South Dakota Politics

Happy New Year!

I wish a very good year to everyone on the local blogosphere. Special mention goes to my Keloland colleagues: Cory Allen Heidelberger, David Newquist, Doug Wiken, Joel Rosenthal, Pat Powers, the Radioactive Chief, Tim Gebhart, and Hell, even Todd Epp. I extend that wish to all our readers.

Has Ben

Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska may have wheeled and dealed himself out of a job. In return for his crucial vote for the Senate health care bill, he got a special deal for his home state: extra Medicaid funds.

Well, now he's getting dumped on from two directions. Attorney Generals in thirteen states have demanded that the deal be canceled. It is in fact constitutionally dubious.

But the real problem Nelson has is with the people of Nebraska. Nelson isn't up for reelection until 2012, but he is already running expensive TV ads. From the New York Times:

To explain his vote to critics, he appeared in an advertisement scheduled to be broadcast statewide on Wednesday evening during the one occasion when most Nebraskans were certain to be found before a television — the Holiday Bowl, in which the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers faced the Arizona Wildcats.

Wow. During the Bowl game! That wasn't cheap. Why it seemed like a necessary expenditure is indicated by a Rasmussen poll.

If Governor Dave Heineman challenges Nelson for the Senate job, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows the Republican would get 61% of the vote while Nelson would get just 30%. Nelson was reelected to a second Senate term in 2006 with 64% of the vote.

Nelson's health care vote is clearly dragging his numbers down. Just 17% of Nebraska voters approve of the deal their senator made on Medicaid in exchange for his vote in support of the plan. Overall, 64% oppose the health care legislation, including 53% who are Strongly Opposed.

Ben Nelson is thirty points behind a hypothetical opponent. Trying to pass radical legislation in the face of unambiguous public opposition might matter. This is, after all, a republic.

Fruit of the Boom

For the second time in two months Federal officials failed to react to obvious indicators of an impending terrorist act, allowing a terrorist to bring his weapons close to his targets. At Fort Hood this resulted in the deaths of 12 soldiers and one civilian. The result in the second incident would almost be comical, were it not for the fact mentioned above.

What do you call the second incident and or its perpetrator? The Christmas Would Be Bomber, as Ruth Marcus has it at Real Clear Politics? Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to board flight 253 in Amsterdam, bound for Detroit, with explosives sown into this underwear. I say we call him the bloomer boomer.

Fortunately his fellow passengers, apparently not employed by the Department of Homeland Security or any other federal agency, were able to see what was right in front of their eyes (Mr. Adul Mutallab was on fire). Or at least they understood what he meant when he told a flight attendant that he had an explosive device and somehow seemed to understand that the proper response was to clobber him. Maybe the lesson here is that when we chose a Secretary of Homeland Security we should pass up the former governors and pick a Dutch film director.

A lot of the post-incident commentary focused on the immediate reaction of the Obama administration, which ranged from the anemic (President Obama's dispassionate response) to the ridiculous (Janet Napolitano's statement that "the System worked."). This is only important if you think that the primary job of the President is to properly manipulate public opinion. In fact, that is his secondary job. His first responsibility is to keep Americans safe without having to rely on Dutch film directors.

Here is how Ruth Marcus puts it:

How can it be that his visa was not revoked after his own father went to U.S. authorities to report concerns about his son's radicalization? "…How can it be that, after the father's alert, the most that seems to have been done was to place Abdulmutallab's name in a database so sprawling as to be nearly useless?... How can it be that British authorities denied Abdulmutallab's request for a visa renewal -- without triggering a comparable review by U.S. officials?... How can it be that an individual passenger (a) traveling from Nigeria, with its known security lapses, (b) not checking luggage and (c) purchasing a ticket with cash was not singled out for additional screening? What did he have to do: wear a sign saying, "You might want to check my underwear"?

How can it be that screening technology is so lacking so long after the 9/11 Commission called for "priority attention" to detect explosives on passengers?... How can it be that our best line of defense seems to have been a combination of incompetence and bravery -- incompetence by the attacker whose device failed to detonate properly, and bravery by passengers who acted so quickly to subdue him and put out the fire?

And how can it be, in the face of all this, that the administration's communications strategy, cooked up on a conference call, was to assure us that they were looking into things but in the meantime we should settle down?

I've cut out a lot of the detail in Ms. Marcus's scathing article. See the link above and read the whole thing. When the Administration loses Ruth Marcus, they are near to losing everyone.

It is surely true that President Obama inherited a defective system from his predecessor. But George W. Bush hasn't been President for nearly a year. This mess is solely Obama's responsibility. It will be a test of his Presidency whether he can improve the security system to the point that it can recognize a terrorist about to board an aircraft when the terrorist has a dozen red flags duct taped to his shirt. I predict that he will fail to do so. I wish I could believe that it is all President Obama's fault. But I don't' believe it. I think the flaw goes much deeper than that.

Health Care Reform: what we are losing

Proponents of the "public option" in health care reform (i.e. expanding the role of government as a direct provider of health insurance) frequently point to polls showing that a majority of Americans support it. But in every poll I have seen, the public option is mentioned along with the word "competition." It is easy to get a majority behind a public option that would compete with private health insurance.

What does the Senate healthcare bill do to competition in the health insurance industry? Here is Scott Gottlieb in the New York Post:

The plan before the Senate creates a set of 50 state-based insurance "exchanges" that are established as markets for health plans. Consumers must buy policies from their employers or through the exchanges — but, either way, their choice of coverage is limited to one of four basic insurance plans that the government sanctions.

Private insurers will still compete to offer policies but must model their coverage on one of these four templates. In short, the Senate bill explicitly standardizes health benefits and then establishes elaborate mechanisms (including subsidies and penalties) to pay for them.

Under the Senate bill, consumers will be able to choose between higher co-pays and higher premiums. That's it. For all practical purposes, only one insurance policy will be available. The terms of that policy will be decided by the new "health care czar," who will effectively control not only the health insurance industry but the health care industry. "Czar" might be too gentle a title. "Overlord" would come nearer.

My guess is that most Americans have as yet no idea what is really in this bill. The legislation is very unpopular because everyone can sense that it is represents a massive expansion of government power and government spending. When they find out that it virtually eliminates competition in the health insurance industry, well, that might not increase its popularity.

In losing competition, all but the very rich will lose access to any health care not blessed by the new Czar. If you don't believe me, ask Bob Herbert at the New York Times.

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate's version of President Obama's effort to reform health care.

The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it's a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care. Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do.

Now, I do not agree with Bob Herbert often. He loathes pretty much everyone I like. But he is right on this one. What is the purpose of this design?

These lower-value plans would have higher out-of-pocket costs, thus increasing the very things that are so maddening to so many policyholders right now: higher and higher co-payments, soaring deductibles and so forth. Some of the benefits of higher-end policies can be expected in many cases to go by the boards: dental and vision care, for example, and expensive mental health coverage.

Proponents say this is a terrific way to hold down health care costs. If policyholders have to pay more out of their own pockets, they will be more careful — that is to say, more reluctant — to access health services. On the other hand, people with very serious illnesses will be saddled with much higher out-of-pocket costs. And a reluctance to seek treatment for something that might seem relatively minor at first could well have terrible (and terribly expensive) consequences in the long run.

The Democrats in Congress can't say no to the tort lawyers, or the doctors, and they aren't' willing to force open the health insurance market to sales across state borders. The only way to hold down medical costs is to discourage access to healthcare.

The President said that no one would be forced to give up his or her healthcare insurance. He was lying. Eventually it will be clear to a lot of someones just how much they are losing.

Sherlock Holmes is Awesome

It is, as most reviewers have pointed out, more James Bond than Sherlock Holmes. But that said, it is much truer to the Arthur Conan Doyle character and corpus than one would expect. If you want to know what to expect from Robert Downey, Jr., well, he's still Iron Man.

This is an action movie, with a lot of fighting, jumping, falling, and swinging from any number of Victorian ropes, chains, pulleys, you name it. On the other hand, to pull a very small spoiler, even in his fighting Holmes is intensely cerebral, doing this rehearsal in his imagination before he strikes a blow. In addition, everything that happens, every mystery large or small, is eventually explained in a very Holmesian fashion.

Watson is brought up several notches in physical ability and is almost a match for Holmes in deduction. Making them more equal partners than hero/sidekick was plenty of fun. The villain(s) were great, and you know who shows up in the margins.

This is a Victorian superhero movie, and that is just fine with me. You will enjoy it, no matter how stuffy a Sherlock Holmes fan you may be.

The Least Popular Reform in U.S. History

The Gallup poll found that 48% of respondents wanted their Congressional representatives to vote against the bill, while 46% wanted them to vote for it. In the Quinnipiac poll, 53% were opposed vs. 36% in favor.

It is difficult to imagine a case in the history of the Republic where the disproportion between the ambitions and the popularity of a proposed piece of legislation has been as great as this.

I have been watching Arkansas TV, and there is a deluge of commercials on this topic. Most of them are pro-reform. According to these ads, the health care reform bills will save Medicare; they will reduce overall health care spending; they will reduce the deficit; they will lower individual health care costs without raising taxes on most Americans; and they will leave all medical decisions up to patients and their doctors. Wow.

Of course, everything in that list is a lie. The current bills do nothing to put Medicare on a sound financial basis. Instead, they propose cutting billions more out of the program. Better than that, the CBO has noticed that the Senate bill counts the Medicare cuts twice! It also counts on cost savings gimmicks like the Doctor's fix (cutting reimbursements to Doctor's under Medicare) that Congress obviously won't make. If it did make them, it would push almost all Doctors out of the Medicare system. This is apparently what the New York Times means when it says that the bill "has been carefully and responsibly drafted so that it is fully paid for without busting future budgets."

Nothing it he process so far suggests that Congress is capable of forcing real sacrifices. For that reason, no reasonable person can believe that it is really going to cut the deficit. But even if, as the New York Times says, the bill is responsibly drafted, that doesn't mean that it reduces health care costs. The trillions that the bill will cost have to come from somewhere. That's money that can't be spent on other things. There is no prospect of significant reductions in other spending.

The audacity of this legislation is breathtaking.

Light Blogging

Mom and Dad still live largely off the grid. So Merry Christmas to all readers, friendly or otherwise. Meanwhile, here is my latest from the American News:

The process for passing a bill into law, as described in the U.S. Constitution, is about as complicated as the recipe for a peanut butter sandwich. Pass the bill in the House of Representatives, then in the Senate, and present the bill to the President. If he signs it, you've got a law. In actual practice, it's more like navigating a labyrinth.

One thing that made the legislation more difficult is the tradition of unlimited debate in the Senate. To pass the health care reform act in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had had only to schedule a vote. All she needed to win that vote was a bare majority. She got it. The Senate is different. Before Majority Leader Harry Reid could get a vote on the Senate version of the bill, he first had to get a vote to end debate. That procedure, called cloture, requires three fifths of the Senate or sixty votes. Reid's Democrats, along with two independents, add up to exactly sixty senators. With all forty Republicans objecting to the bill, that means that any one of Reid's coalition could stop health care reform dead in its tracks by refusing to vote for cloture.

Blocking a bill this way is known as a filibuster, a word that originally meant "pirate." Majority parties in the Senate are understandably frustrated when this happens, and frequently resolve to end the piracy once and for all by abolishing the filibuster. There are two arguments for doing so, but both of them are weak and they contradict one another.

The filibuster is said to be undemocratic because it allows a minority to frustrate the will of the majority. But democracy doesn't mean that the majority can do whatever it wants. The Constitution is full of limits on the power of majorities. No congress can establish a national church or abridge freedom of speech, no matter how many senators or representatives vote to do so. If Congress should try such a thing, the Supreme Court, nine old people in silly outfits, can stop it. The filibuster is one more limitation on majority rule.

A more practical argument against the filibuster is that it makes legislation, and especially radical reform legislation, much more difficult. This is true, and it's a good thing. Consider what almost happened in the Senate in recent days. When Reid couldn't get sixty votes for a new, government run health insurance corporation, he proposed extending Medicare to cover millions more Americans. Never mind that Medicare in about to go belly up financially and that Congress is doing nothing about that. Never mind that the bill Reid is pushing through would cut hundreds of billions from the already insolvent program. Never mind that the nation is already locked into a multi-trillion dollar spiral of debt. Do we really want to make it easier for these people to pass legislation?

In fact, the filibuster makes the U.S. Congress more democratic than it would otherwise be. By making it easier for small groups of senators to block legislation, it requires the Senate to bring a wider range of diverse interest groups on board before it can pass something.

That, of course, is what frustrates the Democrats. They enjoy a majority in both houses of Congress, but the core of their party is solidly liberal whereas the American people are largely centrist or conservative in sentiment. Almost sixty percent of Americans oppose the health care reform bills, and we are a lot more worried about the deficit than about health care. Democrats complain that the filibuster is undemocratic, but it is precisely democracy that stands in their way.

Reid Gets to 60

Barring some last minute surprise, the Democrats will pass health care reform legislation. I didn't think they would be able to do it. It looks like I was wrong. Whatever else one may think about the process and the policy, it represents a remarkable act of courage.

What explains this sudden, unlooked for courage? Very simply, the Democrats were cornered animals on this issue. One thing they told themselves was that they would suffer more by not passing a bill than by passing one that aroused great opposition. I think that is very questionable, and I don't think the Democrats really believe it. They are well aware that public opinion has shifted against them, so they reckoned that this might be their one chance to shift health care policy to the left. If they are damned either way, might as well go for broke.

But consider the odds in this gamble. There is a reason that none of the details of reform were discussed much during the recent presidential election. If Barack Obama had told people what the Democrats would do about health care, with the White House and a veto proof majority in Congress, John McCain would now be living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Likewise the entire Senate drama has been one of hiding the true nature of the Senate bill. We are told that it will cost under a trillion over ten years, that it will reduce the deficit. The President continues to say that it is something we must do to control health care costs. In fact, the ten year cost will be closer to two trillion, once the benefits kick in. Unless the Democrats have really become new creatures, most of the offsets and spending cuts in the bill will fail to materialize, as the CBO has warned. It will increase the deficit by substantial amounts. The nation will end up spending more rather than less on health care.

The public opposes the reform by upwards to sixty percent. Maybe most of us will be presently surprised when large amounts of decision making powers shift from patients and doctors and the private sector generally to the Department of Health and Human Services. Of course, Reid's sleight of hand ensures that the new revenues kick in immediately whereas the benefits and therefore the costs begin in earnest only three years later. That is what it took to make the first ten years look affordable.

But I think that it is the expanding costs and size of government, rather than specific concerns about health care policies, that are behind the public opposition to reform. A year from now, the deficit and public debt aren't going to look any better. To the contrary, it will be clear that the Administration has no plan or prospects for getting the debt under control.

Dan Balz, writing in the Washington Post, has some interesting facts about the popularity of Democrats in Congress.

No Congress is ever loved, but the assessments of this Congress are striking in their negativity. In the most recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, only 7 percent rated the performance of Congress above average, and 34 percent called it one of the worst.

But this one is better:

Thirty-eight percent said their member of Congress deserves to be reelected, and 49 percent said it is time to give a new person a chance. That is identical to the percentage who said to give a new person a chance a month before the 1994 GOP landslide and slightly above the number a month before the 2006 Democratic takeover.

Why won't that anti-Washington sentiment fall equally on Republicans and Democrats? Because it rarely does. Republicans are hardly secure or popular, but Democrats are in control. If the public is ready for change again in November, Democrats will feel the brunt of that anger.

The Democrats now have exclusive ownership of the health care reform legislation. If, next November, voters think of it along with massive deficits, that will be very bad for the party in power. If job growth is still lackluster…

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen

Altogether now:

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town
'Neath her tavern light
On this merry night
Let us clink and drink one down

Representatives of 193 concerned nations have been clinking and drinking in this friendly old girl of a town. They have also been pouring tons of carbon into the atmosphere getting there and being there. They still have to fly back home.

But just when it all appeared to be for naught, in flies the Nobel Peace Prize champion to seize a world climate deal from the frigid jaws of inaction. I say frigid, because a ton of snow was dumped on all those tavern lights by a Mother Earth who was apparently not amused.

The President explains what wonderful thing was achieved there. From the New York Times:

"For the first time in history," Mr. Obama said, "all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change."

Note the article "to," repeated three times in this short quote. Each instance represents one remove from any real action.

The three-page accord that Mr. Obama negotiated with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa and then presented to the conference did not meet even the modest expectations that leaders set for this meeting, notably by failing to set a 2010 goal for reaching a binding international treaty to seal the provisions of the accord.

Nor does the plan firmly commit the industrialized nations or the developing nations to firm targets for midterm or long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The accord is nonetheless significant in that it codifies the commitments of individual nations to act on their own to tackle global warming.

Not only did COP15 fail to produce a treaty, it failed to produce an agreement to get a treaty.

Dropped from earlier drafts was language calling for a binding accord "as soon as possible," and no later than at the next meeting of the parties, in Mexico City next November.

This is theater of the absurd. Nothing whatsoever was achieved at Copenhagen, unless you count "codifying" an historic coming together to take responsibility to take action to confront global warming, absent any actual taking responsibility, or action, or confrontation, as an achievement.

Precisely if you take global warming seriously, you have to be contemptuous of this. If not, perhaps you can afford to be amused. What is certain is that the international community is completely divorced from reality. Global climate change is a serious issue and needs to be seriously addressed, regardless of what you think about the global warming orthodoxy. It cannot be addressed by setting utterly unrealistic goals and then declaring that pious statements, washed clean of any substance, constitute progress towards those goals.

Democratic Crack Up

The MSM has been hoping for a splintering of the Republican Party. They may yet get one. But just right now it is the Democratic Party that appears to be fracturing. Part of this may well be strategic. Howard Dean is screaming again, this time for Democrats to kill the Senate health care bill. I have a hard time imagining that Dean really wants to kill this bill. His opposition, along with that of the left wing blogosphere in general, looks rather tailored to make the Senate bill look moderate. If both the left and the right hate it, that's moderation, no?

But just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Likewise, just because the leftist core of the Democratic Party may be serving the middle by its opposition, that doesn't mean that the opposition isn't genuine or that it can be easily controlled.

The worse news for the Obama Administration this week concerns the President's Afghanistan policy. A sensible party might have given the Administration a pass on this one, at least until healthcare was safely in the bag, and flowers were blooming again in Copenhagen. But that isn't what is happening. From McClatchy:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that it's up to President Barack Obama to persuade reluctant Democrats to fund his Afghanistan troop buildup — his most important foreign policy initiative — because she has no plans to do so herself.

Pelosi's reluctance to lobby for an Afghan surge appropriation reflects the deep divisions within the Democratic Party over Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

This means that Congressional Democrats defect from Administration policy on Afghanistan. That might be good for the Administration in the long run. Obama will be forced to build a coalition on the minority party, as President Clinton did on NAFTA. That might well make Obama more popular, but it dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the Democratic majority in Congress. The President will have to make deals with the GOP, and he will make the Al Frankens in Congress very angry.

Welcome to the majors, Mr. Obama.

Herseth-Sandlin Below 50%

A Public Policy Polling survey of South Dakota was released today, and it contains some disturbing news for Congresswoman Herseth-Sandlin.

When it comes to her reelection next year it appears Herseth Sandlin will have a competitive challenge from Secretary of State Chris Nelson. She leads him at this point by a 46-39 margin, but that's a close margin given that Nelson is an unknown to 59% of voters in the state. Among voters who do know Nelson 29% have a favorable opinion of him to 12% unfavorable and he leads Herseth Sandlin 49-43. So this race could tighten up as he becomes better known. Herseth Sandlin leads Nelson 76-11 with Democrats and 47-29 with independents and also holds him to a 62-24 advantage with Republicans. In a strongly GOP tilted state she needs every one of those independent and Republican votes that she can get.

The key finding there is that H-S leads Nelson 46-39%. That spread is worse for the incumbent than it looks. As PPP points out, very few South Dakotans know who Chris Nelson is; yet he only trails H-S by seven points. An incumbent member of the House should be ahead of even a well-known challenger by double digits to feel safe.

Moreover, H-S is polling below 50% at this point, meaning she will have to gain support to secure reelection. The usual pattern in House races is for incumbents to start out ahead and then for the race to tighten a bit in the challenger's favor. That's because the incumbent starts out about as well known as she is going to get. Barring some bad campaigning by the challenger, the incumbent has no untapped source of support.

Likewise, her approval numbers are weak.

Herseth Sandlin sports approval numbers that are well ahead of the curve in a year when the popularity of politicians has hit unusual lows. 49% of South Dakota voters approve of the job she's doing to 38% disapproving.

An approval rating of 49% looks pretty weak for an incumbent. None of this means that Herseth-Sandlin is doomed, but it does mean that she has her work cut out for her.

Why is Herseth-Sandlin weak? One reason may be that her vote against health care reform has weakened her support among activist Democrats. See this post by Doug Wiken from the Keloland blog site, and this one by Cory Heidelberger, and this one, and this one also by Cory. Of course, Cory and his fellow Democratic enthusiasts aren't really going to run a challenge against H-S, let alone vote Republican next November. But this sentiment may translate in weaker than usual support during the campaign and decreased turnout in the general election. As PPP points out, that could spell doom for H-S.

Herseth Sandlin leads Nelson 76-11 with Democrats and 47-29 with independents and also holds him to a 62-24 advantage with Republicans. In a strongly GOP tilted state she needs every one of those independent and Republican votes that she can get.

But the main drag on our lone Congresswoman is the weakness of the Democrats in general and the President in particular among South Dakotans.

52% of voters in the state disapprove of Barack Obama's job performance with just 41% approving. That makes him downright popular compared to Congressional Democrats who get a 60% disapproval rating with only 28% of South Dakotans giving them high marks. And when it comes to the Democratic health care bill that passed the House last month, which Herseth Sandlin prudently voted against, only 25% of voters are supportive with 59% opposed.

This is the Blue Dog dilemma. Her vote against the health care bill might save her if her support improves among Republicans and independents, as you would expect in a normal year. But if her support among those groups is weak, the only thing it does is dampen the spirits of her base.

This poll may have a significant effect on the election outcome. It will surely make it easier for Chris Nelson to raise money in state and out of it. A lot may change over the next year, but to Republicans the lone South Dakota house seat is now one that looks ripe for the pickin'.

Night @ the Museum 2

I really liked Night at the Museum. I saw it more or less by accident (I missed the movie I wanted to see), but I was delighted. It was as good as a movie can be without being in the least bit serious because it sold its characters and told its story by means of very a compelling texture and engaging action.

I was hoping that NATM2 would be at the very least the same movie twice. In fact it may represent the most enormous waste of talent in any film I have ever witnessed. It is a textbook case of cinematic dysfunction.

Ben Stiller is a fine comic actor. He is about as good as anyone is being the straight man in a ridiculous situation. Amy Adams, Owen Wilson, Robin Williams, and Steve Coogan, that's a lot of acting talent to pour down the drain. Likewise, the writing was excellent, in bits and pieces. There's a scene where Stiller's Larry Daley engages in a verbal and then physical tussle with a Smithsonian guard that is both brilliant and appalling out of place. It goes on too long for any good that it was doing in the movie.

Finally, the Computer Graphics are flawless. Everything, the giant octopus, the hawk-headed soldiers of doom, the cherubs singing soupy disco numbers, all of it was visually compelling. If you want to know what it would look like should a two inch high Roman solider to ride a squirrel into battle against full sized people, well, this is your chance.

The trouble is, none of this added up to a story. It's as if the director summoned a lot of high priced writing talent (say about a seventy different writers) and asked them for ideas. Then he tried to use every single idea, regardless of how incongruous it might be, and forgot about the plot.

Worse still, a lot of the routines were offensive. The walking Lincoln from the Lincoln memorial was stupid. There's a scene where Stiller is slapped repeatedly by two capuchin monkeys and it goes on forever. Adam's Amelia Earhart was great for about two minutes. But for the rest of the movie she kept doing exactly the same spunky women routine until you wanted her to crash into the ocean. This movie was dreadful.

Why are Hollywood sequels so frequently bad? It looks like an easy job: do the same movie over again, or apply the same formula to a new situation. Why can't Hollywood learn to exploit its own success? There's a mult-million dollar prize for the answer.

Crack in the World 2

Intrepid reader Dan takes me to task for my last post, and we engaged in a slightly overheated exchange. No word yet on consequent earth tremors. I was a bit harsh in my reply, so Dan, I apologize.

I posted on a New York Times story about AltaRock, a company experimenting in Northern California on the use geothermal energy as a possible source of electricity. Apparently the process can cause earthquakes, and the Times story indicated that AltaRock had ceased drilling for that reason. Dan says this:

I hate to burst your bubble with reason, but the suspension of operations at The Geysers was not due to earthquakes, but rather do to drilling problems inherent in felsite, a very brittle rock which is very difficult to drill. The earthquake hysteria you quote originated from a NY Times article referencing a barely perceptible quake (yes, 3.4 is barely perceptible) that occured due to a similar, albiet poorly managed, geothermal research project on the other side of the globe. The Geysers project never reached the target depth to even begin the experiment. And yes, The Geysers, as well as much of California, experiences earthquakes every single day. Most residents understand that process, even children. A very few create hysteria blaming earthquakes on everything from weather to homosexuality - the adults do that, not the children.

Dan is apparently saying that the experiments in the area north of San Francisco called "the Geysers" did not in fact cause earthquakes. Unfortunately he provides no links or references so I cannot check his information.

Well, I went back and reviewed the Scientific American article I linked to in the original post. The article included an interview with U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Team seismologist David Oppenheimer. He sounds like the kind of person who would know about this. The technology used in the Geysers involves pumping water into deep, hot rock in order to fracture it and create steam. Here is what he says about the earthquakes:

What they need to do, from an engineering perspective, is keep the size of the fractures small. So they will control the [water] flow rates and pressures to make sure it doesn't become a runaway earthquake.

We've been monitoring [The Geysers] since 1975. All the earthquakes we see there are [human] induced. When they move production into a new area, earthquakes start there, and when they stop production, the earthquakes stop.

They've been inducing earthquakes since the 1960s, and the largest has been less than a [magnitude] 4.5. Earthquakes are occurring in many, many fractures. So that's very different than if you go south to the Bay Area with the San Andreas Fault. For earthquakes larger than 6.0 to happen, you need a big fault. Therefore, it's unlikely they'll intersect a large fault and trigger a larger earthquake.

The threshold goal for the earthquakes is 2.0 or lower. They don't want a repeat of Basel, Switzerland.

I don't know what Dan's expertise is, but if Oppenheimer is right then the geothermal experiments in the Geysers has been inducing earthquakes for quite some time. That bit about "when they stop production, the earthquakes stop," is reason, Dan. And Oppenheimer clearly indicates that it is possible for the process to trigger a "runaway earthquake" if it goes wrong. That sounds bad to me.

My point, however, was not that the experiments ought to be halted, let alone that we should not invest in geothermal energy. In fact, I wrote that "I am all for experimenting with such energy sources." I include in that wind power, solar power, and biofuels.

I posted about the earthquake thing because it is a rocking good story, and because it indicates something important to the current debate on green energy. However successful the experiments at the Geysers may be, they aren't close to the point that they can provide more than a very marginal contribution to our energy needs. The same is true of wind power, solar power, and biofuels. I have no love of big oil; I would be happy to see viable alternative sources of energy come online; but I also like to see things the way they are.

Green Energy Destroys Planet Earth!

Okay, so my sensational title involves a bit of exaggeration. Maybe that will draw them in. This story does read like a proposal for a made-for-SyFy Channel disaster movie.

AltaRock Energy has been trying to harness geothermal energy to generate electricity. The company has been drilling at a site called The Geysers, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. These experimental wells have been financed by the Department of Energy to the tune of $36 million and by matching amounts of venture capital. Google has chipped in six million. The hope is that geothermal energy can be an alternative to fossil fuels. But the company announced Friday that it is suspending operations at the site.

Apparently the process causes earthquakes.

Here's how it works, according to Scientific American: they drill into a layer of very hot rock called felsite and pump a lot of water at high pressure in order to fracture the rock. New holes are then drilled along the initial fracture. The resulting steam would then be used to spin turbines.

Unfortunately, fracturing rocks way down deep triggers earthquakes all the way up here. When these man-made fractures intersect an existing fault, it causes the fault to move. Small earthquakes were observed wherever in The Geysers they drilled, and the earthquakes stopped at that location when they stopped drilling.

How serious is this? It isn't clear, but the problem has been observed elsewhere. Again from Scientific American:

Just a few years ago, a now-infamous geothermal project in Basel, Switzerland, which drilled three miles (4.8 kilometers) into Earth's crust, set off a magnitude 3.4 earthquake, rocking the town and shutting the operation down entirely, The New York Times recalled recently.

Drilling has even been fingered as the cause of a massive 2006 mud volcano in Java, which displaced more than 30,000 people after a gas exploration project went awry. "We are more certain than ever that the Lusi mud volcano is an unnatural disaster," Richard Davies of the Center for Research into Earth Energy Systems at Durham University in England said in a statement after investigating the incident.

There is a lot to chew on here. First consider the "made for SyFy" angle. If a man-made fracture in deep rock were to intersect a major fault, it could trigger a major earthquake. Presumably the folks doing the drilling know where the major faults are and can avoid this possibility. Do they? I don't know. But if I were in charge of research and development for al Qaeda, I'd be pouring money into research on this question. If I were the SyFy people, I would be casting the movie as we speak.

Second, why did AltaRock stop its exploration of The Geysers? I am guessing that they feared a multi-million dollar lawsuit the first time that one of their little quakes jarred something valuable off of some Californian's curio shelf. Of course Congress could provide AltaRock with some protection against tort lawyers. Good luck with that.

Third, geothermal energy, like most "sustainable, green energy sources," is a pretty idea but is nowhere near the point that it can pay returns. I am all for experimenting with such energy sources. It seems ridiculous that we have all the heat energy we will ever need just a few miles under our smart wool socks, but can't get at it. But just right now geothermal energy is like wind power and biofuels: it can only consume wealth, not provide it. For that reason, it cannot create real jobs; it eliminates real jobs. And it cannot produce more energy that is required to make it work.

Finally, green energy sources aren't yet green at all. Wind towers kill birds and bats. Biofuels encourage the plowing of virgin prairie soil. Geothermal energy drilling apparently means breaking the foundations of our earth into little bitty pieces. I hope all these problems can be solved, but massive investment into them right now isn't doing the earth any favors.

Politics Daily Nominates John Thune!

Matt Lewis contributes to the buzz about a possible Thune run for the Presidency.

He's not widely known nationally, which is both an obvious obstacle and perhaps a blessing in disguise: The national media has not turned him into a caricature. That may change in the future. Thune is beginning to generate buzz as a potential 2012 presidential candidate. For example, New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote a glowing puff piece on him, going so far as to say of Thune, "He is a gracious and ecumenical legislator, not a combative one. When you ask him to mention authors he likes, he mentions C.S. Lewis and Jeff Shaara, not political polemicists. The first person who told me I had to write a column about Thune was a liberal Democratic senator who really likes the guy."

To be sure, grace and wit -- not to mention legislative experience and intelligence -- will be an important commodity for any Republican seeking to deny President Obama a second term. The rub against Thune has always been that he's too boring to be elected president. Denizens of the upper Midwest are rarely known for their fiery emotions or natural charisma, so it's not surprising that Thune has a reputation for being a bit dry.

On a conference call this Tuesday, however, I found Thune to be passionate -- and quotable. For example, he dismissed the notion that Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine might vote for health care reform, bluntly telling me he expects Republicans "will be united in opposition" to the Senate health care bill. "This will be and is a Democrat bill," he predicted. Thune then went on to compare the Obama administration's regulatory and climate change policies to "a war on the West."

John Thune & The Senate Health Care Bill

There is a crisis, and it appears to be located in the U.S. Senate. My esteemed Keloland colleague and colleague Emeritus, David Newquist, has this:

John Thune has become the voice of the GOP–Groundless Obstinence and Petulance–according to the Huffington Post. He says his party will unanimously oppose any health care reform, no matter what is proposed.

For someone who complains a lot when he thinks that others have distorted his words, he seems very careless in describing what Senator Thune said or what the Huffington Post said he said. The Huffington Post article he links to makes it clear in the title that Thune was only speaking about "the Newest Heath Care Compromise," and hardly ruling out GOP support for any bill.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) told the Huffington Post that he did not think the dropping of a public option for insurance coverage from the bill would be enough for Democrats to win even the support of moderate Republican Senators Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, both of Maine.

"I just think that our side believes that it is a really bad idea to take a program that is already sinking and put more people into it."

Here is how the Washington Post describes the "newest" idea that Reid is floating:

The 11th-hour "compromise" on health-care reform and the public option supposedly includes an expansion of Medicare to let people ages 55 to 64 buy into the program.

This deal, which the WaPo dates back to the Clinton Administration, seems designed to get something like a "public option" into the bill without calling it a public option. Republican opposition may be obstinate and petulant, or maybe not; however, it is hardly groundless. The WaPo points out that it is difficult to tell what effect this "buy in" would have on the reform scheme.

Presumably, the expanded Medicare program would pay Medicare rates to providers, raising the question of the spillover effects on a health-care system already stressed by a dramatic expansion of Medicaid. Will providers cut costs -- or will they shift them to private insurers, driving up premiums? Will they stop taking Medicare patients or go to Congress demanding higher rates? Once 55-year-olds are in, they are not likely to be kicked out, and the pressure will be on to expand the program to make more people eligible. The irony of this late-breaking Medicare proposal is that it could be a bigger step toward a single-payer system than the milquetoast public option plans rejected by Senate moderates as too disruptive of the private market.

As the perhaps obstinate and petulant, but hardly Republican WaPo presents it, there is no way to predict what unintended consequences may follow.

But Republican opposition is based on broader considerations. Expanding Medicare would be a step towards a single payer plan. But it was also mean expanding a program that is on schedule to go broke in only a few years. It also looks like more sleight of hand on the Democrat's part. They are already counting on dramatic cuts in Medicare to make other parts of the bill look more affordable. As the WaPo points out, Medicare reimbursement rates are already too low to sustain hospital and doctor care, which results in a shift of costs to private insurance. The medical establishment is vehemently criticizing the idea.

This looks like a big mess. Rumors that a deal has been reached appear to be greatly exaggerated. I am not even certain that there is a coherent idea here. Meanwhile the petulant and obstinate public continues to oppose the bill by wide margins. Quinnipiac and Rasmussen put the 52% opposed/38% in favor, and 51/41 respectively. Worse news for reform is the CNN poll, which has 61% opposed and only 36% in favor. That's the first time to my knowledge that opposition has risen above 60%. If it's on track, the CNN poll is disastrous news for Harry Reid.

In opposing the Senate reform bill, Senator Thune is not only exercising common sense. He is standing on behalf of the majority of the American people.

Obama More Popular than Bush

Barely. This might be a watershed on the historical landscape of the Obama presidency. Or not. Either way it's striking. From the Politico:

If White House officials were peeved at Gallup Poll for its reporting on President Barack Obama's recent slide to 47 percent approval — and they were — imagine the reaction at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to the survey released Wednesday by Public Policy Polling, which also reported the president's approval rating at 47 percent, but added this analysis:

"Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50 percent of voters now say they prefer having him as president to George W. Bush, with 44 percent saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term, that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

What one cannot know now is how much of this is due simply to the economy, and how much is due to the President's management style. Either might change. Or not.

Obama Alienates Norwegians

Remember when Obama was going to restore our relations with the rest of the world? Well, his Nobel Prize continues to do him and the United States a world of good. Consider this from the Guardian:

Barack Obama's trip to Oslo to pick up his Nobel peace award is in danger of being overshadowed by a row over the cancellation of a series of events normally attended by the prizewinner.

Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.

The White House has cancelled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children's event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre.

He has also turned down a lunch invitation from the King of Norway.

Can you imagine what the New York Times would be saying if this were Bush? Of course the Times isn't mentioning it. Neither is the WaPo or any other paper I have noticed. In fact, the only other mention of it I have found is in the Huffington Post.

I still think the President was wrong to accept the prize. But having accepted it and accepting the invitation to go to Oslo to pick it up, surely he could find time to have lunch with the His Majesty or whatever the Norwegians call their monarch. The President is going to make his great speech and run. Of course, Norway is a long time ally of the United States. Perhaps this is what they should expect.

Blogging & Freedom

The advent of blogging is one of the most significant events in the history of modern journalism. This is not because blogging can replace traditional journalism. Many critics of blogging (including our esteemed Keloland colleague David Newquist) point out that bloggers are heavily dependent on the main stream media for their original source material. This is quite true.

It is also true that the MSM continues to enjoy the power of validation. As long as a story remains confined to the blogosphere, it will be noticed only by the blogosphere. When a story jumps from the blogs to the MSM, then everyone who watches the news will see it. That kind of jump is what most bloggers hope for when they push a story. Some nationally important blogs, like Powerline, became important by pushing a single story that the MSM was later forced to cover.

The rise of blogging is not important because it can replace the traditional media. It is important because, unlike traditional media outlets, it is radically democratic. Anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can publish his or her writing in a media that anyone else in the world can get access to. Precisely because it is so easy, it is difficult for any government or any other establishment to get control of it.

That has been demonstrated by the recent report of the Committee to Protect Journalists. From Joel Simon at Slate:

From Tibet to Tehran, more and more front-line reporting is being carried out by freelancers and published online. But the revolution in newsgathering—brought about by new technology and the downsizing of traditional media outlets—has a down side. For the first time, half of all journalists jailed around the world worked online as bloggers, reporters, or Web editors. Most of them are freelancers with little or no institutional support.

These are the key findings of a report released Dec. 8 by the Committee To Protect Journalists. The annual census of imprisoned journalists was conducted on Dec. 1 and includes every journalist who was in jail on that day. All told, there are 136 journalists on the list, an increase of 11 from the previous year. Sixty-eight of them worked online, the vast majority of them freelancers.

So far as opposition journalism is concerned, imprisonment is the sincerest form of flattery. China and Iran have gone out of their way to flatter bloggers.

A closer look at the numbers in China reveals just how dramatically the Internet has transformed both newsgathering and the dissemination of critical commentary in repressive societies.

A decade ago, when China first topped the list, most of those jailed were print reporters for mainstream media outlets who had gone too far in their criticism of government officials. The Chinese media are much more open today, but there are still clear limits, and journalists who displease the authorities face consequences. The difference is that they are more likely to be fired than thrown in jail.

But online journalists can't be fired, blacklisted, or, in most cases, bought off precisely because most work independently. They don't have employers who can be pressured. Chinese authorities have few options when it comes to reining in online critics—censor them, intimidate them, or throw them in jail. This explains why 18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China worked online.

That, gentle readers, is what freedom looks like. Bloggers and journalists in these United States don't have to worry about ending up in the slammer. But the current Administration doesn't like dissenting media anymore than Beijing or Tehran. See my last post for an example.

That the Obama Administration failed miserably in its ham-handed attempt to marginalize Fox News is a testament to the professionalism of Fox's fellow news organizations and to such genuine journalists as Mara Liasson.

But whatever pressure the Administration can bring to bear on a cable news network, or whatever power the major news networks have over a story, they can't do a damn thing about Powerline, let alone South Dakota Politics or the Northern Valley Beacon. That is a significant advance in the cause of freedom of thought.

NPR on Front Lines in War Against Fox News

While the Obama Administration was boycotting Fox News, National Public Radio was apparently engaged in its own campaign against Fox. From the Politico:

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network's top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network's political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.

According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR's executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network's supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox's programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.

At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she'd seen no significant change in Fox's programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.

Of course, NPR denies that there is any "relationship" between the White House campaign against Fox, and "any discussions" NPR has been having about Fox. Of course not. I am sure it's a mere coincidence that these things were going on at the same time. And if not, I am sure the most transparent Administration in history will quickly and honestly let us know what really went on.

Obama’s Afghan Indecision

Conservative critics of the President's Afghanistan speech have generally applauded his decision to deploy more troops while writing scathingly about his timeline for withdrawing American troops. One argument is that by announcing an 18 month limit for the surge, he will encourage our enemies to lie low for that time and come out when we are gone. I hope that that is true. It will give us a year and a half to accomplish our objectives with little resistance.

The more serious argument is that the time limit indicates a lack of commitment on the President's part. Ralph Peters put it best:

It's as if, during WWII, we'd told the Japanese and Germans that we really meant business, but intended to quit by 1944.

The depth of the President's commitment is the real question. The Washington Post has a fine piece on the process from which the President's policy emerged. From this piece, by Anne E. Kornblut, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung, we learn just how the President took all those months to reach a conclusion. The WaPo piece tries to make the President look heroic, but does not quite succeed.

Last summer it looked like the President was at odds with his generals. General McChrystal was saying in public that a big increase in troops was necessary, which was apparently not what the President had in mind. The press reported this as a case of generals getting too big for their britches and forgetting who was in charge. The WaPo piece explains what really happened.

In June, [General] McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: "Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population."

"Is that really what you think your mission is?" one of those in the Situation Room asked.

On the face of it, it was impossible -- the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a significant part of the population. "We don't need to do that," Gates said, according to a participant. "That's an open-ended, forever commitment."

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, and it was enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan -- the execution orders for the March strategy, written by [Obama's own] NSC staff.

In short, the Obama Administration didn't know what its own Afghanistan strategy was. General McCrystal did know. He was only doing and saying what the President had instructed him to do and say, even if the President had no idea what that was.

The WaPo story explains in great detail how the present policy was developed. But it contains another tidbit that is rather worrisome. Here is how the final "decision" was made:

Just after twilight on Nov. 29, Obama gathered Biden, Gates, Petraeus, Jones, Emanuel, Cartwright and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Oval Office. He had called Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton earlier.

He had made his decision.

Thirty thousand additional U.S. troops would arrive in Afghanistan by summer, and NATO would be asked to send at least 5,000 forces. …

Obama then went around the room asking one question: Do you support the strategy?

"If they didn't support the decision, he was going to issue another decision" until there was unanimity, a senior administration official said. "But it was his assessment that everyone could and should get behind it." Each of them did.

Now look at those words carefully. He had made his decision. Except that he hadn't. If "they" didn't agree, he was going to make another decision. He got unanimous agreement. Did it have to be unanimous? What if Secretary Clinton had expressed reservations on the phone?

The President is supposed to make such decisions. That is his job. President Obama prefers to outsource his most important decisions to other people. This is a bad sign. Suppose the President confronts a real national security crisis, one in which his advisers are divided. What will the Hyde Park Hamlet do?

For now, the commander of insurgent forces in Afghanistan, if there is one, need only worry about which of the President's decision makers he has to turn when the moment of truth comes.

Political Science

In 2000 a book was published, briefly, accusing one of the most famous anthropologists of a number of grievous sins. The book was Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney. It focused on the activities of Geneticist James V. Neel and Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon in their dealings with the Yanomami, an indigenous people in South America.  You will note that it was a "New York Times Notable Book," and a National Book Award Finalist.  Maybe that should have tipped off the wary. 

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Among other things, Mr. Tierney asserted that Mr. Neel had worsened a measles epidemic in 1968; that the two scholars had failed to obtain full informed consent when collecting blood samples from the community; that Mr. Chagnon had tacitly encouraged violent conflicts among the Yanomami; and that Mr. Chagnon had collaborated with an unscrupulous gold miner in an effort to create a research reserve in Venezuela.

Within a year of the book's publication, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, and committees at Michigan and Santa Barbara issued statements that generally exonerated Mr. Chagnon and Mr. Neel.

As I recall, the book was withdrawn by the publisher. At this year's meeting of the American Anthropological Association, passions still smoldering after nine years have kindled new fire.

During a panel session on Wednesday evening, a Northwestern University scholar presented new evidence of distortions in the book, and she charged that the anthropological association had badly mishandled the entire affair.

In a spirited, at times blistering critique, Alice Domurat Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, questioned why any academic would want to be a part of the association, considering how, in her estimation, it had unfairly harmed the reputations of two scholars. "I can't imagine how any scholar feels safe at the hands of the Triple A," she said.

How bad was Darkness in El Dorado?

One of Ms. Dreger's findings concerns a 1995 incident that is recounted at the beginning of Mr. Tierney's book. That year Mr. Chagnon intended to travel to the northern Brazilian state of Roraima, and he allegedly planned to collect blood samples without proper permission from the Brazilian government. According to Mr. Tierney, that plan was stifled after indigenous activists circulated a "dossier" of material about various controversies that had dogged Mr. Chagnon.

In Mr. Tierney's account, that dossier was written by Leda Martins, a Brazilian-born scholar who was then a graduate student in anthropology at Cornell University. (She now teaches at Pitzer College.) But Ms. Dreger says that Ms. Martins admitted to her in an interview that the actual author was Mr. Tierney himself, and that Ms. Martins merely translated it.

Tierney's book was not only riddled with inaccuracies, it was an intentional act of fraud. The scandal is that the American Anthropological Association not only embraced the book at its publication, but continued to defend Tierney's accusations long after they were discredited.

Why was such a dreadful piece of writing published at all, and why did the "Triple A" champion it? Anthropologists are generally left-leaning in their politics and sentiments, and they want to believe that "indigenous," isolated peoples are better than modern people and especially better than modern people in Europe and America. Chagnon's work with the Yanomami shattered that charming myth. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be much more violent than modern societies, and are every bit as given to social pathologies. The discipline of anthropology has never forgiven Chagnon for delivering this message.

Scientists are people, and people are subject to political passions. This sometimes results in the corruption of science. That is a good thing to remember when considering the current debate over global warming. At stake in the Tierney scandal was the reputation of two honest scholars. At stake in the latter controversy is world economic development.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT 

I once had the pleasure of drinking with Napoleon Chagnon in a Chicago hotel lounge.  That may bias my view of this matter. 

Inconstant as the Weather

If you don't like the weather in South Dakota, just wait a bit; it will change. Apparently much the same is true about our President. Originally the President had planned to attend the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change. Then the Administration said he would not be attending. Then he announced that he would show up, on December 9^th. Now we learn that plans have been changed. President Obama will indeed grace the Danes with his presence, but on December 18^th. One wonders how many times he met, for how long, with how may advisers, before his Copenhagen attendance policy was finalized. If it is indeed finalized. With thirteen days to go, I figure he can change his mind about three more times.

The Hyde Park Hamlet is, as another Shakespearian character put it, inconstant as the moon. He is not entirely to blame, however, for his difficulties when it comes to climate change policy. A policy consists of a purpose and a means to achieve that purpose. The international community is not very good at making collective policy. No one but Iran wants Iran to get nuclear weapons, but getting Russia and China to agree on a common policy to prevent that looks hopeless.

On climate change, all the major nations seem to agree that global warming is a problem and that we should all do something about it. But no one is willing to do anything that would make a difference. For that reason, the Copenhagen Conference will produce no treaty, regardless of whether or on what day the President shows up.

I have been writing and blogging about global warming for several years. My original position was this:

1. The Earth has been warming for some time.

2. It is very likely that human activity is contributing to that warming.

3. It is very difficult to tell what consequences will follow from continued warming, for human beings or for the environment generally.

4. Economic development in China and India will overwhelm any reductions in greenhouse gases that the developed world could possibly achieve.

5. The developed world is not in fact going to voluntarily achieve any significant reduction in greenhouse emissions, because that would mean hobbling their own economies.

6. The only reasonable policy is to accept that global warming is happening and plan for it.

Propositions 3-5 have stood up very well. As for propositions 1 and 2, I trusted the scientists and just right now that trust has been greatly compromised. Consider this news, from the National Post:

Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU's average temperature data doesn't jibe with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.

If this were ordinary science, it would be back to the drawing board. But it is politicized science, where retreat is now allowed. The global warming meme is as basket case. Anyone who cares about these things needs to go back to formula on the whole business. As for the President, neither attending nor non-attending will do any good.

Marching in and out of Afghanistan

Concentrating on its parts last night, I thought the President's speech was pretty good. I still like a lot of it, but a criticism is surfacing today that is hard to get around. Here is an example from Der Spiegel:

It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the "world's great religions." He promised that responsibility for the country's security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai -- a government which he said was "corrupt." The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But "America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars," he added.

And here is how Richard Just puts it, in the New Republic:

[A]s much as I agreed with Obama's essential argument, something bothered me about the speech. It had less to do with Afghanistan than with the larger principles involved. The speech may have been, as Mike pointed out, remarkably consistent with an earlier Obama address. But it was also weirdly inconsistent with itself.

In a speech dedicated to explaining why our national security depends on our ability to help provide safety and good governance for people half a world away, Obama nevertheless felt the need to take not one but two swipes at the concept of nation-building…

Having attacked nation-building and strained unconvincingly to cast his Afghanistan policy in opposition to it, Obama then reversed course and offered this paean to human rights at the end of the speech: "We must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the source, the moral source, of America's authority." In the course of a few paragraphs, Obama had gone from the rhetoric of quasi-isolationism to the rhetoric of democracy promotion.

That's all pretty devastating. Obama is marching boldly into and out of Afghanistan at the same time. It is hard to do that sort of thing with grace. I am not sure the President pulled it off.

Obama’s Latest on Afghanistan

Last night I went shopping for Christmas decorations and politics was the last thing on my mind. That changed at the checkout counter, when a voice behind me boomed out a questioning, "Hello?" It seemed almost indignant, so I spun around to make sure I wasn't blocking or offending the voice's owner inadvertently. But to my relief, he was simply shouting into his cell phone.

"OBAMA? YEAH, HE GAVE A SPEECH TONIGHT!" he thundered. "I LOVED IT. HE'S GOING TO DO EVERYTHING HE'S EVER SAID HE WOULD!"

Since my fellow shopper evidently thought the speech was important enough for everyone in the store to know about, I supposed I ought to at least read through it. I have to admit that I was impressed. Not enough to go shouting about it in public places and not enough to believe that it meant that Obama would be keeping every promise he had ever made, but impressed nonetheless.

What made, perhaps, the best impression on me was the president's response to those who have suggested that Afghanistan might become another Vietnam. He said the following:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.

And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now — and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaida from a distance — would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaida and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

I think this was an able and eloquent defense. I do, however, have a quibble with part of the president's speech. Towards the end, he declares:

It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security, and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan. As president, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means or our interests.

In my view, the president's goals for healthcare and climate change go beyond all of these.

The President makes Policy on Afghanistan

It is tempting to rake the President over the coals once again on the duration and many false starts of his decision making process. How many weeks did it take to decide that troop withdrawal would begin in July of 2011 as opposed to June or August? But beyond that, I will resist the temptation.

The Speech

I haven't had time yet to go over the speech in great detail, but it looks pretty good to me. It begins as it certainly should have with the central fact: the United States was attacked by forces operating in Afghanistan and intertwined with the Taliban government. I especially liked this part:

Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them - an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1. For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5 - the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all. And the United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks. America, our allies and the world were acting as one to destroy al Qaeda's terrorist network, and to protect our common security.

Republicans have pointed out that the bad faith of Congressional Democrats on the Afghan war. While Bush was President and Iraq was going poorly, the Democrats constantly referred to Afghanistan as the war we should be fighting and complained that our commanders in that theater were starved of troops because of the Iraq war. Once those two facts changed, the core of the Democratic Party in both houses suddenly opposes sending in more troops.

Obama rightly points out that, in the only expression of sentiment that really matters, Congressional support for military action in Afghanistan was nearly unanimous.

He also did a good job of reconciling his opposition to the Iraq war with a justified praise of our troops and their achievement in Iraq.

The Policy

The President's policy was no surprise.

I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

The President is going to increase troop strength in Afghanistan by 30,000 soldiers, bringing the total American commitment to about 100,000. This force will concentrate on securing vital areas in the center of the country, and aggressively targeting insurgents in the border areas. He also announced, rather vaguely, that we will begin withdrawing troops a year and a half from now.

The first thing I notice is the President's vindication of George W. Bush's surge policy, which he and his party opposed. The spectacular success of that policy made no impression at all on Congressional Democrats, but Obama is now Commander in Chief, and he cannot afford to so blithely ignore reality. Obama is engineering a virtually identical policy in Afghanistan.

This puts the President at odds with his party in Congress and with the activist base of his party at large. I don't think that Barack Obama is nearly so comfortable doing this as was Bill Clinton; and that, I think, is largely why it took him so long to reach a decision. This might be the first time in his life that he has intentionally departed from the party line.

His difficulty in doing so has real consequences for his policy. Why send in 30,000 troops rather than the 40,000 General McCrystal requested? I don't know which number is the right one, but I doubt that anything in his lengthy policy review process would justify the reduction. He needed to show that he was bending a little to the left of his generals.

Likewise, the schedule for withdrawal looks political rather than strategic. Can he really predict that 18 months is the right amount of time to accomplish all that he says must be accomplished? If so, that was some awesome strategic review he conducted. That bit is another salve for the Left. I doubt that it will be very soothing, for no one here can believe it. It doesn't commit him to much of anything either, unless you think that all our troops will pack and board planes on the second next Independence Day. All he has to do is "begin" withdrawing on that date.

The real risk in the speech is that our foe will see the sops to the Left as signs of weakness. Critics like Charles Krauthammer will seize on that, but I don't think it matters much. What will matter is the effectiveness of our troops on the ground. At least for now the President is acting Presidential. Who knows, but it might grow on him.

Swiss Breeze against Islam

The Swiss people have approved a ban on the construction of new minarets, the towers that are a characteristic feature of the architecture of Islamic mosques. From SwissInfo:

In a major upset the proposal by members of rightwing parties won 57.5 per cent of the vote, despite recommendations by the government and a majority in parliament that the initiative be thrown out.

The government says voters' approval of a ban on new minarets reflects fears among the Swiss population of Islamic fundamentalism.

Well, yeah.

However, [the government] considers a ban is not the right way to prevent extremist tendencies. In an apparent effort to downplay the impact of the result, cabinet ministers maintained religious freedom for Muslims was not at risk and said inter-religious dialogue would continue.

There are two issues here that cut at odds with one another. One is religious freedom. Modern liberal democracy is in large part a reaction to the religious wars that tore Europe apart and killed millions only a few centuries ago. The issue was largely resolved, so far as the Protestant schism was concerned, by a simple social contract. So long as each citizen respected the laws of the state, including the rights of other citizens, he or she could believe and practice his or her own faith. A ban on minarets looks to me like a violation of the contract. It strikes directly at what Americans call free exercise of religion.

The other issue is that the peoples of European nations have lost confidence in the willingness of their governments, let alone the EU, to protect their liberal democracies against the illiberal strains of militant Islam that have immigrated into Europe. An Aramaic priest in Belgium is prosecuted for "incitement to racist hatred" because he said this in a TV interview:

Every thoroughly Islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when they have become a minority.

Well, that's over the line. It should be illegal to say such a thing, unless you think that people have a right to express their opinions.

But Père Samuel is only one of a number of Christian priests to face such a prosecution. If any radical Muslim Imam has been hauled before a European court for saying similar things about the Jews, I have missed it.

The Volokh Conspiracy has the best thing I have seen on this, by David Kopel:

Back in 2003, after I visited Geneva, I wrote the following for my Rocky Mountain News media column: "Local investigative reporting appears weak. A Swiss television station recently exposed a secret deal between the Geneva police and the Iranian government: The Iranians would not commit terror in Switzerland, while the Geneva police would turn a blind eye to Iranian terror bases in Geneva. In the United States, such a revelation would set off a frenzy of newspapers advancing the story with further investigation about a gigantic local police scandal, but the Geneva papers did little with the story."

This is just one of many examples of the Swiss elite's feckless and amoral dealing with the Islamonazis of Tehran.

Europe's Muslims should have the right to build Mosques, just as Europe's priests and Imams should have the right to express their opinions no matter how politically incorrect they may be. But all Europe's people should have the right to equal and vigorous protection against threats to their lives and liberties. If you want to stem the tide of "Islamaphobia," a little backbone on the latter might be in order.