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I knew it would be a bombshell, but it’s gotten bigger and more fundamental than many thought possible: Dr Phil Jones – who in emails wrote about deleting data and emails rather than submit to FOI requests, who spoke of using the ‘trick’ to ‘hide the decline’, and who conspired to can journal editors – stepped down (’temporarily’). Penn State is putting Prof Mann of hockey stick infamy under investigation. As usual, the Lamestream Media is in “denial” mode, underplaying how serious this is, and the real story is on the internet, where you can find the real emails and judge for yourself.

Climate Depot is having a field day with this story – links galore. Here is a good summary by Lord Monkton (PDF): http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught%20Green-Handed%20Climategate%20Scandal.pdf

What it all means is the skeptics have been proved right in several areas:
1. Skeptics were suspicious of ‘data massaging’ and the error of torturing data to fit conclusions – and the emails and data released shows things even WORSE than we might have thought: outright fudging of temperature series, skewing of data, using ‘tricks’ to make misleading presentations of data, mistakes in how proxies are used are admitted in emails but not shared with others, so bad data is reused, and now CRU claims the underlying raw data doesnt even exist! They have a ‘dog ate my homework’ excuse.
2. Skeptics claimed the IPCC was shutting out dissenters – the emails prove it now; attempts to get Journal editors who didnt toe the line canned, attempts to keep dissent out of IPCC reports, refusal to public review notes, and a complete paranoid approach to any questioning of their ’science’
3. Skeptics were claiming that the ‘Hockey Stick Team’ scientists were denying access to data to replicate results – we now have emails where Jones and Mann talking about how to subvert FOI requests and how to stop the skeptics from figuring out their ‘tricks’.

What is left of the ’science’?
#1 – The temperature trends for the last century were skewed – Lord Monckton explains more in above summary, using the example of New Zealand, where “official” temperature took raw temp data and ‘adjusted’ it to create a warming trend that in the raw data doesnt even exist!
#2 – The IPCC’s credibility is now complete shot. The ’system’ was gamed to create a phony ‘consensus’; we skeptics knew that, but this email release proved it.
#3 – The credibility of ANYONE who claims “the science is settled” is now shot.
There IS no science left to trust, we have to hit the ‘reset’ button on every brick of evidence
in the whole chain, because the behavior of these men so skewed the ’science’ it is all tainted.
#4 – The hockey stick is busted – unproven if not a myth.
#5 – The IPCC models were based on suppositions, and the ’skeptic’ theories that pointed out the data that undermined the models was shunned. These too need to be reviewed from the ground up, and until this is done the models have no value.

Without models, a hockey stick ramp up and temperature records worthy of trust, there is not much to go on.

What to do now?
- Removal of any global warming theory nonsense from schools. This stuff has the credibility of Piltdown Man and Lysenko-ism as of now.
- They need to FIRE Prof Mann and Dr Jones and possibly charge them with FOIA violations.
- The IPCC needs to fire all lead authors, and start from scratch with a whole other team
and a process based on 100% transparency. Or failing that, the IPCC needs to disband.
- Congress needs to have an investigation and needs to put a rule into Govt-funded research requiring the full and complete sharing of data produced to support published articles; less than that is not acceptable.

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10 Lessons on how Bob McDonnell won the Virginia’s Governor’s race explores the key to Republican candidate Bob McDonnell’s Virginia victory. A summation:

1. Independents (and others) responded extremely well to McDonnell’s articulate, specific plans.
2. McDonnell ran a very positive campaign.
3. McDonnell successfully tapped in to national issues discontenting VA voters, again with specifics.
4. McDonnell ran a disciplined campaign with a credible focus on job creation.
5. Democrats here, as everywhere else, promise many great things, but governed terribly in the final analysis. In some parts of the state, unemployment was at depression era levels of 20-25%.
6. McDonnell avoided the pitfalls many VA GOP statewide candidates have fallen into. The media constantly were on the lookout for a “macaca” moment (George Allen), but he did not give them one because he was wary of his audience. He did not focus on “pet issue” with which he could be caricaturized…
7. The ground game was superb. … He was an unapologetic conservative. … I saw far more youths and McDonell campaign workers in an “off year election” than I ever did for McCain.
8. McDonnell built a meaningful coalition. He had endorsements from key Democrats, business leaders, and virtually every job creating organization in the state. … McDonnell took the time to woo key Democrats as well as Republicans.
9. He weathered the attacks on him well. McDonnell was villified … McDonnell and other key conservatives (Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner) called the Post out on its daily hack jobs, and they stopped in time. … he continued to utilize the attacks as an opportunity to be the candidate to “refocus” the issues on matters that mattered to VA voters.
10. He never rested on his laurels. His campaign frequently touted that even though they had a lead, they would run “like they were 10 points behind.” They maintained the energy level needed.

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Hutchison to keep Senate seat in bid for governor, aide says: “She will announce tomorrow at the Texas Federation of Republican Women’s Convention in Galveston that she will not be resigning her seat before the primary,”

You heard it here first, probably even before Sen Hutchison came to that conclusion -My fearless prediction back in July was: “Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison will see the writing on the wall by December so she will NOT decide to vacate her senate seat, but play it safe. Lose the primary means she will ride it out until 2012, and no Senate race after all and a more boring 2010 election cycle.”

The ‘play it safe’ route wasn’t her game plan, and my own update blogged a retraction based on her own comments. But Senator Hutchison has been caught in the vice of a delayed ObamaCare vote, where it is vital for her to be there to help stop the ObamaCare train wreck, and polling that shows Perry with an 11 point lead, enough lead, especially among the conservative part of the base, to indicate that he will likely be the nominee. Conservatives prefer Perry, who’s been more out front and forceful in jumping on populist Tea Party sentiment, and has tagged KBH as “Senator Bailout”. So the likely scenario now is that Perry wins the primary.

If Sen Hutchison wins the primary, she’d resign then. This was always the smarter thing to do, given the stack of important issues facing the U.S. Senate right now.

This is an UN-bombshell because so many of the potential dominoes will STOP falling. It means the GOP statewide slate is a stack of incumbents – Lt Gov David Dewhurst, Combs, Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, AG Greg Abbott, Railroad Commissioner Victor Carillo, etc. It also mean ambitions deferred for folks like Ted Cruz and Michael Williams. Never fear, both men are the future of the Texas Republican party, and they both deserve a promotion; they”ll just have to get the other folks out of the way next time.

The real losers here are the Democrats, who might have gleaned some advantage from additional GOP fratricide and were angling for a US Senate race. The Democrats could try to flood the GOP primary and vote for KBH just to get another Senate race going. Will it happen? Not in my crystal ball. Perry ekes out a victory, faces a second-tier Democrat (perhaps even … KINKY?!?) and wins another term to become Texas’ longest-serving Governor.

… and KBH stays in DC until 2012.

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Shattered Lives – a report on victims of socialized medicine:
Example – cancer victim dies due to surgery delays:

By the time doctors got around to work on Skeet in January 2000 – five weeks after the initial scheduled operation – it was too late. The cancer had spread to her windpipe in two places, and doctors determined the tumor was inoperable. … For five months, Jane helplessly watched her mother’s condition deteriorate, until Mavis Skeet passed away in late May 2000.

100 more cases like that.

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Droid is an existence proof that disproves Techno-Pessimistic Liberal complaints about the coming closed internet:

How can a device like this even exist when America’s leading cyberlaw experts have been telling us that the whole digital world is increasingly going to hell because of “closed” devices, proprietary code, and managed networks? I’m speaking, of course, about the lamentations of Harvard professors Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and their many disciples…. If all these dour predictions about the death of digital generativity and the rise of closed networks and walled gardens were true, how in the world does a phone with an open source operating system and a completely open applications process for developers even exist?

What’s more amusing is that the techno-pessimists, who lament Apple’s ‘closed/walled garden’ Apps store, are actually iPhone users:

I used some shameless McCarthyite tactics during our debate at New America Foundation last year — “Are you now, or have you ever been, an iPhone user!”

The techno-pessimistic Liberals calling (unnecessarily) for net neaturality Miss the Droid cluetrain – that these different models/approaches exist because they each serve a customer need.

The Droid is open because the Google Android effort was open, and it was open because those involved saw an opening for such a platform. However, the more controlled iPhone platform innovated so much in the mobile phone space that one could well say the Droid would not be what it is today without iPhone leading the way in defining what a Smartphone is. Forcing open-ness up front could well have prevented the innovation that led to Droid.

The real iPhone/Droid evolution lesson is this: If we want real freedom, we want both open and closed business models, so consumers and businesses have more choice and freedom, and so innovation proceeds without impediment.

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“At my age [68], I don’t know what happened a year ago.” – Rene Nuñez, D-El Paso, making the case for term limits.

State education board trustees failed to disclose gifts, says Dallas Morning News:

Two members of the Texas State Board of Education have received thousands of dollars in gifts from a company seeking a lucrative contract with the board, records show, and those members have not reported the gifts on financial disclosure forms.

Bidding documents submitted to the board by the company, AEW Capital Management of Boston, say its employees bought 53 gifts worth more than $5,000 for board finance committee members Rene Nuñez, D-El Paso, and Rick Agosto, D-San Antonio.

These gifts were from a company angling for possible business in management of the Permanent School Fund.

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I honestly thought it was satire when I read first that President Obama won the Nobel Peace prize. How absurd! What has he done other than embolden violent enemies? A formerly important international prize has now reached the nadir of irrelevant tom-foolery by giving the current President an ‘affirmative action’ Nobel Peace Prize he did nothing to earn. It was just last week was satirized by SNL for lack of accomplishments.

Even the UK Times calls says: absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize, saying: “Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.” The mockery made more notable for the fact that “The deadline for nominations was February 1, meaning Obama was nominated after being in office for just 11 days.” National Review notes:

Every year since 1901, the peace prize has been given by a committee of five Norwegians. They are appointed by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting. The Nobel Peace Prize always reflects the consensus of Norwegian politics. And that consensus is, in a word — a word the Norwegians might well choose — “progressive.” Others might call it left-wing.

The Nobel peace prize has gone off the rails into the deep end of left-wing identity politics and absurd peace awards before (Arafat, Gore, Carter, the fraud Rigobeto Menchu, etc.) Yet now, they are no longer even tethered to the excuse of some accomplishment. All this is about is how un-Bush Obama is supposedly is, and how he makes the left feel. In short, the Nobel Peace Prize has become the “un-Bush Prize” for the public figure these 5 Norwegians think is least like George W Bush.

The committee has said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

Really. Which hope? Is it the $13 trillion in deficits? The 4 million jobs lost since Obama was inaugurated? Or simply the hope of leftists that American supremacy is kaput and America is choosing to decline, and free market capitalism took a beating in the past year?

They said: “In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

Really. They say this just a week after a vicious attack by the Taliban in Afghanistan left 8 Americans killed. Two weeks after Iran announced more about their nuclear program (which we’ve known about since 2006).

The more things change the more things stay the same. Again this year – Five Norwegian Idiots Pick Another Leftist.

UPDATE: Perhaps I am wrong in the headlines. Perhaps it should be Five Norwegian Leftists Pick Another Idiot. Another thought: Bill Clinton surely is steamed right about now. Think about it. The logical name to pick, had Hillary won the past election, would have been Bill Clinton for the Nobel “un-Bush” prize as a celebration of her election.

UPDATE II: Someone who deserved it better – Irena Sendler.

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The Baucas ObamaCare bill, which should be known as America’s Death of Healthcare Freedom Act of 2009. This bill has 250 pages and it’s not even the real legislative language. The bill forces people, via multiple mandates and taxes and subsidies, to get people into Government-controlled health insurance:

Personal Responsibility Requirement. Beginning in 2013, all U.S. citizens and legal residents would be required to purchase coverage through (1) the individual market, a public program such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Children‘s Health Insurance Program, Veteran‘s Health Care Program, or TRICARE or through an employer (or as a dependent of a covered employee) in the small group market, meeting at least the requirements of a bronze plan, or (2) in the large group market, in a plan with first dollar coverage for prevention-related services as recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force – except in cases where value-based insurance design is used and cannot have a maximum out-of-pocket limit greater than that provided by the standards established for HSA current law limit.

Why more Government involvement in healthcare hurts your health and your freedom:

“Spending money leads to control over fees … and it inevitably leads to socialized medicine.” – Milton Friedman

UPDATE: My comment over here – in response to the Rep Grayson smear:

Face it. That’s all the Democrats and left-liberals have left. Hate. Fear. Lies.

4 million jobs lost and all the Democrats can do is piddle around with smears and lies about Republicans. Have they at long last no shame, no decency, no caring for the real issues of this nation?

They can’t stand up on their own agenda, because the MAJORITY of Americans OPPOSE the ObamaCare bills created by the Democrats in Congress.

It’s Obama who said that maybe Granny didnt need that hip replacement. Its Waxman’s HR3200 that put in the QALY provisions (aka ‘death panel’) govt board. Maybe its ‘die slowly’…

Democrats are liars, hypocrites and completely unfit to govern. If this their idea of governance, the Jackass party deserves to be retired for a generation and Rep Grayson needs to get fired pronto. America deserves better.

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As noted in recent blog posts, the Democrats in power in DC are hell-bent on breaking any rules of sane governance and listening to the people in a mad rush to ‘not waste a crisis’ and expand Government in the healthcare.

“It’s possible, and perhaps even probable, that the GOP strategy for 2010 is to create a political environment so toxic and voter-alienating that Republicans can win a very low turnout election..”

It seems the real sucide pact is being cooked up on the Democrat side. First, when bills are debated, they spend more time attacking the Republicans then working towards compromise. Then they ignore the concerns of the people with regards to spending. Then they pass a bad bill on a partisan basis, watch it not work, then … blame the Republicans.

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