The Right Wing Professor's Blog

The Greeks have a plan to pay off their government debt. They're going to build a giant horse…

h/t Andy Borowitz

Really, what can you say about this? Quoting this morning's editorial

Another notable attempt to assert the right of states to nullify federal law was made by South Carolina in the 1930s. Some view that "Nullification Crisis" as setting the stage for the Civil War.

Word to the LJS: change it if you want; I have a screenshot.

Irony: the editorial was written to castigate Sen. Mark Christensen for his ignorance of American constitutional history.

The Lincoln Journal Star appears to be determined to prove me right about their opeds. This morning, approvingly hopping on the rickety Obama class warfare bandwagon, they quote Obama's SOTU:

"Now, you can call this class warfare all you want," Obama said. "But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most people would call that common sense."

Actually, most intelligent people would call it a lie. Buffett certainly pays far more than his secretary in taxes; given that he pays millions a year in taxes, unless he's insane he pays more in taxes than he pays his secretary in salary. And, let's face it, it is a lie, not a mistake — Obama may not be the 'smartest president evar', but he is smart enough to understand the difference between tax and tax rate.

The LJS signs on, though.

And that's just what it is.

In my experience, invoking 'common sense' is usually simply an attempt to beg the question; it's what stupid people cite when they can't articulate an explanation for one of their deeply-held prejudices. And while it's pretty clear Obama was intentionally trying to deceive the American people, I am entirely open to the possibility that the LJS editorial board does not know the difference between tax and tax rate.

(For what it's worth, it's not even clear that Debbie Bosanek pays taxes at a higher rate than her employer. Given that almost half of American households pay no federal income tax at all, and that 'secretary' isn't exactly a highly paid occupation, it's actually rather unlikely she pays 15% of her income in federal tax. Forbes estimated she would likely be in the $200,000 - $500,000 bracket if she did that. I think that estimate may be a little high. But I'd bet dollars to donuts that even highly paid corporate secretaries don't on average pay tax at a 15% rate)

The Lincoln Journal Star has never been either thoughtful or intelligent, and has a long history of publishing bonehead errors, but it's my impression that recently they've been aware that their readership is largely composed of the more thoughtless kind of leftists, and they have started knowingly to cater to that readership. Too bad. American small town newspapers were once a surprisingly good read. The LJS is now nothing more than an argument against structured bankruptcy.

Bold Nebraska supports banning campaign contributions to PSC candidates from entities they regulate. That's not unreasonable; what is remarkable is their nerve. They throw up their hands in horror that TransCanada might contribute to PSC, which would regulate Keystone XL. But Bold Nebraska, which opposes Keystone XL, is itself funded by one of the major competitors of TransCanada, via Dick Holland, original partnership investor of Berkshire Hathaway.

Crony capitalism, anyone?

I have a morning ritual. Before I exercise, I do the London Times' hardest sudoku of the day. Depending on whether it's fiendish or super fiendish, it takes between 7 and 18 minutes. Then I do an even harder puzzle. I read the Lincoln Journal Star's editorial, and try to decide whether it's best explained by massive stupidity or shameless partisanship.

Today's choice was particularly difficult. Arguing that State Senator Charlie Janssen's Voter ID Bill is unnecessary, the LJS opines…

Chances are quite high that an impersonator would get busted. When people go to vote, they give their names and addresses. Poll workers find the name on the voter registration records, and voters sign. So if someone tries to impersonate you at the ballot box, the crime is detected when you show up to vote. Or, if the impersonator shows up after you, the crime is detected when the impersonator tries to vote.

Good grief, is it conceivable they haven't figured out that you don't impersonate the living, you impersonate the recently deceased? Voter registration information in Nebraska is online. So all you do is scan the death notices for a few weeks prior to the election, and then simply look up the name on the voter rolls. If you get a hit, it's a trivial matter to get the address, and you're good to go vote.

There's an entire Ballotpedia page devoted to dead people voting, with numerous separate instances documented across the United States. But, they insist, nobody has ever documented it in Nebraska. I expect this is because no one has ever tried. If the Nebraska GOP had its wits about it, it would have checked voter lists in tightly contested districts and dug out some names of dead people. It's arduous, but not particularly difficult; it's been done successfully in other states, with estimates of sometimes thousands of dead people voting.

Of course, preventing a voter ID bill is high on the agenda of the local Democrat Party and leftist activists, so it could be shameless partisanship.

This time I'm opting for teh stoopid. But it's a close run thing.

…or like Michael Jackson.

I'm sorry, but I believe that the President should be at least a baritone…or a mezzo-soprano.

Alex Pourbaix, president for Energy and Oil Pipelines at TransCanada, said on the Kudlow show on CNBC on Wednesday night that TransCanada were considering ignoring the dithering idiot in the White House (he didn't quite put it that way) and going ahead with the construction of Keystone XL. This was confirmed today in an article in Petroleum World. They can do this because they need State Department permission only to cross the Canadian border. Building the section from Cushing to the Gulf makes economic sense because of the oil glut in Oklahoma, while Bakken production is rapidly increasing, meaning that a pipeline from Cushing to North Dakota and Montana makes at least some economic sense. Basically, TC can go ahead with all of this right now (except for the Nebraska section, for which permission will probably be forthcoming fairly quickly) and wait for a saner inhabitant of the White House to approve the relatively short segment across the Canadian border.

I must say this made my week. The market approaches state interference the way the 'net approaches censorship; it routes around it. Obama has once again made himself irrelevant.

Meanwhile, the Lincoln Journal Star today has a nice frothy mix of cluelessness and moral indignation at Congress for forcing the President to do his job and approve a pipeline for which his own State Department approved an Environmental Impact Statement six months ago.

It's telling that the deadline was not enacted strictly on its own merits. It was inserted into legislation extending the payroll tax cut.

Of course this is because Harry Reid wouldn't do his job, either, and bring the measure up for a vote. More…

We were unimpressed with the quality of the environmental impact statement's assessment of environmental risks in Nebraska.

I seriously doubt anyone on the LJS editorial board even read the EIS. I know none of them have the intellectual wherewithal to make a valid judgement on it.

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln Department of Women's and Gender Studies is hosting a colloquium series on…wait for it…masculinity! Yep, the gals will be getting together to discuss why men are icky, or something. The jokes write themselves. Well, they don't, but seems to me this is like a group of blind people getting together to discuss the drawbacks of vision.

Masculinity, indeed, is like the ability to ride a bicycle; if you don't have it, attending a panel discussion on the subject won't help you much.

Bob Kerrey is a war hero. Most people in Nebraska are aware he was awarded the Medal of Honor for an action in Vietnam during which he lost his foot.

Bob Kerrey may also be a war criminal. Somewhat fewer people know that, right after deployment in Vietnam, the unit he commanded wiped out a hamlet containing only women, children and old people. He admits his unit put some non-combatants to the knife, because it was their policy to eliminate anyone they had contact with. It has been claimed some of of those executed were children. The unit then opened fire on the rest of the village, leaving, suspiciously, no survivors. Kerrey was awarded a Bronze Star for killing 21 Viet Cong; in fact his unit killed 21 women and children.

There is, of course, no reason why he could not be both war hero and war criminal. One does not rule out the other. Neither is relevant to whether he was once a good US Senator, or would be one in the future. I happen to think he was not, and would not be in the future. The overwhelming problem the US faces in the future is massive government debt, compounded by our continued refusal to pay our government's bills. We need to cut federal spending. There is no evidence Kerrey knows this or would promote policies to do it.

The US, 40 years on, has still not faced up to Vietnam. Anyone who disturbs the myth that all returning vets are heroes, victimized by a incompetent callous government, is likely to be viciously attacked. Some Vietnam vets were heroes. Many were victims. A few were villains. Some were all three.

…comes, as it so often does, from Don Walton, Nebraska Democratic Party shill * Lincoln Journal Star political reporter.

And then we'll see firsthand the results of a court decision that says money -- even anonymous money -- is speech when, of course, we know it isn't.

Don's salary, as well as the expense of disseminating his slanted opinion pieces masquerading as news, on both dead trees and on the web, is entirely paid by Lee Newspapers Inc., a rather unsavory publicly traded corporation which recently shafted its creditors in a 'structured bankruptcy'.

Of course, that corporate money is way different from, say, the Koch brothers' money.

---

*Don says calling him a shill is 'hate speech'.

…the location of the statue might surprise you!

Bordering on the ridiculous; a snowdrop, today, in flower in our front flowerbed. The median date for snowdrops here near Lincoln, NE, is approx. Feb. 10.

Just like the last two years' unusual snow and cold, this years' mild winter is undoubtedly a result of global warming. I just got back into town, but I note that two days ago, the high temperature was 67 F (19 C).

There are those, including members of the Nobel Memorial Prize committee, who think Paul Krugman is qualified to pontificate on economics. I think they're probably right; he is qualified to pontificate, he's just very bad at it. However, I am reasonably sure he knows no more about toxicology than the average layperson.

His column "Springtime for Toxics", bears this out. In it, he parrots the EPA's ridiculous claim that their new mercury regulations will yield

up to $90 billion a year in benefits

in the form of higher wages from the children of freshwater anglers, the only significant category of people in the country who ingest a substantially above average amount of methylmercury.

To understand how ridiculous the EPA's claims are, you have to read their technical reports, something I'm sure Krugman hasn't done. First of all, the toxicology of methyl mercury is largely based on a few terrible but very old mass-poisoning incidents; the Minimata disease episodes in Japan, and the ingestion of methyl mercury-treated grain in Iraq. From these, the EPA concluded tiny quantities of methylmercury in the diet (a fraction of 1 microgram per kilogram body weight per day) had tangible neurological effects, in the form of paresthesias in adults, and slowed development in children. The problem is , everything about these poisoning cases is uncertain; the actual doses experienced are conjectured or extrapolated, and recording of symptoms is largely anecdotal.

Later studies correlating IQ in at-risk populations with mercury ingestion have horrible issues with confounding variables. In short, we really don't know what level of methylmercury causes health problems, and the EPA's (very low) number is suspect, if only because animal studies tend to show much higher doses are needed to cause harm than the EPA claims for humans.

But it gets worse. Simply correlating mercury emissions from power-plants with increased dietary mercury is hard. Complex modeling is needed to figure out the fall-out from volatile mercury compounds emitted by power plants into the soil and water, along with further modeling of bio-accumulation, in order to determine how much of the methylmercury in freshwater fish comes from power plants. The EPA does not even really know what number of Americans use freshwater fish as a significant source of dietary protein, and what fraction of that fish is fed to children. I know when I was a kid, the answer was zero. You couldn't force-feed me fish. Even if these speculative harms are real, you don't think we could reduce them by simply telling people not to make freshwater fish a major part of their children's diets, or their own diet while pregnant? Many authorities already (and wrongly IMO) advise people not eat fish more than once a week.

The uncertainties in every part of this work are enormous. What we do know is that it's essentially impossible to identify tangible harm to individuals caused by dietary methylmercury in the United States from power plant emissions. So, to fix this conjectured problem, the EPA wants power-plant operators to spend $10 bn.

Elsewhere, Krugman writes…

But mercury regulation would not have happened if John McCain were president. Elections have consequences, and this is one delayed consequence of 2008 that will make a big difference.

Indeed. $10 bn. here, $10 bn. there, and pretty soon you've strangled the economy. It won't do a damn thing for American public health, though, except maybe a few more people will freeze to death because of the increase in electricity prices.

I grow potatoes every year, and I try to store them in a cool place in the basement (don't have a root cellar), but by late winter, they've usually sprouted. So this year, I decided to leave some of them in the ground, heavily mulched. In fact, it's barely frozen out there, and early this morning I managed to dig out a few pounds of nice fat red spuds, along with some of the leeks that are still surviving, despite the hard 0 F freeze early in the month. So this year with Christmas dinner we have genuine Nebraska Vichysoise, made from fresh vegetables grown a couple of hundred feet from the kitchen.

Poking around outside in the 51 F weather, I noticed the first green tips of the snowdrops are coming up. Ridiculous.

One final note: don't clean out your bluebird boxes in December. The mice that have taken up residence in them resent it.

Merry Christmas to my fellow atheists, and happy holidays to all you Christians.

Worried about overdoing the holiday revelry and driving home blasted? Don't be! Thanks to yet another public spirited Husker Scholar-Athlete, it has been revealed that Lincoln Police don't charge you with DUI for a first offense!

Yep, after senior center Mike Caputo was found slumped over the steering wheel sleeping it off outside a UStop, and tested .108 BAC, he was merely charged with reckless driving (which seems odd, considering he wasn't actually driving, he was passed out). His lawyer, Terry Dougherty, assures us he didn't get any kind of special treatment.

He did not get this opportunity because he's a football player. He got this opportunity because other than a speeding ticket he has no criminal history, he has no alcohol history whatsoever and he has been an exemplary academic student.There are normal, ordinary people who get this.

I did not know that. But it's liberating to find out that because I haven't even had a speeding ticket in years, have a Harvard Ph.D., and no criminal record, I can drive boozed up to the gills and get off with a $100 fine and no record. Furthermore, thanks to Scholar-Athlete Lauren Cook, I know that if I do happen to run over a stationary motorcyclist, break his leg, and then leave the scene, they'll only give me pre-trial diversion. Because everyone gets it, not just our Scholar Athletes! Hey, even if they get punitive and suspend my license, I can still drive, because driving on a suspended license is no big deal!

I bet Jerry Sandusky wishes he coached for the Huskers. By now, they'd have let him plead down to spitting on the sidewalk and fined him $20.

BTW, Mr. Dougherty seems to represent many of our stray Husker lambs. I wonder if the AD has him on retainer?

…is today's word for the day. It's akin to pornography, except hagia is the Greek word for holy. It's particularly apposite when applied to 'profiles' of leftist figures by leftist journalists. A Catholic canonization is far more objective; they are careful to include a promotor fidei to ensure a proper level of scrutiny.

Case in point; yesterday's profile of Jane Kleeb by Don Walton in the Lincoln Journal Star. As usual in such pieces, Don's lips are so firmly affixed to his subject's hindquarters one is inclined to suspect surgical silk is implicated. There is a cursory genuflection towards balance, by including critical comments about Kleeb by Mark Fahleson. But Fahleson, chair of the Nebraska Republican party, is so definitively a partisan figure, the criticism can be given zero weight by anyone not on that side of the partisan divide.

Unmentioned: the financial arrangements between Kleeb, Bold Nebraska and Dick Holland; the lack of any scientific foundation for Bold Nebraska's campaign against Keystone XL; Dick Holland's likely financial interest in getting the Keystone pipeline stopped; Kleeb's prior financial arrangements with SEIU…by all means add things inquiring minds would like to know, but Walton fails to ask.

You probably missed this— it wasn’t in all the papers — but Lee Newspapers, parent company of the Lincoln Journal Star, went bankrupt this week. It was a structured bankruptcy. What this means is, Lee tried to blackmail their creditors into accepting a renegotiation of their debt; when all the suckers wouldn’t agree, Lee went to court to get a package that extended the payment period by judicial fiat. The stockholders weren’t even wiped out, as would be usual in a bankruptcy. Instead, Lee handed out some more stock to its creditors. Thanks for nothing, you might say.

Lee got itself in this mess by doubling down on the dead tree publishing business, right when said busienss was going the way of the 8-track. It did a leveraged buyout of Pulitzer Newspapers (yep, that Pulitzer) back in the early part of the decade, and has never managed to pay off the debt it incurred. How it managed to con some morons into financing such a predictably doomed deal is beyond the ken of your devoted correspondent, and so, I don’t feel particularly bad for the creditors Lee just stiffed. All I can say is, if you sell anything to the LJS, demand cash in advance.

What is amusing is that this week, oblivious to its own insolvency, the LJS editorial board just opined that we should just pass the FICA tax holiday, without worrying our little heads about how it should be paid for. It’s like a drunk doing alcohol counseling.

There is little debate that it is an effective tool; most wage earners quickly spend the money.

Actually, there's a lot of debate whether an effective tool; many economists think a short-term tax-cut simply introduces instability without affecting long-term hiring. It doesn't do the economy any good if people spend it on cheap Chinese crap from Walmart.

So we get to put up with at least another 6 months of local news suppression combined with oh-so-closeted Democrat party propaganda, all funded by over-lax bankruptcy laws. Woohoo!

Meanwhile…

In the year to Sept. 25, Lee had an operating loss of $103.3 million on revenue of $756.1 million, according to court documents.

A business deader than the trees they print their newspaper on!

A confession; I can't find it in my heart to hate Tim Tebow. As a matter of fact (not knowing him personally) I rather like what I see of the young man. He exudes an ebullient joy in what he does. While certainly lacking some of the finer skills of top-tier professional quarterbacks — watching some of his pass attempts, you wonder what exactly he thought he was throwing at, and in a beautiful simile, the WSJ described his carrying the football as being like a thief sprinting from Best Buy with a toaster under his arm -- he wins, and six in a row is starting to look beyond a fluke. His prayers after a touchdown are an improvement over the standard in-your-face victory dances, and if he wants to thank his savior the Lord Jesus Christ after a game, well, it's still a free country.

The young man has, despite his rawness, displayed style and grace in victory. When opponents mock his demonstrations of religious fervor, he waves it off as good-natured ribbing, which it probably isn't. He is a thing much rarer than a Christian. He is a gentleman, in a sport that celebrates thuggery.

That being said, I'm still a Patriots fan, and the streak ends on Sunday.

This morning's launch of an Atlas rocket carrying the Curiosity Mars lander.

A couple of people asked me to post about Graham Spanier, who was chancellor for the first four years of my time at UNL. Ordinarily I wouldn't, because I hate to kick a man while he's down, but a couple of UNL administrators have weighed in on what a great colleague he is, and I feel the need to set the record straight.

Nebraska was a stepping stone for Graham Spanier, and he treated us as such. He was responsible for a disastrous initiative to reform the core curriculum that looked great on paper but,in practice, was a bureaucratic nightmare for the students. This was done, in my opinion, merely to burnish his resumé. It took us 15 years to undo the damage he did. He tried a couple of politically correct initiatives, such as the notorious pink triangle stickers that we were supposed to stick on our door to show we were gay-supportive, which resulted in widespread ridicule. And he took a completely hands-off approach to the athletic department, and so let the Lawrence Phillips scandal spiral way out of control. In other words he made poor policy decisions, and his efforts at UNL were largely directed at winning his next job.

The scandal at Penn State is in my opinion a result of his unwillingness to confront a powerful athletic department, something for which there was adequate evidence already in Nebraska.

I have no love for the man, and I feel his ascent to one of the top academic positions in the country is a reflection of a corrupt administrative culture in US universities

Michigan parents who take care of disabled children and receive Medicaid benefits for doing so are forced to pay part of the benefits to the Service Employees International Union, as dues. This amounts to $30 a month. In 2006, Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm forced parents who take care of their kids and have their expenses reimbursed to become part of SEIU, via a dummy employer, the 'Michigan Quality Community Care Council'.

No wonder labor unions are so widely despised.

Some irrefutable facts:

• The leading opposition group to the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska is Bold Nebraska.
• BoldNebraska was founded in July 2010, with a major donation from Richard Holland of Omaha, to whom they refer as a 'founding donor'. Holland is one of the original partnership investors in Berkshire Hathaway, and still a major shareholder. He is also a major donor to the Democratic Party.
  
• Berkshire Hathaway has a 100% ownership stake in the railroad company BNSF, which they acquired in November 2009.
• BNSF has a huge stake in transporting oil from the Bakken oilfields in North Dakota by railcar. It has around 1000 miles of track in the Bakken region. They have plans to ship 730,000 bpd, twice Bakken's current total production. BNSF and its partners are investing massively in new terminals in North Dakota and on the Gulf Coast.
• Shipping oil from Bakken south to OK/TX/LA is hugely profitable. Conservatively, Bakken crude at wellhead has a $12/barrel discount on West Texas Intermediate, yet sells for a $3 /barrel premium on the Gulf Coast. But price spreads have gone as high as $35 a barrel. $12 of that $15 - $35 goes to the shipping and oil terminal companies.
• TransCanada offered 100,000 bpd of Keystone XL pipeline capacity for Bakken crude, and has already secured 65,000 bpd in contracts. That's $1.2 m/day in lost revenue to rail shippers like BNSF. And it discounts the prospect that Canadian crude may also soon be shipped by rail to the Gulf, and that reducing the oil glut in both Alberta and North Dakota will undoubtedly reduce the profits to be made from rail shipment.

Given all these facts, should Dick Holland's donations to Bold Nebraska be viewed as philanthropy, or a very canny investment directed at eliminating a direct competitor to a Berkshire Hathaway company?

The Journal Star posted a piece about pipeline opponents on Friday evening, authored by one Kevin O'Hanlon. In it, they managed to confuse Randy Thompson, the suburban cowboy whom Bold Nebraska are trying to make an icon of the anti-pipeline movement, with Randy Johnson, a.k.a the Big Unit. I emailed Mr. O'Hanlon pointing out his mistake, and suggesting he could also work on his objectivity. (The piece gives full voice to the anti-pipeliners, without a single interview with anyone who supports the pipeline). In fact, the mistake got corrected in time for the print edition, so I did them a favor. However, Mr. O'Hanlon charmingly replied this morning with…

I just signed on my LJS archive account and it says Thompson not Johnson. Are you, by chance, a drinker?

I informed him I have a copy of the Google cache with the original version in it, so it wasn't going to be successfully memory-holed. (You can also see references to the original wording in the comments.) No big deal, until he started with the personal shite. Now he wants to 'get together'. Ain't gonna happen without an apology.

It's bad enough these guys can't keep names straight and can't separate news from opinion, but they can't even reply to email without personal attacks.

The Green Left is currently hopeful that Obama will deny a permit to Keystone XL to placate his base and galvanize them into activism for his 2012 election campaign. To an extent, this makes sense; with his support among independents tenuous, and the Right fired up to defeat him, the only chance of reelection he has is a massive turnout by the same people who worked so hard for him in 2008.

The problem he has is Saudi Arabia, which despite his 2009 obsequiousness to its feudal monarch, wants him gone. It has never forgiven his abandonment of Hosni Mubarak. They simply can't count on him to be steadfast in the face of threats from Iran and from insurgents in their kingdom and the Gulf States. And King Abdullah has one enormously powerful weapon; the oil spigot. It's common knowledge that most of the world's oil-producers are pumping it out of the ground as fast as they can, and Saudi controls the price by dialing down or up their own production. In fact, it is the Saudis that have ensured that world oil prices have remained persistently high, despite the usual fall-season dip in demand, and in fact are creeping back up toward $100 a barrel for WTI.

Of course, approving Keystone XL won't increase supply for several years, and so won't affect prices in the run-up to the election. But what it will do is make a statement that the US is willing to ignore the pleas of its environmental movement and move further towards energy independence. Keystone XL represents 20% of the oil currently imported from OPEC. If Obama denies or delays the pipeline application, and Saudi restricts supply towards the summer season, oil prices will skyrocket. Obama will be extremely vulnerable to charges that he has consistently obstructed US efforts to struggle free from OPEC's grip. A denial of the Keystone XL permit will be in the face of a final environmental impact statement from his own State Department that found the pipeline safe. While the way the FEIS was produced has been criticized, Obama can hardly criticize it; his own people produced it! And since Ken Salazar, his Interior Secretary, was already caught red-handed manipulating an expert report on Gulf oil production, the GOP can make a powerful case that Keystone is not merely a one-off, but another and egregious example of Obama's policy of deliberately impeding US energy independence.

If gasoline goes to $6 a gallon, would you like to be in the position of having to justify cutting off a major source of near-domestic supply? Nor does Bill Daley.

One of the funnier aspects of the Keystone XL opposition is the flood of tweets with the #kxl hashtag coming from users with the first three initials @ISF, from all over Europe. The tweets all have a certain distinctive hysterical tone to them, so I decided to do a little research. At first, my mean old right-wing mind thought "International Socialist Front" but in fact it's a lot less threatening.

ISF stands for Ian Somerhalder Foundation. Ian Somerhalder (and I had to look this up) was a star on Lost (I watched Lost, once. I must have been really lazy that night.) Then he went on to star in the Vampire Diaries. And thence the teenage girls. I have no idea why teenage girls develop overwhelming crushes on cute male vampires, but it seems to be a phenomenon that crosses national boundaries.

Somerhalder seems to fall into the general class of tree-hugging Hollyweirdos. His foundation, blissfully oblivious to the clichéedness of it all...

view the environment as an interconnected organism of which we are not separate but a part of. There is no differentiation between all living things: trees, rivers, animals and humans. We are all one interdependent organism.

Feel free to roll your eyes.

I suppose the besotted teeny-boppers don't deserve more than a little mild mockery. In the grip of raging hormones, kids of both sexes do some remarkably stupid things. If there were only an equivalent excuse for the adults in Bold Nebraska.

Ken Haar is a member of the Executive Committee of the Nebraska Sierra Club. Haar also represents a Lincoln district in the unicameral. So now we have a special session of the unicameral, ostensibly to consider the routing of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The trouble is, the Sierra Club doesn't want to reroute the pipeline, it wants to kill it outright, because it opposes the exploitation of tar sands oil.

This means that Haar has an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Who will he choose to serve: the Nebraskans who elected him, or the environmental extremist organization he helps run?

I think Haar's bill answers the question. It bans any pipelines that traverse Ecoregion IV 44, or the watershed of any cold water class A creek, or where the groundwater depth is 10 feet or less for ten miles in length.

This makes pipeline siting an impossible task. The boundaries of Ecoregion IV 44 are not defined by statute in Nebraska or the US, and may be impossible to define precisely enough for legal purposes. Choosing where one ecoregion starts and another stops is not a precise science. The classification of a Class A coldwater stream depends on whether trout are found, and this can vary from year to year; but many of the small creeks that lead into the Niobrara on its south side have this classification. But worst of all, groundwater is near the surface along the Platte and most of its tributaries, and since the Platte flows from the Western boundary of the state to the Missouri for over 400 miles, this forms an invincible barrier to any pipeline. And, of course, groundwater rises and falls with the season.

This bill is clearly designed to kill the pipeline, not reroute it. If Haar had a conscience, he'd quit his unicameral seat, and go lobby for the Sierra Club, because that's the work he's doing here.

I have a confession. There was a time I thought Sandhills ranchers were tough. You know, pulling-calves-out-of-cows-in-the-middle-of-snowdrifts-in-February tough. However, having been re-educated about them by Lincolnite pipeline opponents, I now realize they are really delicate prairie flowers, apt to wilt if exposed to the slightest harshness.

Oh, my heavens, TransCanada wants an EASEMENT to put a pipe across your Sandhills ranch, four feet underground? You mean, an easement like 90% of Lincoln homeowners have for a sidewalk in front of their property, that allows ABSOLUTELY ANYONE, even Democrat members of the unicameral, violate the entire frontage of their homestead, at will? You mean like the cable company, and LES, and miscellaneous other public utilities have, stringing wires and pipes all over and under their sacred habitation? How can people live like that, with the constant unending intrusion?

Well, sure, we tough city dwellers can handle the brutal invasion of our space, but it's easy to see why these fragile Holt County coneflowers would get upset. They're in a tricky yoga position, or doing Japanese flower arrangements, or nibbling Brie and sipping Sauvignon Blanc with the other three residents of the county, and a Canadian in a business suit walks up the driveway looking to give them some money in return for use of their relatively worthless land. It's practically rape. And do you know what a 36" steel pipe does to your Feng Shui? Let's not even go there.

Earth to Bill Avery. Beam down please!

Turn your irony meters off before you read this, folks.

The New Nebraska Network just launched into a Kyle Michaelis-written rant (OK, everything on that site is a rant) about how Dave Heineman has appointed two conservative political activists to help implement Nebraska's ObamaCare health exchange. "Inexperienced!" squeals Kyle. "Radicals!" "politically motivated!"

Kyle himself was appointed, controversially, to the Lincoln/Lancaster County EMS Oversight Authority in May 2011. Kyle, an attorney, has no discernible expertise in Emergency Medical Services (he's employed by the Feds, so he doesn't even chase ambulances). His appointment was widely regarded as a political payback for dropping out of a Lincoln City Council race, and for his blog.rants in the service of the Nebraska Democrat Party.

The Pot once again lectures the Kettle on his blackness.

According to the Times of London this morning, 90% of the tents pitched outside St. Paul's Cathedral in the 'Occupy London' protest proved to be empty when the police thermally imaged them last night. A reporter the newspaper had 'embedded' in the demonstration reported that many of the 'occupiers', rather than sleeping outside the cathedral, were going home at night. Meanwhile, the architectural gem, which survived WWII, remains closed to the public because of the hazard posed by the vast collection of mostly empty tents.

I had a similar impression walking past 'Occupy Lincoln' last week, when I saw 40 tents and a half-dozen people.

Laziest radicals evar!!!

...and in my department, no less!

The Chemistry department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, like many institutions, has a one-credit honors seminar program. Any faculty person can choose a topic, and meet once a week with a group of students, giving them one credit-hour worth on honors credit. Often the topics are quite imaginative; in the past we've had 'The Color Red', 'The Chemistry of Harry Potter', etc.. I taught one a few years ago called 'The Chemical Basis of Evolution', where we compared the gene and protein sequences of a variety of different organisms, and created phylogenetic trees.

We don't as a department vet the topic, relying on the faculty member's professional judgement. Unfortunately, one of our teaching faculty has now taken this as liberty to create a course called 'Science and Bible Wisdom'. wherein they will 'discuss' Intelligent Design nutcase Gerald Schroeder's 'The Science of God -- The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom'.

I had a bad feeling as soon as I looked at the poster for the course, which has shiny stars and galaxies flying around in a way IDers seem to love. But, so I wouldn't judge the book by a few unfortunate things Schroeder has posted on the internet, I actually shelled out $11 for the ebook and wasted several hours reading it. And it's worse than I thought. First of all, the book really is 70% religion; Schroeder is an Orthodox Jew, and he spends a great deal of time parsing the words of Maimonides and his chums -- stirring stuff, but not exactly science. A science course in a public university should not begin with the presumption that the student knows the entire Bible throughly, as Schroeder's book does. And the science, when he gets down to it, is junk. All the usual creationist canards are repeated. There are no transitional species. The laws of thermodynamics forbid evolution. The usual specious statistical arguments about the impossibility of evolution of protein sequences are dusted out and brandished. All the voluminous molecular evidence for evolution is otherwise ignored. Schroeder thinks convergent evolution can only be explained if the genomes of our common ancestors were preprogrammed by God with genetic information. And then there's this passage; anyone who can't prove in five minutes that this is an exact inversion of what one should infer about the independence of atoms undergoingradioactive decay should not be teaching chemistry.

Similarly, give thought to the amazing consistency of radioactivity. 1 billion atoms the radioactive noble gas radon all have the same half period of 3.83 days. That means 3.83 days from now only half a billion atoms will remain. In twice that period only one quarter will remain. But which atoms will radioactively decay now and which later? Some will decay after a second and some only after a century. Yet all have the same 3.83 day half-period. Do they decide among themselves? Are the individual atoms aware of how many have already decayed and so how many must today? Or more generally stated, is matter in some sense aware of its environment? It often seems so for radioactivity and also for a variety of other occurrences regularly observed in physics laboratories.

Trying to get away from my reputation as a trouble-maker, I quietly pointed out these problems to my department chair, who has decided to do exactly nothing, except get an assurance from Professor Malina that he will teach Schroeder's book 'skeptically'. Problem is, once one has looked at the scientific claims of Schroeder's book in the cold light of actual science, there is nothing left.

I have no problem with the religious trying to reconcile their religion with science. When they do so, however, the shoehorn needs to be used on their religion, not on the science. It is a disgrace this course is being taught, and a disgrace that our administration, having been informed of the nature of the course, will do nothing about it.

This is a great opinion piece by Joe Nocera of the NYTimes. A liberal who goes to the root of why the political process has broken down, and finds liberals to blame. If only we were all as honest.

What I don't know is how to fix it, to undo all the nastiness of the last 25 years.

....inviting shameless self-promoting race-huckster, Jesse Jackson, to UNL to speak.

Why are we doing this? If Jackson had anything important or enlightening or useful to say, he would have said it in the last half-century of shooting off his mouth, all the while telling fibs about cradling MLK while he died, paying off his mistress with charitable contributions, and generally polluting American political life.

I hope the legislature remembers this when setting UNL's 2013 budget.

Link to his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Remember Jamie Leigh Jones?

No, of course you don't. Jones was the woman at the center of the notorious KBR rape case. She claimed she was raped by a co-worker at Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) in Iraq, and then imprisoned by the company to prevent her from complaining. Democratic hysteric Al Franken used the case to ram a law through Congress forbidding defense contractors from using binding arbitration. The 30 GOP senators who voted against this free gift for trial lawyers were vilified as rape apologists. The ever obnoxious New Nebraska Net blog viciously libeled Mike Johanns, one of the 30, repeatedly, as a 'friend to rapists'.

This summer, with very little media attention, Jones had her day in court, and lost.In fact, it transpired that Jones had tried to win through media publicity a case that was incredibly weak. She tested negative for Rohypnol, the date rape drug she claimed she had been given. She claimed to have been gang-raped, but only one man's semen showed up in the rape kit. Jones was reported by witnesses to have gotten drunk with, flirted with, and then headed off to the barracks with the man she accused. Her accusation of false imprisonment by KBR was only made two years later. She had fabricated her medical history, and had fabricated rape allegations previously. In fact, just last week, the court took the unusual step of awarding KBR some of their legal costs for the fabricated lawsuit.

Will Al Franken apologize? Will the New Nebraska Network? Don't hold your breath.

It was a distinct honor to be asked to report for Leavenworth Street, Nebraska's most important and influential political blog, about the Keystone XL pipeline hearings. My random, impressionistic and narcissistic musings are here.

It was revealed this week that the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World had decided to speed up global warming (so to speak) by melting the ice on about 15% of Greenland's land area. Somewhat surprisingly, the reaction of the climate science community was not to remain mute, but to object that mistakes of this sort serve to delegitimize the case for anthropogenic global warming. If this pattern continues, with climate scientists disavowing the more egregious exaggerations of global warming alarmists, perhaps they can go some of the way to repairing the tattered credibility of this branch of science. Currently about half the population simply discounts well established facts of the case for AGW, and the behavior of some climate scientists has played no small part in this. Or as Rod Liddle said in today's London Sunday Times:

The biggest impediment to believing in global warming is the suspicion – with plenty of supporting evidence – that we are continually being lied to by conspiracy of arrogant obsessives.

Indeed.

Ben Nelson just voted with the Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee to block the National Labor Relations Board from punishing companies which send work to right-to-work states, such as Nebraska, to avoid labor union strikes. This measure was immediately directed at the NLRB's attempt to prevent Boeing from locating a production line in South Carolina, but was generally written to strip the NLRB from any power to punish companies who try to avoid hostile union activity by transferring production to right-to-work states. Nelson was the deciding vote on a 15-15 tie which failed for lack of a single vote.

Benedict Arnold Nelson has once again shown where his allegiances lie: with the union thugs who contribute to his campaign, not the people who elected him.

...when you think that the oil that fuels your 14/20 mpg faux-pickup sport utility vehicle isn't brought by pipelines, but by the Oil Fairy.

An American citizen who was doing nothing, but was seated beside two apparently middle-eastern men, is taken off an airplane in handcuffs, imprisoned against her will, interrogated, and cavity searched. This happened not in some godawful third-world hell-hole, but in America (or Detroit, which used to be America).

Our homeland security apparatus -- TSA, FBI, etc. -- is completely out of control, and needs to be reined in.

Today's Lincoln Journal Star op-ed. Unbefreakinglievable.

In Nebraska, word began to spread shortly before 10 a.m. Maybe the news came from a co-worker who stuck his head into your cubicle. Maybe it was an early report you heard on the truck radio on the way into town. Maybe you were at home half-listening to the television when you realized, suddenly, that a note of urgency had crept into the voices. The first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:46 a.m. central time. In many workplaces people already were gathered around television screens when the second plane hit the South Tower at 10:02 a.m.

I remember it vividly. I was getting ready for work. My wife called me to the TV to say the World Trade Center was on fire. We watched the second plane hit. It was around 8 in the morning. The official record says 7:46 a.m. central for the first impact, 8:03 for the second.

It's highly unlikely many people in the central time zone were gathering around TV screens at their workplaces at 8:03 a.m.. This is just made-up crap. The LJS editor was probably still sleeping off his hangover.

Please let Lee Newspapers go bankrupt, so we can close this embarrassment to our city.

Experience has taught me never to expect very much of the Daily Nebraskan editorial board, and yet they manage to disappoint me with distressing frequency. However, today's staff op-ed is more than simply disappointing. It's downright sinister. According to the DN, because the Governor and the two senators from our state have all expressed opposition of one kind or another to the Keystone-XL pipeline, 'the pipeline needs to cease to be an issue of debate in Nebraska'. That's right, if you disagree with Heineman, Nelson and Johanns, you need to shut up. Never mind that the State Department's Environmental Impact Statement, 320 pages of detailed technical analysis, evaluates the pipeline as safer than any currently operating, and alternate routes as less safe. We must all ignore the science and get in line with the political establishment. Moreover, speech contrary to that party line should be barred from any state-run media!

Aspiring journalists, clueless about the first amendment.

Checking the Keystone XL system map for another reason, I was struck by one conspicuous feature of the routes of both Keystone Xl and Keystone.

See how both pipelines thread between the grey areas? The grey areas are reservations. One would think, naively, that routing through the Rez would be simpler. Instead of dealing with hundreds of individual landowners, one deals with a single tribal government. And tribal governments, mostly impoverished and continually complaining about the refusal of industry to locate on reservations, have a major incentive to take the company's easement payments, which in several cases would make a huge difference. Yet it appears that a foreign company with no particular reason to be ill-disposed towards tribal governments would rather wade through the morass of hundreds of eminent domain proceedings, rather than deal with them.

Telling.

(Yes, it does seem to be ditz week here on the RWP blog, doesn't it?)

Anyway, Daryl Hannah was arrested in DC protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. Doing a little research on the comely but aging Ms. Hannah, I see she lists among her hobbies scuba-diving in Micronesia and helicopter-snowboarding in the Canadian Rockies. She also commutes from her eco-ranch in San Miguel Co., CO, to work in Hollywood. Oh, but her truck uses biodiesel.

RWP is thinking, if we could maybe convince Hannah to move back to Malibu and take up chess, we wouldn't need the Keystone XL pipeline.

Jane Kleeb claimed on Pacifica's Democracy Now that no crude oil pipeline currently crosses the Sandhills (go to 41:00 of the video). As discussed in this previous blog post, the Platte Pipeline crosses the Sandhills in South Lincoln County and has done so for 50 years. And what's worse, Jane knows this, because she responded by Twitter to the original blog-post.

As my mother used to say, a liar has to have a good memory, and in the age of the internet, nobody's memory is good enough.

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And Leavenworth Street has a great post on the pipeline and specifically the State Department's Environmental Impact Statement here.

Not my question, Politico's. But here's exhibit A: his college transcript. Let me draw your attention to the D in trigonometry, a subject most kids take in high-school. Rick bombed in it in college. An outright fail in Organic Chemistry II? And even if you wave off his uniformly horrible grades in math and science (many people aren't good at those subjects) you still have a politician who got C in American History, and a D in Economics.

It would be one thing if an appreciation of his own limitations led him to an attitude of due modesty about subjects of which he knows nothing, and, judging by his transcript, there are many things he should be modest about. But no. Ignorance as big as Texas has not inhibited him from thinking he knows better than Nobel Laureates and National Academy members on scientific matters from Evolution to Global Warming.

Answer: yes, the man is dumb as a bag of rocks. He clearly has some raw political instincts, and some homespun charm, but he is not presidential material. We can do better.

I seldom just link to an article or opinion piece. But this is one of Steyn's best, which means it's an absolute must-read. A taste: about the English looters, he says…

In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.

Ireland is once again proving itself the world's best advertisement for conservative economic policies.

My former country earned the sobriquet Celtic Tiger during its boom of the 1990s, when a reduction in corporate tax rates raised it from the the poorest country in Europe to one of the richest. Then came the inevitable property bubble and economic collapse. At the time of the collapse Ireland did an incredibly foolish thing. It took advice from Paul Krugman, and nationalized its banks rather than letting them go bankrupt. This put an enormous burden of bad debt on the Irish taxpayer.

Quickly recovering its sanity after this bonehead error, Ireland changed course and instituted austerity on a scale not repeated elsewhere in Europe. There was a nationwide 10 to 15% pay cut. It is now reported in the London Times that the economy grew at a 5% annual rate in the 1st quarter. Its zombie banks are not quite as serious a burden as initially thought. The notorious PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain – may soon be looking for a new vowel. (Fortunately, there's always Italy.)

The lesson for us all is to ignore the Keynesians who plead for more government spending. Balance the budget by any means necessary and make austerity a short sharp shock instead of a drawn-out headache. Or in other words, pull the Band-Aid off quickly.

Ann Coulter is one of those people a scientist who is also a conservative has to spend a far too much time apologizing for. In 2007, she wrote a truly awful book called Godless: The Church of Liberalism, which set out, inter alia, to disprove evolution. Of course, it didn't; it just further discredited Coulter and Michael Behe, the ex-biochemist who reputedly ghost-wrote her anti-evolution chapters. She's now recycling the old chapters from 2007 into a 2011 column, with the aim of defending the appalling and indefensible Rick Perry. Unfortunately, while nothing has changed in Behe's hackneyed old 'irreducible complexity' argument -- that the system of 30-40 proteins that make up a bacterial flagellum could not have arisen by random mutation/natural selection -- the science, which had already discredited Behe's claims by 2007, has advanced still further. Several of the 'indispensible' proteins have been shown to be dispensible. Other parts of the system have been shown to be derived from magnesium transporters, and one bacterial symbiont has a partial flagellum that it uses for an entirely different purpose. So much for irreducibility!

These advances are nicely reviewed here. A controversial paper has even proposed an entire phylogenetic tree for the flagellum from a small set of components. Even before Coulter's dreck was published, Pallen and Matzke had reviewed the extensive phylogenetic evidence for flagellum evolution, and utterly discredited Behe's argument. Most intriguingly, my colleague Bob Powers has published an interesting, albeit speculative, proposal that the Type 3 secretory system (TTSS), homologous and ancestral to or derived from the system for export of flagellar proteins, is actually ancestral also to the BCL-2 family of proteins involved in eukaryotic apoptosis. Apoptosis is a process of cell suicide which is necessary for development (e.g. in the death of the web of skin connecting fingers and toes) and is similar in many ways to the TTSS, whose role is to inject bacterial proteins in eukaryotic cells.

So, in fact, the system of proteins that Coulter claims could not have arisen by evolution, may well have evolved further into a system vital for the development and the well-being of her own body. There's no gratitude.

The Lincoln Journal Star's opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline seems to have reached the pinnacle of desperation. Today they publish a column by one Richard L Schmeling, apparently a Lincoln bankruptcy attorney, suggesting oil might be economically transported from Alberta to the Gulf using railcars. Unfortunately Mr. Schmeling, in pontificating about the dangers of crude oil, confuses benzine, an old-fashioned term for light petroleum distillates, with benzene a carcinogenic hydrocarbon with the formula C6H6. This is a mistake which would cause one to flunk freshman chemistry. One is inevitably forced to wonder whether the rest of the column is similarly uninformed.

Bankruptcy attorneys, former MTV reality show presenters, they're really drawing on some intellectual heavy artillery here. Hey, maybe they can find a web-designer to tell us about hydrodynamic flow of heavy crude through porous soil!

I am open to correction by any competent mycologist, but if I'm not mistaken this is a rather large and beautiful specimen of Amanita bisporigera, the Destroying Angel. It appeared at the bottom of our garden under a cherry tree a couple of days ago.

Probably the deadliest organism on the Plains. One mouthful and your liver is on a one way trip to perdition, followed shortly thereafter by the rest of you.

Normally I ignore newnebraska.net. I met Kyle Michaelis once; I think I taught his brother physical chemistry (whether his brother learned any I don't remember). It's not that there is anything particularly awful about it, more than any other generic lefty site; its prime movers, Michaelis and a new guy who posts under the handle 'Ronaldo' just seem somehow to be not quite living on this planet. It's as if they get all their news about Nebraska and the nation from left wing websites, whose contents they devour and then vigorously regurgitate, not quite digested. There's just this odd atmosphere of reality-disconnect that permeates the whole site.

A prime example is today, where Ronaldo, in the course of a lengthy and perhaps stimulant-induced rant about taxation, says this:

Those same 50% who don't pay federal income taxes do pay FICA, Medicare and Social Security taxes at the federal level.

Pick two of three. FICA theoretically means both social security and Medicare tax, though most people think it means just social security. But anyone who has ever read a paystub knows that 'FICA, Medicare and Social Security' is a redundant list.

Which makes me think Ronaldo has never gotten a paystub.

Of course, there's all sort of other garbage:

Myth, because on the average, most U.S. corporations pay an effective rate (after taking allowable deductions) of around 25% - which is one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world.

US corporations have effective tax rates of 23% (domestic) or 28% (multinational) and are taxed more heavily than any country in the industrialized world, except Japan.

Some hip-hop to play on the DeathBus.

Now everybody smoke but I be higher than the birds go
My donk got big feet I'm drivin on the dirt flo'
Naw this ain't ya average old school
My paint change faster than the cast of Road Rules
My tires is skinny the rims wide and swole
My sound system like ya life I got the highs and lows
Ya hear me comin I'll give you time to hide ya hoes
Be five minutes before ya see me cause I'm drivin slow
Fresher than potpourri be betcha I'm smokin freely
Leather with oak and TVs matchin my spokes and peet me
Slow motion like a blimp I glide
And I didn't need the Secret Service to Pimp My Ride

Darth Hussein, pictured at the helm of the sinister DeathBus, a $1.1 m Canadian-built armored-plated monstrosity, designed to cruise the galaxy and destroy its remaining pockets of wealth and prosperity. Let's listen in...

What's the next stop, commander?
Davenport, my Lord Hussein. A widget factory.
Widgets, eh? Are they green widgets?
No, my Lord. Shall we wipe them out?
Send Commander Jackson with the EPA inspectors. That should finish them off.
My Lord Hussein, a group of tea-baggers has been detected 30 parsecs off the left front fender!
Notify Janet the Hut. She knows how to deal with terrorists.
(The Imperial Troopers shuddered, thinking of the hapless tea-partiers facing the wrath of the monstrous, bloated Homeland Security Secretary)

To be continued...

Rick Perry: B.A. in Animal Science with a 2.22 GPA at Texas A&M. Was a male cheerleader.

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Mitt Romney: B.A. in English from Brigham Young; gave the commencement addresses for both the College of Humanities and the University (though is careful to admit he didn't quite make valedictorian). Went on to do a combined J.D./M.B.A. at Harvard. Was cum laude (top third of class) in law school and a Baker Scholar (top 5%) in the business school.

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I'm tired of voting for loudmouth populist morons. Accordingly Romney has my endorsement for the GOP nomination. He is well qualified by education and by experience. I love Ron Paul, and have voted for him in the past, but this time, the future of the party is at stake. Perry is a creationist who has forced his ignorance onto the Texas Board of Education; he does not believe in anthropogenic global warming, and in his first few days has been effective at issuing provocative statements but not at articulating serious policy positions. We can do better.

Shepard Fairey, the graffiti artist responsible for the iconic HOPE obama poster, was smacked around by local lefties outside a trendy Copenhagen nightclub, supposedly for creating a mural commemorating a local lefty hangout, Jagtvej 69, demolished by the city of Copenhagen. The mural pictured a dove over the word 'Peace' and the number '69'

But the mural appeared to reopen old wounds, with critics accusing Fairey of peddling government-funded propaganda.

Fairey said the men called him "Obama illuminati" and told him to go back to America. He didn't file a police report.

The artist said he had not filed a police report following the attack in Copenhagen. "I did not know any of the people or get a great look at them, so it seemed pointless," he said. "I'm not a huge fan of the cops anyway. The only thing I could see coming out of it was further media commentary like 'street artist whiner Shepard Fairey can't hold it down in a fight so he snitches to the cops'."

So he's whining to the Guardian instead.

This blog has made quite an issue of the LJS's suppression of racial information in the descriptions of perps of armed robberies in the Near South area. The LJS now seems to have changed its policy. It's no longer reporting these robberies at all! Twice in the last few days, armed robberies have gone completely unreported by the Journal Star. The most recent, at 12th and A, was quite newsworthy; the victim ran from his wannabe attacker and was pursued, and eventually dissuaded the perp. by threatening to call police. Oh yeah, the description:

Fehringer said the suspect is described as a 5'11, black male, with dark hair and dread locks. Police say the suspect was wearing a red plaid shirt and black pants.

Two forces may be at work here. The first is the LJS's political correctness;they would rather not report the news at all than report politically uncomfortable news. The other is that they may be trying to hide the crime problem in Near South, which is serious enough that it calls into question the city's leadership and policing, and may also cause further flight away from the neighborhood.

However, denying a problem is seldom a route to a solution.

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Another Near-South violent assault last night.

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Still, the Journal Star is still reporting some armed robberies, outside the Near South neighborhood. Just not the suspect description.

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So, 12 hours after I posted this, the LJS finally gets around to reporting it. Amazing how a little pressure can get a newspaper to act like a newspaper.

There is an interesting piece in the London Times this morning that every fan of single-payer and other government-run health insurance schemes should read.

It is about a new drug called tocilizumab which is used to treat systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis. sJIA affects children from about the age of 18 months to 2 years old, resulting in intense joint pain and disability. According to Dr. Eileen Baildam, a pediatric rheumatologist...

At its worst it can affect every joint in the body and can leave some little children screaming in pain if you even touch a joint. Some cannot walk, others walk with a very stiff gait. It is a truly horrible condition.

The alternative treatment, methotrexate, has serious side effects, incuding teratogenicity, and is not as effective. Tocilizumab is a monoclonal antibody and is therefore extremely expensive. It costs about $15,000 a year to treat a 70 kg person (much less for a small child). It is administered intravenously only once a month. It has a very high success rate (71% of children had at least 70% remediation of their condition).

Unfortunately, this new wonder drug will not be approved by the NHS's NICE panel, because under the panel's inhuman calculus, it costs $32,500 per 'quality adjusted life year', and is thus above their threshold. So the 2500 kids in the United Kingdom with the 'truly horrible condition' will either have to have their parents pony up individually for the drug, or suck it up.

As I'm sure you know, NICE is a model for ObamaCare's Independent Payment Advisory Board , which under PPACA will approve treatments that can be paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.

Your daily dollop of anti-scientific lunacy comes to you today from the Lincoln Journal Star, carrying a column by one Lewis W. Diuguid, who, after he blames every extreme weather event he can think of this year on global warming, proceeds to falsely claim the ozone hole is growing (the best evidence is it's shrinking), and that the intensity of solar radiation is increasing, causing an increase in skin cancer (bullshit). He obviously doesn't know the difference between ozone depletion and anthropogenic global warming.

He proffers a Luddite solution; shut down all that nasty clanking machinery on Sunday. Yep, planes trains and automobiles, power plants (sorry, hospitals!), cars, TV, radios and computers.

Diuguid doesn't say how he'll enforce his 'energy free day', but you know that the only way it could be achieved is government coercion. It's significant he chose Sunday. Environmentalism is now a secular religion, an atavistic form of earth worship. Very little of it has any basis in science. It's a substitute for Christianity and the other theistic superstitions, and, in fact, a reversion from a personal Deity to a crude, superstititious adoration of 'Nature'.

...meanwhile, Britain's state-run health service, the NHS, has come up with a new way to cut costs. It seems that depriving the cancer-stricken of state of the art drugs, starving the elderly, and forcing 1/3 of all pregnant women to give birth at home hasn't saved the gummint enough money, so they are now going to confront their victims, er, I mean patients, with a 'care footprint', 'to convince them to make better use of limited NHS resources'.

The hope is, when people find how exactly much treating their suffering costs the state, they'll do the decent thing and suck it up.

Welcome to your future, America, courtesy of Senator Ben Nelson and the Democrat Party.

The London Times had an interesting piece on the poor unfortunates driven by a life of deprivation and oppression to crimes against the Man in the London riots last week

• Chelsea Ives, "Olympic ambassador" and "talented sportswoman", charged with violent disorder, two counts of burglary and throwing bricks at a police car (surprised she got close enough before they ran away).
• A 17 year old ballerina, who cannot be named, charged with stealing two big screen TVs.
• Marouane Rouhl, a second year law student, accused of being part of a gang that ransacked cafés and restaurants, with knives and lighter fuel.
• Saffron Armstrong, studying accounting and finance, and Kairo Lawson, a civil engineering student, charged with affray (lovely word).
• Gassam Ojey, a real estate agent, ditto.
  
• David O Neill, chef, hoping to open his own restaurant, threw a brick at police.
• Shereka Leigh, 22 and a mommy, caught trying on shoes in a looted store.
• ...and we can't forget Laura Johnson, 19, daughter of a millionaire, getaway driver for a merry band that made off with TVs, cellphones, cigarettes and alcohol worth $7,000. Her lawyer says she was just naive.

I wonder would our own home-grown flash mobs show a similar profile?

The exquisitely politically correct Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has finally gotten around to admitting what the rest of Milwaukee, and those of us elsewhere in the country who don't depend on the mainstream media for our news, knew a couple of days ago. The mass attacks by hundreds of black youths on innocent white bystanders at the Wisconsin State Fair on thursday night were racially motivated.

Large groups of young African-Americans engaged in widespread fighting at the fair midway, and then attacked white fairgoers as they headed home for the night. More than 30 were arrested, and seven officers were injured.

In fact, the MJS has gone so far as to allow that these attacks may follow a pattern of similar but less severe attacks at Mayfair Mall in january and Riverwest last month.

Would that many violent people coincidentally show up at one place at the same time, or are mobs like this forming with the help of social networking sites? We asked that question about the melee at Mayfair in January, and now we're left to wonder again. These incidents are not isolated if they keep happening.

And the MJS has made a half-assed admission it covers up such attacks.

This newspaper normally avoids mentioning the race of people involved in crime, unless it's part of a description to help apprehend someone at large.

Hey, the Lincoln Journal Star is even more censorious! As some of you know, similar attacks have occurred in Chicago, Peoria and elsewhere.

So, kiddies, what would have been the response of the US Dept. of Justice if white mobs had randomly attacked blacks just once in one city. Would it be fair to assume Eric Holder would leap to the defense of 'my people'. Would the President convene a 'beer summit' (hey, it's Milwaukee, even) as he did on behalf of one cantankerous African American professor?

Not hardly, because the president is dancing a very delicate ballet here. He needs black voters to turn out for him, and acknowledging the serious and growing problem of racially motivated mob violence in the black community won't help with that. He also knows any increase in racial polarization will hurt the turnout of already suspicious white independents and working class democrats. And so he and his supporters in the media will sit on their hands and hope this all blows over.

They don't have that luxury any more in Milwaukee.

Plastic cowboys seem to be a fetish of the Kleeb political operation in Nebraska. Scott Kleeb (Ph.D., History, Yale) and his incarnation as the 'hawt cowboy' was a hilarious and much derided feature of his unsuccessful campaigns for 3rd Congressional District and Senate. Now Jane Kleeb, who, presumably out of personal political ambition, is trying to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline, has come up with another straw-man in a stetson. His name is Randall F, aka Randy Thompson, and we're all supposed to 'Stand with Randy'.

His bio claims Randy is a landowner in Merrick Co, NE. That's probably true; his mother died in May 2011 and likely passed on a property where she and her husband once raised livestock and wool. But Merrick County is not in the Sandhills. And Randall lives in Martell NE, on the outskirts of Lincoln, on what looks like an acreage. He has at various times claimed to be managing his family's 400 acre property in Merrick County, and that may be true, but it's not particularly feasible to manage a working livestock ranch from a house in the suburbs 100 miles away.

Randy, however, doesn't seem to mind giving a misleading impression of what he does and where his mother's farm is located

Randy Thompson, a 63-year-old landowner whose property lies in the path of Keystone XL, says pipeline workers would face difficult conditions running pipe through sandy soil saturated with water. The Sand Hills are dotted with “wet meadows” across the landscape where the aquifer’s water table is high. “If they dig a trench to bury that line, they are going to have to pump water out while they are putting pipe in,” Thompson says. “They talk about how the oil is not going to travel very far if there is a spill. But what if you get a mile-wide plume and it is stuck under your place, then I guess you are just an acceptable casualty.”

This isn't even true in Wheeler County, around the only tract of the pipeline that actually runs through the Sandhills. It's away from any surface water. Not all the Sandhills are wet meadows.

This boy's all bull. Mechanical bull.

Senate rules require a waiting period before a cloture motion can be filed. So Harry Reid introduced his doomed debt ceiling bill last night, and announced his intention to file cloture on it 1 a.m. Sunday morning.

That's OK, said Mitch McConnell, we'll waive the waiting period. Let's vote on cloture now, and move this puppy along.

Reid refused. So today the Democrats are filibustering their own bill.

President Obama and the rest of his clown car posse claim this 'crisis' is deadly serious. Only a fool would believe them. A wise man watches what they do, not what they say.

The Obama Administration's Department of Education is lowering the standard of proof for faculty accused of sexual harassment. Previously, faculty were entitled to due process and accusations needed to be proved beyond reasonable doubt; with the new rules, faculty will be judged guilty if it is found 'more likely than not' they committed harassment. Given that many of the cretins who make a living in the feminist grievance industry believe that sexual harassment accusations are never fabricated, this means that anyone accused of harassment will be automatically guilty, unless he (and it will be mostly men) has taken extraordinary steps to protect himself.

The impotent American Association of University Professors opposes the change. That, and two-fifty, will buy an accused faculty member a cup of coffee. Significantly, the American Association of University Women supports it. Evidently, misandry trumps whatever minimal attachment these harridans have to due process.

Un deux trois quatre cinq

six sept huit neuf dix onze douze

En français ça marche!

One two three four five

six seven eight nine ten...damn!

Why doesn't this work?

It's really hard to understand why conservatives keep questioning the success of the stimulus, when you see it put to such worthwhile purposes as this:

The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive. The book by Virginia education consultants could raise some eyebrows with its viewpoints. The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that “channel wealth and power to white people,” that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should “take action for social justice.” The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and “ableism,” defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities.

Question for the class: what's brown and always shovel-ready?

There are some acts so outside the pale, so alien to our civilizational norms, that they simply trump all arguments about a man's character. One is lying about your own mother's death to obtain political advantage.

The WaPo reports today that the US, after 3 years of hopenchange, is now more disliked in the Mideast than we were when George Bush was President.

Fewer than 10 percent of respondents described themselves as having a favorable view of Obama.

Obama actually has higher favorability ratings among registered Republicans in the US than among ordinary citizens of the mideast. Way to go, Bambi!

Prominent British leftist journalist Johann Hari was just suspended for extended bouts of plagiarism and outright journalistic fraud. It's about time.

My own little encounter with Hari came in August 2007, after I read a hit piece he wrote about the National Review cruise; it was published in the UK fishwrap The Independent and reprinted in The New Republic. I was interested because it mentioned Ward Connerly, whom I know personally from the fight against preferences. Hari mused about Connerly and National Review:

What must it be like to be a black man shilling for a magazine that declared at the height of the civil rights movement that black people "tend to revert to savagery", and should be given the vote only "when they stop eating each other"?

This didn't seem right, so I emailed Hari, and asked him where he got the quote. He replied it was from John Judis's biography of Buckley. I'd been meaning to read that anyway, so I bought it. It turns out Buckley was not referring to America at all, but was arguing, circa 1961, that newly independent African countries were not yet ready for democracy. Granted, it was politically incorrect (though pretty darn prescient) but it had absolutely nothing to do with the US civil rights movement. I pointed out to Hari that the quote was not just taken out of context, it was placed in an entirely misleading context. He replied:

they said these things about black people. That is true.

(apparently, all black people are the same to Mr. Hari). He refused to admit he had done anything wrong or even misleading. So it is unsurprising to me that his unethical journalism eventually led to his undoing.

Ironically, this particular piece, with the gross misrepresentation of William F. Buckley's words, was one of five submitted on Hari's behalf, for his 2008 Orwell Prize for Journalism. I have informed the Orwell Prize of our correspondence; I gather they are investigating Hari.

One final quote from Hari, defending himself against the present charges:

I did not and never have taken words from another context and twisted them to mean something different.

BWAHAHAHAHA!

The Washington Post reported today that Michelle Obama had a 1700 calorie meal at some dump called 'Shake Shack'. This apparently comprised "a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake and a Diet Coke". Supposedly, this shows Michelle Obama's anti-obesity crusade to be hypocrisy. Well, no it doesn't. It shows the WaPo to be an intrusive crowd of busybodies who should mind their own goddamn business. (Mind you, the diet coke is kinda funny, considering the rest of the meal)

This follows another nosey harpy from Rutgers University, who 'caught' Paul Ryan downing a glass of $350/bottle wine at an overpriced Washington bistro. Apparently the nasty harridan obtained the Dutch courage to intrude on Rep. Ryan's privacy by guzzling half a bottle of $80 plonk, in the course of having a meal that, judging by the menu, cost her somewhere around $200 for two people.

You know, I don't care. If Mrs. Obama wants to eat disgusting fast food by the bucketload, it's none of my business, or anyone else's. Her anti-obesity campaign stands or falls on its own merits -- just as Paul Ryan's budget cutting campaign stands or falls on its own merits. I hate fast food, my taste in wine leads me to two-buck Chuck and the bargain rack, but I think it's utterly impertinent to tell Mrs. Obama and Mr. Ryan what they should eat or how they should spend their money. Using allegations of hypocrisy as a lame attempt at an argument is the mark of someone who didn't successfully haul his/her brain out of grade-school.

MYOFB, people!

I'm a member of the NEBirds list, which is supposed to be dedicated to sightings of unusual and rare birds in Nebraska. Unfortunately, recently it's been increasingly used by activists pushing the usual extreme green agenda. When I've made substantive contributions questioning the factual accuracy of some of these posts, I've been told my comments are inappropriate to the list. This rule, of course, is applied selectively. If you want to round up people to plead for federal largesse for some environmental hobby horse, or make idiotic claims about how we're destroying the planet, you have free rein.

Today's outrage is a post urging list members to contact their representatives to try to reverse the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee's zeroing out funding for the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act. This piece of winged pork funds projects, 75% of them in foreign countries, to help conserve neotropical migrants to the United States. So basically we give grants of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations elsewhere in the Americas, ostensibly to bribe them not to kill habitat for birds that also spend some time here. Of course, like any federal program, it's being exploited mercilessly. For example, we've given several million dollars to Canada (a wealthy country) for various purposes mostly unrelated to neotropical species. One grant, funded at the height of the recession, sent $150,000 to the University of Alberta to map the distribution of boreal species - species that live in the far north. It followed up a $170,000 grant in 2007. Boreal and neotropical are almost antonyms.

Why, with massive national debt, and a huge budget deficit, are we sending over a million dollars total this year to a wealthy country, one which is in considerably better fiscal shape than we are, to map out and conserve its own bird populations? Why are we spraying millions of dollars all over the hemisphere to fund things like national parks in leftist-run Ecuador, when we can't look after our own?

Lincoln Journal Star description:

The woman described the robber as a man who appeared to be about 30 years old. He was 6 feet tall, weighed about 200 pounds and was wearing a light-colored polo shirt and a baseball cap.

KOLN-KGIN:

Police are looking for a black male, 30-years-old, 6', 200 pounds. He was wearing a baseball hat and a light colored, striped, short sleeve polo.

Look at the comments. People are starting to notice. Note: I did not post a comment.

August light crude contracts are above $94 this morning, right back where they were when Obama announced he would release 30 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We lowered our ability to withstand real crude oil supply disruptions for...nothing.

Same old same old. Another armed robbery in Near South.

Lincoln Police are looking for two men they believe robbed a Lincoln man at knife-point. Captain Chris Peterson said two mean jumped out at the victim, who was was walking near 14th and South Streets around 9pm Sunday. Peterson said the two men demanded money from the victim. When the victim refused, Peterson said the suspects threatened the victim with a knife. Peterson said the victim gave the men $20 and then was punched in the face by one of the suspects. The suspects are described as two black men, in their 20's, 6 feet tall. One had the word "Paris" tattooed on his inner right arm, the other had a teardrop tattoo under his right eye and a sleeve tattoo on his left arm. The sleeve tattooed had a flower in it, possibly a rose.

Another victim punched in the face after the robbery. Another truncated description in the Lincoln Journal Star.

But the censorship campaign has escalated. Look at this comment on the discussion forum.

‘Markstud’ and ‘Nighthawk’ seem to have read the ‘fact’ that the two perps were ‘black’ into the story.

But Markstud and Nighthawk's comments are nowhere to be seen!

The Lincoln Journal Star seems to have changed its policies, at least with respect to violent robberies in Near South. But they've done this in the past, and then gone back to suppressing parts of the perp. descriptions.

---

I just noticed this post from the Grundle King, where the LJS posted the race of a suspect. Needless to say, he was white.

Lincoln has seen a lot of downtown development recently. The much-criticized Antelope Creek project has created what could be a very nice streamside linear urban park. There's new development downtown, and a new arena going up in the Haymarket.

At the same time, the area in the immediate periphery is in serious trouble. The area east of the University City Campus (and now bordered by Antelope Creek) and west of about 33rd Street -- old-timers here call it T-town -- has always been dodgy (by Lincoln standards). The area south of the Capitol -- Near South -- used to be an OK neighborhood. The houses are older, but some are large and a few are still well-kept up. One of my junior faculty colleagues, over a decade ago now, bought a house there, but I think he saw himself as somewhat of an urban pioneer/bourgeois bohemian. That's now changing. I've been cataloging the spate of violent armed robberies, and the willful suppression by some of the local media of the details of those robberies. It's looking more decrepit, and law-abiding residents are moving out.

What I'm afraid is happening in Lincoln is what has happened in many cities; a vibrant downtown, sustained by state government, entertainment and the University, is being ringed by blighted, crime-infested areas. Antelope Creek Park, rather than being an attraction that might increase property values and stimulate development on its outer edge, is looking more and more like a moat, protecting downtown from the howling wilderness outside. To the south, there are armed holdups a few blocks from the Governor's mansion. And the city establishment is in active denial. You can't solve a problem if you refuse even to discuss the details of the problem.

Lincoln is still a compact city, and with the right combination of planning and market forces, might have pretensions to becoming another Portland, with residential areas still in walking-cycling distance of the center. But there's no point in building bike paths if gangs of 'urban youths' (coded enough for ya?) are going to mob cyclists on those paths, as recently happened on a bike path I used to cycle every day to and from work.

I routinely walk along Antelope Creek and through the Near South. I would no longer do so after dark. And I am someone who is well able to protect himself.

We have Mayor Beutler. Unfortunately, what we need is Mayor Giuliani.

Story, as usual sans descriptions of the perpetrators, in the LJS. Hasn't showed up on other websites yet.

Note that in every case, there was an assault on the victim, often after he had been robbed. This suggests gang activity.

There has been a spate of armed robberies by young black men in central Lincoln recently, and rather than alerting citizens to the fact, providing full descriptions given out by the police which might help potential victims avoid being victimized, and perhaps help even catch the criminals, the Lincoln Journal Star is actively suppressing information.

On Wednesday, there were two separate violent armed robberies within 4 blocks of each other, at the 1400 and 1800 blocks of G street (not far from the State Capitol, where they rob you in broad daylight, ha ha).

In the first robbery, a pizza delivery guy was held up at gunpoint; he was then hit with a weapon and punched in the head. The Lincoln Journal Star described them as 'teenage boys' or possibly 'young men'. It omits to mention they were both black.

In the second robbery, three young black men in their late teens or early 20s approached a man looking for a cigarette. When he said he didn't have any, they punched him , stole his cigarettes, and tried to break into his apartment. He suffered swelling bruising and a broken nose. The Lincoln Journal Star gives no description other than their gender.

The Monday night, two 'light-skinned, adult black males' held up a man at gunpoint betwen 9 and 10 p.m., robbed him of $600 and a cellphone, and struck him in the head, at 17th and H street. The Lincoln Journal Star reported the crime but not the police description.

I would not walk around the Near South neighborhood after dark without a (legal) concealed weapon. And I would actively avoid small groups of young, black men in that neighborhood. Surely the residents should be given the information to make similar informed decisions for their own personal protection?

Here's a story about a home invasion armed robbery in Lincoln.

In brief: four men force their way into an apartment in the 4200 block of F street early Monday morning. One takes out a semi-automatic handgun and orders the occupant to the floor. They kick him several times, and then take off with $3,675 worth of electronic gear (!), including 3 flat screen TVs and 2 laptops.

The vehicle leaving the apartment was described by a neighbor, and was pulled over at 27th and Randolph. Three men ran off. Lincoln police of course were unable to keep up with them, and they got away.

A very easy quiz for y'all; what detail of the men's appearance did the Lincoln Journal Star deliberately omit?

You can check your answer with a report from another news outlet that doesn't want to prevent you from knowing politically uncomfortable things about crimes in Lincoln.

Evolution, as anyone with any sophistication in biology knows, is by no means a linear, unidirectional process. Fins evolve into limbs which evolve back into flippers. And so, when the New York Times calls Obama’s Views on Gay Marriage ‘Evolving’ it's not the usual whitewashing of the President's poll-driven indecision and lack of principle. Obama has 'evolved' from a gay marriage proponent in 1996 to an opponent in 2004 - 2008 back to a proponent in time for the 2012 election (but still dithering to see if it will cost him votes and if the gay lobby can be bought out with similar bogus promises to those he's fed to Latinos). But evolution's like that. What's funnier, though, is how the Times tries to argue Obama is inherently sympathetic to the plight of gays.

[Jimmy Creech, a methodist gay marriage proponent] thought Mr. Obama, the son of an interracial couple whose marriage would have been illegal in some states, would be sympathetic.

It was illegal in all 50 states, and still would be today, because it was bigamous. But what's a minor detail like that when you're trying to defend Obama's indefensible lack of principle?

Anyone who follows the creation evolution dispute is aware that Michele Bachmann is a creationist. It's one of several reasons that, taken together, would prevent me from ever voting for her. But at the very least, one would hope she'd learn to frame her nutty views in a way that doesn't make her sound like an idiot. But no. In 2006, she said "There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design". Actually, I knew one Nobel Laureate who did, sort-of, support ID, but he's dead. There certainly aren't many. There may be none still alive.

Anyway, asked to name some Nobel Laureates who support ID, she dodged the question:

What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.

This is stupid. Not only is there no reasonable doubt about evolution, but Bachmann hasn't a clue how we teach science. The idea that we might, say, put heliocentrism and geocentrism on the table and let students decide between them is ludicrous. There isn't time to teach even all the valid science out there that students need to know. If we took every failed hypothesis and 'explored' whether it might be true, we'd be even further behind the Chinese than we are.

Bachmann must be denied the Republican nomination. Her complete ignorance of a subject clearly doesn't prevent her from trying to make public policy decisions on it. This is not a quality I want in a President.

NCSE is looking for a "Climate Change Programs and Policy Director"

For those of you who don't follow the crevo wars in the US, the NCSE has been essential to fighting creationism's incursions into public education here. They have played a leading role in most of the important legal victories won for the teaching of the scientific theory of evolution. Their narrow focus and refusal to be dragged into other controversies and issues has been a major strength. Now, evidently because there's not enough creationism to beat back, they're getting entangled in the climate change issue.

I strongly believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are making the earth warmer, although I am unsure of the extent of the effect (as is anyone who reads the literature). I tend to believe CO2 forcing is towards the low side of the IPCC estimates; and am generally skeptical of attempts to blame severe weather events, or changes in frequency or intensity of those events, on AGW. In these positions I agree with many mainstream climate scientists. However, i think this is a terrible move for NCSE.

First of all, I'm not even sure we should be teaching about climate change in K-12. Evolution is fundamental, basic to biology. Climate science is the end result of a lot of complex physics and math. Anyone who thinks he has an intuitive grasp of it is kidding himself. Teaching climate science in public school is an attempt to sway public policy. It is not science education.

Second, the 'scientific consensus', to the extent it exists in climate science, is quite narrow. The principle of AGW is pretty universally accepted. Much of the rest -- the extent to which it influences storms, shifts in climatic regions, sea level rise, etc. -- is a matter of active research and debate. Exaggerating the extent of the consensus is a mistake.

And finally, mission creep is incredibly corrosive to advocacy organizations. I left Audubon because the local chapter got into worrying about human population growth rather than watching birds. The Sierra Club long ago abandoned working on trail protection and maintenance, and is just another generic environmentalist organization. Etc.

I have in the past donated quite a lot of money to NCSE. I will not do so again.

After American Electric Power this week announced that the EPA's proposed new regulations on toxics would cost them at least 600 jobs and would result in an extra $6 billion in charges to consumers, Lisa Jackson went nuclear in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee.

She noted, for instance, that new standards for power plant emissions of mercury and other air toxics proposed in March will prevent an estimated 17,000 premature deaths, 120,000 cases of childhood asthma and 850,000 days of missed work due to illness.

Trouble is, this isn't what the EPA's own Regulatory Impact Analysis found. In fact, with regard to asthma, they found pretty much the opposite. Based on a very loose estimate from two tiny studies, on Vancouver Island and of African American kids in LA, which looked at different particle sizes and had rather disparate results, the EPA estimated that there would be a reduction of between 4,100 and 390,000 asthma exacerbations from the new rule. The most likely estimate was 120,000, but you can see the number is so imprecise as to be essentially valueless. And the estimate was not of new cases, but of exacerbations of existing asthma, meaning increased frequency of wheezing or shortness of breath (according to one study) or coughing (according to the other study).

The report explicitly stressed that they could not estimate an increase in the number of asthma cases. Their scientific advisory board said that it...

does not believe that the association between ambient air pollution, including ozone and PM, and the new onset of asthma is sufficiently strong to support inclusion of this asthma-related endpoint in the primary estimate.

Isn't lying to Congress a crime?

RWP is not a death penalty supporter. If one has limited trust in government, trusting it with the power of life and death over the citizenry seems a bit odd. But he is amused by the combination of ignorance and faux indignation over Nebraska's acquisition of sodium thiopental, the anesthetic part of the three-drug cocktail used to carry out executions.

For example, the New Nebraska Network, a low traffic website run by hyperpartisan Lincoln attorney Kyle Michaelis, calls sodium thiopental illegal in the US. It isn't. It's a Schedule III controlled substance, which has been widely used in clinical practice in the US, though it has mostly replaced by other drugs.

Moreover, holding up an execution because a drug was made in India and might not be 'safe' is idiotic. The purity of the substance could be checked by a competent chemist in 5 minutes. And let's face it, once the chemical cocktail has done its work, the 'safety' of the sodium thiopental they use is moot.

Of the 27,000 Nebraskans claimed to be eligible for federal health insurance under PPACA because of a pre-existing condition, 91 have signed up. This coverage has been claimed as one of the major justifications for passing the monstrous take-over of a large sector of the economy. Ben Nelson has cited it as a reason to fight repeal of the health care law. But apparently, almost nobody cares enough about it to sign up for it.

Earlier in the week, it was reported that few parents are putting their young adult dependent children on their health insurance.

Alec Baldwin excuses Anthony Weiner's manic sexting habit by calling him a 'modern human being'. No, Alec, he's a nutcase, and so are you. Normal grown up men don't send pictures of their genitals to total strangers in cyberspace.

The Times of London summarize a lengthy and detailed report by Britain's Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership. The report attempts to do a detailed, quantitative comparison of lifetime carbon emissions between a standard electric vehicle and a mid-sized conventional, gasoline driven car.

The conclusions...well, it's complicated. The emissions involved in producing the electric vehicle are far higher; 9 tonnes, compared with 6 tonnes for a gasoline powered VW Polo. However, during its lifecycle, the EV produces fewer emissions; if both cars end up with 150,000 km on them, the total lifetime emissions of the gasoline car are 23 tonnes, compared with 19 tonnes for the EV.

Of course, it's more complicated than that. It's not clear many electric cars will accumulate 150,000 km, given they run less than 90 km on a single charge. And if they need a single battery replacement over the lifetime (which is likely) their emissions advantage is totally wiped out. Then you have to figure in disposal costs, which are higher for EVs; and their effective 'tailpipe' emissions depend heavily on how the electricity to run them is generated. If it's in a coal fired plant, all bets are off.

In summary, this is the state of green technology at present. It's inferior in terms of usefulness, more expensive, and when the full carbon footprint over the lifecycle is carefully considered, not that much better than current technology.

Because 'S', my middle initial, really stands for 'Schadenfreude', today I tooled over to the blogsites of John Edwards' erstwhile nutroots coordinators, Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte. I wanted to see how they had reacted to the indictment of the man who first employed them and then threw them under a bus when he found out they were rabid feminist loons with a net.trail. I was not disappointed. Marcotte, seemingly having learned nothing by her betrayal by the Silky Pony, has now taken up the cause of the sadly persecuted Anthony Weiner. Yes, the eeevil right wing is attacking Weiner because he's a fighter. The intended recipient of his turgid little tweet is a victim, but she's a victim of the eeevil right wing. Not of a loon who thinks iPhone pix of your erect weenie (or some larger vegetable stand-in), inside your undies, is an appropriate thing to send to women half your age whom you've never met.

What an airhead. What airheads.

And by the way, the pic of Weiner on her webpage looks uncannily like Smiling Bob. Methinks Amanda's subconscious is a lot smarter than Amanda.

Oil pipeline fears are unfounded

A U.S. Department of Energy study released this month projected gasoline prices to stay high through the end of 2012.

The culprit? The moratorium and then delays in issuing permits for new offshore drilling will cause U.S. oil production to decline next year — just when we particularly need it. What we did last year will cost us at the pumps next year.

The oil brought to us from Canada by the Keystone XL pipeline would not reduce prices for two or three more years, when this safe source of hydrocarbons would substantially increase U.S. gasoline supplies.

Objections to the pipeline have never amounted to much and seem to stem from ideological hostility to fossil fuels rather than sincere safety concerns.

Keystone XL crosses a very short tract at the northeastern edge of the Sand Hills. A pipeline has carried Wyoming oil across a similar sized corner of the southwestern Sand Hills for the past 60 years.

If the pipe leaks, the heavy crude would not flow far. Even in the unlikely event it reached groundwater, it would flow east or northeast, away from the Ogallala Aquifer.

It’s time to stop thinking small-time and short-term. End the debate and approve Keystone XL.

...Orange Pineapple Juice, as approved by the White House.

Bitches, ask, why my britches sag/ I ask the bitches, "Why your titties saggin?"/ Put your nipple to the bottle I bust rhymes like breastses

Y'all feeling uplifted, bitches?

Monterey Harbor, CA, April 9, 2011. Don't know why it took me so long to add it to the list. But here it is, number 587.

Number 586 was a white tailed kite, seen hovering over the median of Route 101 about halfway between San Jose and Gilroy, on 4/8.

STS-134 launch from Cape Canaveral this morning.

Taken from Jetty Park, about 1 1/2 minutes after liftoff.

Nelson also gets national media attention from George Will, who names him, in a piece on Obama's National Labor Relations Board and its war on Boeing.

Will wonders where the ten Democrat senators from right-to-work states stand on NLRB attempts trying to prevent companies from moving manufacturing to right-to-work states, such as Nebraska, to avoid debilitating strikes.

This is yet another issue where the interests and the wishes of Nelson's electorate clash with those of the party to which he owes allegiance. it would be a truly lost opportunity if the GOP did not force a vote to make fence straddlers like Nelson definitively declare where their loyalties lie.

Ben Nelson's phtograph appears in the New York Times this morning, under a headline 'Republicans Optimistic About Retaking Senate'. He's probably not delighted to be Exhibit A for such an article.

Republicans say they see strong chances of victory in Montana over Mr. Tester and in Nebraska, where Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat and a former governor, has trailed potential Republican rivals in polls. “That leaves us 20 more seats to pick up one to get into the majority,” Mr. Cornyn said. But Democrats say Republicans are seriously underestimating Mr. Nelson and Mr. Tester and are overlooking the prospect that Democrats could win Republican seats.

The second alternative is probably not one that consoles Mr. Nelson.

A few weeks ago, something rather slimy and disgusting turned up in my private email in-box. It was a spam email from Senator E. Benjamin Nelson. In it Nelson was claiming credit for Mike Johanns' successful overturning of the 1099 requirement for small business. This piece of stupidity was attached to ObamaCare to help pay for its enormous cost. Nelson, in providing the 60th vote for ObamaCare, voted for the provision. Nelson was still supporting it until last July. They he did an about face and started claiming he was against it. Pretty much typical Nelson, in other words.

Anyway, I called the senator a goddamn liar, and asked him to unsubscribe me. He did not. I received more spam from his office on April 19; more on April 20; more on April 21; and more today. Each time I hit the unsubscribe button; each time I was ignored.

It appears that Nelson isn't just a liar. He isn't just a man who cost Nebraskans $150 m because of his 'bad faith' over the Boyd County nuclear waste dump. He isn't just a Judas who voted against the wishes of his constituents, for a million dollars in campaign advertising from the Democrat Party. He also has the manners and the ethics of a Nigerian email scammer.

So I am keeping a list, and for every email I get from Nelson, I am going to pledge $10 to whoever his opponent is in 2012.

In case you thought Obamolatry was dead, savor this from Kevin Drum of Mother Jones.

So what should I think about this? If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do.

Yes, this is what the self-styled 'reality-based community' has come to. I paraphrase...

What he's doing looks wrong, but he is a superior being and I am a mere mortal, so I shall substitute his judgement for my own.

Comical, certainly, but also slightly sad.

Someone asked me to comment on the FOIA request by the Wisconsin GOP chair for some of the email of William Cronon, a Wisconsin professor who wrote a NY Times column critical of Governor Scott Walker.

First of all, in 2008, I myself filed an FOIA request for emails between the University of Nebraska President and members of the Board of Regents about a resolution they (illegally) passed, condemning the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative. I wanted to find out how seriously they'd violated Nebraska's open meetings statutes. So it would be mighty hypocritical of me to claim such email should not be subject to open records laws.

Second, I have no idea if he is doing so, but hypothetically, for Cronon to be using his university email account for political activity would be foolish at best and could be felonious at worst. I have no idea what UW policy is on this, but at UN, our 'personal use' policy is fuzzy and anachronistic. We are allowed to use our university email accounts for personal business, in moderation, but are not supposed to use it for partisan activity. I think this dates back to a time when people had one email account and the university did not want people wasting time going to a separate computer and email account just to pay a bill.

For many reasons, I now do this very little. First of all, I have an iPad, a personal laptop, and a private email account. It's much easier to keep things straight if I do personal business exclusively on my private account, and I don't much trust information security at U. Nebraska anyway. This blog is of course hosted privately, via a program I bought personally, and posted via my own internet connection from my own personal computer. I would advise everyone to adopt the same policy of keeping personal business off work computers, whatever their employer's policies, and whether or not they work for a private employer or a public institution. If Cronon did violate university policies, he should have his wrist slapped and be warned to be more careful.

Is this intimidation by the state GOP? Possibly, but politicians and activists trying to intimidate academics is commonplace. Compared with someone creating a libelous blog about the professor, publicly telling lies about his teaching, or threatening to come to his office and break a baseball bat over his head, all of which I've experienced from the local left (including high-ranking present and former officials in the Nebraska Democratic Party) a request for email is pretty tame stuff. Compared with what Ann Althouse and her husband have had to put up with at the same university, it's neutered-poodle level of tameness. It's not a threat to academic freedom, as Cronon rather hysterically claims. And academic freedom isn't worth a whole lot these days anyway.

So let me summarize. Yawn!

Last night's perigeal full moon, at moonrise.

The London Times (Britain's most distinguished and generally middle-of-the-road newspaper) today took Obama's foreign policy and ripped it to shreds in crisp, British prose. Since it's behind a paywall, I reproduce it here in full.

Deserted by Obama

Lack of support for Arabic campaigners lessens America's authority and dismays its allies

On being told that Pres. Coolidge was dead, Dorothy Parker replied "how do they know?" Something similar might be said of Pres. Obama's foreign policy. If the US were to retreat into isolationism, its diplomatic weight could hardly atrophy from where it stands today. Addressing cheering crowds in Berlin in July 2008, Mr. Obama declared that the burdens of global citizenship united Europe and America. His administration is shirking those burdens, and presiding over a disturbing erosion of American influence. It is a triumph of the lack of will.

The Arab world has been roiled by political descent and violent attempts to suppress it. And when freedom was at stake, the leader of the free world was nowhere to be seen.

As Col. Muammar Gaddafi's forces bombarded Tobruk with artillery fire yesterday, the attempt to overthrow his regime appeared close to failure. Bernard Kouchner, the former French Foreign Minister, lamented the failure to impose a no fly zone over Libya and save lives. The torpor begins and ends in the White House. It is one thing to make a judgment, even mistaken, that the US should refrain from intervening. But faced with Col. Gaddafi's depredations, the rebels are entitled to solidarity and support.

The Obama administration has done worse than fail to offer that support. It has lagged world opinion. Its most vocal comment on the Libyan crisis has been the derision expressed by Robert Gates the Defense Secretary for European proposals to impose a no fly zone. Yet a broad international coalition, including not only Britain and France but also the Arab League, already exists.

In language as bloodless as its diplomatic impact is feeble, Hillary Clinton declares: "absent international authorization, the United States acting alone would be stepping into a situation the consequences of which would be unforeseeable."

This is a difficult dangerous situation, but inaction will be more deadly for the Libyans and deeply damaging for the West's reputation. If the outcome of the Arab Spring is that Mr. Mubarak goes and Col. Gaddafi stays, then the message across the world is clear: brutal repression pays. The rot is starting. Visiting Bahrain this week, Mr. Gates urged on its leaders far-reaching steps to political reform. They promptly ignored him and invited Saudi Arabia to send troops instead.

There are many possible courses of action. An emergency summit in, say, Paris between the heads of state of the Arab League, the Europeans in the US could show a determination to remove Col. Gaddafi, by means of a no fly zone, and a willingness to shoot down his planes and arm the rebels.

For all the promise that Mr. Obama's presidency offered, his insouciance about America's international responsibilities is no aberration. Before he became a presidential candidate, he showed scant interest in European opinion except as a cipher for his opposition to the policies of President Bush. His indifference to protests in Iran against a patently fraudulent presidential election in 2009 gave an ominous sign of the cast of his diplomacy.

The trans-Atlantic alliance is founded on shared values rather than personalities. It will survive Mr. Obama's feckless disregard for America's reputation among its allies and admirers. There will be consequences nonetheless. These will be measured in the diminution of the confidence of campaigners for liberty in autocratic states, and of the cohesion of relations between the US and Europe.

David Cameron is said to be frustrated at working with Mr. Obama. The US may have complaints about special relationship from its side, such as the UK's willingness to look for the door in Afghanistan. But as seen from London, and even more keenly from Benghazi to Bahrain, Mr. Obama is proving to be a brutal disappointment.

The DN screwed up my column. It's nothing without the graphics.

Two of the three people who read my column last month thought it too whiny. “So UNL wants you to prove you’re married to your wife and father to your son. Boo hoo! Man up, get the paperwork filed, and stop boring us. Unless that is, you have something to hide…”

It’s time to come clean. Exhibit A is above, and as they say in Germany (when they’re reading John Grisham aloud), res ipsa loquitur. I’ll take a few questions…

Q: You can’t seriously expect us to believe such a story. How did this happen?

A: Sometimes, when a man and a woman develop special feelings for each other…

Q: No, no, how did THIS happen?

A: Well, I think Madonna and I were both at a low point in our lives. She worried she would never be taken seriously as an artist, and a student evaluation had said some very cruel things about my flannel shirts. So, you have two desperate, lonely people, and 9 months later, out pops little Justin.

We knew we could never properly care for him. She had to go on tour, and I had a grant proposal to finish, so we gave him to a nice Canadian couple to look after.

Q: So why are you claiming him on your UNL health insurance?

A: Do you know what the medical system’s like up there? You have to wait two years for a tonsil examination! I though it was the least I could do as a father.

Q: Did you really think nobody would find out?

A: Justin and his mother each have secret clauses in their contracts guaranteeing they will never be played or mentioned on Froggy 98, so we knew the UNL Benefits Office wouldn’t recognize the names. But when the audit was announced, the gig was up (a showbiz phrase I learned from Justin). Auditors are notoriously hipsters, and would almost certainly have a Justin Bieber dartboard in their cubicles.

Q: But, but…the birthdate means he’s 25. How come everyone thinks he’s a teenager?

A: Two words: drugs, and surgery. Thank God we have health insurance. Keeping Justin looking seventeen costs the Nebraska taxpayer almost $2 million a year. But don’t worry; I have the low deductible plan. It’s hardly costing me a thing!

Q: (from Fox News) So you’re telling me UNL asks for more verification for health insurance eligibility than we require when we elect a President of the United States?

A: You have to keep these things in proportion. If we elect, hypothetically speaking of course, a Kenyan-born socialist with no executive experience and few leadership skills President, so what? There will be another election in four years. Whereas if the UNL insurance pool shells out $50 to LincCare for a strep. throat test, that money’s gone for ever!

Q: (from MSNBC) Are you a birther? You sound like a birther!

A: No...NO! I believe and confess that Our President was conceived by a teenage woman named Stanley after a visitation by an alien economics graduate student, and born in Honolulu, in a manger. Wait, some of that may not be quite right…

Q: (from the DN) I’ve been trying to convince Reese Witherspoon we’re husband and wife, but since she took out that restraining order, I can’t even email her. Could you get us a marriage license?

A: Text me and I can work something up.

In any case, Justin has some more very expensive work scheduled, and we’re just delighted he’s covered until next March 1. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to be with my son…

Remember 'soft power'? This was how the Obama administation was going to repair the US's supposedly diminished international standing. Through a web of international alliances and friendships, deftly woven by the big momma spider herself, Hillary Clinton, we were going to bring about international consensus and solve pesky problems like Iran and North Korea. Better yet, the world would wuv us again. America would be a superpower not because people feared us, but because we are so gosh darn charming and Mr. Obama makes such eloquent speeches. Or something.

Well, guess what? This morning, the first two real google references I found to 'soft power' were an article headlined 'The Decline of America's Soft Power', and an interesting February article about Said Gaddhafi, celebrating soft power as a step on the route to 'collective decision making'. And well he should celebrate. Soft power has proven to be as much an oxymoron as a soft erection, and every bit as useful. But it has been good for Mr Gaddhafi's father, the Colonel, as he ruthlessly stamps out the once-hopeful looking rebellion while Zero in the White House dithers, and wonders why, with all that bowing and scraping and those mistranslated 'Reset' buttons, Russia and China still relentlessly vote their national insterests and block any action by the UN Security Council.

'Zero' was what my right-wing friends were calling him in 2008, parodying the 'O' based iconography. And indeed, he has been a black hole, sucking the life out of international democracy and civilization. He has been a friend only to autocrats. Gaddhafi called him his 'brother', and truly Obama has shown filial restraint when it comes to curbing the Colonel. He has been less than zero, worse than useless, on the international stage. He has actively encouraged rebellions in first Iran and now Libya without the faintest intention of backing his teleprompter-rhetoric with American muscle. The West has waited in vain for American leadership. As I noted already, the Times of London a month ago was looking wistfully back four years, to when an American president could be counted on to act decisively, whether or not the world always approved of his actions. Because foreign policy is like driving. The worst drivers are those who are indecisive.

And all of this was predictable. The endless dithering about the Afghan surge, the rudderless Iran policy, the total failure of leadership on multiple occasions in the present Middle-East crisis; all of these reflect a man whose tenure in the Illinois Senate was distinguished principally by the number of times he voted 'present'. Those of us who held our noses and voted for John McCain knew that the only thing scarier than Obama's lack of a record was the meager record he had. Obama seems determined to act as Teddy Rossevelt's antithesis; he speaks loudly and carries an overcooked noodle.

The blood of dead Iranian and Libyan rebels is on the hands of those of you who voted for this cipher, as well as the 'intellectuals' worldwide who abandoned reason, gave themselves over to the emotion of the mob, and jumped on the bandwagon. The Economist, once a sane and rational voice of classical liberalism, endorsed Obama. It has been awfully quiet recently. What's even scarier is the prospect that China might learn from Obama's congenital paralysis, and seize the opportunity for an international demarche before the 2012 election.

So, if you voted for Obama, please take a lesson from experience. You shouldn't be helping to elect the leader of the free world until you acquire the mental wherewithal to make rational choices. Sit the 2012 election out. And if you endorsed Obama, do us all a favor, and STFU for the next two years.

Thanks.

As Roger Pielke Jr. and many others have noted, up-and-coming conservative politician Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg was recently forced to resign as German Minister for External Affairs, after a petition campaign by 50,000 doctoral students. Guttenberg's doctoral thesis, it appears, was heavily plagiarized. Fair enough; plagiarism is a serious issue.

The students' work is only beginning, however. I notice the following streets and byways in major German cities are named after a man whose doctoral thesis was more heavily plagiarized than zu Guttenberg's.

• Martin-Luther-King-Straße, Bonn, Deutschland
• Martin-Luther-King-Straße, Hanau, Deutschland
• Martin-Luther-King-Weg, Münster, Deutschland
• Martin-Luther-King-Weg, Berlin, Deutschland
• Martin-Luther-King-Weg, München, Deutschland
• Martin-Luther-King-Platz, Hamburg, Deutschland

An die Arbeit, Studenten!

I'd just like it on the record that if defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting causes that weird little freak to die a slow, horrible death from starvation, then I'm even more for it than I was already.

The Journal Star has an article today about the Platte Pipeline, which has carried crude oil across Nebraska for the last 60 years without a substantial spill or incident within our state. They asked MTV blow-in and Keystone XL pipeline opponent Jane Kleeb about it.

Jane Kleeb of Hastings, one of the leaders of groups that oppose TransCanada's route through the Sandhills, doesn't think the Platte Pipeline route farther south makes for fair comparison on the risk posed to drinking water. One reason is that Sandhills soils typically are much more porous and vulnerable to groundwater contamination than those farther south. "The Nebraska Sandhills simply doesn't have this type of pipeline out there," Kleeb said, "and we think that's for a reason."

Jane should learn a little more about Nebraska geography, if she's planning to continue to inflict her left-wing viewpoints on the rest of us. The Sandhills are not located entirely north of the Platte/I-80. There's a nice swatch of them in south Lincoln County, and the Platte pipeline (whose corridor now also carries the REX natural gas pipeline) crosses them.

My latest column appears in tomorrow's DN. I think it's mildly amusing, and I get in some more cheap shots at the University of Colorado @ Boulder. Enjoy!

...and a thousand words from Mark Steyn are worth a million from your standard drooling liberal media idiot. The eloquent pictures are photographs of the graduating class of Cairo University in 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. You can click on the pictures to enlarge. As Steyn notes....

The young women of the Fifties and Seventies are little different from their counterparts at Brown or Brandeis. The 2004 group shot shows a wholly transformed culture: True, it's more "modern" than Take Your Child Bride To Work Day in Kandahar, but that's about it.

The class of 2004 looks, well, not exactly secular. Look at those headscarves. And these are the most educated members of the society.

Our media assure us Egypt is westernized, and it won't go the way of Iran. I say, keep hoping. But in the meantime, could we just learn a teeny bit from history, by shipping all classified materials out of the Cairo embassy via diplomatic bag, removing non-essential staff, and maybe replacing them with a couple of platoons of Marines? True, the Tehran embassy siege finished Jimmy Carter off, and that was good, but I like to think we can handle the eviction of Jimmy Carter II without another international humiliation.

Lisa Jackson, EPA administrator, yesterday claimed that contaminated water supplies cause autism...perhaps if they're contaminated by vaccines?

Our science may be good, but I don’t know how you price the ability to try to forestall a child who may not get autism if they’re not exposed to contaminated water.

Her testimony is on video here. Start at 1:22:45.

Weather in Sprague for January:

• Average temperature 20.7 F (1.7 F below normal)
• High temperature 50.7 F (Jan 28th 4 p.m.)
• Low temperature -10.9 F (Jan 13th 5 a.m.)

Precipitation 0.4 in (but this is low, because precipitation from yesterday is sitting frozen in the top of the gauge. According to the Journal-Star, this was the 5th snowiest January on record.)

FWIW, the mega-blizzard mostly missed us. We got maybe 4 inches of wind-blown snow, and it's colder than a witch's tits, but the big storm went south of us.

The envelope please!

And the award goes to...Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (and graduate faculty member at the the University of Colorado) who submitted a heavily plagiarized paper to the American Meteorological Society annual conference, and then, when caught red handed, withdrew it and rewrote it.
This would ordinarily be grounds for dismissal. Far less serious plagiarism got Ward Churchill fired from the same institution at which Trenberth occupies a graduate faculty position. But Trenberth, being a Famous Climate Scientist, won't be touched.

---

Teddy W. has contacted Trenberth and U. Colorado, and established that Trenberth is no longer associated with the university. This has no relevance to his plagiarism, but it does, presumably, relieve U. Colorado of the necessity of taking any action against him for it.

Thanks to Ted for the correction

Precession of the equinoxes discovered by Aristarchus of Samos: 280 BC (or maybe by Hipparchus 100 years later)

Story picked up by CBS News: 2011 AD

A quite shocking paper in Nature has confirmed what has been widely suspected for at least ten years; the use of flipper bands to track King Penguins seriously harms their survival chances. One of the reasons flipper banding has been so prevalent is because of the substantial funding for studying the effect of climate change on bird populations. But, in fact, most of this research may in fact now be compromised.

Thus, our decade-long monitoring demonstrates the detrimental effect of flipper banding and its interaction with climate on the major life-history traits of king penguins (Fig. 3). The effects of extensive banding schemes on penguin populations can on ethical grounds no longer be neglected, and studies considering population trajectories with regard to climate change seriously need to reconsider the biases inherent in studies using flipper-banded birds.

So, of course, we can now blame AGW for the increase in penguin mortality, because AGW has increased the amount of funding for scientific studies that kill the penguins they are studying!

So far in 2011, our low temperature has been -6.4 F (~7 a.m. 1/13/2011) which would place us squarely in USDA zone 6.

Weather in Sprague in December was entirely typical as far as temperature goes, but very low in precipitation.

• Average temperature 26.6 F (normal for Lincoln 26.5 F)
• High temperature 60.0 F (Dec 30th)
• Low temperature 5.2 F (Dec 12th)
• Precipitation 0.05 in (normal for Lincoln 0.86 in)

Two days after 9/11, I attended a memorial service led by Chancellor Harvey Perlman. As I recall it, it was a solemn, dignified affair, at which were played a couple of patriotic hymns. The chancellor and possibly some other dignitaries gave sober but uplifting addresses. It was everything a memorial service should be; it properly remembered the dead, while consoling the living.

I can't help but contrast it with yesterday's disgrace at the University of Arizona, with its pep-rally-like, boosterish speeches from University of Arizona administrators, cheering, whooping and hollering from the student audience, and even partisan booing of the Governor. Clearly, neither the administrators nor the attending students of U of A know how grown-ups are supposed to behave. The President, to his credit, gave a good and entirely appropriate address; I could only wish he had asked the attendees to remember they were at a memorial service, not a circus. But that would have been difficult to pull off properly.

So, after criticizing the Chancellor two days ago, let me just say I'm thankful to be at an institution where the leadership and the students know how to carry themselves with a little dignity and gravitas, and reserve the cheering and hollering for sporting events.

Dear Harvey:

I'm sitting here, gazing out over the four, maybe five inches of snow covering our front yard, and the sun filtering through the clouds, with nary a snowflake in the air, and I just found out you cancelled classes again tomorrow. Personally, I think it was foolish to cancel class today. We had maybe an inch and a half of snow yesterday, and around three inches overnight. Even though my driveway is nearly a quarter mile long and my snow plow is down, I managed to shovel it the old fashioned way this morning, well in time to get in for class, except there was no class. I haven't been in to Lincoln, but I expect even mayoral incompetent Chris Beutler and his city-union-crony-administration managed to get the major streets cleared after such a trivial amount of snow. I suppose it's not completely insane that, out of an overabundance of caution, you cancelled school today, even though four or five inches of snow is pretty darn routine, because a small minority of our students might come from Central Nebraska where they had a bit more snow. No biggie; we lost a lecture, but I got plenty of work done at home, thanks to the internet.

But now I just found out you cancelled class tomorrow. Seriously, WTF? There is no snow anywhere between here and the Iowa border, and the Weather Channel seems to be predicting no more than a shower overnight. Looking at the clear radar between here and the Rockies, and the total absence of anything looking like a storm on the barometer, I doubt we'll get more than a flurry between now and Tuesday morning.

I know you've never actually taught a real undergraduate class at UNL, but please be aware that canceling Monday and Tuesday classes, in a course with recitations, basically wipes out recitations for the whole week. It substantially shortens the semester. Are we now making a policy of closing school 24 hours out on a slight chance of frozen precipitation? Because if so, why don't we just start the spring semester on April 15, and eliminate all chance a student might get concussion from being hit by a stray snowflake?

(Seriously, why do I care? It's another day off, and a full week off for my TA! And why should I care the students get the chance to learn something, when no one else seems to?)

Bold Nebraska, ex-MTV micro-celeb Jane Kleeb's political organ, was out in force -- well, as much force as they can muster -- at the State Capitol on Wednesday, protesting the TransCanada oil pipeline that will cross a very tiny corner of the Nebraska Sandhills. It is not recorded how Jane Kleeb traveled to Lincoln from her home 100 miles away in Hastings, but presumably it was either by bike or horse-and-buggy. Most amusing, however, were the props Ms. Kleeb, local femino-pop-psycho-victimologist Mary Pipher, et al. handed out to state senators.

Leaving aside that these plush toys didn't in the least look like the state bird, the (Western) Meadowlark, they purported to be, it is amusing to reflect on the composition of the toys. A little enquiry reveals they are made of synthetic plush, a.k.a 'polyester', a.k.a. polyethylene terephthalate, a.k.a. PET; and filled with polyethylene beads. Both PET and polyethylene are petrochemicals; they are produced essentially 100% from petroleum. Yep, these little plush meadowlark-imposters had more oil in them than a pelican fishing above the Deepwater Horizon. How ironic that to protest the transport of crude oil across Nebraska, Pipher/Kleeb handed out toys made entirely from crude oil!

This exemplifies the airhead quality of so much contemporary environmentalism. They don't know squat about nature OR the economy. They haven't a clue about how most of the products they use come into being. They can deplore the use of oil, without having the remotest notion of how much of the stuff they use every day comes from oil. The gasoline that drives their giant SUVs is only the beginning.

H/T The Invaluable Street Sweeper.

According to a front page article in today's New York Times...

The Obama administration is expressing alarm over reports that thousands of political separatists and captured Taliban insurgents have disappeared into the hands of Pakistan’s police and security forces, and that some may have been tortured or killed.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! The rich incoherent looniness of Obama's SW Asian policy never fails to disappoint. So we launch drone attacks against Pakistan that kill scores, maybe hundreds of Taliban, and hundreds of civilian bystanders as 'collateral damage', but at the same time criticize Pakistan for rounding up and killing the very same people?

These people have risen beyond their competence. Obama in particular is floundering. Do we want the Taliban killed by extrajudicial means, at considerable risk to civilians, or not? Bush at least could give a single coherent answer to that question.

In the New York Times, December 12 (sorry, didn't spot it until a follow-up letter appeared). Ken Salazar, who has already misrepresented the expressed opinion of NAE drilling experts in seeking to impose a moratorium on deep-water drilling, has now finalized the regulations on repatriation of Indian remains and artifacts to insist that materials with no connection to any extant tribe be given to some easily available group, whether they have a connection or not. These rules have been heavily criticized by the relevant scientific societies; Salazar simply ignored the criticism. This will effectively finish off what's left of pre-Columbian archaeology in the US, but at the same time make sure that there are no more pesky discoveries, such as that Kennewick Man wasn't actually an American Indian.

The new federal regulations undermine this progress. In an effort to repatriate the 124,000 sets of remains that cannot be affiliated with recognized tribes using current evidence, they ignore the importance of tribal connections to ancient remains — that essential common value that drew the tribes and the scientists together. Institutions must now offer to repatriate remains to tribes that have no demonstrable cultural affiliation with them. In some situations, under the new rules, institutions are directed to simply “transfer control of culturally unidentifiable human remains to other Indian tribes” or, in clear violation of the law, “to an Indian group that is not federally recognized.” If all else fails, institutions can simply re-inter the unidentifiable remains near where they were found. The main objective, it seems, is to get rid of the remains however possible, as quickly as possible. The regulations clearly undermine the law’s compromise, and Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, should rescind them.

Lat year about this time I posted amazement that Dublin, Ireland had gotten down to 17 F. Last night it was 12 F. This has been an utterly miserable month for northwestern Europe, with frigid temperatures, intermittent snowstorms, blocked transport and closed airports. It's a result of an unusual negative value of the Arctic oscillation, but it's the second unusual winter in a row. I vaguely remember weather like this in the early 1960s, but it has to be a shock to anyone under 50.

Climate is an integral over weather. Blips get smoothed out. Long repeated cold spells, not so much.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the continued unusually low level of sunspot activity.

I am not ordinarily particularly sympathetic to claims of religious discrimination. Christians in this country are not in general a persecuted group. They do have to put up with an occasional insult or misguided abridgment of their freedom, but then, so does almost everybody. But a case that has recently gotten quite a bit of national attention is, in my opinion, a valid and quite egregious case of anti-Christian bias in employment, and it involves an astronomer who until recently worked at UNL, Martin Gaskell.

Many of the details of the case have been published elsewhere, so here's a summary. Gaskell applied for the post of Observatory Director at the University of Kentucky. He had previously overseen the construction of the student observatory here at UNL. He has a reputation as a first-rate teacher, and oversaw a truly impressive undergraduate research effort here at UNL, which drew a considerable number of students into doctoral programs and careers in astronomy. He conducted numerous annual public outreach events, some of which I attended; I particularly remember watching a transit of Mercury with Martin. He also supervised my daughter in undergraduate research; she is now completing a doctorate at Cornell. He also has a truly impressive research record in observational astrophysics, and his own independent research funding. The chair of the University of Kentucky search committee said he was the strongest candidate;

He has already done everything we could possibly want the observatory director to do.

The committee also ranked him as the most qualified. Many of his competitors did not even have doctorates.

So slam dunk, right? Not quite. Some members of the search committee, and one outsider who shouldn't even have been privy to the discussion, got word that Martin was Christian and had some unorthodox views on evolution. I should emphasize that Martin fully accepts the standard model of the age of the universe (in fact, he's contributed to its measurement) and is not a creationist in the usual sense. Nor is there any evidence he has used his classes to argue against evolution; there were no complaints in teaching evaluations at UNL that he was forcing his religion on anyone. Martin's beliefs became a major issue for the committee, with outlandish predictions of future newspaper headlines such as "UK hires creationist to head student observatory" (Of course, there were no such headlines here in Lincoln; few people were even aware of Martin's position on evolution, which IMO is not at all clear anyway).

Eventually, Kentucky made an offer to a far less qualified candidate, one who lacks even a Ph.D., has no experience with observatories or undergraduate research or outreach, and only part time instructor experience. This was against the advice of the department chairman, who advised them to "forget about it and pick the best Director you can find", and over the protests of the search committee chair, who wrote:

In the end, however, the real reason why we will not offer him the job is because of his religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy or to any of the duties specified for the position... If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simpler. We could easily choose another candidate, and could content ourselves with the idea that Martin's religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, that is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we have excluded Martin on any basis other than religious.

Let me make my position clear. I have initiated inquiries at UNL about whether we are accepting transfer credit from colleges that teach creationism. I would fight vigorously against hiring as a faculty member someone who publicly denied the validity of the Theory of Evolution as settled science, in any field where there was a real need to teach and use evolutionary principles. That would include biology and some areas of chemistry, as well as geology. However, that is not the case here. The settled science in Martin's field is science he fully accepts (heck, he's helped make it settled science). Despite what are clearly post-hoc attempts to change the requirements of the position, Martin's views on evolution have no relevance to the job for which he applied. A commitment to freedom of thought and conscience requires that we be very careful to limit restrictions on personal beliefs, be they religious or otherwise, to matters that are clearly and directly relevant to the job requirments. This was anything but the case at the University of Kentucky.

I hope he takes them to the cleaners in court. And I expect he will.

I have a confession. I am, I have been informed, a subject of Her Britannic Majesty. My mother, who would not have lied about such a thing, told me I was born on a gurney hastily transporting her between a bathtub and a delivery room at Salford General Hospital, in Greater Manchester. I have done my best to cure myself of this unfortunate condition by becoming a citizen of no fewer than two constitutional republics (both insolvent, but that's another story). But as a fellow sufferer once pointed out to me, one doesn't get to opt out of being one of Her Majesty's subjects. That's Liz's call, and so far I have not received a missive from the Palace saying "sod off, you ungrateful commoner. I don't want you any more."

As revenge for this state of involuntary subjection, I feel entitled to be as rude as I can about the small northwest European anachronism named the United Kingdom. And by golly, have things been ridiculous over there this week! A mob of spoiled upper middle class prats, euphemistically termed 'students', have been running rampant about London, in protest at being asked to pay about half the cost of their own university education.

Poster child for the yobs is one Charlie Gilmour, adopted son of slightly talented Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, of "we don't need no education" fame. Dad is reputed worth over $100 m, collected $5 a time from stoners worldwide, and so Boy Charlie was packed off, with a couple of freshly bought Savile Row suits, to Cambridge this year. Various cameras -- you can't toss a brick in London without hitting a surveillance camera, and a lot of them have been hit by bricks this week -- pictured Charlie frolicking with rioters surrounding the Royal Car, and swinging from a Union Jack on the Cenotaph, a war memorial.

Our Bright Young Thing, described by a date as 'beautiful, like a porcelain doll' (good grief, if someone said that about me, I'd feel compelled to join the Marines) is supposedly reading History at Cambridge, yet said he didn't know what it was he was swinging off. I would have thought the words 'The Glorious Dead' engraved on the face of the monument might have been a big clue, but I suppose he's reading History, not English. As to why he's protesting fees that amount, per year, to around 1/10,000th of Dad's wealth, I doubt he himself has thought that far. Cambridge says he's not subject to discipline because it's out of term and he was off-campus. As it happens, British universities are almost always out of term; Michaelmas term is typically eight weeks long.

Newspaper accounts seem to indicate that the rioting students have been joined by no small number of faculty, who also have plenty of time on their hands. Meanwhile, the generally totalitarian disposition of British university faculty was exemplified elsewhere yesterday by its two recent Nobel prize winners for physics, who criticized the Nobel Committee for awarding the peace prize to Liu Xiaobo. The two profs, who are, to be fair, expatriate Russians, said they though human rights in China are pretty darn OK. They may possibly be comparing them with Mother Russia, and may also still resent the failure to award the prize to Stalin.

It's of minor interest, but the Prince of Wales and his tart, on the way home from a bit of fun at the London Palladium, were surrounded the mob, who smashed the windows of the Royal Car. One of the lice-infested vermin actually had the effrontery to poke poor Dutchess Double-Barreled in the ribs with a stick. She is quoted as saying 'There's a first time for everything'. Evidently reports of Charlie's poor aim have been exaggerated. Amazingly, the Prince's security detail were armed, but it being Britain, nobody had explained to them what guns are for.

Much of this is gleaned from the Times, which is behind a paywall, so you peasants will have to take my word for it all. The iPad, edition, by the way, is $16 a month. I think I'll riot.

...or 100% of columnists are idiots? Well, maybe not 100%. But you have to wonder when two columnists, within a couple of days, cite a self-selected poll of AAAS members to claim that 6% of scientists are Republicans, apparently unaware that only a tiny and unrepresentative fraction of scientists belong to the AAAS.

And then we have all sorts of wild speculations about why scientists are almost never Republicans, ending with a bit of liberal auto-back-patting.

Sigh! I wonder is this all self-esteem building after last month's election? "Well sure, the majority hate us, but the brainiacs don't!"

Contrary to what you've been told by the very successful leftist propaganda machine, in its total tax burden, the US already has the most progressive tax system in the developed world. As you get richer in the US, you pay a higher percentage of income in total tax. We are the exception, rather than the rule. A graph tells the story.

The graph shows the percentage of income paid in total tax, as a function of income decile. The poorest are on the left.

Paul Krugman, February 3, 2009:

The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode.

So the Irish Government took the advice of the Nobel-prize winning economist, and agreed to backstop the debt of its largest banks.

Paul Krugman, November 25, 2010:

Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

Jonathan Swift might, were he alive, have quite a bit to say about the 20:20 hindsight of Professor Krugman.

Mickey Kaus details how the Obama administration's 'hands-off' administration of GM has been anything but hands-off.

If you think some firms really are "too big to fail," then at least some degree of unseemly state-corporate comingling and influencing seems inevitable when they do fail (and need bailing). According to Alter, Obama recognized that this was uncharted territory and tasked subordinates with drawing up some "rules of the road" to govern these situations. The result was a report written by Lawrence Summers's deputy Diana Farrell, arguing (in Alter's words) that "when new management is in place, the government's role would be hands-off." The trouble is that Obama announced this rule, but then his government made "reluctant" exceptions pretty much whenever it felt strongly enough. Then the exceptions were covered up.

Matt Bai discusses how the TSA fracas is symptomatic of an essential problem of the Obama Administration's philosophy.

Richard Epstein discusses how the Left's governing philosophy -- government by waiver -- gives it untrammeled power and does an end-run around the rule of law. I've often observed that if you ban everything and then choose what to prosecute, you can rule as arbitrarily as a medieval monarch.

...would the Lincoln Journal Star interview Paul Olson, far-left Nebraskans for Peace president, about football coach Bo Pelini? I mean I can see the LJS looking for an opinion from Olson on topics like whether the US should have surrendered to Japan in World War II, whether we should unilaterally disarm and adopt Sharia law, or whether George Bush should be tried for war crimes. If you want an oddball opinion that differs from 95% of all Nebraskans and 100% of common-sense, Olson is your man. But apparently the retired English professor, probably after first having been informed by the reporter who Bo Pelini is, thinks Pelini was 'very agitated' on Saturday. No, really? What was your first clue? I was pretty darn agitated myself, particularly after that bogus roughing-the-passer call.

(What is the going rate for bribing a college football umpire these days? Probably 5 bucks and a hug from a cheerleader.)

But if NfP starts campaigning for anger control in football coaches, at least it will keep them from bleating on about the US culpability For Everything Wrong In The Entire World, their usual schtick. So go for it Paul!

...I'd like to save you Democrats some time on Tuesday, by letting you know that according to Ireland's most distinguished bookmaker (we call them Turf Accountants), the GOP have already won control of the House.

So go ahead and spend a few more minutes in bed, before you head down to the Welfare Office. There's really no point in voting. You might as well keep some energy in reserve for 2012 (when you will be voting on the first Wednesday in November; mark your calendars now!)

Republicans, of course, will want to make sure the winning margin is as large as possible. Hop on the bandwagon, lads and lasses, there's room for everyone!

A commenter on the 'Juan Williams' post is 'sure I don't listen to NPR'. This is the typical mindless Leftist prejudice. My clock radio is set to NPR; I like to joke that I wake to the NPR six o clock news, and the first piece of slanted nonsense I hear gets me mad enough to get out of bed, usually by 6:15 am. I also frequent listen to it on my drive in to work, though I've been doing so less and less recently. If I liked the sort of 'analysis' they provide, I'd buy satellite TV and watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Maybe when I get senile...

Dan Schorr was a partisan flak. His high reputation among the Left dates to a malicious fabricated story he turned in about Barry Goldwater in 1964, in which he claimed Goldwater was going to Germany after the GOP convention to meet with German right-wingers and visit Berechtesgaden. Given that Goldwater had a distinguished record of service against the Axis in WWII, retiring from the Air Force as a Major General, and Schorr never heard a shot fired in anger in his life, spending the war stateside in 'Intelligence' (whose, one wonders), this was particularly snide.

Schorr's commentary on the 2000 election, in which he described as a 'coup' mounted by the Bush 'junta', gives the lie to NPR's pathetic excuse that Williams was fired for expressing opinion while working as a news analyst; Schorr was also a news analyst for NPR. NPR has never enforced the supposed rule against commentary against any news analyst commenting from the Left. Williams was quite obviously saying that his fear of Muslims in traditional garb was irrational. Of course, it is not required by the Left that one be rational; one must purge oneself of thoughtcrime.

I have no problem with anyone pledging to NPR, or NPR running their own little Air America. I do have a problem paying for it. As I see it, getting NPR off the public trough will require a two-part effort. The first is to defund CPB congressionally. The second is to cut state budgets for affiliates like Nebraska Public Radio. The second will be tougher, because NEPR is far less slanted than NPR, and has some support in the state. But the fact remains that it supports the national organization, and it soaks up considerable state taxes in catering to an elite audience (such as myself) which is well able to pay its own own leftist-slanted news (in my case, opposition research) and classical music.

Nebraska Public Radio and NET need to be forced to disaffiliate from NPR/PBS., and to devote themselves to producing non-partisan content of value to the citizenry of Nebraska, while their operation is wound up.

I did a short video interview about TATP on WBTV in Charlotte, NC yesterday. They recently had a couple of idiots make some and hurt some school kids and firefighters.

...and I hereby pledge, when the GOP takes the House in two weeks, to lobby as hard as I can to defund this ridiculous publicly-funded leftist media outlet.

Last night, NPR fired Juan Williams, for some innocuous comments about Muslims and terrorism he made on the Bill O Reilly show. A lot of people are mystified, but the real reason is obvious. Williams' sin is not what he said, but that he regularly appears on Fox, which is anathema to the Left, which seems to have collectively convinced itself, in its usual 'reality based' fashion, that the best way to persuade conservatives, moderates and independents is not to talk to them. It is retreating ever further into a closed, claustrophobic circle of like-minded blogs and news outlets, and pretending the 70% of America that disagrees with it doesn't exist. Crossing the lines to speak to the enemy, as Williams regularly does, is now tantamount to voluntary contagion.

I rarely agreed with Williams, but respected him for arguing his position with insight and reason in neutral and even hostile surroundings, and not merely on the NPR echo chamber. I'm sure he will prosper; the loss is almost entirely NPR's.

---

From the NPR Ombudsman page

Due to user volume, NPR Contact Us page is down. Please use FB/Twitter or post comments on last column.

I think NPR is discovering that when conservatives say "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", we mean it. A lot of people (including me) who routinely yell at the TV in response to Juan on Fox News Sunday are really, really pissed NPR fired him.

Wayne State University graduates a shocking 9.5% of its African American students within six years.

Looking at the details, it's clear the low graduation rate is a simple result of what happens when you institute incredibly low admissions standards in an intellectually quite respectable university. Wayne State's official ACT/SAT standards are at a 'barely breathing' level of 21/990. But in fact, Wayne State has a slew of programs admitting students at below these levels; 30% of last year's freshman class had scores below 18. Unless you're an unusual 'diamond in the rough', it is highly unlikely you can handle even the most dumbed-down college level course if you can't muster more than 18 on the ACT.

Wayne State is a poster child for what will happen if we try to implement the president's frequently-stated aspiration that everyone go to college.

Incidentally, only 43.5% of white students at Wayne graduate within 6 years, well below the public college average of 59.5%. As usual, black students are the canary in the coal mine, indicating a far more extensive problem.

Frost on the lawn in front of my raspberry patch this morning, just before dawn, out here in bucolic SW Lancaster Co., Nebraska. It's a week earlier than average. This should not be taken as evidence the earth is getting cooler; weather is not climate.

And besides, last year's first frost was two weeks early!

Since the recent incident of a suicidal gay man at Rutgers has gotten everyone's panties in a pandemonium, I thought I'd set down a few random thoughts.

First: it's nice the left is now on a privacy crusade, but it would have been nicer if they'd started thirty years ago. You can't simultaneously tell me it's OK to publicize Clarence Thomas's alleged pornographic movie rentals in a book and in the national media, and then whine when gay men's smoochies are streamed over the internet.

The left has hitherto gleefully used invasion of privacy as a political tool. They have written detailed justifications for 'outing' Republican politicians. I myself, a private citizen, have experienced their privacy-violating attentions here in Nebraska. If the left decides it was wrong to do these things, I'm listening. But until then, Mr. Clementi's suicide is a sad event made sadder because it's being exploited by political hacks.

Second: as a general rule, it is a bad idea to have sex in front of someone else's webcam, unless you are being paid for it, and particularly if having it broadcast nationally will humiliate you.

Third: as a general rule, if you share a room with someone, kicking him out of his own room for three hours late in the evening on two successive nights, so you can have sex, is an obnoxious thing to do. Get a freaking motel, or an apartment. I'd have been very pissed off myself, although my inclination would have been to refuse to be kicked out, not to webstream the action. But then, I always made sure I had a single room at college.

Fourth: good grief, this is the 21st century. Your life is not ruined because some people saw you kiss a guy. The majority of us don't give a damn, as long as you don't make us watch. A minority of us like to watch. (I'm in the majority, by the way.). If anyone tried this crap on me, my actions would be homicidal, not suicidal.

And fifth, 18 year old males are 'men', not 'boys', as the media have universally been describing Mr. Clementi. General rule: if you're old enough to be shipped to an overseas hell-hole to get blown apart fighting for your country, you're a man, not a boy. What's wrong with our society, that we encourage eight-year old girls to dress like whores, and then decline to consider fully adult human beings men and women?

On authority not granted to me by the Nebraska Civil Liberties Union, but which I'm taking anyway, I'm awarding the NCLU Free Speech Award this year to Senator Bill Avery (D, Lincoln), for his courageous defense of the free speech of a former student and Nebraska citizen, Darren Drahota.

After Mr. Drahota engaged in a spirited email correspondence with Senator Avery (the highlight was Senator Avery suggesting that Mr. Drahota go serve in Iraq, Mr. Drahota having recently returned from an 18 month tour). Senator Avery sicced the police on Mr Drahota. Drahota was convicted of 'disturbing the peace', a conviction which (thanks to the intervention of libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh) was just overturned by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

Senator Avery, of course, maintains it was not his fault Mr. Drahota was prosecuted. He merely contacted the police, filed a complaint, and provided Mr. Drahota's emails to them. In fact, in a sense, Senator Avery by his actions clarified the important legal principle that a politician can't have a citizen locked up just because the politician doesn't like what what the citizen said or how he said it. Some of us might think that that principle was already pretty darn clear, and that even a former political science professor like Senator Avery might be aware of that, but still the First Amendment can use all the reinforcement it can get. So congratulations, Senator Avery, your eminence, Sir! In your unsuccessful attempt to lock up people with opinions you dislike, you have made us all a little freer!

Arctic ice melt is done for the year; the ocean is beginning to re-freeze. The melt this year was less than 2007, the record year; it was also less than 2008; in fact, it was basically the same as last year.

Since lurker1 and I had a wager on this, and it appears I have won, he will please send a $50 check to the National Center for Science Education. This is, I hope a charity to which he can donate without violating any personal convictions.

A couple of years ago, leftist blogger PZ Myers conducted what he called The Great Desecration. He stuck a rusty nail through a consecrated Communion host, and then through a few pages from the Koran and from Dawkins' The God Delusion. He threw the result in the garbage can, and photographed it. The photo is below.

PZ said was he said trying to demonstrate that "[n]othing must be held sacred". That, or to prove he's the biggest, baddest atheist on the block. Whatever.

Above is a picture of Billy Ayers, former terrorist and later an Obama fundraiser and supporter, trampling on an American flag. The picture was published on the cover of Chicago magazine in the summer of 2001, shortly before 9/11.

What do these actions have in common? Several things. They are expression protected by the First Amendment. They offended a lot of people, desecrating things those people think are sacred. And they were not condemned by David Petraeus or Barack Obama. President Obama, in fact, attended a church whose preacher very loudly called down damnation on America. He never raised a peep.

Count me as unimpressed, therefore, by the outrage about some small town preacher planning to hold a Koran burning on 9/11. It's his first amendment right, regardless of whether some so-called liberals are willing to suspend the first amendment to stop him. Sure it will piss a lot of angry religious nuts off, but then so did PZ, and so did Piss Christ, a far more disgusting befoulment of a religious symbol whose creation and display were not only permitted but funded by the US government. Those who protested were rightly told to get over it. This is excellent advice for everyone, particularly Muslims, who clearly need some extra practice at the exercise.

In fact, I'd like to further suggest that this scheduled Koran-burning represents an opportunity for our Muslim brethren. Obama and Petraeus and thousands of other are predicting that Islam will respond with violence, clearly suggesting that Muslims cannot be trusted to treat the provocation in a thoughtful and tolerant fashion. Catholics did not storm the University of Minnesota Morris when PZ carried out his little desecration thang, and nobody expected they would; they complained to him and to his bosses, which is their right. I likewise wrote to the University of Minnesota Morris to defend PZ's right to do what he did. Christians likewise left the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art unburned after they awarded Piss Christ a prize. So now is the chance for American Muslims, and Muslims of the world, to show that their reputation for answering the smallest slight with violence is undeserved, and that they can respond to a challenge to their faith in a civilized manner.

Would I desecrate a Koran? No. While I am also an atheist, unlike, PZ, I have a mental age above 5. In my experience, you piss enough people off in life just doing the things you have to do, and you don't need to seek out new ways of causing offense. And desecration implicitly acknowledges the sacredness of objects whose sacredness I don't acknowledge anyway. I've never read the Koran and would care not in the least if it vanished from the universe tomorrow. I don't care enough about it to burn it.

"It's a free country. I wish it weren't, but it's a free country."

• Governor Deval Patrick, (D) Massachusetts.

On the bright side, he correctly used the subjunctive. H/T Darwin Central.

The fatal hostage taking at the Discovery Channel HQ today may be the work of a deranged ecoterrorist loon, but its origins are surely in the hateful rhetoric of green rabble rousers like Joe Romm ...

I want to trash them for this insanity and ignorance.

-- Joe Romm on best selling authors of Superfreakonomics, Dubner and Levitt, ...and James Hansen

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

The escalating level of rage-filled utterances and apocalyptic predictions from fringe demagogues, like the two I mention, may not be the direct cause of the incident, but they surely contributed to James Lee's breakdown.

"Hate rhetoric often leads to hate crimes, and I think that's what we're seeing now," spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said.

Oh, wait, that was about another incident. Never mind!

The British National Health Service, that exemplar of socialized health care that our newly recess-appointed Medicare czar, Donald Berwick, so idolizes is, according to the London Times yesterday, starving old people in its care.

Malnutrition costs the NHS up to 7.3 billion pounds a year in avoidable hospital stays, medication, and increased risk of infection.

Families are bringing food into hospitals and feeding their elderly relatives because the hospitals themselves won't; only 48% of NHS nurses think their hospitals do an adequate job of checking whether their older patients are underfed, while a third said they would not put their own older relatives under the care of the NHS.

So I say to my fellow geezers and soon-to-be-geezers; put on a few pounds! Fatten yourselves up, because Obamacare's on the way, and Obama's unvetted, unapproved NHS loving ghoul is already in charge of your insurance. Bon appetit!

So often these days, the American Left is deeply, madly surreal.

Item 1: The Carpenters Union have 150 pickets up and down the East Coast, protesting non-union construction sites. The picketers are not members of the carpenters' union; they are non-union minimum-wage paid protestors who earn no health insurance and no benefits. The carpenters are far too good to do their own picketing; that's why they have hired help. Maybe someone should unionize the union's non-union picketers? Then we could have a union picketers union (AFL-CIO).

Item 2: Obama's EPA just fined Tesla Motors, makers of the eponymous fully electric sports car. Their crime? Non-compliance with emissions requirements. How could a zero-emissions car not comply with emissions requirements? Because Tesla Motors didn't file the right paperwork to confirm that their electric car is actually zero-emissions. Hey, maybe it sneaks out at night and buys gas while its owners are asleep!

It's just a miracle anything at all gets built in this country.

One more reason to love Nebraska's concealed carry law.

Sgt. David Murillo stated in a report on Friday night, "On-duty officers at the fairgrounds advise there was a group of 30 to 40 individuals roaming the fairgrounds openly calling it 'beat whitey night.' "
Jammie Carroll, 36, of Polk City, was seriously injured in the 3000 block of East Grand Avenue Friday night after a group of people beat him up, causing severe injuries to his eyes, cheekbones and nose, Murillo wrote. Carroll is white, and many of the suspects are black, police said.

Of course, this simply isn't possible...

State Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, D-Des Moines, who has worked to fight gang-related violence, said he doesn't have enough information to decide if the fights were racially motivated.

Nothing to see here, move along...

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Local ABC affiliate report, including video.

A rare event. I wonder why they chose to describe this guy?

Yocum described the suspect as white, perhaps 45 to 50 years, 5-foot-8, 175 pounds, clean shaven and with bushy, salt-and-pepper hair.

Yep, it's a puzzler.

Invenergy recently announced plans to build a $448 million, 200 Megawatt wind farm in Antelope and Boone Counties. let's run the math.

A typical land-based wind farm runs, year to year, at about 30% capacity; even in Nebraska, it isn't windy all the time. So a 200 MW farm actually, on average, generates about 60 MW. Electricity in Nebraska currently retails at slightly under 6 cents/kWh to the largest industrial customers. So this wind farm will generate money for the public power district at a rate of 60,000 X $0.06 /hr, or $3,600 an hour, or $ 31.6 million/year, assuming that Public Power Districts have no expenses associated with administration, billing, etc.. So to pay off the capital cost of construction, the farm will operate approximately 125,000 hours, or 14.2 years.

Rates on 20 year AAA corporate bonds are about 3.85%. So the interest alone on a $448 million dollar loan is about $17 million a year. That leaves $14 million a year for maintenance, downtime, power distribution losses, and the NPPD markup. Return on investment has got to be close to zero, if not negative.

So how does this work? Two words: government subsidies. Even though wind power is uneconomical, it's sufficiently subsidized by tax breaks and other gummint goodies that companies like Invenergy are willing to build these massive white elephants. But don't be surprised if, once they're built, a lot of them aren't turning. Because generating electricity is not where the real money is.

The so called recovery continues to stall, as the Administration, while it explosively increases government spending, continues to stifle private investment by a morass of new regulations, hostility to business, and economic uncertainty.

With the American economic recovery hanging in the balance, private employers added 71,000 jobs in July, up from a downwardly revised 31,000 in June but well below the consensus forecast of 90,000. The unemployment rate stayed steady at 9.5 percent. Over all, the nation lost 131,000 jobs last month, but those losses came as 143,000 Census Bureau workers left their temporary posts, the Labor Department said. June’s number was revised dramatically downward to a total loss of 221,000 jobs.

Anyone else get the feeling that Michelle took this massively extravagant, politically suicidal vacation in Spain because the White House has already concluded they're looking at a single term, and might as well get as much out of it as they can? It's reminiscent of foreclosed homeowners gutting the house they formally owned.

Let's just hope they at least leave the frame intact.

Pizza delivery guy robbed, fourth such robbery since June. Lincoln Journal Star omits most of the details.

Capt. Joseph Wright said the driver, 23, was making a delivery in the area of N. 32nd and Starr streets at about 11 p.m. when he was approached by the three men. One was brandishing a knife, Wright said.

How odd that the guy who was robbed could not describe the men who robbed him! Oh wait, he did!

Officer Katie Flood says it happened around 11 p.m. Tuesday night, when a 23-year-old driver attempted to make a delivery near 32nd and Starr. Flood says the driver was approached by three men, and one of them had a knife. Flood says one man pointed the knife in the driver's face, and then pushed the driver back into his car. At that point, Flood says the suspect demanded money, and the driver emptied his pockets. The two other suspects grabbed the money and the food and ran westbound. The total loss in the robbery, which includes food and cash, is $172. Flood says the three suspects are described as black, 5'10" to 6'0" tall, 20 to 25 years of age, and all were wearing masks, jeans, and cut off t-shirts. Flood says this is the fourth pizza delivery driver robbery this year, and all of them have occurred since June 6th. However, she says, it's not clear if any of the cases are related.

Why would one buy a newspaper that edits its stories to remove information it thinks its readers shouldn't know?

In the last couple of days, I've been attacked personally by a poster on the Leavenworth Street blog, who is writing under the handle of 'Bud'. More than the usual rough-and-tumble of the internet, these posts were personally libelous and impugned my professional reputation. Some excerpts:

RWP I think it is time for you to resign as a teacher at UNL you can not be trusted to be around any one much less young people.

I don't believe in bigotry. I believe you do. I have had students( one is a doctor now) who have taken your classes tell me you are a bigot and a poor teacher who rants and raves.

RWP you right wingers make me sick. You are on the wrong and the dark side of history. I defended you when I said the person who made fun of the Irish was out of line. Has for Obama's birth. There is no legal proof his father was married when he married Obama's Mother. Just BS made up by right wing thugs like you. Just more birther crap. Has for his Mother being pregnant before they were married. So what. How many people on this blog have went through that in there family? Sara Palin's daughter comes to mind. Your values and lies, are what is wrong with America, Go back to Ireland and preach your crap to your terrorist family friends. I have talked to some of your former students. Your a terrible teacher and they believe you are racists with black students. You spout off all the time and they keep their mouths shut because they wish to pass the class.

There is other, previous hateful stuff in the same vein, but it was particularly egregious this week.

You might well say that, well, it's not pretty, but it's the currency of the internet. But 'Bud' is not just anybody. The biographical details that he's posted on Leavenworth Street indicate he is in all likelihood Bud Pettigrew, a senior official in the Nebraska Democratic Party, who holds the position of 'chair of chairs', which I gather means he chairs meetings of the other committee chairs. This same Bud Pettigrew was previously chair of the Cherry County Democrats, and is apparently (according to today's LJS) the NDP historian. Remarkably, given the near-illiteracy of the comments I reproduce above, he's a history teacher in Valentine High School. Here's an example where almost the same hilarious errors are made, in this post from the NE district 3 blog.

Hello my fellow Democrats. Has I promised at the Alliance meeting I would give you an up date on scheduling for the Third District Democrats first 2010 meeting which will be held in Valentine. The meeting will take place on Saturday January 30,2010. It will be held at the meeting room of Cedar Canyon restaurant. The restaurant will also take care of the meal. We get to use the meeting room free of Charge. Many people have asked me about the agenda. I am working on getting speakers and work shops set up. We have two semi conformed. I won't announce who they are;until they are 100% tied down. Many of you have sent in suggestions for many speakers. Thank you for doing so. Please keep it up. I have contacted every person you have suggested. Some can't come. Some cost a tremendous amount of money from the cheapest of 500.00$ to the most expensive of 30,000 $. WOW! If you want those speakers please find me the funds to pay for them. The two most asked about speakers are Senator Ben Nelson and Congressman Tim Walz. Both have been contacted. Both I believe want to come. It is a matter of scheduling . Hopefully we will hear soon from them about their availability.

Note the substitution of 'has' for 'as', which you can also see in one of his Leavenworth Street posts.

This illustrates the sort of raw intolerance that passes for political thought in the modern Democratic Party. The libelous allegations and suggestions that I am unfit for my job (all based on my expressed political views) are entirely inappropriate from a high-ranking state political official. It is Mr. Pettigrew who should resign; he is a wannabe totalitarian, who believes views contrary to his should be suppressed at all costs.

I will be contacting the UNL Academic Rights and Responsibilities Committee asking them to remonstrate with the NDP about Mr. Pettigrew's conduct. Attacks by a leading official of one of the two major parties on a faculty member at one of the state universities is a serious threat to academic freedom.

I've been involved in Nebraska politics in a peripheral way for the last 15 years. What got me started was the ‘Opportunity Hires’ program at the University of Nebraska, in the mid to late 90‘s. The program allowed academic departments to by-pass normal job searches, and identify and hire faculty based on their sex or race or ethnicity. We were even provided with a big book with the names of recent minority Ph.D.s, from which we were supposed to identify suitable tokens to be brought here, vetted, and hired without a competitive search. I went to the Board of Regents to protest this; I wrote columns for the Lincoln Journal Star; I sought opinions about the legality from well-known attorneys, and provided them to the Chancellor. Thanks to a friend in the legislature, I and some like-minded people assembled a file containing enough biographical information about the ‘opportunity hires’ to identify all of them. We did not make the names public -- we were fighting the system, not individuals -- but we used the files to keep track of the program, and the files, without names, eventually (once Clinton was no longer President) made their way to the US Department of Justice, which initiated an investigation. In the interim, however, Harvey Perlman became Chancellor, and while he made no policy statements about it, he effectively closed down the Opportunity Hires program. The US DoJ eventually sent a Deputy US Attorney General out to Lincoln to investigate, but unfortunately, by that time, Alberto Gonzalez had become Attorney General, the Bush administration had shifted to favor preferences, and since the Opportunity Hires program was no longer active, the investigation was quashed “at the highest level”.

Meanwhile, however, Michigan had outlawed preferences, and Ward Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute was looking at other states where the initiative petition process made it possible to amend the state constitution to outlaw racial, ethnic and gender discrimination. I contacted Connerly, offering to help, but he had already set up, with some other faculty at UNL, a Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative committee. I was never directly a member of this, but I did help. I arranged for Connerly to visit the UNL campus and speak. I filed a successful complaint against the UNL Board of Regents for railroading through a motion opposing the NCRI, and (against the wishes of the NCRI committee, who were rightly convinced the press was implacably opposed to us) debated opponents of the initiative on campus. I arranged press coverage for Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Falls Church Virginia to give a press conference on campus to disclose the massive level of preferences used in admissions to UNL’s law school (which the administration had previously been denying). I even stood outside the Student Union collecting signatures for the initiative. For my pains, I was called names, mostly ‘racist’ by various people, but that I was prepared for. What I wasn’t prepared for was that opponents of the initiative would actually set up a scurrilous blog attacking me personally, including some vile accusations that I sexually harassed women students, etc.. Various people contacted the University suggesting I be fired. It was with some relish, therefore, that I watched as Nebraska, repudiating the pleas of its university and business elites, passed the initiative 58:42. Nearly two years later, the sky has not fallen.

Last year the editor of the Daily Nebraskan, the campus newspaper, asked me to write a monthly column from a conservative perspective. I initially demurred, but he said other campus conservatives were afraid to do it. So I wrote a series of about eight columns — I guess I should link to them — on various things such as libertarianism, health care, anthropogenic global warming, etc.. I was truly shocked by the sheer nastiness of the comments coming from our students. I was accused of being incompetent, a quack, a racist (of course) etc.. There was a cavalcade of complaints to the editor that they were publishing my submissions at all (they apparently didn’t know I’d been asked by the editor to write the columns). In fact, another faculty member was meanwhile also writing from the standpoint of the left. I liked his columns, but he didn't attract much attention.

Meanwhile, on some of the local blogs I frequent, things took a turn for the worse. I found the left had looked up (or tried to look up) my voter registration and whether I’d voted in recent elections; they also posted the names of my Department Chair and Vice Chair with telephone numbers to complain about me. I had people contact my chairman about some of my past columns, accusing me of ‘hate speech’. And this week, on the major Nebraska political blog, one local Democrat claimed that he’d contacted some of my past students, and that they’d said I’m a lousy teacher, was constantly ranting about politics, and discriminate against black students.

Now, opinions on my teaching vary; let’s just say the students who get As in my class seem to like it better than the students who don’t. But I never, ever, discuss politics in class; it just isn’t germane to subjects like quantum mechanics or chemical thermodynamics. Students probably know my political views from my DN columns, but I used to pride myself that no one could guess them from my lectures. And I most certainly don’t discriminate against black students. There are very few black students in advanced undergraduate chemistry courses anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever had a black student in a graduate course who wasn’t my own research student. And most of my grading in undergraduate courses has been done by a graduate TA. My most frequent TA for the last few years had an Obama campaign picture as the desktop on her computer.

So this is truly vile. I’ve never run for office. I’ve never even run an initiative petition campaign. I’ve probably been more outspoken than the average citizen. I’ve expressed myself usually, though certainly not always, in a civil fashion, and I’ve espoused positions that are unpopular with the left, although certainly not with the majority of the citizens in my state. But in return, I’ve been stalked and libeled publicly in several very crude, vicious and potentially damaging ways.

In other words, I've experience the politics of personal destruction, very personally. It hasn't embittered me, but it has made my dislike of the Left correspondingly personal. I'm mostly amazed that someone so peripheral to Nebraska politics can become the focus of so much active hate. While it is likely only a small number of people are directly involved in what I’ve described, almost nobody to the left of the political spectrum in Nebraska has raised their voice to say that this is wrong; indeed, I get the distinct impression they are not unhappy about it at all. In fact, I think the majority of them are discomfited by a spokesman for the right who can’t be stereotyped as a redneck troglodyte, and would just as soon I was silenced.

I won’t be silenced. But you should be aware, if you’re from the left side of the political spectrum, that experience -- a lot of nasty experience -- has taught me to be suspicious of you. Prejudice (and try to get beyond the cliché and read the word according to its actual meaning) is indeed rational, if all one has to go on is membership in a group and a well-established common feature of the group. I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament; I do believe that having more scruples than one’s adversary usually hurts one, and I don’t fight fire with fire, I fight it with napalm.

Now we’ve got that straight, let’s move on. :-)

This is a remarkable piece. Not for what it says, which is commonplace wisdom, but because its author, Jim Webb, is one of the more moderate Democrats in Congress. The conclusion...

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end. Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

My interpretation is this; the part of the Democratic party that once hewed to the DLC are looking at the increasing mess the White House has gotten into over race, the ever more bizarre behavior of the race- and ethnicity- hustlers in Congress, and Obama's collapsing poll numbers among whites and even hispanics. It's beginning to realize that branding the Republicans as the 'white party' may be a two edged sword, if the Democrats as a result become the 'anti-white party'. There are also obvious rational arguments that gender diversity programs make little sense when women make up 60% of college students, while racial and ethnic diversity prgrams predominantly help already-well-off blacks and hispanics, but Webb's is, IMO, far more a political calculation than a statesman-like judgement.

I shall be writing to my Congresscritters to pin them down on the issue of whether they agree with Senator Webb. Stay tuned.

Jeffrey Shallit drew attention to a Newsweek blog post that reported on a survey by Christopher Parker, at the University of Washington, that has been used to represent tea-partiers as 'racist', or at least, more racist than other Americans. Indeed, it seems pretty bad...

Only 35 percent of those who strongly approve of the tea party agreed that blacks are hardworking, compared with 55 percent of those who strongly disapprove of the tea party. On whether blacks were intelligent, 45 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 59 percent of the tea-party opponents. And on the issue of whether blacks were trustworthy, 41 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 57 percent of the tea-party opponents.

Now, one of the basic rules to live by, is never to trust any journalist's report of any technical matter, even something as uncomplicated as an opinion survey. Even if the journolist [sic] isn't wildly spinning the data, chances are he's too lazy or too stupid to understand it properly.

So I went to look at the raw data. And what's interesting is, as usual, not what the reporter included, which is accurate as far as it goes, but what he left out. Notably, the survey also asked tea-party supporters and opponents what they thought of whites. And what do you know...tea-partiers were also less likely to think of whites as hardworking, compared with anti-tea-partiers (49% vs. 56%)! They were less likely to think of whites as intelligent (59% vs. 69%). And they were far less likely to think of whites as trustworthy (49% vs. 72%)!

In fact, tea-party supporters had a less jaundiced view of blacks, compared with whites, on a scale of trustworthiness (-8% compared with -15%) and a very similar view of black intelligence (-14% vs. -10%). Tea partiers were however significantly less likely to regard blacks as hardworking (-10% vs. -1%) than tea party opponents.

So the spin put on these data both by the investigator himself (who is black) and the journalists covering the story is extremely deceptive. The principal difference between tea-party supporters and opponents is not racism, but more general misanthropy (or perhaps skepticism about human nature) in the tea-party supporters. Tea partiers regard everyone as less intelligent, trustworthy and hardworking than tea party opponents do. The differences in attitudes towards blacks vs. whites are inconsistent, and certainly don't support a charge of racism.

The Daily Caller has a wonderful exposé today, culled from posts to the now notorious 'journolist' list for liberal journalists, as they discussed ways to bury the Jeremiah Wright story. (Parenthetically, I'm amused to see they mention Media Matters for America, Jeffrey Shallit's 'credible source', as past masters of this sort of thing. In fact Eric Alterman, the source he quoted from MMA, was a member of the list.)

Here's Katha Pollitt of The Nation:

I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita.

That's really going to help her future credibility both as a journalist, and as a 'feminist and a woman'.

Here's Spencer Ackerman's reply

Part of me doesn’t like this shit either. But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.... I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically. And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Or course, the 'find a rightwinger and call them racist' is a technique of long-standing, and we've seen it used very recently.

Read the whole thing, though, and send it to people who ask why you distrust the mainstream media.

Shirley Sherrod was fired.

That in itself is unsurprising. Shirley made the classic gaffe; she told the truth by accident, in front of a video camera. She expressed (significantly, to a cheering, sympathetic NAACP audience) what is a commonplace truism among the mid-level functionaries of liberal America; that because of 'white privilege', it's entirely legitimate to treat white citizens in a discriminatory and even negligent manner.

The Federal government is staffed with thousands of Shirley Sherrods, exacting their own little chunks of racial reparations, day by day. They're in Agriculture, Education, HHS, and NSF. As J Christian Adams revealed over the last several weeks, they're thick on the ground in the now comically-misnamed Department of Justice. Some of them are Obama political appointees. But more are just career civil servants finally delighted to be able to come out of the closet. They know they owe their jobs to racial preferences. Of course they're going to actively prolong and even propagate the theory and the system that justifies their employment over others who had better qualifications, but are 'privileged' by their skin color. The ideology that drives them has been taught as fact in our universities for the last quarter century; merely to question it makes one a racist. And more often than you'd expect, the new racists just come clean, as Shirley did, because they honestly believe they are completely justified. Stick it to that white farmer. Let him deal with his own kind.

And then you get comical characters who worry that the tea parties are racist.

Just remember, without the new media, and Fox News, Sherrod would still be in her job. The major news-media still haven't picked it up. And how many other Shirley Sherrods has Obama appointed?

---

Sherrod now claims that later in the speech she grew to wuv the farmer and help him. More tellingly, she said this

There were some white people there. The mayor (of Douglas) was there," Sherrod recalled. "Why would I do something racist if they were there?

Indeed.

The Times of London yesterday carried a front page article about what a disappointment Obama has been to Europe. José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission told The Times that the EU-US relationship 'is not living up to its potential'. In its first leader, the Times commented:

There is an inevitability in politics, in earning the ire of your opponents. It takes a special kind of carelessness to earn that of your friends.

Obama is indeed 'a special kind of careless.' But RWP does not share Europe's disappointment. Obama is every bit as lousy a president as he expected.

At the great national convention for race hustlers in Atlanta, Sheila Jackson Lee (D, TX), intellectual leader of the Congressional Black Caucus applauded the fact that two once-warring nations now live together in perfect harmony, like ebony and ivory.

today we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace.

In fact, they've gotten along like scrambled eggs and scrambled eggs since they were unified in 1976, after the North invaded the South in 1974 and Congressional Democrats refused to support our ally. Had Ms. Jackson-Lee been male, of course, she would likely have gotten a lot more familiar with Vietnam than she is. I guess that's 'female privilege'. Still, 34 years is a long time to have missed a seminal event in world history, particularly when one serves on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

The Daily Caller notes that this is just one of a long string of stupid statements Jackson-Lee has made, betraying her ignorance of, well, just about everything. Of course, to take note of this is racist.

The Lincoln Journal-Star's 'interactivity editor' asks 'Do you think racism is rampant in the tea party?'

And then they wonder why most local conservatives write the LJS off as a leftist rag.

Switzerland, not content to be a financial haven for Nazi profiteers and third world dictators, has now taken to protecting pedophiles from justice.

Scum.

So we release ten Russian spies, and in return they release...four Russian spies.

Well, that's darn puzzling. Best day for Russia since 1/20/2009, I'd say.

Great column by Michelle Malkin today, on the Holder DoJ's dropping the already-won voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, including King Samir Shabazz, utterer of the joyous words

You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You’re gonna have to kill some of their babies!

The present head of NBPP, given the opportunity to disavow those words, instead said he didn't like them because he thought it was a bad idea for the NBPP to telegraph their intentions! These people are walking around free because of Eric Holder, Obama's Attorney General, and only because of him.

This is what hate speech looks like.

Just so you know.

By the way, George Dunn Engineering is located in Palm Springs, California.

Interesting op-ed from Anatole Kaletsky in the Times of London today (sorry, paywall!). He claims the biggest obstacle to global economic recovery is low business confidence in the US. It’s been widely reported that US Corporations are sitting on a pile of $1.8 tn in cash, which they won’t invest in new equipment or hires. Why? Kaletsky blames ‘hyperpartisanship’ in Washington, which is silly. Major corporations don’t make decisions on a partisan basis, they make decisions to make money.

The Business Roundtable has a more plausible explanation; it says it’s because businesses don’t trust the administration. There is supposedly a giant bolus of new Federal regulations coming, and nobody wants to invest in equipment or a process they might ban in six months. The EPA is trying to regulate CO₂, in a blatantly illegal way, and nobody knows what the courts will ultimately decide. The Bush tax cuts are about to expire, and nobody knows what kind of fix will be applied. Cp-and-tax might pass, though it's looking increasingly unlikely. We don’t even have a Federal budget. ObamaCare is coming, and we don’t have a good handle on its total costs (except they’ll be much higher than Obama said). And, ultimately, most people strongly suspect Obama is, at core, anti-business.

What is killing us is uncertainty, and the uncertainty can be blamed 80% on the Administration and 20% on Congressional Democrats. Fortunately, we can solve one fifth of the problem in November.

No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt: on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable.

George Washington, Message to the House of Representatives, December 3, 1793

Happy July 4!

Some inadvertent humor from the LJS headline writer, describing Danielle Nantkes', er I mean, Danielle Conrad's head-on collision with a snowplow. Danielle has decided to come kinda, sorta clean about it, not admitting, as far as I can tell, her previous alcohol-related arrests, not admitting that she refused to take a chemical test mandated by law, etc..

Her claimed recovery from alcoholism should be the least of the issues in this race. Real issues should be her use of her legislative seat to pursue policies far to the left of her constituents, including a stint as paid director of Nebraskans United, where she promoted the perpetuance of policies that discriminated against 90% of the people she represents. She's also done a certain amount of dirty work for the University, including introducing a bill to make audits less transparent.

Save a snow-plow, and vote for Chad Wright!

Hilarious Nebraska story of the week is the request to the University of Nebraska Foundation by the Omaha tribe for $120 million (one tenth of the total UN endowment) for use of the tribe's "intellectual cultural property". WTF? The offense is that an apparently harmless and devoted scholar, Mark Awakuni-Swetland, took 19th century records of the Omaha language and transferred them to digital form. This, according to some charlatan with the distinctive Omaha tribal name of Dennis Hastings, was "institutional racism".

Since the early 1970s, the University of Nebraska, through its publications, research and academic activities, has commoditized for its growth and self-interest the ancestral and contemporary culture of the sovereign Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa, with little consultation nor recompense

RWP thinks this is a great idea, and wants all of you who've drunkenly said 'Erin go brágh' or, worse, 'Póg mo thón', on or around St. Patrick's Day, to mail him a check for a gazillion dollars, or better yet, 1.1 bazillion Euros, to compensate him for the appropriation of his beloved Gaeilge (and, unlike almost all living Omaha Indians, I do speak my native language). And by golly, those froggy interlopers at Notre Dame are going to be forking out big. Fighting Irish indeed.

Unfortunately, RWP suspects the Omaha know exactly what they're at. Stymied in Plan A for tribal enrichment (open a casino) by the obdurate voters of Nebraska, they're falling back on Plan B (guilting whitey). He expects the NU Foundation to lay out a couple of million smackeroos for a 'Omaha cultural center', to celebrate a culture the Omahas mostly themselves abandoned once they realized steel knives and broadcloth were way better than stone tools and buffalo hide. Then the Omahas will shut up for a while.

But maybe they should be paying us for using our culture? Hey man, that SUV you're driving is a cultural icon. Whitey wants $1,000.