McCain To Base: I'm Just Not That Into You

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Hat tip to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air

John McCain is a stubborn man and it is a character trait that has held him in good stead. As a prisoner in Vietnam his stubbornness in not giving up and giving in to the five year long ordeal of his imprisonment certainly played a large part in keeping him alive. And stubbornness can be a good quality in a politician, too. God knows Ronald Reagan was stubborn, often proudly saying that one of his political strategies was to get most of what he wanted from the Democrats in one battle, letting them save face with a partial win...and then going back and getting the rest of what he wanted later.

But stubbornness can be a character flaw, too. It can make you blind to the arguments of others. This can be especially problematic when you're wrong and they're right. It can make you arrogant and can alienate people who should be your allies. Which brings us to McCain and conservatives, his base without whom he can't win this election. You see, the problem is McCain really doesn't like us. To a large degree he's bought into the moonbat caricature of conservatives, thinking we're bigots and yahoos who lack hearts. But he's figured out a way to deal with us. He's going to throw us some red meat during the campaign; he'll give us some lip service when he has to and once he placates us enough that we vote him into office, he's stubbornly going to go right back to what he wants to do. You can do that sort of thing and keep a clear conscience when you're doing it to people you don't respect, I guess.

Take a listen to the following clip of McCain answering a question after a speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Washington, DC on Saturday.


Link: sevenload.com



McCain took a terrible beating on comprehensive immigration reform when the conservative grassroots mobilized against The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 which conservatives asserted was nothing more than a Trojan Horse for amnesty for illegals. Ostensibly chastened by the defeat and with his eyes on winning the Republican nomination McCain toned down his rhetoric and started emphasizing border security enforcement. As a matter of fact, in his prepared remarks at the NALEO he maintained that new line:

I and many other colleagues twice attempted to pass comprehensive immigration legislation to fix our broken borders; ensure respect for the laws of this country; recognize the important economic necessity of immigrant laborers; apprehend those who came here illegally to commit crimes; and deal practically and humanely with those who came here, as my distant ancestors did, to build a better, safer life for their families, without excusing the fact they came here illegally or granting them privileges before those who did. Many Americans, with good cause, did not believe us when we said we would secure our borders, and so we failed in our efforts. We must prove to them that we can and will secure our borders first, while respecting the dignity and rights of citizens and legal residents of the United States. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that our responsibility to meet this challenge will end with that accomplishment. We have economic and humanitarian responsibilities as well, and they require no less dedication from us in meeting them.

Only in the q and a session, when he wasn't reading from a script did his real feelings and intentions come out. Comprehensive immigration reform "and not just enforcement" (quote from questioner) "will be my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow" (quote from McCain). His "top priority". Oh. I see. He pretty much admits that the emphasis on border security is not much more than the usual boob bait for the Bubbas when he says (while he was off-script), "We have to secure our borders. That's the message." Right. That's the message. But it isn't the important part of what he wants to do, which stays substantially the same as when conservatives sank it last year. He also reminds us conservative brutes that illegals may be breaking the law but, by Golly, "They're God's children and they'll be treated in a humane fashion." Well, I guess that means we should all put away our white sheets and flaming crosses. According to McCain, those of us who want the law enforced are inhumane. Nope, he doesn't care for us at all.

He also thinks we're trying to destroy the Earth or something as well, as he's seemingly bought into the Al Gore apocalyptic view of man's impact on the environment. The Wall Street Journal had this to say about McCain's "solution" to global warming:

This is one of those issues where Mr. McCain indulges his "maverick" tendencies, which usually means taking the liberal line. That was the case yesterday, no matter how frequently he claimed his approach was "market based." In fact, if "the market" is your favored mechanism, Mr. McCain's endorsement of a "cap and trade" system is the worst choice for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The Bush Administration has pursued one option, which combines voluntary measures with subsidies for "clean" alternatives. Since 2001 under this approach, U.S. net carbon emissions have fallen by 3% – that is, by more than all but four countries in cap-and-trade-bound Europe. At the other end of the market spectrum is a straight carbon tax, which would at least distribute costs more efficiently. It would also force politicians to be honest about – and take responsibility for – the true price of their global-warming posturing. Then there's cap and trade, which Mr. McCain has backed for years and would, as he put it with some understatement, "change the dynamic of our energy economy." He noted that Americans have a genius for problem-solving but continued, "The federal government can't just summon these talents by command – only the free market can draw them out." To translate: His plan is "market based" insofar as it requires an expensive, invasive government bureaucracy to interfere with the market.

McCain has bought into the whole global warming cult and, as with so many other issues about which conservatives have disagreements with him, he is impervious to points of view other than his own. He refuses to favor drilling in ANWR, convinced beyond all reason that it is the equivalent of the Grand Canyon instead of the mosquito-ridden swamp that it is in summer and the tundra wasteland that it is in the winter, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. When McCain becomes convinced of something that puts him on the opposite side of conservative thought, he simply ignores counter argument and becomes as suspect of conservative motivations as the average poster on the Huffington Post. It seems unlikely that he would be moved by this counter argument to the assertion that global warming is settled science:

The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of "an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure." Global warming may or may not be "the greatest scam in history," as it was recently called by John Coleman, a prominent meteorologist and the founder of the Weather Channel. Certainly, however, under the scientific method it does not rise to the level of an "item of physical knowledge."

Nevertheless, the acceptance of man-made global warming as scientific fact has become so prevalent that the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, recently declared: "The debate is over. It's time to discuss solutions." Leaving aside the question of the secretary-general's qualifications, that is certainly one of the most antiscientific statements ever made. The first question that this raises is why have so many scientists chosen to ignore this glaring failure of the global warming hypothesis to meet the standards of their own profession? The second question is what, if anything, can be done about it?

The first, and most obvious, temptation for this sort of willful blindness is financial. Hearst made only a fraction of his estimated $140 million in net worth from yellow journalism. Global warming, on the other hand, has provided an estimated $50 billion in research grants to those willing to practice yellow science. Influence in the public sphere is another strong temptation. It might not be as impressive as starting the Spanish-American War, but global-warming alarmists have amassed a large group of journalists and politicians ready to silence any critics and endorse whatever boondoggle scheme is prescribed as the cure to our impending climate catastrophe.

Finally, one should not underestimate the temptation of convenience. Just as it is far easier to publish stories without verifying the sources; so is it much more convenient to practice yellow science than the real thing. It takes far more courage, perseverance, and perspiration to develop formulas, make predictions, and risk being proved wrong than to look at historical data and muse about observed similarities. Yellow scientists have fled the risks of science that Albert Einstein described when he said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong."

McCain really doesn't want to deal with arguments like these. He's part of the the global warming crusade and those of us who aren't are probably jerks (a favorite term of his) to him. John McCain wants to be President and seems to think that conservatives better get in line behind him, instead of him taking us seriously if he wants our votes.

He has seemed to move some of his positions somewhat to the right but it is hard to tell if all of that is just "message", masking his real intentions. Many conservatives feel it is all mask and no reality. A lot of conservatives comfort themselves with the belief that even if most of McCain's (very tepid) outreach to conservatives is all smoke and mirrors, at least he'll appoint conservative judges. But George Will in a recent column calls even that into question when he notes how conservatives on the Court have ruled on an issue near and dear to his hear:

The McCain-Feingold law abridging freedom of political speech -- it restricts the quantity, timing and content of such speech -- included a provision, the Millionaires' Amendment, that mocked the law's veneer of disinterested moralizing about "corruption." The provision unmasked the law's constitutional recklessness and its primary purpose, which is the protection of incumbents.

The amendment, written to punish wealthy, self-financing candidates, said that when such a candidate exceeds a particular spending threshold, his opponent can receive triple the per-election limit of $2,300 from each donor -- the limit above which the threat of corruption supposedly occurs. And the provision conferred other substantial benefits on opponents of self-financing candidates, even though such candidates cannot be corrupted by their own money, which the court has said they have a constitutional right to spend.

Declaring the Millionaires' Amendment unconstitutional, the court, in an opinion written by Alito, reaffirmed two propositions. First, because money is indispensable for the dissemination of political speech, regulating campaign contributions and expenditures is problematic and justified only by government's interest in combating "corruption" or the "appearance" thereof. Second, government may not regulate fundraising and spending in order to fine-tune electoral competition by equalizing candidates' financial resources.

The court said it has never upheld the constitutionality of a law that imposes different financing restraints on candidates competing against each other. And the Millionaires' Amendment impermissibly burdened a candidate's First Amendment right to spend his own money for campaign speech.

This ruling invites challenges to various state laws, such as Arizona's and Maine's, that penalize private funding of political speech. Those laws increase public funds for candidates taking such funds when their opponents spend certain amounts of their own money or receive voluntary private contributions that cumulatively exceed certain ceilings. Such laws, like McCain-Feingold, rest on the fiction that political money can be regulated without regulating political speech.

The more McCain talks -- about wicked "speculators," about how he reveres the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as much as the Grand Canyon, about adjusting the planet's thermostat, etc. -- the more conservatives cling to judicial nominees as a reason for supporting him. But now another portion of his signature legislation has been repudiated by the court as an affront to the First Amendment, and again Roberts and Alito have joined the repudiation. Yet McCain promises to nominate jurists like them. Is that believable? [emphasis mine]

John McCain "is just not that into" his base. Well frankly, we in his base are not really that into him either. He's seems to be pegging his Presidential hopes on the fact that however we feel about him we're still going to march down to our local voting booths and vote for him come Election Day.

Its a helluva campaign strategy, isn't it?

Nocomme1 also posts at The Patriot Room and Flopping Aces

Shh! Don't Tell Al Gore: Late Spring Snowstorm On Mount Hood

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Its a darn good thing that Al Gore is impervious to facts because if he cared a lick about the truth this story would rattle the King of Global Warming:

Winter-like weather returned to the Northwest as snow fell across the state Tuesday including on Mount Hood where drivers were dealing with unusual weather for this time of year.

And while it didn't cause major problems, most people were asking, "What happened to spring?"

The snowfall at Timberline Tuesday was amazing, blowing snow and ice most of the day. There was packed snow and ice on the roadway that turned to slush in some spots and the trees were coated thickly.

Even though the Fourth of July is less than a month away to many it seemed more like February.

"I don't ever remember it being this much snow this late in the season," one mountain resident said.

People who live on the mountain said they found 3 to 4 inches of fresh snow on the ground Tuesday morning and it was a shocker -- even for those who stay there year-round.

"It is not supposed to do this in June," Bill Roberson of South Carolina said with a laugh as he stood in the falling snow wearing shorts.

It must be getting harder and harder to be Al Gore.

Enviro-Mental News

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San Francisco, always at the cutting edge of putting bad policies into law has become the first municipality in the nation to punish businesses by making them...

...pay a tax on carbon, according to the Los Angeles Times.

At 4.4 cents per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, the tax is expected neither to generate a windfall of cash for local government nor induce much change in polluting industries. Power plants, refineries and other big smokestack polluters would be hit the hardest, whereas most of the 2,500 newly regulated businesses would pay less than $1 a year, according to published reports. All businesses currently regulated for emitting smog-forming pollutants – everything from bakeries to print shops – will be affected, according to the Mercury News.

But it is the first attempt at a global warming regulation that economists say would be more efficient (and possibly more effective) than a cap-and-trade system of regulating carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade regulations on power plants and factories have, over time, been effective in reducing pollution that causes acid rain and smog, but carbon emissions result from many more sources.

The basic idea of a carbon tax is to assess the true cost of pollution up front. As is, carbon dioxide is spewed into the atmosphere at no charge, but the resulting changes to the climate are expected to have profound economic costs, ranging from increased rates of tropical disease to the need for fortifying coastal zones from sea-level rise.

Of course the problem with the above information is that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant and if it is now policy to start taxing emitters of carbon dioxide, one can only wonder how long it will be before the government begins to tax us for breathing. As a matter of fact the average person exhales about 1kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per day which means the government stands to make a pretty penny off your very existence. It probably isn't too early to start to practice holding your breath.

_______________________________________________________________

President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus, has already made an enemy of the environmental movement awhile ago by stating in a newspaper interview that...

Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment.

Now he has gone and made matters worse by writing a book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, obviously in the same evil vein. In it he says,

"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."

Don't expect Klaus to be one of those foreign leaders who gets quoted a lot in Time or Newsweek.

_____________________________________________________________

Renowned physicist, author and non-kook has written an essay for the New York Review of Books in which he says,

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the be-lief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

Of course Dyson isn't Al Gore, but maybe we should listen to him. You know, maybe just a little?

John McCain's "Base-less" Global Warming Speech

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John McCain had a good day today; no, John McCain had a great day today. He had the kind of day that he likes best, the kind that makes him smile and laugh that "Heh-Heh" laugh of his. McCain gave a speech that he knew would make people like me really unhappy with him.

McCain's speech on global warming, given in a windmill factory in Oregon, spelled out his "cap and trade" plan, which is ostensibly a free market approach to limiting CO2 emissions. Sadly, like most global warming schemes it a feel-good plan masquerading as reasoned policy. National Review Online editorialized against it today and hit on most of its very large flaws:

The Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) estimates that a U.S. cap-and-trade regime like the one discussed in this speech would cause about a one-percent reduction in GDP within five years. In less abstract terms, under that projection, by 2014 something like 1 million people would lose their jobs and the average American family would have about $150 less to spend every month. The costs would ramp up dramatically from there. In short, it would cost a lot. The U.N. IPCC estimates that unconstrained global warming is expected to cause damages equal to about 1-5 percent of global economic output about a century from now. William Nordhaus of Yale has estimated that the net benefit that would be created for the world by a perfectly implemented, globally harmonized carbon tax would be just under 0.2 percent of the present value of future global consumption. That presents a painfully thin margin for error, ignores the fact that costs will be disproportionately borne by the U.S., and does not bear much resemblance to the rhetoric of crisis that Sen. McCain uses in his speech.

It is highly unlikely that we could ever realize this theoretical benefit. Nobody has any realistic plan to get China and India to reduce emissions, and without doing so the costs of cap-and-trade to the U.S. would be dramatically greater than the benefits. Even if we could get the developing world to go along, the theoretical benefits that such a regulatory regime might create would, in the real world, be more than offset by the economic drag that would be created by the side deals required to get China, India, and the U.S. ethanol lobby, among many others, to go along with it.

Well, that's ok because McCain knows just what he'll do in relation to those countries that don't go along: nothing:

The scariest sentence in the speech was: “If the efforts to negotiate an international solution that includes China and India do not succeed, we still have an obligation to act.” This is posturing in the place of thought. It puts us in the worst possible negotiating position, and confirms that Sen. McCain is not engaging practically with the costs and benefits of his own policy. It indicates a foolish willingness to sacrifice trillions of dollars on the altar of fashionable, though uniformed, opinion and political expediency.

This is climate stupidity of Al Gore-ean proportions. It is harmful to the economy, won't accomplish its stated goals and diverts our attention from policies that might be sound.
But this is all about cynical calculation and has little to do with sound policies, anyway. McCain figures if he acts the maverick and annoys people like me, it will attract Independents away from Obama in the general election. Thinking as he does, he sees no way he can lose here. He'll get great press and while it is an extreme policy, Obama's response will attack it as being basically, not extreme enough. McCain figures he can live with that.

Apparently he believes that even though folks like me (and probably you) may throw our slippers at him whenever we see him on TV, on election day we'll still vote for him rather than Obama while at the same time he's attracting enough Independents to win. His calculation has a flaw, of course. Just because we'll never vote for Obama doesn't mean that we will vote for him. If he's going to give the finger to his base he may just find out that the base will give him the finger right back.

He's going to need a whole lot of Independents to make up for our loss.

Also discussing: Hot Air, A Newt One, Gina Cobb

Saving The Earth One Olympic Torch At A Time

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Forget the whole Tibet/China thing; there a real reason to put out the Olympic torch: to save the Earth.

So when the torch isn't being marched through city streets and/or extinguished by protesters, how is it getting around? You guessed it, by plane -- an Air China A330 custom painted with the Olympic logo and color scheme. The A330 burns 5.4 gallons of fuel per mile. That translates into 462,400 gallons for the entire trip. With Earthlab estimating that every gallon of jet fuel burned produces 23.88 pounds of CO2, the Olympic Torch Relay is adding about 11 million pounds of carbon to the atmosphere. That's 5,500 tons.


London has a plan to ensure that the 2012 torch relay ends up carbon neutral, so we figured that Beijing must have one too, right? Sally Lu, the frazzled Olympic media relations rep that we reached in Beijing, says that if there is a plan to neutralize the torch-carrying jet's carbon emissions, she hasn't heard about it. But she thinks there is one. Probably.

For all our children's sake, let us hope there is!

Cross-Posted at Liberty Pundit

Climate Change Crazy - Not What You Think

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The headline reads, Climate change leads to psychiatric illness: WHO so naturally I thought it was going to be an article about Al Gore and how society is ready to finally give him and his "We'll all be cannibals" minions the psychiatric care they all so desperately need. But nope, I should have known better. Instead of challenging Al's sanity the article is about yet another monstrous ramification of global warming.

New Delhi: Establishing a link between climate change and mental health, the World Health Organisation has said extreme weather conditions like floods, droughts and natural calamities can lead to psychiatric illnesses.

"Psychosocial illnesses are a part of the various health issues associated with climate change," Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Deputy Regional Director, WHO, said.

Anticipating that severe flooding may become more frequent due to global warming, a WHO report said that independent studies in cyclone-affected Orissa and a flooded town in England has shown that post-traumatic stress disorder syndromes of different severity in affected people even after an year.

So it seems, not only will we be eating each other we're all going to be really stressed about it, too. Global warming sucks, man. Really sucks.

Inspiration for D Students Everywhere

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Former Vice President, Nobel Prize winner, secular saint and Natural Science D-student Al Gore is continuing his global warming crusade with a new $300 million ad campaign. According to this story

The Alliance for Climate Protection's "we" campaign will employ
online organizing and television advertisements on shows ranging from "American Idol" to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

Part of the above stated cost of this extravaganza is to be funded by Gore, although how much he will not say. This silence is not unusual for Mr. Gore, however as it is reminiscent of his refusal to answer any direct questions by scientists who doubt many of the particulars of global warming although, to be fair to Mr. Gore, this may have something to do with the fact that he refuses to acknowledge that any actual scientists with such questions exist. As the erudite Mr. Gore would probably tell you, you can't answer questions from people who don't exist.

Despite increasing evidence against the accuracy of his crusade such as this, this and this Gore refuses to acknowledge any possibility that he may be wrong or to address any evidence which might cause a scientist to reconsider his conclusions. But once again, to be fair to Mr. Gore a D-student in college Natural Science would be very likely not to consider such evidence.

Another Example Of The Overheated Rhetoric Of Global Warming

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Andean toads have been dying off for over twenty years. What could be the cause? I'll bet you can guess what was blamed:

It looked as if one research team was a winner
in 2006 when global warming was identified as the “trigger” in the extinctions by the authors of a much-cited paper in Nature. The researchers said
they had found a clear link between unusually warm years and the vanishing of mountainside frog populations.

Well, maybe not:

Now, in the March 25 issue of PLoS Biology, another team argues that the die-offs of harlequins and some other amphibians reflect the spread and repeated introductions of the chytrid fungus. They question the analysis linking the disappearances to climate change. In interviews and e-mail exchanges, Dr. Pounds and the lead author of the new paper, Karen R. Lips of Southern Illinois University, disputed each other’s analysis. Experts who have researched the amphibian said neither group had enough evidence to nail down its case and warned that this normal tussle over scientific details should not distract from the reality that humans are clearly roiling biology in ways important and yet poorly understood.

This is just another example of how the politics of global warming influences the science. When the Left says that certain scientists can't be trusted because they're on the payrolls of corporations with a vested interest in a given issue they conveniently forget that the careers of all scientists rise and fall on the grants they get and right now global warming is hot (if you'll excuse the pun). The fact is that climactic science is far from being understood well enough that conclusions about toad death being caused by global warming and other such similar "scientific findings" is specious at best.

The Left is correct to a degree that you should follow the money. But the money frequently flows to their pet causes, too.

Cross-linked at Liberty Pundit