I don’t believe the polls any more than I believe the so-called journalistic organizations which commission the polls. Despite absurd claims of ten and fifteen point margins of victory, this is going to be a close race right up to the last minute. Ultimately, I’m afraid, my gut tells me that Obama and his party of frauds will prevail in this election.

But before you rush to clean out the local ammunition store stop, take a breath, and let’s look at the situation rationally.

The fact that the race is this close, despite everything the republican ticket has stacked against it, is cause for extreme optimism about the future direction of this country. This election can be seen as a last ditch act of desperation on the left’s part. Their last gasp. They are expending every last bit of ammunition they have to pawn Obama off as a post-partisan, post-racial moderate, instead of the far left, redistributionist, black-liberation theologian he is. The dying dinosaur media has doubled down with it’s final shreds of credibility. Zillionaire leftist financiers and subsitence-class liberal donors alike have dug deep in these trying financial times and thrown every last red cent they could muster into the Church of Obama’s unscrupulous online offering plate. The left has played every magic political card in the deck, from the race card to the elitist card. The Obama campaign linked Acorn has registered every real or imaginary Obama supporter in the world to overwhelm and effectively sap the efforts to oversee the veracity of the electorate at the local level, which aids the typical beneficiaries of voter fraud - the Democrats. All in an effort to skew the playing field in favor of the left. In Washington, ballots are being mailed to democrat supporting felons, despite laws forbidding it.

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I recently sent the following letter to the Washington Post:

Dear Editor,

Ruth Marcus’ recent defense of Obama was incomprehensible (”The ‘Socialist’ Scare,” Oct. 22). While rightly acknowledging that it’s important to debate the proper role of government, Marcus later uses examples of those trying to engage in such debates as proof of an “uncivil” campaign. Socialism and welfare go to the heart of “the proper role of government,” yet she finds discussion of such issues to be “ominous.” We must, in her view, move beyond the “stale ‘no new taxes’ debate.” Rather, she is concerned that engaging in these important debates will make it harder for the next President to “unite a divided country.”

Marcus wants a debate, but only after we first all accept her premise that taxes are good, and that any increase should be seen as nothing more than the price for civilized society. It sure is easy to win a debate if everyone is forced to accept your ideas before it even begins.

Sincerely,
Brian Garst

That’s the amount John Boehner says ACORN is known to have received from the taxpayers.  There’s probably more.

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) today sent a letter to President George W. Bush, urging his Administration to block all federal funding directed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and its affiliates until federal investigations into the group are complete.  Allegations of voter fraud perpetrated by ACORN in at least 15 states have triggered an FBI investigation of the scandal-tarnished organization.  A preliminary analysis of federal data conducted by the Republican Leader’s staff has determined that ACORN has received more than $31 million in direct funding from the federal government since 1998 – and likely substantially more indirectly through states and localities that receive federal block grants.

Can you imagine the media outrage and hysteria if there was a federally funded criminal organization working as an arm of the Republican party to promote voter fraud n behalf of John McCain?

This election cycle has seen a proliferation of “fact checking” and “ad watching” columns and websites, all pretending to peddle impartial analysis of candidate claims.   While useful in the aggregate, some of these are little more than venues for partisan advocacy under the fig leaf of impartiality.  The most recent such Ad Watch column by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post exemplifies this behavior.

Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are — (Barack Obama:)“. . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” (Narrator:) How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops. Increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America.

ANALYSIS

This John McCain ad blatantly distorts Barack Obama’s words in an effort to paint him as callous about the role of the U.S. military. The commercial truncates a comment that Obama made to a voter in New Hampshire in August 2007. According to the Associated Press, the senator from Illinois brought up Afghanistan when asked whether he would withdraw troops from Iraq to fight terrorism elsewhere: “We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” In short, Obama was saying he wanted to avoid just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, not that this was all that American troops were doing. His meaning was the opposite of what is portrayed in this spot. Civilian casualties have been rising in Afghanistan this year, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates last month apologized for U.S. airstrikes that have killed civilians.

This is an utterly dishonest analysis by Kurtz.  Obama was indeed saying he wanted to avoid air-raiding villages, but that doesn’t preclude him from also saying that it’s all that American troops are doing.  Those two positions can be held simultaneously, much to Kurtz’s chagrin.  So while it’s true that the ad does not include that Obama wants to avoid “just air-raiding villages,” it doesn’t claim he wants to encourage it either, and thus can’t possible portay the opposite of Obama’s meaning, another of Kurtz’ false conclusions.  And that issue isn’t even the point.  Whether or not Obama wants to avoid it is immaterial to his assertion that “just air-raiding villages” is what he thinks we are doing now.

Kurtz would have us believe that Obama is just mentioning civilian killing air-raids as a hypothetical outcome of having too few troops, but that’s an overly generous reading of Obama’s statement.  While Kurtz scolds the McCain camp for cutting out part of the quote, Kurtz himself completely ignores an important qualifying clause from his analysis.   If Obama did not believe we were “just air-raiding and killing civilians,” why would he then immediately and describe how that is presently affecting Afghanistan, when he says it “is causing enormous pressure over there.”  He doesn’t say that it “would” cause pressure, he says that it “is.”

Kurtz is free to conclude that Obama didn’t mean to imply that he thought that American troops were only air-raiding villages and killing civilians, but it’s not dishonest to point out that, if taken how it was actually delivered, it’s exactly what his statement claims.  If Obama was overly flippant and imprudent in his response, that’s his fault and his problem.   Obama is prone to these kind of gaffes when speaking off the cuff and without his precious teleprompter to guide him.  Falsely attacking McCain as a liar is apparently how Howard Kurtz wishes to contribute to the Obama campaign and cover up this particular shortcoming of The Messiah.

Given the media coverage the last few days, I have come to believe that reporters are able to read minds. It is, after all, the only logical explanation for these headlines:

Stock market rallies amid bailout hopes
Stocks Move Higher On Hopes Bailout Bill Will Be Revived
US STOCKS-Futures rise on hopes for reviving bailout
Wall Street rallies on bailout revival hopes

And it’s not just American stocks supposedly placing their hopes and dreams in the U.S. Congress:

Toronto stocks bounce back on bailout hopes
Russian stocks gain on US bailout hopes
Indian shares close higher on hopes of new U.S. bail-out package
Mexican stocks, peso bounce back on bailout hopes
European, Asian markets improve on US bailout hope

On and on it goes. How do they know what drives investors?  These headline are not reporting news, they’re interpreting it.  That should not be the function of the media, but they do it whenever they want to make sure you evaluate the actual news appropriately and learn what you are supposed to learn (what they want you to learn).

Here’s what they want you to think: “See, everyone is pulling for government intervention. If you damn conservatives will just let big government intervene, stocks will rise and all will be well!” This narrative is predicated on the assumption that every time the stock market goes up it is good, and all drops are bad. As a rule of thumb, this is a fairly adequate framework to help people evaluate what’s going on most of the time. It is not, however, completely accurate. Rises and falls are good or bad in so far as they signal that the economy is strengthening or weakening. Only when prices reflect an honest evaluation of market strength, then, should it be assumed that stock increases are good.  When they do not, they create “bubbles,” and the inevitable result is an eventual downward correction.

One such bubble, in the housing market, has just been popped.  This bubble was created by government intervention, the primary culprit (there are many) being the Fed’s holding of interest rates at levels lower than the market otherwise would have accorded.  It did this, let us not forget, after another bubble, the 90’s dot com bubble, collapsed.  The lesson one should take here is: we should not attempt to fight corrections with more interventionist policies that will only create yet more bubbles.  Even if we assume the media is correct, that investors want an infusion of taxpayer money to prop up flailing business engaging in risky practices, that is not a sound reason to formulate government policy.  We should not make bad long term decisions just because stocks might fall in the short term.  If that fall reflects a realignment of capital toward more efficient uses, as it does in this case, the end result will be much better in the long run if it is allowed to happen.

Too biased even for MSNBC:

MSNBC is replacing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as co-anchors of political night coverage with David Gregory, and will use the two newsmen as commentators.

The change reflects tensions between the freewheeling, opinionated MSNBC and the impartial newsgatherers at NBC News. Throughout the primaries and summer, MSNBC argued that Olbermann and Matthews could serve as dispassionate anchors on political news nights and that viewers would accept them in that role, but things fell apart during the conventions.

…The tipping point appears to have come during the GOP convention when Olbermann criticized MSNBC for showing a Sept. 11-themed video prepared by the Republicans.

MSNBC executives, who had publicly defended their anchors’ roles while privately monitoring them throughout the political season, made the change over the weekend after discussions with Olbermann. Despite the controversy around him, Olbermann has been a hero with left-leaning viewers and keyed MSNBC’s growth among coveted young viewers.

During her acceptance speech last week, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin talked about the “Washington elite” not accepting her qualifications for the job. Some delegates on the convention floor began chanting, “N-B-C, N-B-C.”

Olbermann began to have difficulty keeping his opinions in check, or simply stopped trying.

That blowhard’s moronic opinions have never been in check.  That such an obvious party socket-puppet is propped up as a serious journalist is a blight on the profession’s last remnants of credibility.

The New York Times has a problem with McCain’s chosen tactic of running against the establishment.

“Party in Power, Running as if It Weren’t”

The nominee’s friend described him as a “restless reformer who will clean up Washington.” His defeated rival described him going to the capital to “drain that swamp.” His running mate described their mission as “change, the goal we share.” And that was at the incumbent party’s convention.

After watching two political conclaves the last two weeks, it would be easy to be confused about which was really the gathering of the opposition. As Senator John McCain accepted the Republican nomination for president, he and his supporters sounded the call of insurgents seeking to topple the establishment, even though their party heads the establishment.

…But as a matter of history, it is easier to run as the opposition party if you actually are the opposition party.

“When the president of the United States is from your own party, to present yourself as a change agent is not the easiest thing to pull off,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist. Referring to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, Mr. Trippi added, “All Obama has to do is say, ‘Bush-McCain, Bush-McCain.’ ”

How does something so moronic get printed in the New York Times? You would think, after however many years of peddling such blatantly biased reporting, they would have at least managed to comprehend that there is more than one branch of government. A Republican most certainly can run against the establishment, since that establishment includes a Democrat controlled House and Senate (which also just so happens to be more unpopular than the Republican controlled branch of government).

Here’s a little quiz for the New York Times. Which of the two Presidential candidates holds committee chairs as a member of the majority party? Here’s a hint: it’s not the republican.

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.

Lots happening on the global warming front recently.

Earth shaking testimony on the hill this Tuesday by one Roy Spencer, formerly of NASA and now the Principal research Scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. I say earthshaking - that’s what it would be if the media gave a crap about objectivity as opposed to ideology. Googling Roy Spencer and July 22 reveals no links to major media outlets. Compare that to googling Obama and July 22. I guess the messiah’s trek through the holy land is that much more important than the debunking of the entire anthropogenic global warming hoax in front of congress.

As I will outline in this lengthy post, there is a growing consensus - and I use the term flippantly - that human activity is NOT to blame for most of the climate change over the last 100 years. Spencer’s presentation can be found here. Some of the salient points:

Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC). Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks” — instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC. (Feedback parameters larger than 3.3 Watts per square meter per degree Kelvin (Wm-2K-1) indicate negative feedback, while feedback parameters smaller than 3.3 indicate positive feedback.) If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, as we will see, it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end — if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now.

Like he says, good news for us, there is no crisis. But just like victory in Iraq, this isn’t good news for leftists looking to turn it into a power grab.

The support for my claim of low climate sensitivity (net negative feedback) for our climate system is two-fold. First, we have a new research article1 in-press in the Journal of Climate which uses a simple climate model to show that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system from satellite data were biased toward the high side by the neglect of natural cloud variability. It turns out that the failure to account for natural, chaotic cloud variability generated internal to the climate system will always lead to the illusion of a climate system which appears more sensitive than it really is. Significantly, prior to its acceptance for publication, this paper was reviewed by two leading IPCC climate model experts - Piers Forster and Isaac Held– both of whom agreed that we have raised a legitimate issue. Piers Forster, an IPCC report lead author and a leading expert on the estimation of climate sensitivity, even admitted in his review of our paper that other climate modelers need to be made aware of this important issue.

He then goes on to outline the observational evidence which confirms his theory. I bet Barbara Boxer had a sort of dizzy feeling through the entire testimony.

Remember top NASA scientist James Hansen’s absurd claims that the Bush Administration tried to silence him on global warming before it turned out that he gave tons of speeches and made tremendous amounts of money speaking to manmade global warming? It turns out that the White House actually did try to silence dissenting voices on climate change. Except it was the Clinton White house.

On the subject of the Administration’s involvement in policy-relevant scientific work performed by government employees in the EPA, NASA, and other agencies, I can provide some perspective based upon my previous experiences as a NASA employee. For example, during the Clinton-Gore Administration I was told what I could and could not say during congressional testimony. Since it was well known that I am skeptical of the view that mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions are mostly responsible for global warming, I assumed that this advice was to help protect Vice President Gore’s agenda on the subject. This did not particularly bother me, though, since I knew that as an employee of an Executive Branch agency my ultimate boss resided in the White House. To the extent that my work had policy relevance, it seemed entirely appropriate to me that the privilege of working for NASA included a responsibility to abide by direction given by my superiors.

Yet another bit of information you will never hear about on the evening news.

More under the fold.

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The New York Times, which just recently ran an editorial on Iraq authored by Obama, hasn’t any room in its daily rag of democratic talking points for a McCain rebuttal.

An editorial written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by the NEW YORK TIMES — less than a week after the paper published an essay written by Obama, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The paper’s decision to refuse McCain’s direct rebuttal to Obama’s ‘My Plan for Iraq’ has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles.

‘It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece,’ NYT Op-Ed editor David Shipley explained in an email late Friday to McCain’s staff. ‘I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.’

In McCain’s submission to the TIMES, he writes of Obama: ‘I am dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it… if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president.’

NYT’s Shipley advised McCain to try again: ‘I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft.’

[Shipley served in the Clinton Administration from 1995 until 1997 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential Speechwriter.]

A top McCain source claims the paper simply does not agree with the senator’s Iraq policy, and wants him to change it, not “re-work the draft.”

Just don’t you dare call them biased.