Australian Senate shoots down the Great Green tax

The Australian version of cap-and-trade is toast (Andrew Bolt):

How close was that bullet? A mad new tax is voted down, thanks only to Tony Abbott’s one-vote win over Malcolm Turnbull yesterday:

KEVIN Rudd has lost his bid to deliver an emissions trading scheme in Australia before talks in Copenhagen but won an early election trigger after the Senate formally rejected the laws again today.

Just two Liberal senators broke ranks with a clear mandate among Coalition MPs to delay an ETS and voted with Labor on an emissions trading scheme

Please note, the Liberal Party in Australia is actually the lead right-of-center party (a smaller one, the National Party, tends to represent more rural areas and is allied with the Liberals).  Labor is the center-left party currently in government.

This means Rudd can (not must, just can) dissolve both the houses of parliament and call a “double dissolution” election.  No one is sure if he will, in no small part because the politics of cap-and-trade is no longer recognizable in the wake of ClimateGate.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

The President pulls a Romney on Afghanistan (and no, that’s not a good thing)

I wanted to be able to say I supported the President’s new policy in Afghanistan.

I wanted to be able to talk about partisanship stopping at the water’s edge.

I wanted to be able to say this President understood the danger we face in losing Afghanistan.

I will confess that I have only heard a small snippet of the President’s speech, but what I heard was enough to break my heart:

. . . as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.  After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

The first sentence made my heart soar; it crashed upon hearing the second.

I should note the rest of the speech (which I did read) was quite good, and nearly the perfect tone for a wartime president in a dovish party.  It would not have been the speech I gave, but I’m not in that party, and thus don’t feel politically compelled to address them.  He did, and I’m OK with that.

Additionally, he noted that al Qaeda itself was a foreign force in Afghanistan (he did not mention that the Taliban is considered one, too, but I’ll take what I can get), and he did rediscover American exceptionalism – the one thing that propelled him into the White House and then was promptly forgotten for ten months.

I’m also OK with the troop level – as the president is assuming that our allies will make up the difference with General McChrystal’s request.

Unfortunately, the 18-month timeline undermines everything he said.  It tells our enemy that they can run out the clock on us.  It tells our allies - the very ones upon whom the president will rely for the extra 10,000 troops – that he’s just card-punching.  It tells the troops the same thing.

In effect, President Obama is pulling a Romney – saying the right things about the war, but setting the nation up for defeat with an unnecessary and dangerous timetable.

The only difference is that I suspect more Republicans will notice Obama’s timetable than they did Romney’s (John McCain already has – NRO: The Corner).

As for me, I am left with the painful reality that the leader of my country, when push came to shove, wasn’t ready to do whatever it takes to win the Wahhabist-Ba’athist-Khomeinist War.

That really, really hurts.

ClimateGate central figure steps down from East Anglia CRU

Professor Phil Jones – arguably the central figure in ClimateGate – is stepping down from his position as head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University pending an investigation into what was revealed by the still anonymous whistleblower roughly two weeks ago (Fox News).

Despite MSM’s attempt to whitewash this, ClimateGate will not go away.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

So . . . what does it all mean?

The Pedant-General has what is by far the best analysis of what Climategate has shown us (Devil’s Kitchen). 

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon