SARAH~CUDA

By now, most of North America, and no doubt, the English speaking free world, have heard about John McCain's coupe de grace, Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, as his vice-presidential running mate in the November US presidential election. You'd have to be politically dead and buried, not to palpably see and hear the squeal being squeezed out of the MSM and the Democratic National Caucus so soon after the Obamessiah's ascension. If nothing in the last two days, the MSM have demonstrated that at their core, democrats and liberals are just nasty, ignorant slobs. Misogynistic, bigoted, slobs. I'm not even going to bother to link any of this - just google Sarah Palin and read the trash from the left.

The biggest complaint has been her "lack of experience". Never mind that she is a 44 year old mother of 5 kids, the latest just this past April, sadly, a Down's Syndrome child. Never mind that along with her B.A. in journalism, she is capable of putting meat on the table, literally, as a capable hunter (and Horrors! a lifetime NRA member. Some would say that's just proof of her pragmatism - its cheaper that way than annual dues...) She brings much of this skillset to the job, too.

Attaining the Alaska governorship in 2006 after a short stint as a small town mayor, Gov. Palin's (just Sarah, as she is referred to in her home state) high school reputation as "Sarahcuda" on the basketball court foretold her penchant for state governance reform once she got into the Governor's chair. Move over "Ahrnold ", there's a new terminator in town. Dick Morris, in the August 31, New York Post:

Sarah Palin does not simply represent an opportunity to appeal to women voters and to add a new, charismatic presence to the ticket. Her selection signals the rebirth of John McCain, the courageous, independent senator who seemed to have been anesthetized during the long primary process.

[...]

But Palin is McCain's kind of governor. She took on the corrupt establishment of the Republican hierarchy in Alaska and defeated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in a GOP primary. The Murkowski family and the family of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have run the state for decades. Frank served as senator and then gave it up to run for governor. And into the Senate seat slid his daughter Lisa Murkowski, whom Alaska voters dutifully elected. To give you a gauge of how hard it was for Sarah to beat Murkowski for governor in a Republican primary, Stevens has just won his primary for re-election even though he is under indictment!

But Palin uncovered Republican corruption in the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which she had been appointed to lead. She reported the violations of ethical regulations by her co-commissioner (who also happened to be the Republican Party state chairman). Barred by state law from going public with her charges, she quit and revealed her accusations. She was vindicated when her co-commissioner agreed to pay a $12,000 fine for breaking the state ethics law.

Then, in true McCain style, she took on the state attorney general over his corruption and forced him to resign. Finally, she challenged Gov. Murkowski himself in a primary and won 51 percent of the vote in a three-way contest. Since then, she has line-item-vetoed huge parts of the state budget that she found wasteful and has cleaned house from top to bottom.

Her appointment demonstrates the crucial flaw in the Democratic attack on McCain: the accusation that he is another George W. Bush. Bush chose Cheney. McCain chose Palin. That's emblematic of the difference between them.

[...]

The entire edifice Obama and Biden built in the Denver convention hinges on the supposed similarity between Bush and McCain. Every speaker hewed to his suggested talking points in calling a McCain presidency a third Bush term. As proof, Obama cited the fact that McCain voted with Bush 90 percent of the time. But most Senate votes are unanimous! They praise high school sports teams or American heroes for their accomplishments or rename post offices or courthouses. It's likely Obama and McCain voted together most of the time, too.

Once McCain rebuts the supposed similarity between himself and the man he ran against in the bitter primaries of 2000, there is not a whole lot Obama can do to besmirch McCain's reputation.

Reacting to Palin's selection, Obama called it "more of the same." To say that Sarah Palin is more of same is like saying that Cameron Diaz is like Doris Day.

I had an opportunity to meet and spend half a day with Gov. Palin during a vacation cruise to Alaska sponsored by National Review magazine. The governor invited several of us, including editor Rich Lowry and former UN Ambassador John Bolton, to come see her. There we learned about her crusade against corruption in Alaska, her support for oil drilling there, and the quality of her leadership.

I will always remember taking her aside and telling her she might one day be tapped to be vice president, given her record and the shortage of female political talent in the Republican Party. She will make one hell of a candidate, and hats off to McCain for picking her. Her very presence on the ticket underscores something Obama doesn't want us to notice: He spent two years stopping a woman from becoming president and now he is about to spend two months stopping one from becoming vice president. Obama could have made history but failed the test. McCain passed with flying colors. That point will not be lost on independent women.

But it was when I looked up her biography after the meeting that I learned one of the most salient facts about Sarah Palin. She knew she was bearing a Down syndrome child but refused to have an abortion. While I am personally pro-choice, pro-choice means just that, the right to choose to have or not to have an abortion. My head bows to the integrity, guts and courage it takes to embark knowingly on such a life challenge because of one's personal belief in the sanctity of life. When we look at McCain's loving adoption of a child from a Bangladeshi orphanage run by Mother Teresa and Palin's knowing birth of a handicapped baby, we see a quality of character on this ticket worthy of the White House.

Says LibertyLeft, in Alaska: Palin is a shark, a warning: "..."Don't underestimate her."

...To many of us it felt like the Democratic party didn't ever take her seriously. We all knew Sarah had a chance of winning, even a good chance, Alaska is a very red state after all, but no one predicted the landslide that developed, or her ability to maintain an 80% approval rating.

Sarah is a shark. She is smart, and she is shrewd. However, she comes across as extremely personable; you can't help but like her in person. She is a good public speaker, I've seen better from her in Alaska, and considering how little time she had to prepare for today's speech, I think we'll see much better from her in the near future.

The biggest mistake we can make is to write her off, ignore her, or think she won't bring anything to the campaign. Quit with the jokes and the remarks about how cute and quaint she is. Stop with the pats on the back and the hurr hurr stuff.

The experience debate disappears now, let it disappear. It seems many Dems feel a vindictive need to bring up the experience issue after it's been applied to Obama so many times. Don't. Experience is a non-issue, she won in Alaska by being the inexperienced, outside candidate, and the Rs will, and already have, argued that she has more "executive experience" than Obama anyways. This is an opportunity to take the experience issue off the table, lets take it.

Our job is to remember and remind everyone else that it is John McCain running for President and not Sarah Palin. This means dropping the "old and dying" stuff. The jokes and comments that McCain's VP might become president in the next 4 years. We don't want people thinking about Sarah as the President.

I say this because I believe Sarah could win if she were the one running for President. Sure she's from a small town in Alaska and has only been the Governor for 2 years, but it doesn't matter; she is as of today on the national stage. McCain's campaign will do its best to lead with the pretty, energetic woman and let you forget that he's the one that would sit in the big chair. People will like her, and she will be a name in the Republican party for quite a while now.

The experience debate off the table? No, I don't think so. Experience isn't about how much time you've spent, it's about what you have done. Sarah Palin, in two short days, may have just caught up to Barack Obama and ran right past him, while he was straightening his tie and rehearsing his TelePrompter lines. McCain 1, Obama 0.

The next few days add yet another dimension for the GOP in this campaign. Hurricane Gustav is about to trash the south coast again, potentially as fierce as Katrina, while the Republicans try to have a convention in Minnesota. Given the audacity of McCain/Palin gambit, the Republicans may once more get the chance to demonstrate that conservatives are nothing like their trash talking cousins on the left.

When a hockey stick becomes just a straight piece of wood, with splinters...

Climate change/global warming evangelists have long treasured the infamous "hockey stick" graph, that purports to show the rapid increase in global warming that is being attributed to anthropogenic events in the 20th century. Indeed, the IPCC report (remember the 2500 "scientists" who authored this baloney?) needed, and depended on it.

Steve McIntyre, retired Canadian climatologist/statistician, took exception to the statistical methods used to create the "stick", especially the upturned "blade" of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and pursued the derivation of this upturn, both directly and in print with Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, (and author, with Christopher Essex, of Taken by Storm, The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming), believing, rightly so, that it was unsupportable by the math.

The tale is long and convoluted, and paints an ugly picture of climate science gone very bad, of political meddling, pandering and malfeasance. McIntyre has chronicled much of this highly technical story at his website Climate Audit, but the story is difficult for lay readers to piece together.

Kim at Bishop Hill blog has put together a lengthy lay chronology of the story of the stick, and sheds light on how badly the world has been misled by the IPCC, Al Gore, and a pliant leftist media.

There's discussion of the Hill article at Climate Audit, here, and Roger Pielke Jr. has written more discussion here at Prometheus: Science and Policy Blog. Its important to note McIntyre's commentary to the Bishop Hill piece, here, in the comments.

McIntyre:
[...]

People have argued - if the Stick is wrong, then the situation is much worse than we think it is. My answer to that is simple: well, if it's wrong, then we should know and govern ourselves accordingly; if it means policy action is more urgent, then so be it. But we should not thank the authors whose withholding of data and obstruction has made it so much harder to detect the error than it should have been. And if this is a risk, other people besides me should have taken some initiative in vetting the Stick.

The other issue that it speaks to is the form of due diligence. Whether or not the Stick was a "real" argument, it was clearly represented by IPCC as an important argument. That's what caught my attention, not that I thought that it would be particularly easy to break. It was said to be important.

There's a definite foolhardiness and contemptuousness of the public by the IPCC and, in particular, the core of the Hockey Team. The Wahl and Ammann process has been publicized at a popular blog; a lot of people have followed this particular story. Every step of the process has been publicly documented. You'd think that they'd have been extra diligent in their reviewing. Instead, what we see is one thing botched after another and one sly maneouver after another.

If this is representative of how climate articles are written and how climate peer reviewing is done, what a pathetic performance. They might say - well, this is a bad example. To which I'd say, well, you knew that it was in the public eye, it should have been a good example, why wasn't it?

[...]


Bishop Hill:

At some time or another, most people will have seen the hockey stick - the iconic graph which purports to show that after centuries of stable temperatures, the second half of the twentieth century saw a sudden and unprecedented warming of the globe. This was caused, we were told, by mankind burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For a while, the hockey stick was everywhere - unimpeachable evidence that mankind was damaging the planet - an impact that would require drastic measures to reverse. The stick's most famous outing however was just a couple of years ago when it made a headlining appearance in Al Gore's drama-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The revelation of the long, thin graph with its dramatic temperature rise in the last few decades, and the audience gasps that accompanied it, is something of a key moment for many environmentalists.

Shortly after its publication, the hockey stick and its main author, Michael Mann, came under attack from Steve McIntyre, a retired statistician from Canada. In a series of scientific papers and later on his blog, Climate Audit, McIntyre took issue with the novel statistical procedures used by the hockey stick's authors. He was able to demonstrate that the way they had extracted the temperature signal from the tree ring records was biased so as to choose hockey-stick shaped graphs in preference to other shapes, and criticised Mann for not publishing the cross validation R2, a statistical measure of how well the temperature reconstruction correlated with actual temperature records. He also showed that the appearance of the graph was due solely to the use of an estimate of historic temperatures based on tree rings from bristlecone pines, a species that was known to be problematic for this kind of reconstruction....

[...]

In other words, far from confirming the scientific integrity of the hockey stick, Wahl and Amman's work confirmed McIntyre's criticisms of it! McIntyre's first action as a peer reviewer was therefore to request from Wahl and Amman the verification statistics for their replication of the stick. Confirmation that the R2 was close to zero would strike a serious blow at Wahl and Amman's work.

Caspar AmmanWahl and Amman's response was to refuse any access to the verification numbers, a clear flouting of the journal's rules. As a justification of this extraordinary action, they claimed that they had shown that McIntyre's criticisms had been rebutted in their forthcoming GRL paper, despite the fact that the paper had been rejected by the journal some days earlier. At the start of July, with his review of the CC paper complete, McIntyre took the opportunity to probe this point, by asking the journal to find out the anticipated publication date of the GRL paper. Wahl and Amman were forced to admit the rejection, but they declared that it was unjustified and that they would seek publication elsewhere.

[...]

As 2005 neared its end, two important events loomed large. The first was the year end deadline for submission of papers for the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report on the state of the climate, and realisation soon dawned on McIntyre and the observers of the goings-on at GRL:

the IPCC needed to have the Wahl and Amman papers in the report so that they could continue to use the hockey stick, with its frightening and unprecedented uptick in temperatures. Mountains were going to be moved to keep the papers in play.

[...]

That the statistical foundations on which they had built this paleoclimate castle were a swamp of misrepresentation, deceit and malfeasance was, to Wahl and Amman, an irrelevance. For political and public consumption, the hockey stick still lived, ready to guide political decision-making for years to come.

Changing the subject - Liberalism and human rights

In a recent blog, Ezra Levant writes [responding to a blog by Luiza Savage, for Maclean's]:

"But the smart folks Savage referred to initially are probably sophisticated thinkers who are genuinely perplexed by the conflict between their politically correct, liberal values and applying those values to a scenario where the oppressors are foreign, Muslim, visible minorities, and the oppressed person (well, they're trying to oppress me!) is a white male (Jewish doesn't count as a minority when compared to Muslims. It does when compared to WASPs. I didn't make up the rules of politically correct poker, I just know which poker hands beat which)."

Couple of things here - one, I think Levant gives these so-called "sophisticated thinkers" too much credit - they're actually too naive and simplistic to be sophisticated, and two, the clue lies in the second part of that statement.

The fundamental problem for the liberal left is their basic laisssez-faire attitude toward cultures not their own (ie liberal white christian/secular tolerants). In that simplistic view, its ok to trash catholic priests, guys like Levant and Steyn and others of their tribes, because they're family. The Catholic priests are their Catholic priests.

But, for them, its not ok to trash members of other tribes, because those other cultures are not their cultures, and if you believe in the God of multiculturalism, then if racism and bigotry as the cultural norm is ok in that culture, its ok for the liberal left. That's multiculturalism in action. Its an oddly twisted way of embracing the concept of "I don't agree with what you do and say, but will defend your right to do and say it."

But it also means that the Liberal left does not, and cannot, believe in the universality of human rights, or put another way, each tribe must be able to define human rights as it suits their local culture, because that preserves who they are.

When viewed against the backdrop of their insistence on demonstrating against human rights violations in other places, it becomes paradoxical. On the one hand, they believe that they should embrace the violations that define many cultures when invited into a pluralistic society - on the other, they are critical when these same cultures practice these cultural "values" in their own places.

It also explains why they are blind to these cultural abuses outside of their own "white" group. They have to be, or their whole belief system collapses. None of the liberal left's community leaders and politicians can provide them with an answer to this paradox, and so the liberal left shrinks away from the both the intellectual and the physical conflict.

This paradox is demonstrated daily in Canada in their responses to the Afghanistan mission, "islamophobia" tagging, HRCs, and a myriad of other ways. There is no way out for them - they've painted themselves into an intellectual corner, and the paint won't dry.