UK Met office pushes reset button on CRU data.

It’s going to take a while for them to cycle through the process, though. As in, more than a week. A lot more than a week.

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world.

Just in time for Copenhagen, which relied heavily on the climate change data that CRU provided, and can no longer even remotely back up.  Meanwhile, the President – who seems to have a real gift at walking into these controversies at the worst possible moment for him – seems determined to use the luster of his name to ensure results at the Copenhagen thing.  Personally, I think that it’d be good for the planet, the country, and his political party if the President just dropped the trip entirely.  Which he won’t, of course.

Via Q&O, who thinks that they should completely cancel Copenhagen; and Hot Air, who thinks that the British government should stop trying to keep the Met Office from pushing the reset button.  And if either actually happens, all three of us will be massively surprised.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Worse than you think, Ace.

When you’re a Democrat, not only can you use “I’m sleeping with her” as a stealth job prerequisite for an US Attorney’s position – HI, Senator Max Baucus (D) of Montana! – but when you’re a Democrat you can also publicly disrespect inconveniently conscientious female journalists (even if they’re African-American ones) when they insist on doing their jobs. Although I will admit that at least Bobby Gibbs didn’t use the word ‘uppity’ in public:

Yet.  They’ll be saving it for after the midterms, no doubt.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Rep Carol Shea-Porter (D, NH) can’t remember what she believes.

In this case, she apparently forgot completely that the antiwar movement was supposed to be all about fighting in Afghanistan, not that awful Iraq place. Why else would she be trying to abandon headlong the war that we’re fighting there now?

‘Because she was cynically lying about the need to win in Afghanistan all along?’ Interesting answer, but that would imply that Shea-Porter was smart enough to pull that off.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Waterboarding, torture, and the law of unintended consequences.

I think that Allahpundit is over-analyzing the reasons why support for ‘torture’ is currently polling at 54/41 in favor (God help us all).  It looks fairly simple to me: the antiwar movement has spent the last five or six years attempting to equate waterboarding to torture.  They even more or less succeeded – but then they made a classic mistake: they assumed that stigmatization would inevitably follow.  Their thinking presumably was that if you can define X as Y, and Y is bad, then it becomes inconceivable that people could possibly support X.

Apparently, what happened instead was that they got the American people to define X as Y… and then the American people decided that perhaps this meant that Y wasn’t so bad after all.  This answer allows them to keep doing X, which was after all keeping us from losing any more national landmarks and innocent civilians to terrorist attacks.  Men not being angels, that’s enough for a justification right then and there.

Mind you, it’s not the waterboarding that’s the problem here: it’s that this strategy also makes it slightly easier for the CIA to feel better about handing over suspected terrorists caught abroad to say, France; who will hand them over to, say, Egypt; who will hand them over to people with car batteries.  Which is bad, by the way; but it’s now also easier.

Oops?

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, all of this was incredibly stupid of the antiwar movement – not to mention morally shortsighted of them.  Antiwar progressives, remember?

Crossposted to RedState.

What Ace said on the Palin birth certificate thing.

Nothing to add, nothing to subtract. Read the whole thing.

Moe Lane

PS: OK, one thing.  I understand that Democrats would rather talk about this particular issue than, say, the way that they’ve doubled the unemployment rate under their watch… and I don’t care about what they’d rather talk about.  And I don’t care if they don’t like my side’s conspiracy-flavor-of-the-month: at least my guys aren’t blaming it all on the Jews.

Oops, did I just type that out?  My bad.

Crossposted to RedState.

Secret Service: Actually, no elevated threat level against POTUS.

Via The Weekly Standard and HolyCoast.com comes excellent news:

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, testifying today about the state dinner security breach, refuted stories that President Obama has received more threats than previous presidents.

“The threats are not up,” Sullivan said, adding that they receive about the same amount of threats against Obama as they did for presidents Clinton and Bush.

Except of course for those people on the Left who can’t function without a belief in the utter villainy in their political enemies. In that case, the news that the current President is nothing special when it comes to being threatened is probably depressing the living life out of those folks. Check out the TPM link above for some examples, in fact: they’re busy telling themselves stories about how the President really is more at risk, really, uh-huh, no fooling…

Moe Lane

PS: Of course I’m being contemptuous towards people who need the Right to be devils. Why aren’t you just as contemptuous? It’s one of the more annoying fetishes out there.

Crossposted to RedState.

Whatever happened to Neel Kashkari?

Who is Neel Kashkari? The TARP bailout guy for Bush and Obama. Yeah, that guy. Although he was just the public face of that particular… event. Anyway, he’s got a WaPo profile:

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

He’s currently living in a shack in the Sierra Nevada mountains; the stress apparently snapped him like a rubber band. I don’t know whether to be sympathetic, or use him as a Horrible Example of Why You Need To Stay Out Of Dizzy City. Possibly both.

Moe Lane

Word on the Tweet was wrong: 10% unemployment.

Went down .2% instead of up .2%.  My sarcastic reaction to the folks responsible for this amazing long-term trend in the American economic situation* remains unchanged.

*The below is the good news.

There was little change in wholesale and retail trade employment in November.
Within retail trade, department stores added 8,000 jobs over the month.

The number of jobs in transportation and warehousing, financial activities,
and leisure and hospitality showed little change over the month.

Employment in professional and business services rose by 86,000 in November.
Temporary help services accounted for the majority of the increase, adding
52,000 jobs. Since July, temporary help services employment has risen by
117,000.

Health care employment continued to rise in November (21,000), with not-
able gains in home health care services (7,000) and hospitals (7,000). The
health care industry has added 613,000 jobs since the recession began in
December 2007.

Feeling good yet?