoist the Lombardi Trophy. I also think that the Colts will be exposed on defense, especially if Dwight Freeney cannot go. My prediction: Saints win and Drew Brees will be the MVP. Who Dat 70, Island of Misfit Toys 67.

So you're suggesting that a potential bettor might want to pick the over, huh? Although you barely mentioned them, the defenses are likely to show up to play the game, so I think your score might be a little high. To me, this is pretty simple -- Peyton Manning has a chance to prove himself one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history tomorrow. He's had his best season ever in many ways, considering that he's been throwing to people like Austin Collie (which sounds like a cross between a Mike Meyers movie and a Smashing Pumpkins album) and Pierre Garcon (who just sounds French). Can I be honest here? I didn't think the Saints were that good against the Purple squad, but now the citizens of Minnesota understand what the true depth of the Brett Favre Experience. I suspect Brees will play well, but Manning will be better. And therefore I'm picking the Colts. Colts 38, Saints 23.

Believe me, as a Packer fan I know the depths of the Favre Experience. Maybe Favre should be Otis Wilson's roommate in the nursing home. He could rap with Otis. "I'm the grizzled QB from Hattiesburg, I throw interceptions around the world!" Until next season, Ben out!

A question for the audience

So Barack Obama has been president for over a year now. Are we allowed to start holding him accountable for anything yet? Or is he still the Great Inheritor?

The floor is open.

Guilty Pleasures Part Sixty-Three -- A Week in Music

It has not been a very happy week around here for a lot of reasons, which is why we need a little joy. And when it's time for some joy, who else to turn to but. . . Fearless Maria!

Bonjour! Je m'appelle Fearless Maria! I don't know much French, but I can handle that much! So Dad, the title is "A Week in Music." Does that mean we're going to do songs about the days of the week? I suppose we could do Manic Monday, or Tuesday Afternoon, or Friday on My Mind, or Saturday in the Park, or. . . did anyone write a song about Thursday?

I'm having a hard time thinking of a song about Thursday. Maybe that's why we write these things on Thursday!

I'll write a song about Thursday, Dad! Guilty Pleasures, Guilty Pleasures! We write them on Thursday! Guilty Pleasures, Pleasures Guilty, we write them on. . . oh, what rhymes with Thursday anyway?

That might be why there aren't any songs about Thursday, Maria.

It's like trying to rhyme purple, Dad! Or orange! Well, do you have another approach?

Glad you asked, Maria. One thing I do each day on Facebook is post lyrics for a song by an artist whose birthday it is that day. We could look back at the past week or so and see if you like any of these. How does that sound?

I don't know how it sounds, Dad. You haven't played any of the videos, yet! It might sound good, but I'll be the judge of that!

Okay, that appears to be a call to action. Let's start with yesterday's song. As it happens, yesterday was the birthday of Ray Davies of the Kinks. And the song I picked is this one, from about 1970, a cranky little number called:

20th Century Man

I've heard of people having a bad day, Dad, but this guy sounds like he had a bad century! Was it really that bad in the 20th Century, Dad! Or did I plan it out smart by being born 15 days after the 20th Century ended?

I mostly enjoyed the 20th Century, Maria. And I'll bet that Ray Davies enjoyed it a little better than he's letting on in this song.

Well, I hope so, Dad! If he was complaining for the entire century, I'll bet people got pretty tired of him! Of course, if I was wearing ugly plaid pants like the guy was in some of the pictures in that video, maybe I'd have been a little cranky, too! Maybe rotten tomato juice got on his pants or something!

As a good a guess as I've heard. Now, speaking of cranky, the next song is from Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash, whose birthday was earlier in the week. Graham wasn't very happy about what was going on in Chicago in 1968, so he wrote this song:

Chicago

Dad, I've been to Chicago. It wasn't nearly as bad as these guys were saying! I loved Chicago! Didn't they go to Millennium Park?

No, it didn't exist then.

I know that -- I was teasing! But maybe that would have made them feel a little better about it. They could have played in the fountain instead of whining like 3-year olds!

The weird part, Maria, is that on some of the same land where the fountain is in Millennium Park, the Chicago police were having a big fight with the hippies.

The hippies! I can see it now -- hippie hippie forward hippie hippie arrest!

That's about what it was like, Maria.

Well, glad I waited until 2008 to go to Chicago, then! Forty years seems to have made a difference!

Indeed. So the next song was for Mike Campbell, who is one of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers. This song is one of their very first ones, from way back in 1978, on an appearance on the British music show The Old Grey Whistle Test.

American Girl

Dad, I'm an American Girl, too, but I sure don't have the problems that this girl they're singing about seems to have! So do you think that the American Girl Company, with all the awesome dolls, would want to hire Tom Petty? He's a little cranky, but he seems to like American Girls better than the Guess Who likes an American Woman!

That's an excellent point, Maria. I hadn't thought of that!

Well, that's why I'm here, Dad! I get what you leave out!

Indeed you do, Maria. So shall we move on?

Sure. So who's next?

The next birthday belongs to Phil Collins of Genesis, who has every reason to be happy, given the huge piles of money he's earned over the years.

I guess Genesis didn't need to take an Exodus from making money, huh, Dad?

Nope. But they did get to prowl the streets of Amsterdam (I think) on this song from 1981:

Keep It Dark

Dad, didn't you say that Genesis was very successful?

Yes, I did. Why do you ask?

Well, they seemed to get through that whole video without ever actually having full instruments! Couldn't they afford them? Phil Collins was walking around Europe with just drumsticks? That seems strange to me! Or did he have to uh, keep it dark?

The streets in Amerstdam are pretty narrow, Maria. Maybe they couldn't get the tour bus in.

I don't think that's it, Dad. And why would they need a tour bus anyway -- no one would have recognized them in those big trenchcoats! They look like Sherlock Holmes with drumsticks!

It is very mysterious, Maria. Maybe the next song will make more sense.

Based on your track record so far, Dad, I'm not going to count on it. What do you have?

Okay. Another recent birthday was for Louie Perez of one of my favorite bands, Los Lobos. And I've always liked this particular song, a simple shuffle called:

That Train Don't Stop Here

They sure love to jam, don't they? They just keep playing and playing their song! That's a really long train ride, no wonder they didn't stop!

Yeah, they like to play. But they play very well.

If they keep playing much longer, the moon is going to come out and they'll be playing in the moonlight!

Funny you should mention that, Maria --

Oh, did I set you up again, Dad?

You sure did. Another birthday person was Phil Lynnott, the bassist and lead singer of the 1970s Irish band Thin Lizzy. Phil is no longer with us, but this song still works and it's got some moonlight going for it:

Dancing in the Moonlight

Sounds like that if they really got into it, their hair would get caught in the spotlight -- literally! Now these guys really look like 70s guys! I like the finger snapping, but tell me this, Dad -- did they not make buttons in the 1970s?

Why do you ask?

Look at the video, Dad -- their shirts are wide open and you can see all their gross chest hair! Who are they trying to be, Hairy Potter?

I suspect they weren't always up on the grooming tips, Maria.

Well, I can't help them now, but if they were here, I'd have a little talk with them!

I'm almost afraid to show the next video to you, although I think these guys have a little better grooming. The last birthday belongs to guitarist Andy Cox of the English Beat, who recorded this song in 1982:

I Confess

I confess that this is kind of a weird video, with some guy dressed up as an archbishop and then another guy wearing eye shadow and a cape! He's weirder than Thin Lizzy or even the Kinks' pants! That's saying something, Dad!

So you don't approve, Maria?

Of course not! If there was a survey for this band, and the choices for clothing were excellent, great, fair or poor, I'd make my own line and say extremely poor! It is a good song, but they probably need to visit a clothing store or something!

Well, that's a week's worth of music.

And the best part is that most of it wasn't really that weak! So you know what to do, people! Vote in the comment section! And don't come around here wearing any weird plaid pants!

State of Grace

We knew it was coming, but that didn't make it any easier to see on the CaringBridge page.

Sunday, January 31, 2010 11:04 AM, CST

Surrounded by his family, our dear John was called to his peaceful resting place early this morning. We are thankful he is now at peace and no longer suffering.

John Kunstman is my cousin and my contemporary. He was born about a year before me, but we both graduated from high school in 1981 and from college in 1985. He had been a succesful corporate executive, was a devoted husband for 17 years and the father of two children. John was 47 years old, felled by metastatic cancer that started as an innocent-looking mole on his back two years ago, but one that later spread to his lymphatic system and then throughout his body. On at least two occasions, John had thought he was cancer-free. But the cancer returned, each time with greater ferocity, despite the care and attention of world-class oncologists. While the words on John's CaringBridge site were often circumspect, one can surmise that he suffered greatly in the last six months of his life, not only from the pain he was enduring, but from the growing realization that his journey was coming to an end far sooner than he could have imagined.

John and his siblings grew up in Cudahy, Wisconsin, a working-class suburb of Milwaukee that was near the airport and is perhaps most famous for being the home base of Patrick Cudahy, a prominent meat supplier best known for supplying bacon to supermarkets throughout the country. I remember visiting John's house a few times as a kid and the roar of airplanes overhead was a constant feature of his world. John and his siblings were all excellent athletes and they were all outstanding students as well. John ended up going to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a business degree, then beginning a steady climb up the corporate ladder.

I always remembered John as being a focused guy -- he would meet you with a firm handshake and a steady gaze that sometimes seemed a little intense to me. He had an excellent sense of humor, but you always got the sense that he was serious and had a plan for his life. While I didn't see a lot of John over the years, it was clear that he was living his life well; he was an avid cyclist, worked hard and was able to adapt as he moved from place to place, from Milwaukee, to Indianapolis, Atlanta, Roanoke and on to suburban Washington, DC. He was a director-level financial executive at one of the largest healthcare companies in the country and it was clear that he had achieved great success in his life. And then the cancer came.

There are no tidy answers for those of us who mourn John's passing. God has a plan for all of us and there are times when that plan seems incomprehensible. This would be one of those times. We struggle to understand why John faced such a difficult journey and such a lonely one, even though his devoted family was there every step of the way.

John's college degree was in actuarial science, which is a necessary but often joyless endeavor. I'm guessing that John spent a fair amount of his career looking at numbers and data points without ever having to consider that his own number would come up so soon, that he would end up being an outlier on the actuarial table.

We are awfully good at reducing people to numbers and data points. It's something we do every day, just as aggregate numbers of the living and dying are part of the business in which John spent his working life. We love our numbers and we hate them, too. Numbers can tell many stories. My son sometimes chafes at the notion of grades, arguing that the number doesn't tell you the whole story. But one thing I know -- John understood that the numbers stand for something greater than data points. John cared about the people in his life and challenged them to be better -- the testimony of his colleagues on the CaringBridge site and the various online memorials that I've read are proof of that.

But in the end, even if you have everyone who loves you as you make the journey, you still have to face the solitary number you are. Somehow, John was able to make his peace with it. John said this to his brothers Andy and Greg shortly before he died:

"I have nothing to complain about, I have had a great life."

There's no disputing that. Our task, as we mourn this special man, is to do a little better, to understand that our complaints are transitory, to get beyond our complaints and to leave footprints, to make this world a better place. John could have complained about many things, but he found a way to leave this world and enter the next world with grace. It's a lesson worth remembering and a challenge for those of us who remain. Nothing in this world is promised to us, but promise remains. And the promise God has made to all of us is the one promise that matters in the end.

Lightning Round 020310

Fast. Fierce. Funny. That's right, it's time for another edition of the Lightning Round!

• So Rahm Emanuel, the president's ever-excitable, R-rated chief of staff, got in trouble for calling Democratic activists "f******** retards." Chastened, he has apparently decided to apologize to Tim Shriver of the Special Olympics. He has not apologized to the Democrats he insulted, though. Feel the love, activists!
• Rahm is not alone, of course. The President himself has a propensity to take shots at his friends as well. Consider the grief he's caused his chief water-carrier in the Senate, the lovely and talented Harry Reid, by bashing Las Vegas. Things aren't going so well in Sin City these days and Reid is in a lot of trouble. Here's a bet (pun intended) -- Obama's comments won't help him much.
• Fred Thompson demonstrates the joy of Twittering.
• Megan McArdle of the Atlantic Monthly seems to think the President is a little unclear on the concept, pointing out what she terms the "Quote of the Decade." Oh, the decade is young, Ms. McArdle. Rahm Emanuel could have that topped by lunch.

Caucus Day, New Brighton Precinct 1

I went to my caucus this evening -- New Brighton Precinct 1, House District 50B. I sat in a classroom at Mounds View High School with about 35 of my neighbors. The work at a caucus is nuts and bolts stuff -- pick the precinct leadership, pick delegates for the BPOU, start the process of selecting delegates for the state convention. And there's a little bit of politicking, too.

Back in 2008, the caucuses were absolutely nuts. There were probably 1,000 people at the caucus that time. This time, there were probably a third that many. The frenzy of 2008 was replaced with a smaller group of citizens, much more low-key, but focused. We heard from a potential candidate willing to take on the incumbent state representative. We batted around a few resolutions for changing the party platform. And we voted in a straw poll for governor.

I haven't written much about the governor's race yet, because I'm still trying to sort out the candidates. There are two frontrunners on the Republican side -- Tom Emmer and Marty Seifert -- and you could make a plausible case for either of them. As it happened, in our precinct Seifert got 18 votes and Emmer received 12, while the other votes were spread among the other candidates.

The sense I get is that the party apparatus is behind Seifert, but the activists support Emmer. It's easy to understand the reasons for this -- Seifert, although not yet 40 years old, has represented his Marshall-area district for over a decade and has paid his dues. Emmer represents the Delano area, which was once a rural area but is now on the edge of suburbia. These are both traditional, but very different, Republican areas. Emmer, who is a dynamic speaker and a forceful advocate for conservative values, is the sort of candidate who hits an activist's fun button. Seifert can be dynamic, but he's not as gifted on the stump. And while appearances shouldn't necessarily matter, Seifert is prematurely balding and looks like an assistant claims adjuster. Conversely, Emmer has what the Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams calls "executive hair" and looks the part.

So how do we sort it out? We don't have to, yet. The conservation began in earnest today, in precincts throughout the state. And there will be a lot more to say. We'll be going to the BPOU on February 27. And by then we should know a lot more.

Radio Free Dilettante — Caucus Edition

No one should run on this platform:

Last Five:
Hot Rod Lincoln, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen
Drinkin' Muddy Water, The Yardbirds
The Times They Are A-Changin', Bob Dylan
Helter Skelter, U2
I've Been Everywhere, Johnny Cash


Next Five:
Heartbeat City, The Cars
Smokin' from Shootin', My Morning Jacket
Cocoanut Woman, Harry Belafonte
Hot 'Lanta, The Allman Brothers Band
I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement, The Ramones

Caucus Day

We talk a lot about politics 'round here, but there are times when talking isn't enough. Sometimes you have to take action. And today is a day in Minnesota when you can.

It's caucus day and the parties are holding caucuses throughout the state. For those of you who live in House District 50B, the caucus will take place tonight at Mounds View High School, 1900 Lake Valentine Road in Arden Hills. More info is available here at the House Republican 50B website.

We'll talk about a number of topics at the event, including the party platform and the potential candidates for governor, state representative and state senate. If you want to see Minnesota start to move away from the big government model that our DFL overlords prefer, the work starts tonight. Join us -- I'll see you there.

Even More Bad News for Copenhagen Kate

No wonder AGW advocates are concerned about heat. The heat is definitely on in the British media:

The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Well, the good thing is that the IPCC is really concerned about scientific rigor and peer review, so it's okay to include some anecdotal information, right? Well...

The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled "Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming".

It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.

The report also states that the section is intended to "assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects".

But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.

Maybe next time our local representative and AGW enthusiast, Kate Knuth, holds a town meeting, she might want to address some of these issues. I'd suggest that she do so.

More Bad News for Copenhagen Kate

Those climate change deniers -- man, they aren't scientific, are they? So we've been told, repeatedly. Good thing that we have organizations like the U.N's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that maintain strict standards of scientific rigor. Right? Well, the British press continues to stay on the story. Needless to say, it keeps getting better and better.

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

Is it too soon to say that the 2007 report is baked wind? The glaciers aren't melting and the rainforest isn't being destroyed by global warming, either. Tell you what -- believe in AGW if you'd wish. But y'all can stop telling me that your views are ungirded with "science."

Is it too soon to say that the 2007 report is baked wind? What say you, Rep. Knuth?

Home Truth

Mark Steyn gets to the heart of the matter:

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.

That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along — and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.

There's more, a lot more, at the link. Read the whole thing.

At least Bin Laden is aboard

The story on AGW keeps getting better and better. So earlier we learned that the Himalayan glacier story was crap. Now we discover that the head of the IPCC knew it before the start of the Copenhagen summit, but didn't bother to tell anyone:

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists. The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Pachauri denies it, of course:

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

But there's a problem.

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

Not when there's a chance to lock in a lot of money. And Dr. Pachauri could make a lot of money.

So what does the evidence actually show?

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

So what did Dr. Pachauri know, and when did he know it?

Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.

Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast."

I guess nearly two months isn't so bad, even though we've been told that if we don't act now, the earth could be imperiled. But it's more likely that the delay gave a chance for the checks to clear.

The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus.

Pachauri may not get that money now. But the good news is that Osama bin Laden is aboard. Maybe he'll fund the research.

Somewhere in the 651 Area Code, Kate Knuth Must Be Muttering. . .

Get off my side.

Demonstrating a surprising concern for the environment, Bin Laden voiced his dismay at recent international efforts to tackle global warming.

"Discussing climate change is not an intellectual luxury, but a reality," he said. "All of the industrialised countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis."

No word on whether bin Laden regrets missing the confab in Copenhagen.

And in a surprise that should hardly be surprising to anyone who thinks about it for more than a moment, bin Laden likes Noam Chomsky:

The terror chief also appeared to reveal himself to be a reader of the Guardian when he quoted from an interview with Noam Chomsky, the liberal linguistics professor, which appeared in the newspaper in November.

"Chomsky was right when he pointed to a resemblance between American policies and the approach of mafia gangs," he said. "Those are the real terrorists." Western intelligence has yet to be verify the authenticity of the recording, which was broadcast on al-Jazeera television, but independent experts said the voice on it appeared to be Bin Laden's.

Bummer, Kate.

Guilty Pleasures Part Sixty-Two -- Mysterious Wild Things That Drive Fearless Maria Crazy and All She Wants to Do Is Stop Them

Fearless Maria is back for another round of Guilty Pleasures.

Greetings from Mars, Earthlings! Wait a second -- I'm an Earthling, too? I must have been hypnotized? Benster, were you playing with the hypnotizing machine again?

He's not here, Maria. He's downstairs watching a basketball game, which seems to be plenty hypnotic for him.

Well Dad, then I won't worry about him. Dad, I have many questions.

Musical questions?

I suppose, Dad. One question I have is this: did the music get any less weird around 1990?

Well, there's one way to find out. And that's look at some music.

Are you going to pick weird songs on purpose again, Dad? Are you trying to make me think that the real old songs you like are better than newer songs?

Well Maria, songs around 1990 are already 20 years old, so they aren't so new anymore.

Compared to all that ancient stuff you like Daddy-O, 20 years ago doesn't seem so long ago, even if I'm only 10 years old.

Well, here's a song that will drive you crazy:

She Drives Me Crazy

That song drives me crazy, Dad! It looks like an anime version of President Obama playing leapfrog with guys wearing couch cushions! I know that's not President Obama, but that's really strange, Dad!

Actually the singer's name is Roland Gift and he's British. So I don't think he's even eligible to be President, Maria.

Well, maybe he wasn't so gifted, then!

Not nearly as gifted as you are, Fearless Maria.

Why thank you, but let's get on to another song before the world ends. I hear an asteroid is coming soon!

Really? Hmmm.

Things That Make You Go Hmm.

Hmmm is right. That was pretty weird, Dad! I'm not sure that 20 year old music is all that good. I really don't like rap, you know!

There was a lot of rap back then, sweetheart. But I know a few other songs.

Dad, why would people want to listen to that anyway? I find it very mysterious!

Funny you should mention mysterious, Maria....

Mysterious Ways

That video is beyond mysterious, Dad! It's pretty freaky, really. It's like being inside a kaleidoscope! But why would I want to be inside a kaleidoscope anyway, Dad? All I want to do is have some fun!

What's that you said, Maria?

All I want to do is have some fun, Dad!

All I Wanna Do

Dad, I do have a question.

What's that, Maria?

What do car washes and beer have to do with fun? I don't think I'd want a drunk person washing your car! And I definitely wouldn't want them driving!

That seems like good advice Maria. Maybe we should send a note to Sheryl Crow and recommend that she try something different.

I think we should, Dad, but it's been a pretty wild night looking at all these weird videos!

But there's one more, Maria.

On a wild night?

Wild Night

See all the stuff that lady had to watch in the back of her taxicab? That's why I don't want to have a car yet! But I really like the puppies! Hint hint!

I think we've heard that hint before, Maria.

Well, here's another hint: it's time to vote, people! Pick your favorite song and put it in the comments section! And don't be mysterious! That will drive me crazy, or it will make me go hmmm....

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life."

J. D. Salinger, the man who put those words in the mouth of his most famous protagonist, Holden Caufield, died today at the age of 91.

While I have always thought that The Catcher in the Rye is an overrated book, it is quotable. And some of the words Holden Caufield utters ring true, even if he's admittedly a terrific liar.

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

Indeed they do.

People never notice anything.

I'm glad somebody noticed that. Of course, since we're dealing with a self-admitted terrific liar, you have to account for the possibility that Holden Caufield never noticed anything either. And often the most corrosive lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves.

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

It's not often that a man gets to write a fitting epitaph nearly 60 years before his own demise. Salinger spent nearly the last 50 years hiding from flowers and hosannas, walking away from the fame he'd achieved in the 1950s. As far as the larger world was concerned, Salinger might as well have been dead. And now that he has finally died, his works will come to life again and gain a larger audience than the occasional high school English class that seems to encounter him now. I don't think that is truly irony, even though irony is a deeply debased word, but I have to imagine that the old recluse might find it all somewhat amusing. And I'll bet that someone brings Salinger flowers, maybe even out of spite.

In a deeply dishonest world, sometimes a terrific liar is a useful guide. RIP.

SOTU Snafu

It's probably not worth rehearsing my policy differences with the President on the particulars of his State of the Union speech, but it's worth pointing out that his harangue against the Supreme Court was an amazingly dumb move. I don't think he earned himself much goodwill from the Court by doing it -- Justice Alito did a sotto voce version of Joe Wilson by mouthing "not true" at one point.

Even people who typically carry water for Democrats understood this was a bad idea -- for example, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times:

This time, Justice Alito shook his head as if to rebut the president’s characterization of the Citizens United decision, and seemed to mouth the words “not true.” Indeed, Mr. Obama’s description of the holding of the case was imprecise. He said the court had “reversed a century of law.”

The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries — as opposed to their political action committees — on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election. It is true, though, that the majority wrote so broadly about corporate free speech rights as to call into question other limitations as well — although not necessarily the existing ban on direct contributions.

So let's tote up the damage:

1) He insults a coequal branch of government (the judiciary) in the home of another coequal branch (the legislature), drawing the quiet ire of a Justice who will be in position long after the President has returned to Hyde Park;

2) He gets the facts of the case wrong; and

3) He complicates the life of Elena Kagan, his Solicitor General, to score a cheap point.

As we've all learned, President Obama has a lot to learn. Here's yet another suggestion that I'm certain the President will not accept, but I offer it anyway. Every administration engages in some measure of demagoguery, but smart administrations job out the demagoguery to underlings. Let Axelrod to this stuff, Mr. President -- it diminishes your office.

Because Every State Really Ought to Have Two Ridiculous Proto-Teutonic Candidates for Governor

I'm not sure if Arnold Schwarzenegger is running for re-election in California, but there's good news for our friends in the Golden State:

Move over Arnold, there's another celebrity in the race for governor in California. Prince Frederic von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, announced his intention to run as a liberal independent candidate Monday.

By all reasonable modern standards, von Anhalt is certainly qualified to be a candidate. KTLA helpfully points out his CV:

Von Anhalt is used to having his name in the news. He married Gabor in the mid-1980s.

In 2007, he claimed he was the biological father of Anna Nicole Smith's infant daughter.

Later that year, LAPD officers found him naked and handcuffed to the steering wheel of a 2006 Rolls Royce. Von Anhalt told officers that he was driving when "three white women" with a gun took his jewelry and clothes.

There has been speculation regarding whether Prince von Anhalt is actually a prince. According to reports, he was born Robert Lichtenberg, the son of a German policeman and bought his title after being adopted as an adult by a bankrupt daughter-in-law of the last kaiser.

Sounds like a good candidate to me. And we Minnesotans really can't sneer too much at a guy like von Anhalt throwing his hat into the ring, considering we elected Jesse Ventura. I think we missed a bet, though -- we really should have elected this guy.

(h/t: Kausfiles)

An anniversary worth remembering

Ed and Mary Jane tied the knot 47 years ago this day in Appleton, Wisconsin. While they've both been gone a long time now, their legacy lives on in their six children and seven grandchildren. And I'm proud to be one of those children. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Helpful Explanations

I've been laying off the AGW business lately, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been news on that front. A particularly interesting example is the revelation, pretty much ignored in the U.S. press, that the claim that Himalayan glaciers were melting and could be gone by 2035 was, shall we say, preposterous. This is big news because this claim was a big part of the 2007 report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by the way won a Nobel Prize. Fortunately the British press has been all over this story and it was moved forward today by the Daily Mail:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

Hey, whatever works, right? There's more:

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF. It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Math is hard, I suppose. But there's more.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Well, confession is good for the soul, I suppose. But there's even more:

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

Which is what happens when you have a narrative to construct. And a conclusion you'd like. Read on:

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.

A factor of 25? Well, I suppose that's pretty close.

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh about this. After all, getting the right information is painstaking work.

One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’ When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.

Voodoo? Maybe someone ought to alert Pat Robertson! The good news is that Pachauri, who we have featured in this space a while back, was now on the case and had identified the scoundrels:

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

Lal denies that. And we get a sense of what IPCC procedures actually are from the following:

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.

Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.

Do you sense there's a pattern here? It's pretty clear that something other than dispassionate inquiry was driving the work of Lal and the others involved. And yet I also wonder why we haven't heard any of this before now. If the Japanese government, or Kaser, or any of the others who raised objections at the time, were genuinely concerned, why didn't they make their concerns public in 2007? Or later on when this report received a Nobel Prize?

Or maybe we just shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about such things. Tim Blair notes this comforting explanation:

Professor Christopher Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution in California, who is the new co-chairman of the IPCC working group overseeing the climate impacts report, said the 2007 report had been broadly accurate at the time it was written.

He said: “The 2007 study should be seen as “a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around.”

Yeah, let's fix it. Good plan, Professor!

Live by the Favre, Die by the Favre

No schadenfreude tonight. Favre threw the dumb pass at the end, which as a Packer fan I've seen numerous times before. It's part of the equation. And unless I miss my guess, Favre will be back.

One last thing: I've argued this before and I'll continue to argue this. The NFL overtime rule sucks. Favre, bless his heart, never had a chance to get the ball back to redeem himself. While the Vikings had a few chances to stop the Saints in the overtime, it was a lot to ask. They need to look at a variation of the college rule. But having said that, a team that turns the ball over 5 times ultimately deserves its fate.

Housekeeping

More as an FYI than anything else, I've made some long-overdue changes to the sidebar. I've done some culling from the recommended blogroll, mostly because the blogs seem to be dead or moribund. Since the blogs in question are still worth your time, they are now in the "Gone But Not Forgotten" category further down.

I've also added the home blogs of my Grumpy Old Men colleagues, along with a few other national blogs that I read regularly, like Ann Althouse and Kausfiles. I've also added No Runny Eggs, a strong blog out of Milwaukee, and The Curse of Bobby Layne, which is a lovingly compiled site detailing the utter futility of the Detroit Lions. A good blogroll ought to have at least a little schadenfreude, I think. And there are a few others as well.

Check 'em out.

Benster and D Pick Your Games -- Conference Championship Round

It's conference championship week. Can you feel the HYYYYYYPPPPPEEE! Of course you can. How could you not feel it?

I don't know what I feel. But I do know that my ears are numb from all the shouting of HYYYYPPPPPPE! that you do 'round here, Seabiscuit!

You stole my line, Decrepit! C'mon, man! Anyway, let's get down to bidness:

New York J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS (+7 1/2) vs. Indianapolis Mannings. Of the four teams still standing, the Jets are the least likely team to get to this point. I was very surprised that the Bolts failed to git 'er done against Mark Sanchez and the rest of his green-clad crew of misfits. Rex Ryan, the Jets coach, has said that his team was out of the race and that after the Jets made the playoffs, that they were going to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. It looks like he should be on a Coors Light commercial some day. Look for Indianapolis to try and get points on the board early and force Sanchez to win the game himself. Colts 35, Gang Green 30.

Okay, so let's look at what we have. On one side you have the aforementioned Mr. Sanchez, a hotshot rookie quarterback who makes some plays. On the other, Titan of Commerce Peyton Manning, the go-to-guy for half the companies in America for deadpan commerical fun. And he also works for Japanese companies, too. But what he really works on is opposing secondaries. I've seen it argued that Manning might be the greatest quarterback of all time. He could go a long way towards proving that by winning this game. And I suspect he will, although the pesky Jets will make him earn it. Colts 27, Jets 20.

Minnesota Skol Vikings (+3 1/2) vs. New Orleans Brees. This should be the best game of the playoffs. Both teams have solid veteran quarterbacks, dangerous running backs and explosive wideouts. Both teams also have very good defenses. Hurricane Brees will be a challenge for our intrepid Norsemen, especially since both Ray Edwards and Kevin Williams will be limited in what they can do. That means the Saints can work on Jared "Mullet" Allen, who can sack you and look like Billy Ray Cyrus at the same time. And we all know how painful that can be; ask Aaron Rodgers and Allen "Swinging Gate" Barbre. Brett Favre came back to try and get a ring. He might get it, but look for him to have to try and go gunslinger. And we all know what happens when he goes gunslinger. Saints 84, Skol Vikings 70.

So how do you sort these two teams out. Quarterbacks? Both awfully good. Running games? Both very good. Defenses? Both very good, too. There's a reason why these two teams are in the NFC championship game. They deserve to be. My guess is this: it's going to be more or less a standoff in normal play, but the special teams are where the difference is going to be made. Here's the thing: Percy Harvin has headaches, while Reggie Bush causes headaches. And if Harvin cannot answer the bell (and based on what I've heard, it's about a 50/50 shot that he won't), figure the Saints have the advantage. If Harvin can play, then give the special teams advantage to the Vikings, since Ryan Longwell is perhaps the top clutch kicker in the league. Of course, Vikings fans were saying the same thing about their kicker in 1998. As for Favre? He could throw the killer pick and break your heart, but I'm guessing he won't get the chance because the matter will be decided earlier. Saints 37, Vikings 27.

So you're saying that Percy Harvin is a better return man than Reggie Bush?

No, what I'm saying is that a healthy Reggie Bush might make the difference.

Just remember: Reggie Bush has a Heisman. And he can run. But he can't avoid the HYYYYYPPPPPPE! Ben out!