I Like The Doppelblogger's Metaphor Mangler

Doppelblogger Patrick Appel explains that Andrew Sullivan's unique voice is really a three way party line and puzzles us with this:

Almost all the posts I write are naked links or excerpts, which makes Andrew a weather-vane in the gale of the larger debate.

So Andrew is a weathervane pointing whichever way the wind is blowing?  Well, sure, he supported the war in Iraq when it was cool and opposed it when that was cool, but really - shouldn't he and his minions aspire to pointing boldly towards The Truth, regardless of the prevailing breezes?

The Ace has more.  And "Doppelblogger" is all Mickey (Scroll down).

AS IF WE NEEDED FURTHER CONVINCING:  In a follow-up Mr. Appel adds this:

I'm not nearly as talented a writer as Andrew is, a fact readers ceaseless remind me of whenever I guest-blog for the Dish.

All your adverbs are belong to me.

Comments

[anduril]

Hands up! This is a hijack!

[anduril]

Kaus' strategy, of course, is the wonderfully responsible one of: pass a mess now and make it work later. Yeah, right!

[narciso]

Sullivan has been so vicious and
irresponsible, in the last yeat that one can't help that Appel is associated with him, and not in a good way. No, Kaus doesn't make
much more sense either

[Charlie (Colorado)]

I kinda thought there was too much crazy over there to be the work of just one person.

[clarice]

You mean Sullivan ? Antiwar is rather crazy , too..

Wikipedia (the ron Paulian stream of carp):

Giraldi's claim in the American Conservative magazine
In August 2005, Philip Giraldi claimed that US Vice President Dick Cheney had instructed STRATCOM to prepare

"a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States... [including] a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons... not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."
The reason cited for the attack to use mini-nukes is that the targets are hardened or are deep underground and would not be destroyed by non-nuclear warheads.[4]

[edit] On forged documents
He has written about forged documents and the Iraq War intelligence twice.

First, he said that the Italian Niger/yellowcake document were forgeries created by former CIA officers and Michael Ledeen. See Niger uranium forgeries.

Second, he said that the Habbush letter was created by the Office of Special Plans on the order of Dick Cheney. See Habbush letter

[edit] 2008 Primaries
During the 2008 presidential primaries, Giraldi served as Ron Paul's foreign policy adviser.

**

[Willie Wonka]

Since yer 'Mickey' link demurred to the Healthcare debate, it ain't, technically OT.

In order for the Dems to consider the Nuclear Option, it would take balls. Therefore, ambinder is just stoking the furnace to kill any Healthcare Reform, of any variety that doesn't completely satisfy the Healthcare Industry.

Along with that Strawman, I will eat Maguire's Straw Hat, if the Dems actually pursue a simple majority. They , like all politicians, value their jobs more than the Public Trust they pretend to defend.

[narciso]

Yes, he's either certifiable or mendacious, He was a Turkey and/Italy expert, yet he claims expertise that is far a field

[anduril]

2 strikes against you, clarice:

1. you're trying to hijack this thread from its topic, and

2. you're peeking at my posts again.

[clarice]

Any partner of Cannistraro is certifiable or corrupt.

As for Sullivan why did he allow Appel to reveal this now? Is he leaving and wants to turn this over? It is not just serendipity.

[verner]

Excuse me, but what the hell does Andrew Sullivan do all day? He needs help to produce that pitiful little blog at the Atlantic? Geez, the only thing it publishes are 1000 versions of how much thinking people should hate Sarah Palin--you need help to do that?

[narciso]

They do strike me, like the Tommy Lee Jones character in "Under Siege", or the Timothy
Oliphant villain in the latest "Die hard." If only they had listened to me, Saddamm would still be in power, and everything would be hunky dory

[Rob Crawford]

Excuse me, but what the hell does Andrew Sullivan do all day?

Pot?

[peter]

excuse me, but what the hell does Andrew Sullivan do all day?

eeewwww, don't want to go there

[narciso]

Well there is adoration of the Obami, that takes work in all it's manifestation. Greeley
is doing somersaults, at what his Atlantic has become.

[clarice]

Exactly--Preposterous that he can't turn this out on his own.

[verner]

Right Clarice, and one can only imagine how much they are paying him for it.

Another example of a rich person (David Bradley) using his money foolishly to gain access to the Kewl kids...

With Andrew, he had a writer who would reliably give Obama and his crew journalistic BJ's in a taylorized fashion. Thus the big paycheck for the trademark "conservative" (cough cough) gay guy and his ghostwriters. The cute beagles--lagniappe.

[bgates]

With Andrew, he had a writer who would reliably give Obama and his crew journalistic BJ's in a taylorized fashion.

I think you wrote "journalistic" when you meant to write " ".

[verner]

bgates--well, that too--you bad thing. I've always felt that Andrew's main attraction to Obama is just the plain old garden variety sexual type...

[anduril]

I'm surprised our in house NYT reader didn't find something to say about this: Ross Douthat: Here's How To Understand Obama's Hand In Glove Relationship With Big Business.

[anduril]

Here's an amusing, but sad, report from The Corner:

About a half hour ago, Sen. Joe Lieberman was making remarks on Medicare on the Senate floor when his allotted time expired. As is standard practice in the Senate, Lieberman asked the chair for a few minutes of additional time to conclude, “without objection.”

But the presiding officer, one Sen. Al Franken, said no. “In my capacity as Senator from Minnesota, I object.”

Lieberman laughed. “Really? Okay, I don't take it personally.”

But John McCain did. Rising to defend Lieberman he told Franken that in 20-plus years in the Senate, he’d never seen a member denied an extra minute or two of floor time.

“I don't know what's happening here in this body,” McCain said, “but I think it is wrong.”

[JM Hanes]

I think we're talking unitary executive, not Doppelblogger, but this was still pretty lame:

Bylines would fracture the solitary voice of the blog.

Sullivan's aversion to giving other people credit where credit is due goes back to his earliest days on the net, where he was padding his blog with anonymous reader emails from day one. He originally couched his refusal to acknowledge their authors as a "policy" designed to promote ideas based debate over personality driven argument. We've got yr irony right here.

I wouldn't be surprised if the mud slinger in chief were expecting to be outed for this little fraud. Hotfooting it out of town, and letting a minion take the heat, seems par for the Sullivan course.

[pagar]

"But the presiding officer, one Sen. Al Franken"

Al Franken presiding over a PTA meeting would be scary. Al Franken presiding over the US Senate shows just how far this once great country has fallen.

[daddy]

Patrick Appel writes in the linked story:

"I've marinated in Sullivan's cerebral juices for a few years now..."

Maybe its just me, but for some reason that phrase strikes me as almost vomit inducing.

[Ignatz]

It's most definitely not just you daddy.

[clarice]

It is peculiar that Apel would suddenly and proudly announce that Sully's even a bigger fraud than we imagined.Maybe Sully's been reading all those articles in the MSM about how much fun it is to be unemployed (now that there's a Dem president).

[anduril]

I'm not a big fan of Rod Dreher, but...he seems to have the same take as Rick Moran. Come to think of it, I'm not much of a fan of Moran, either. Still:

I'm reading Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue":

Got it this morning, and will be reviewing it on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon. The story so far: Sarah loves Alaska, she loves America, she loves serving "ordinary, hardworking people," she loves tax-cutting, and she loves our free enterprise system. She hates hates hates people who tell her she can't do this or that because she's a woman. A hundred pages in, two things jump out:

1. She's selling a personality, not a platform. This might change as I get further into the narrative, but there's very little of substance here, and a whole lot of attitude. That may be politically smart, given how Americans tend to vote on personality.

2. She's a conflicted populist, and doesn't understand that. It's simply bizarre how she can write with passion about how badly Exxon screwed over the people of Alaska in the Exxon Valdez incident, and how the cozy relationship between Alaska's government and the oil industry worked against the interests of ordinary hardworking people ... and yet repeat shopworn GOP nostrums like this one:

In national politics, some feel that big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy. Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what's good for business is bad for people. (That's what Karl Marx thought too.)

Somebody is not connecting the dots. OK, back to the book. I'll update this later.

So he does update it, and that's why I provided the link above! Everybody happy about that? Well, just in case you're too lazy to click the link, here's Dreher's absolute bottom line:

I think Palin is probably a likable person, and she really has suffered some nasty, disgusting attacks from Trig Truthers and others. But she is so far from being capable of being president of the United States it's not even funny. I know, I know, this isn't news, but you'd think that if there was anything more to her in terms of intellectual seriousness and judgment than we saw last fall, she'd have brought it out in a memoir she had most of a year to write with the help of a professional writer. But there's no there there. I'm not saying she's a bad person -- I don't believe she's a bad person at all -- but I am saying she's not a credible national political leader.

[narciso]

There is nothing about effective stewardship, or budgeting or fighting corruption in Dreher's account. Daddy explained to me the unique nature of the oligarchy that reigns in the state, United Fruit with Polar Bears. Dreher really hates capitalism intrinsically, she has problems with some company's management of the lands. THat's why she opposed the corrupt bargain with Exxon Mobil,
why she pushed for an open bidding process.

[daddy]

It must be nice to be a CNN International Reporter. You wake up and know that the Science is settled, that no one in Copenhagen has any motive whatever beyond altruisim and a sincere love of GAIA and their fellow man, and that whatever agreement gets churned out in this transcendent moment of human nobility will prove compassionate, visionary, and beneficial.

Just watched one pop up and say matter of factly that Global Warming will cause wars, because some nations will no longer be able to produce crops, while other countries will be enabled to start producing crops, thus wars will start. And here to comment on AGW starting wars is my guest from the UN Mister blah, blah, blah...

I feel sad for you JOMer's back stateside not being able to share the karmic wonderfulness of the moment with me and CNN International. Bummer.

[Boatbuilder]

Don't cry for us, daddy. Rest assured the stateside press shares in the bliss, and continues to spread the gospel. I know, we don't get to see Al in the flesh, but they are working hard to convey to us just how truly special it all is.

[daddy]

Speaking of Andrew's DoppelBloggers, how about Android Andrew ">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1235994/I-Robot-Buy-android-double-Christmas.html"> Doppelganger-Bot Bloggers?

Simply stew in Sully's cerebral juices for a few years, set in front of a keyboard, and voila', your Daily Dis.

[Stephanie]

Found a great letter to the eds for y'all to read.

LUN

[daddy]

More ">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1236651/Is-lost-city-Atlantis-Grainy-images-released-showing-city-like-structures-beneath-Caribbean-Sea.html"> "The Science is settled"

Now if we could just tie in Nessie, Bigfoot, Crop Circles, AGW, and the Face on Mar's, we'd be getting somewhere!

[daddy]

Great letter Stephanie,

Very funny but true. Thanks for posting it.

[Melinda Romanoff]

Thanks, Stephanie, that was a refreshing link.

Keep an eye out for the burning bag I left on the doorstep of the other thread...

G'night all.

[daddy]

Even More settled Science!

Wherein I prove that ">http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091214.html"> Saturn's Hexagon is actually ">http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/class/w031223d079.jpg"> a Snowflake!

[daddy]

Alright, I'll quit.

But as if there wasn't already enough encroachment on the territory of endangered Polar Bear's:
">http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/1060566.html"> Beware of frog 'hitchhikers' on Christmas trees.

[Dave (in MA)]

Wife is watching Joy Behag and the pressing news topic of the day is Sarah Palin's hat.

[Neo]

They say it will only cost the US about $100 billion …

The madness is now official:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-draft-deal-agreed-20091218-l1jo.html
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Brazilian President Inacio Lula da Silva were all seen as the talks got underway shortly after 11pm in Copenhagen.
Among industrialised countries, the participants were Norway, Russia, Spain, Britain, the US, Denmark, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan.
Representing small island states were the Maldives and Grenada, with Sudan, Algeria, Ethiopia and Lesotho from Africa. Sudan is also the leader of the G77 group of 130 developed countries, Algeria heads the Africa Group, and Lesotho leads the bloc of Least Developed Countries.”

[Topsecretk9]

I can't believe The Atlantic is paying ghostbloggers for Andrew!!! The Atlantic???

[AL]

“I think Palin is probably a likable person…But she is so far from being capable of being president of the United States…”

Wrong. She is the only politician who proved to be different from current breed of illiterate, soft-fingered, and egomaniac layers you vote to rule the country.

You can call it “hope and change”. The real one.

[Extraneus]

This year, the presidential capability bar has been permanently lowered. It is reasonable to argue that we now have the worst president in American history, and that virtually any randomly-chosen adult would be better. Therefore, references to how far from "capable" Palin or anyone else is simply reveal Dreher as either a fool or a liberal suck-up. (Oh, and he's on NPR is he? Didn't realize they had many "conservatives" there.)

[Old Lurker]

Chaco is top story at Powerline.

We are surrounded by rockstars!

[Captain Hate]

simply reveal Dreher as either a fool or a liberal suck-up.

They aren't mutually exclusive. Ok, it's no surprise that the douchetools at Pravda West wouldn't like teh Sarah's book. The question is: Have they turned their critical eyes to the subliterate doggerel that ManBearPig penned in his latest propaganda scam text? That "poem" is so godawful (as somebody at AoS wrote: It's like calling a bunch of bullet points in a presentation poetry) that I'd rather endure Dhimmi Carter's senile ramblings than subject myself to that sub-tripe.

[RichatUF]

Extraneus-

It is reasonable to argue that we now have the worst president in American history, and that virtually any randomly-chosen adult would be better.

Obama has a ways to go before he reaches Fillmore or Wilson status.

[Poet Laureate Al Gore]

Its hot
and getting hotter.
earthheat

one million degrees and lockboxes
for Mother Gaia

one million dollars and fixers
for Father Earth

my blubber layers
are earthheat endothermic

and winter storms are named after me.

[Extraneus]

He'll make it, Rich.

[Jane]

I think this is pretty funny:

2010 Campaign Preview: Democrats To Say GOP Still Party Of Bush

[ManBearPig]

Through years of therapy
and awkwardness within my skin
I've finally found my voice

When earth has a fever
I'm the doctor
in the ER

Though my teachers at St Albans
may not have recognized my genius
I have the last laugh

And for the apostates
in Divinity school
I've found a more convenient deity

In the Buddhist temples
brimming with cash
I detected serenity

who cares if the Arctic isn't a continent

[BlackWidow]

Little does A know he's become stuck in our sticky web
so he can't disrupt the thousand Climategate parties elsewhere :) Good work, gang! Keep it up, ignore but engage just enough to keep him here.

[DebinNC]

It would kick off with $US10 billion ($A11.28 billion) a year from 2010 to 2012, climbing to $US50 billion ($A56.39 billion) annually by 2015 and $US100 billion ($A112.78 billion) by 2020

I guess it's pure chance that the costs don't explode until the 2012 election is over.

[pagar]

"Obama has a ways to go before he reaches Fillmore or Wilson status. "

My first thought was up or down. I'd be interested to hear more thoughts on this.

[Pofarmer]

“I don't know what's happening here in this body,” McCain said, “but I think it is wrong.”

Does it really take Mr. Obvious to point out what's happening?

[Jack is Back!]

Pagar,

My first thought was to channel my son: "Are we there yet?"

It was 80 and raining when I left Orlando yesterday. Now in Southampton and it is a bright and sunny 34F with snow on the horizon for tomorrow. Not just snow but a blizzard. Too much CO2 I guess.

[verner]

Jane, um....should we send the Dems the memo that a significant percentage of the electorate is now nostalgic for Bush after 11 months of Obamasocialism?

History will be kind to GWB.

[Janet]

Who exactly are McCain and McConnell (when Sanders amendment was withdrawn) pleading with? They look out and complain that the Dems. are cheating!...it's not fair!

Well wake up! The Dems. will cheat, lie, and rob for there ideology. This is nothing new. Are they just now seeing it? The Repubs. are so naive. We need some "tough as nails" leaders or there is no hope in stopping ALL the nonsense that is coming our way.

[Janet]

I want Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Ace of Spades, or Bill Whittle to represent me. I want them to say, "You are a moron Al Franken". I want the Dems. to be outraged at the uncouth TRUTH.

[Jane]

I'm with you Janet. I want to see some anger.

[clarice]

Oh Oh, The Telegraphs Dellingpole says we won the Climategate battle but lost the war:
"Richard North has spotted this, even if virtually nobody else has. The key point, he notes, is the Copenhagen negotiators’ little-publicised decision to save the Kyoto Protocol. This matters because it was at Kyoto that the mechanisms for establishing a global carbon market were established. Carbon trading could not possibly exist without some form of agreement between all the world’s governments on emissions: the market would simply collapse. By keeping Kyoto alive, the sinister troughers of global corporatism have also kept their cash cow alive.
As North says:

This is nothing to do with the headline billions and all the rest. Nope, the deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change – you can buy countries with that sort of money. "

< href=http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020288/climategate-we-won-the-battle-but-at-copenhagen-we-just-lost-the-war/>troughers win?

[clarice]

LUN

[Neo]

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.

After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

... too funny

[narciso]

I think the phrase we are looking for is "boom, taste my night stick" that's certainly
what they deserve. We have Noah level conditions down here, as bad as the no name storm of 2000

[Janet]

Who is enforcing ANY rules or laws anymore? Our side appeals to the rules and law, but it is already gone. The Dems. don't obey any rules....so what? What are we gonna do about it? The Dems. are a law unto themselves. The refs in the game - the media - will let them do anything. There is absolutely no accountability. We must play by "the rules", and they do not. I don't see how we win this game.

[anduril]

Wife is watching Joy Behag and the pressing news topic of the day is Sarah Palin's hat.

And so you came here to find out what Michelle wore yesterday? Hey, did you hear she wore black to light the Christmas tree? What was that about?

Here are a couple interesting stories:

Blindfolded on a cliff edge:

"MONTREAL - If the Chinese stock market is still an indicator of global investor appetite for risk, as analysts viewed it a few months ago, then that appetite has lately diminished. Perhaps they are finally absorbing some of the revelations about statistical manipulations."

This one was on the front page of the WSJ yesterday and is a pretty big story:

Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes (Updated)

Tapping into drones’ video feeds was just the start. The U.S. military’s primary system for bringing overhead surveillance down to soldiers and Marines on the ground is also vulnerable to electronic interception, multiple military sources tell Danger Room. That means militants have the ability to see through the eyes of all kinds of combat aircraft — from traditional fighters and bombers to unmanned spy planes. The problem is in the process of being addressed. But for now, an enormous security breach is even larger than previously thought.

The military initially developed the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, in 2002. The idea was let troops on the ground download footage from Predator drones and AC-130 gunships as it was being taken. Since then, nearly every airplane in the American fleet — from F-16 and F/A-18 fighters to A-10 attack planes to Harrier jump jets to B-1B bombers has been outfitted with equipment that lets them transmit to ROVERs. Thousands of ROVER terminals have been distributed to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But those early units were “fielded so fast that it was done with an unencrypted signal. It could be both intercepted (e.g. hacked into) and jammed,” e-mails an Air Force officer with knowledge of the program. In a presentation last month before a conference of the Army Aviation Association of America, a military official noted that the current ROVER terminal “receives only unencrypted L, C, S, Ku [satellite] bands.”

So the same security breach that allowed insurgent to use satellite dishes and $26 software to intercept drone feeds can be used the tap into the video transmissions of any plane.

Lots more...well, OK:

But it won’t be easy. An unnamed Pentagon official tells reporters that “this is an old issue that’s been addressed.” Air Force officers contacted by Danger Room disagree, strongly.

“This is not a trivial solution,” one officer observes. “Almost every fighter/bomber/ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance] platform we have in theater has a ROVER downlink. All of our Tactical Air Control Parties and most ground TOCs [tactical operations centers] have ROVER receivers. We need to essentially fix all of the capabilities before a full transition can occur and in the transition most capabilities need to be dual-capable (encrypted and unencrypted).”

Which presents all sorts of problems. Let’s say a drone or an A-10 is sent to cover soldiers under fire. If the aircraft has an encrypted transmitter and the troops have an unencrypted ROVER receiver, that surveillance footage can’t be passed down to the soldiers who need it most.

“Can these feeds be encrypted with 99.5 percent chance of no compromise? Absolutely! Can you guarantee that all the encryption keys make it down to the lowest levels in the Army or USMC [United States Marine Corps]? No way,” adds a second Air Force officer, familiar with the ROVER issue. “Do they trust their soldiers/Marines with these encryption keys? Don’t know that.”

Since the top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, issued strict new guidelines on the use of airstrikes, the United States has turned nearly every plane in its inventory into an eye in the sky. Sending video down to those ROVER terminals has become job No. 1 for most American air crews flying today.

[anduril]

This link is not intended as an endorsement of DiFazio, but it's worth a read: Pelosi, Rahm do not scare Rep. DeFazio.

I like this quote:

DeFazio has been a leading liberal voice complaining that the Democratic Congress and White House have failed to capitalize on significant victories in last year’s elections. His latest target is the Senate, where he says Democrats’ struggle to move healthcare legislation is preventing the Congress from sending a job-creation bill to the president’s desk. With the unemployment rate at 10 percent, House Democrats see jobs as the No. 1 campaign issue heading into the midterm election year.

“It’s just incredible frustration,” DeFazio said. “The killing ground of the Senate is ultimately, potentially, the killing ground of the Democratic Party.”

[Rick Ballard]

Clarice,

I believe that Dellingpole may be a tad too pessimistic. The US is not signatory to Kyoto (BJ Bubba's signature aside) and the Democrat Economy Killers will have to pass Crap on Trade legislation in order for the carbon credit fraud to truly flourish.

I don't see a particularly bright future for Air Taxes.

[Janet]

...like the LUN from Clarice on Kyoto. What are we gonna do about it? How do you stop this madness? H. Clinton is pledging my families money to this fraud...we all know it's a fraud, but we can't stop it.

When I give my money to whatever cause I believe in...and I find out it is a hoax or corrupt, I can stop giving. But when the government takes my money and gives it to different causes...the money never ends, even if the cause is a complete hoax.

I don't see how we stop this madness. I need to go do something positive...I'm rambling and disheartened.

[anduril]

Who does this guy think he is?

COPENHAGEN — A visibly angry Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet at China and other developing nations Friday, declaring that the time has come "not to talk but to act" on climate change.

Emerging from a multinational meeting boycotted by Chinese Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Obama warned delegates that U.S. offers of funding for poor nations would remain on the table “if and only if” developing nations, including China, agreed to international monitoring of their greenhouse gas emissions.

"I have to be honest, as the world watches us... I think our ability to take collective action is doubt and it hangs in the balance,” Obama told the COP-15 plenary session as hope for anything more than a vague political in agreement faded.

“The time for talk is over, this is the bottom line: We can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward. We can do that and everyone who is in this room will be part of an historic endeavor or we can choose delay,” he said.

This rhetoric is just so typically Marxist, so typical of European philosophy from Hegel on. But beyond that--does anyone think that the Chinese or other world leaders take kindly to this bullying style? They may have objected to Bush's "unilateralism," but they can't prefer this hectoring, nanny-style in which Obama addresses them as a god from on high.

[clarice]

Rick--Dellingpole's audience is largely British and yes, he was writing that for them. I don't think Cap & Trade will pass here..Americans are less bound to state media and climategate seems to be getting aroung. The WaPo has an interesting poll today, though--despite the public's scepticism about climate change and the pols and scientists who promote it, they want the govt to controlk "greenhouse emissions". Of course it's a WaPo poll so I'd not bet on it being more than a hamburger helper poll, but we cannot let up/

[clarice]

Guardian reprint speech (url embedded in article LUN) and is disappointed in the empty blather.

[anduril]

Also worth a read--a polarized nation (pun semi-intended): The Battleground Poll and the Battle for America.

Just two snippets:

On December 16, 2009, Battleground released its latest poll. In this poll, 63% of the American people described themselves as "very conservative" or "somewhat conservative." The rest of America - not just liberals, but moderates and people who were unsure about their ideology or chose not to respond to that question, totaled, collectively, only 37% of America. A measly one percent of Americans called themselves moderates; 25% of Americans called themselves "somewhat liberal," and 8% of Americans called themselves "very liberal."

...

In the November 2008 Battleground Poll, for the first and only time, the straight question of "conservative" or "liberal" was not posed to respondents. Instead, the poll asked respondents two separate questions: fiscal ideology was asked on Question D6 and social ideology was asked on Question D7. The Battleground Poll was clearly intending to refine Question D3. What were the results? Fiscal conservatives in Question D6 were 69% of respondents and fiscal liberals were 37% of respondents. Social conservatives were 53% of respondents and social liberals were 39% of respondents. While that sounds like social conservatism is a weak link, that is misleading: a whopping 34% of all Americans described themselves as "very conservative" on social issues, by far the largest very intense group in any Battleground Poll.

[anduril]

heh, really weird, the way "respondent" starts four consecutive lines.

[Janet]

Gerald Warner - "What a bunch of baffoons"
LUN...same link as Neo.

I'd vote for him to represent me.

[anduril]

Really fascinating: India is 'thailand' to Asia, say scientists:

MUMBAI - Since "thai" means "mother" in classical Tamil, the language of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu and said to be the oldest living language in the world, "thailand" means motherland. However, India could be an ancient "motherland" of Thailand and Asia in a more literal sense, according to a new investigative study, "'Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia".

The findings, from an unprecedented collaboration of over 80 researchers and 40 scientific institutions across Asia [1], reveal a twist in the history of human migration. It points to India, then Thailand and Southeast Asia, being the ancestral home to most Asians.

The paper, titled "Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia", published in the Science journal issue of December 10, is the first of its kind on Asian populations. Undertaken by the Singapore-based Human Genome Organization (HUGO), the study follows earlier multiple genetic studies on European populations.

[willis]

"So Andrew is a weathervane pointing whichever way the wind is blowing?"

Please don't mention Andrew, pointing, and blowing in the same sentence.

[Trigonometry]

"Weathervane" is a joke; Sully's fevered obsession with the Trig pregnancy borders on the pornographic.
His ghostwriters probably all take a half-step back and look at each other nervously when Sully goes on one of his Trig rants. Once he calms down they block out the painful memories and pretend nothing happened.
It's how kids react when their parents launch into a screaming match at the dinner table on Thanksgiving, one of those real freak shows where the big guns of TMI crash and explode somewhere over the Plymouth Rock diorama: money problems, sexual inadequacies, weight gain, and the relative happiness of other couples' marriages.
In the ensuing silence one of the kids pipes up, in a voice struggling to be normal but coming out like Oliver Twist, "Pass the turkey, please?"
That child grew up and went on to work for the inhuman intellect of the brilliant Andrew Sullivan. Same scene, new adjectives. "Weathervane" indeed.

[Quilly Mammoth]

I always wondered what those two beagels at Sully's feet represented...which one is Patrick?

[Bob C]

Be careful using the words "Andrew Sullivan" and "blowing" in the same sentence, ok? I just ate lunch.

[srp]

BTW, the Atlantic pays Sullivan because he is by far the biggest traffic generator to their website. I'd say that scares me, but if you think of him as a troll embedded in the larger blogosphere it sort of makes sense.