Except that I’ve been wrestling with video for two days now.
And some fiddle music’s never amiss. Even if I’m so bleary-eyed that I didn’t spell it “Charlie Daniels Band
Rep. McClintock interview with RedState.
As promised, here’s the Tom McClintock interview.
Link here, if that doesn’t work. As you can see, Rep. McClintock isn’t precisely shy about speaking his opinion, particularly when it comes to the religious aspect of global warming. I had originally written “essentially religious aspect” there, but when thinking about it McClintock was pretty unambiguous on that point, so neither should I be when describing him. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, the Congressman’s main theme was that it’s of primary importance that ordinary citizens get involved and stay involved in this issue.
Just a reminder: Democrats wanted Bush to fail in 2006.
Links via Hot Air. Here’s the first question, exactly as it was offered:
Contra Ed, though, the Sister Toldja post actually indicates that a bare majority of Democrats were pro-victory in 2007. Which is nothing to be proud of, considering that we were right and they were wrong, but expect the shouting to start over that. Besides, it’ll keep them from admitting to this:
21. Do you think most Democrats want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed and lead to a stable Iraq or do they want it to fail and for him to have to withdraw U.S. troops in defeat?
SCALE: 1. Most Democrats want Bush plan to succeed 2. Most Democrats want Bush
plan to fail 3. (Some want one thing, some another) 4. (Don’t know)
(Some one,
Success Failure some another) (DK)
16-17 Jan 07 32% 48 8 11
Democrats 42% 38 7 12
Republicans 21% 67 7 5
Independents 30% 42 11 17
…translation: even the Democrats were at best evenly divided over whether their party wanted Bush to succeed. The rest of the country was under no such illusions.
Crossposted at RedState.
Preliminary notes from the ICCC breakfast: Tom McClintock.
Congressman Tom McClintock (R, CA-04) started off his comments at the ICCC breakfast session with reminding us about RFK Jr’s comment that global warming skeptics are quite a number of things, up to and including traitors. Not wanting to die a traitor’s death, McClintock then claimed that he came up with global warming long before Al Gore… in the third grade, when he noticed the entire dinosaur / mammoth thing in the local museum. Alas, his grade school teacher never wrote him up for the Nobel Prize. [More…]
That was the general tone of Congressman McClintock’s comments over breakfast; he’s generally a good speaker and not particularly afraid to either say what he thinks, or name names – neither of which will endear him to global warming advocates, specifically including the current Governor of California. We have the video of the speech, and will be hopefully putting it up soon: in the meantime, the Congressman in my opinion hammered two major points home. The first is that global warming is not a scientific issue, but a policy one; the second is that the State of California is currently going through the effects of the policies that are being advocated on a national level. And if people are being amused at the travails that California is going through right now, they should consider that Californians are moving out of the state – which means that these problems are going to be considerably less amusing when they’re starting to affect your local area.
One last note: during the question and answer, when asked about how to influence legislators, McClintock made an interesting point that you don’t call, or even visit their office. Instead, you confront them in public venues, and make them answer in public. Presumably, he’d be all right with people visiting Congressional offices in groups of, say, several hundred or so: when I interview him later today it’ll be one of the questions that I’ll ask him.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
The Audi Shark Hovercraft.
Via the lovely and far-too-quiet Academic Elephant, the best concept vehicle that you’ll see this week:
You want one.
Admit it.
I have the Vaclav Klaus speech…
…from the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change; I’m just working on getting it up. In the meantime, my general impressions of the speech: President Klaus isn’t particularly shy about opining that the situation with environmentalists pushing climate change is not one of science, but of competing agendas, and that there is an economic dimension to the environmentalists’ policy platforms. He also had a few choice comments about how the typical response from climate change proponents to any kind of skepticism reminded him of the way the communists used to handle similar objections… which is, of course, not complimentary. Ending quote: “The environmentalists don’t want to change the climate: they want to change us and our behavior.”
His book Blue Planet in Green Shackles
Crossposted at RedState.
OK, so we’re here at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change.
The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change. We’re here, we’re registered, and it’s a perfectly lovely day here in the Big Apple. Not too warm, not too cold, and not a blizzard in sight. In about an hour or so we’ll be in a reception, and this evening’s there’s going to be a dinner speech by Czech President Vaclav Klaus.
Skanderbeg and I are covering this conference: he’s doing the science, I get the politics. Tomorrow morning we should be hearing from Congressman Tom McClintock (R, CA-04) over breakfast: I’ll see if I can score an interview afterward. Needless to say, anyone attending this conference is welcome to stop by and see how we’re doing.
Moe Lane
PS: If I can, I hope to pull a Caleb and get a handle on whatever protesters might be showing up for this. And by “get a handle,” I mean, of course, “savagely mock.”
Crossposted to RedState.
It is currently 61 degrees in Manhattan.
Weather today will be cloudy, with a chance of rain; weather for the next two days will be highs in the upper forties, with a reasonable chance of rain but no particular chance of extreme weather. Typical-to-pleasant climate for the climate change conference that I’m covering, in other words.
Something out there has a sense of humor, I’m thinking.
Moe Lane
PS: By all means, hit the PayPal button to the side. Train tickets cost money. See? I’m taking public transportation. Minimizing the carbon footprint, yadda yadda.
A colleague’s real-time review of Watchmen.
“There are multiple scenes of giant blue penis.”
I have apparently not reached the maturity level of a 13 year old child, because I thought that the above was the funniest thing I read all night.
Oh, well, I didn’t complain when they dressed Mystique
More or less.
Moe Lane
Pelosi, Reid swear at each other in semi-public.
Are they getting their naps in? The older I get, the more I appreciate the concept of napping.
(H/T: Don Surber) The two Democratic branches of Congress aren’t precisely happy with each other right now:
Reid, Pelosi Swearing Match Over Omnibus
After an angry, swearing late night meeting among top Democrats, Congress voted Friday to give itself another five days to try to complete a long-overdue omnibus spending bill that had become a growing embarrassment for party leaders and President Barack Obama.
Senate Democrats had abruptly pulled back Thursday night after finding themselves one vote short of the 60 needed to cut off debate. The action infuriated Speaker Nancy Pelosi so much that the California Democrat wanted to abandon the $409.6 billion measure and instead push through a stripped-down continuing resolution to keep the government operating through Sept. 30.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) and his deputy, Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D.-Ill.) were called to Pelosi’s office late Thursday night and ultimately prevailed in their argument that Democrats should try to salvage the bill, which includes critical spending increases for vital agencies. But the heated, sometimes profane, exchanges were described as “ugly” by Democrats on both sides of the Capitol. Staff, kicked out in the hall, could hear the yelling, and Pelosi herself seemed a little abashed the next day, joking that nothing her leadership could say to her now would match the night before.
Continue reading Pelosi, Reid swear at each other in semi-public.