Meanwhile, a terrorist beheading stuns the UK (UPDATED AND BUMPED)

UPDATE: The Telegraph now reports two more arrests in relation to the attack.

Yesterday afternoon, two men beheaded a member of the British Armed Forces, in broad daylight in London, and one of them proceeded to declare to a videophone that the decapitation was done in the name of Islam. Then they waited for armed police so they could have a shootout (that didn’t go so well for them).

Suffice to say, Muslims in Britain had something to say about that (Spectator Coffee House).

At first, this very much resembled the “lone wolf” aspects of the Boston Marathon bombing. Now, one day later, the al-Qaedist aspects of that attack are popping up here, too (Telegraph):

The security services are likely to face questions after it emerged that both suspects in the killing of a soldier in Woolwich were already known to them.

It is understood that the man widely named as Michael Adebolajo and his fellow suspect have featured in “several investigations” in recent years.

Reports suggest they were not thought to be planning an attack, however.

Sources told the BBC that one of the suspects was intercepted by police last year while leaving the country.

He was reportedly heading to Somalia to join al Shabaab militants.

MI5 had collected information on the two men before yesterday’s brutal attack took place in Woolwich, south east London.

For the uninitiated, al Shabaab is Somalia’s al Qaeda wing.

Now, it’s still very early, and odds are there is still a lot to discover. However, it is a reminder that al Qaeda and Wahhabism aren’t simply biding their time while we argue about debt, taxation, and the level of civil discourse.

They still want the world…and we’re still in their way.

IRS can’t do their contracts right either

The IRS’ nefarious actions toward center-right organizations has had one unexpected consequence: it has kept attention away from the Agency’s appalling record in contract compliance.

Government contracts are regulated by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which gets revised often. As it happens, according to Jeryl Bier (Weekly Standard), “Congress had passed legislation in 2008 to address high-risk contract awards” – a reference to cost-reimbursable awards, in which the government is basically on the hook for whatever the contractor says is cost incurred.

By 2011, the Congressional changes were worked into the FAR. Yet according to the IRS Inspector General (same link):

The IRS did not issue internal procurement policy guidance to implement the FAR revisions that were required by the Act.  Although the revised FAR became effective on March 17, 2011, the IRS has not issued any procurement policies and procedures to implement recent FAR changes for cost-reimbursement contracts.  Instead, the IRS has used the prior FAR and its existing internal procurement policies and procedures[.] [B]ecause no guidance had been provided, the COs (RWL note: COs is short for “contracting officers”) who we interviewed were not aware of revisions to the FAR required by the Act as they related to documentation requirements in the contract file.  One CO stated there was no communication from the Office of Procurement regarding any FAR revisions on the subject of cost-reimbursement contract documentation requirements.

Uh oh.

Sure enough, the IG looked at 49 cost-reimbursable contracts and found…

The IRS did not comply with the majority of the new FAR requirements for 46 of the 49 cost-reimbursement contracts entered into between March 17, 2011, and June 30, 2012, totaling nearly $47 million.

But the Tea Party groups are the problem. Right…..

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

E.W. Jackson for Lieutenant Governor

As the Republican convention met last weekend, Susan Stimpson was my first choice for Lieutenant Governor, and the four tax-hikers in the field were, for me, unacceptable. While the convention did not choose Simpson, neither did they choose any of the tax-hiking four. The resultant selection, E.W. Jackson, was a good choice, and I endorse him for LG in the general election.

Jackson is known first as a social conservative, but the economic positions he adopted in this campaign are very encouraging. He opposed Plan ’13 From Outer Space, and he clearly understands the danger excessive government can bring to an economy.

I would also note that Jackson is African-American, and the first African-American the party has nominated for statewide office in 25 years. Of course, it will take more than nominating one African-American to win over that group of voters, but you have to start somewhere. Moreover, African-Americans in Virginia are not the monolith for the Democrats that they have been elsewhere. In the 1990s, Allen and Gilmore each won nearly 17% of the African-American vote (Allen even managed 15% in his 2006 race – “macaca” and all), while Governor Doug Wilder has shown that African-American and big-government-liberal are hardly synonymous.

In short, Jackson has good economic views, an understanding of the dangers of big government, and an opportunity to appeal to African-Americans in a way the GOP hasn’t had in many a year. These make him a good nominee, and I believe the first two will also make him a good Lieutenant Governor.

Whoops! Scientists ask out of the global warming “consensus”

The latest attempt of the global warming alarmists to silence debate – by screaming, “Consensus!” – has hilariously come a-cropper.

As usual, the good folks at Watts Up With That have the details, from three paper authors who take great issue with the characterization of their papers as endorsing global warming.

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-four examples of data manipulation, errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject since Climategate broke in November of 2009, just under three and a half years ago.

More to the point, they don’t seem capable of stopping.

Ken Cuccinelli for Governor

As I tended to the hallowed right-hand column over the weekend, I discovered, to my surprise, that I hadn’t posted an endorsement of Ken Cuccinelli in this space. It turns out my endorsement was only posted on Virginia Virtucon. Whoops.

Of course, the VV endorsement was months old, and I was speaking for VV as a whole then. In the time since, Ken has gone a little wobbly on taxes, but he righted his ship with his recent tax reform plan. Due to the extremely low level of taxable income threshold for the highest bracket ($17,000), Ken’s plan to lower that bracket rate from 5.75% to 5% will be helpful to Virginians across all income levels.

My original candidate for Attorney General (Mark Obenshain) won the nomination, so that clearly stands. I’ll have a post on the LG race later this week.

British Tories tearing each other apart; UKIP basks in the aftermath

Over the weekend, the leadership of a major center-right political party may have been exposed as out of touch with its own voters and joyously comfortable in its elitism – as it bleeds voters.

If your first thought goes to Richmond, you’re really not paying attention to the rest of the world.

A senior British Conservative – without naming himself, but insisting he was close to Prime Minister David Cameron – referred to the party members as “mad, swivel-eyed loons.” The ensuing rage unleashed on “Number 10″ was extraordinary, leading Cameron himself to try putting out the fire. Here’s the Telegraph headline:

David Cameron to Tories: ‘I’m not sneering at you’

There’s an inspirational message.

The story also noted a recent poll that put the United Kingdom Independence Party (a right-wing alternative to the Tories that wants Britain to leave the European Union) at 22%, only two points behind Cameron’s party.

Now that’s a real split.

Cross-posted to Bearing Drift

London Meteorological Office caught upping the temperature data – again

“The Met” – as it is known – didn’t bother to warn anyone that is had “updated” their temperature data for their HADCRUT4 and CRUTEM4 data sets, choosing instead to simply unleash them on the public.

The folks at WUWT couldn’t help but notice that the data “updated”….

…are concentrated in the last 16 years, a period that the Met Office is under scrutiny for the lack of warming in their data.

Also, some of the regional changes appear quite contrived, e.g. it looks like they found five hundredths of a degree of extra warming in the Northern Hemisphere in the last couple years.

South America they found almost a tenth of a degree of warming over the last decade;

Africa, had five hundredths of a degree of extra warming in the last few years;

and Australia/New Zealand a tenth of a degree of additional warming over the last few years.

I left out the accompanying graphs, you can find them here. The WUWT fellows also note how this is part of a pattern of “adjusting” recent temperature data upward.

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-four examples of data manipulation, errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject since Climategate broke in November of 2009, just under three and a half years ago. More to the point, they don’t seem capable of stopping.

In this case, however, it is especially important to remember that the “adjustments” come right smack in the period of the data that has given alarmists their worst headaches: the post-1996 temperature stability. It could very well be that the “solution” is to simply jack up the numbers to make the stability go away…