National Security Advisor James Jones seems to be at odds with administration spokesman Robert Gibbs (I really miss Tony Snow) on our possible withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011.
The video on this post by Mark Mardell of the BBC could put Jones's job in jeopardy, unless the president was being his usual equivocating self during his speech at West Point last week.
The world of popular music lost one of its brightest stars last week. Al Alberts, lead singer of the Four Aces, died at the age of 87. He was a South Philadelphia icon throughout the 50s and 60s, and the unique sound of the Four Aces could be heard on virtually every car radio making the Friday night trip from Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore. A South Philadelphia native, Alberts served in the Navy in World War II, then attended Temple University, where he earned a degree in finance. He married his wife Stella in 1953, and she was at his bedside when he died, 56 years later, on November 27, 2009.
Two of the songs recorded by the Four Aces for movies by the same name: Three Coins in the Fountain and Love is a Many Splendored Thing, won Academy Awards. One of their most memorable hits, On the Way to Cape May, is not available, but here are some of the other top hits recorded by the group. Enjoy!
Charles Krauthammer reviews the president's speech at West Point this week.
Here's a snippet:
Words matter because will matters. Success in war depends on three things: a brave and highly skilled soldiery, such as the U.S. military 2009, the finest counterinsurgency force in history; brilliant, battle-tested commanders such as Gens. David Petraeus and McChrystal, fresh from the success of the surge in Iraq; and the will to prevail as personified by the commander-in-chief.
There’s the rub. And that is why at such crucial moments, presidents don’t issue a policy paper. They give a speech. It gives tone and texture. It allows their policy to be imbued with purpose and feeling. This one was festooned with hedges, caveats, and one giant exit ramp.
Greg Knapp at Big Government.Com has an interesting piece today on what is now being called "Climategate," but of course it's not being called anything in the major U.S. media outlets (they apparently haven't heard anything about it). Meanwhile the Obama administration is charging ahead with Cap and Trade as if there really is no scandal here concerning the, in some cases made up, and in some cases destroyed, data concerning the global warming scam.
Christopher Booker, of the UK's Sunday Telegraph, is calling it "The Worst Scientific Scandal of Our Generation." He wrote an essay about it for the Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI) that is sure to aggravate Alarmist-In-Chief Al Gore (that's Al in the above photo), who by now should be looking for a rock to hide under. Here's a link to Booker's essay:
That's Deputy Attorney General David Ogden on top, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy Phillip Carter underneath. They're both leaving the administration for "personal reasons" (probably to "spend more time with their families" as they always say). There has to be more to this than is currently known, and we may never hear the whole story. I'll bet the rest of the story would be interesting, though. The earlier announced departure of White House Counsel Greg Craig, because of his stance on the release of the so-called "torture photos," has been well covered, but that makes three departing top lawyers already - and departing lawyers from anywhere is usually a good sign (God knows there are enough replacements around).
Here are links to the initial stories on the latest departures:
Did he just say "Maybe the Enemy Camp?" Who watches MSNBC anyway? This guy, not for the first time, has revealed himself to be not only a total partisan, but a fairly ignorant one at that.
Too Few Troops: As we noted yesterday, when General McChrystal provided President Obama his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan in August, he identified three troop levels each with a corresponding level of risk that the mission could fail: 1) an additional 20,000 troops that would run a “high risk of failure“; 2) an additional 80,000 troops that would be a “low risk option” that has “best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan“; or 3) an additional 40,000 to 45,000 troop “medium risk option.” President Obama’s 30,000 troop increase falls squarely between the “high” and “medium” risk options. Nowhere in his address did Obama explain how a medium or high risk of failure in Afghanistan could possibly be acceptable to the American people.
and another one:
Hopefully the President’s incoherent address to a muted West Point audience will not reverse America’s growing support for victory.
Here is a math problem for you: Assume that the legislation establishing government control of medical care is passed and that it “brings down the cost of medical care.” You pay $500 a year less for your medical care, but the new costs put on employers is passed on to consumers, so that you pay $300 a year more for groceries and $200 a year more for gasoline, while the new mandates put on insurance companies raise your premiums by $300 a year, how much money have you saved?
Andy McCarthy, the prosecutor of the Blind Sheik for the 1993 bombing of The World Trade Center, has been asked innumerable times how we could prevent KSM and his friends from being tried in New York City, reversing possibly the worst decision made by this administration. He tells us how today in his piece on National Review Online. Here's a link:
James O'Rourke of Politics or Poppycock posted about this monument in Bayonne, New Jersey back in March. Why did it not get more media attention when it was dedicated in 2006 as a gift from the Russian people? Couldn't be as he conjectures: because it had a picture of George W Bush on it, could it?
Try to forget about Obamacare, Cap and Tax, the VAT of Pelosi, Cars for Clunkers, and the wasted Stimulus Money (that should be spent on the troop buildup in Afghanistan (but won't be), and concentrate instead on the upcoming anniversary of the Birth of Christ. Thank God we are a Christian Country.
The Wall Street Journal, surely to no one's surprise, has caught the gainsaying John Kerry in a contradiction of an earlier stance of his.
THEN:
On CNN with Larry King on Dec. 15, 2001, a viewer called in to say the U.S. should "smoke [bin Laden] out" of the Tora Bora caves. Mr. Kerry responded: "For the moment what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way." The Rumsfeld-General Tommy Franks troop strategy may have missed bin Laden, but it reflected domestic political doubts about an extended Afghan campaign.
NOW:
In a 43-page report issued yesterday by his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry says bin Laden and deputy Ayman Zawahiri were poised for capture at the Tora Bora cave complex in late 2001. But because of the "unwillingness" of Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals "to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden," the al Qaeda leaders escaped.
Comes now Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to lend some truthful insights to the claims of the alarmists. His article appeared in today's Wall Street Journal. Here's a link:
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.
Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.
Nina Owcharenko of The Heritage Foundation responds to Michelle Obama on the effects of Obamacare on Women. Fifty percent of american women are opposed to the plan, and my guess is that most of the other fifty percent are unaware of what's in it.
Perhaps inevitably as with much of what is polled by Rasmussen Reports, there is a partisan difference on the question. Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans and 70% of adults not affiliated with either major political party like store signs that wish them a "Merry Christmas," compared to just 58% of Democrats.
That's Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds (her voice was dubbed) in the 1942 film, Holiday Inn singing the most famous Christmas song ever: "White Christmas," written by Irving Berlin.
