I apologize for the lack of posting lately.  I’m getting settled into new living arrangements.  I should be back to more regular updates within a few days.

Gallup covers the Biden Bounce:

An analysis of historical election poll trends by Gallup Poll Managing Editor Jeff Jones shows that recent presidential campaigns have enjoyed a small (though short-lived) bounce from the running mate announcement. This includes a four percentage point bounce for John Kerry in 2004 after selecting John Edwards, a 5-point bounce for Al Gore in 2000 with his announcement of Joe Lieberman, and a 3-point bounce for George W. Bush in 2000 upon choosing Dick Cheney. Bob Dole received an extraordinary 9-point bounce in 1996 after bringing Jack Kemp onto his ticket.

All of these bounces occurred before the respective party’s convention began, and in most cases the candidates received an additional boost in the polls upon completion of the convention. Thus, any increase in Obama’s support in the coming days would seem to be more the result of the star-studded and well publicized Democratic national convention than the apparently lackluster Biden selection.

Surprisingly, the public just isn’t all that enamored with the liberal dream team.

Regular readers will know I have many issues with Ron Paul. From his quirky and misguided obsession with the gold standard to his head-in-the-sand isolationism (and his tendency toward kook conspiracies), he often rubs me the wrong way.  But on many other issues he is one of only a few voices representing federalism and limited government.  In that vein, this op-ed by Dr. Paul is worth reading, especially considering the type of big-government rhetoric that is about to bombard us from Denver.

It’s a vicious cycle, I tell you.

Climate change could release unexpectedly huge stores of carbon dioxide from Arctic soils, which would in turn fuel a vicious circle of global warming, a new study warned Sunday.

And according to one commentary on the research, current models of climate change have not taken this extra source of greenhouse gas into account.

…

Commenting on the research, Christian Beer of the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, pointed out that the climate change models upon which future projections are based, do not include the potential impact of the gases trapped frozen Arctic soils.

“Releasing even a portion of this carbon into the atmosphere, in the form of methane or carbon dioxide, would have an significant impact on Earth’s climate,” he noted in his commentary, also published in Nature Geoscience.

Methane, another greenhouse gas, is less abundant than carbon dioxide but several times more potent as a driver of global warming.

Our hysteria has not yet been properly calibrated to take into account this new source of doom! And to think just how much more wrong our predictions could be if we did take this new finding into account.

On a related note, I couldn’t help but scoff at reporting this pathetic:

The Nobel Prize-winning UN panel of climate change scientists project temperature increases by century’s end of up to six degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic region, which is more sensitive to global warming than any other part of the planet.

“The Nobel Prize-winning UN panel of climate change scientists.”  The purpose of that love-fest description is to get you to bow to the dictates of the IPCC without asking questions.  The problem is that the description is entirely misleading.  First of all, the IPCC is not a scientific panel; it’s an intergovernmental panel (hence the I in IPCC).  It’s made up of government officials, environmentalist activists and yes, some scientists.  Furthermore, it does not follow the scientific process of peer review, and many scientists involved in the reports were never given a say in the final product, but had their names attached (often over their objections) anyway.

“But it received a Nobel Prize,” the faithful will assert.  Yes, the Nobel Peace Prize, which is not awarded for scientific accomplishment, but, history suggests, for successful implementation of left-wing ideology.

AFP sells the IPCC as an award winning scientific authority, but it is nothing of the kind.  Don’t let their falsehoods intimidate you.

For those who understands how government works, stories like this are no big surprise:

Erroneous and fraudulent Medicare payments for medical equipment could make up almost a third of the number of disbursements by the program, according to a draft report from the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general.

…According to an executive summary of the draft report obtained by Congressional Quarterly, Medicare officials massively underestimated the payment error rate in the durable medical equipment program, or DME, which reimburses Medicare beneficiaries for items like wheelchairs and oxygen tanks.

The draft report summary says that in 2006, 31.5 percent of the payments made under the program were in error. That is much higher than the 7.5 percent error rate that the CMS had originally reported through its own fraud-finding Comprehensive Error Rate Testing program (CERT).

This kind of failure would be completely unacceptable in a free market. Government is a different story. Most likely this will be swept under the rug. If some pretense of corrective action is attempted, it will likely result in an even bigger and more incompetent government program.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure…A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

- Isabel Paterson

On a similar matter to the video I posted yesterday, it seems Britain is seriously considering taking a hint from the Swedish and might actually allow their citizens a bit of educational freedom.

This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be failing will welcome an intake of new pupils. Youth unemployment will probably hit an 11-year high. It will, tragically, be just another year in one of the world’s highest-funded education systems.

Two strategies are available to David Cameron in addressing this scandal, should he get to No. 10. He could perform his own surgery on the comprehensive system pretending, as all prime ministers pretend, that he can actually control it. The Local Education Authorities, with whom the power rests, would almost certainly ignore him, as they did Tony Blair. But the second policy would be a new one. He would invite anyone to set up a new state school, run it independently of government, and receive a sum likely to be more than £6,000 a pupil.

He would, in short, seek to bring the Swedish education revolution to Britain. When Mr Cameron first promised to do this at the Tory conference in Blackpool (along with Wisconsin-style welfare reform), it sounded a rather abstract idea, the stuff of think-tank seminars rather than everyday life. Yet in the last five months Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, has been carefully designing a blueprint which would enable the establishment of a new breed of local independent schools, funded by the state but not run by it. It is potentially a plan of huge significance.

…

Freedom works.  Maybe one day the unions and other entrenched interests can be defeated here in that State’s and we can have some.

Boy were they ever swindled.

As we watch Britain collapse under the weight of its own moonbattery, we should remember exactly what it is that has been lost:

At the recent Saddleback forum, where by almost all accounts McCain spanked Obama, the anointed one provided new fuel to critics regarding his complete and utter lack of qualifications.

Asked about judicial nominees, Obama stated that he would not have nominated Clarence Thomas because he didn’t have enough experience.  I kid you not.

“I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don’t think that he, I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution.”

So what shows that Obama is a strong enough executive for elevation to the office of the Presidency?  Obama’s opinion of Thomas is laughable, especially coming from a man who was, by all accounts, an utterly undistinguished professor too scared to put his own opinions on paper.