Osama nukes the fridge

One can come up with a number of nouns for Osama bin Laden: terrorist, enemy, murderer, rebel, radical, jihadist, Wahabbist, etc.

However, today, as he attaches himself to global warming alarmism (WaPo), we can add a new one: laughingstock.

Seriously, we may look back at 29 January 2010 an “inflection point” in the WBK War.  Image and propaganda matter, and mistakes like this have an impact.

Bismark’s wisdom is validated once more.

Cross-posted to VV

Ford posts first profit since 2005

The last privately-owned American car company comes roaring back to life as its government-owned competitors continue to crash (Market Watch):

A strong performance in the long-ailing North American car market helped propel Ford Motor Co. to its first annual profit in four years, and the automaker said Thursday that there’s more to come.

. . .

In 2008, the company lost nearly $15 billion as industry sales were caught in a historic slide. The next year was even worse for most — and yet Ford handed in a profit of $2.7 billion.

The story doesn’t go into any explanation, but I suspect it had something to do with GM and Chrysler folks seeing the president guarantee their warrantees and run screaming to Ford.

Seriously, there’s been anecdotal evidence all year that the American people were rejecting the auto-bailout the only way they could – by going to Ford.  Kudos to them, and to Ford for resisting the financial drug of taxpayer money.

Cross-posted to VV

A genuine surprise out of Richmond

Truth be told, “surprise” doesn’t come close to describing what happened in the Virginia Senate Committee on Commerce & Labor.

SB 417, what I like to call the Virginia Health Care Personal Liberty Law, actually passed the committee on an 8-7 vote.  Two Democrats had to crossover to pass the bill: to everyone’s shock (according to Norm at TQ) – certainly to mine – Senators Colgan and Puckett actually did.

Next up is the Senate floor.  If Colgan and Puckett hold to their vote, that means a 20-20 tie the Lieutenant-Governor Bolling can break.

In other words, the Health Care Personal Liberty Law may actually be enacted!

The Manning Bowl

So it’s Peyton and company against Archie’s old team.  I don’t know how much that angle will be played up (as fewer and fewer fans remember Archie Manning these days), but it is interesting.

As for my team, well, they played a decent first half, and I’d like to think things might have been different had Shonn Greene not been hurt (Thomas Jones is more a bruiser than a speed guy), but credit the Colts’ offense for making the necessary adjustments.

Still, Sanchez has a year of experience under his belt (and he wasn’t bad yesterday, either), and with another receiver or two, the offense may be able to keep up whenever the opposing offense picks Ryan’s lock.

Good news, bad news

The Good news: Lisa Murkowski got not one, but three Dems to join her effort to block the EPA from regulating carbon (Hot Air via Planet Gore).

The Bad news: Contrary to initial reports, none of them were named Jim Webb.

Tease: One more piece of news over at VV.

Those pesky glaciers

Ah, Tibet.  No place on earth is more adept at driving the elite completely bonkers.  Despite six decades of occupation from the Tom-Friedman-approved Chinese Communist Party, the Tibetan people continue to resist the loss of their country.

Now, even the glaciers in Tibet refuse to play ball with the chattering classes (Times of London):

The UN’s top climate change body has issued an unprecedented apology over its flawed prediction that Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035.

. . .

The 2007 report, which won the panel the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”. It caused shock in Asia, where about two billion people depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers for their fresh water supplies during the dry seasons.

Oops.

Cross-posted to VV

Will Jim Webb block carbon regs?

It has long been presumed that the reason the EPA decided to declare carbon dioxide a “pollutant” was to pressure Congress into passing some sort of “greenhouse gas” regulation.

This probably wasn’t what they had in mind (Norm @ TQ, with apologies for the scrape):

Interesting, if true:

On Friday I reported that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has picked up a Democratic co-sponsor for her efforts to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. I haven’t been able to conclusively pin down who that is, but a number of Hill sources are pointing to Virginia Democrat Jim Webb.

Webb was already leaning against the cap and trade bill currently parked in the Senate. If he is, indeed, against the EPA declaring carbon dioxide a pollutant, it would seem he’s making a stand for at least a portion of his constituency.

Namely, the green plants that need carbon dioxide to live. And anyone who enjoys exhaling.

As an added bonus, I’ve spread around my broken-clock phrase so much that it has itself become hackneyed, so I’ll spare the readership here.

The more important thing to remember is this, the EPA’s “finding” was never the final word on the matter – even with Murkowski and (apparently) Webb fail with this, actual regulations could be tied up in court and administrative law cul-de-sacs for years, long enough for a different EPA to reverse itself and shut down this laughable nonsense.

Cross-posted to VV

What the Massachusetts result (may) mean

We have fifty states in the Union, and nearly every one of them has experienced some time as a “battleground” or “bellweather” state. 

New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania competed with each other for election-deciding status for nearly two centuries – and Ohio still holds that moniker.  The South and the rest of the Midwest had their time in the sun during the latter half of the 20th Century; the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, the latter half of the 19th.  California decided the election of 1916 and nearly carried favorite son into the White House in 1960 (it accomplished the mission in 1968).  Even Alaska and Hawaii had a competitive period – albeit one that vanished for each soon after admission.

New England had its own period of uncertainty – mostly during the Second Party system for New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and to a lesser extent Connecticut.  Even tiny Rhode Island achieved “battleground” status in the 1840s – literally – during the Dorr War.

Massachusetts, however, has – practically alone – seemed to avoid national political competition (local and state-government offices are, as with all states, an entirely different story).  From the moment political parties took shape in the young Republic, the Bay State has always been seen as the big-government party’s redoubt.  From the Federalists, to the National Republicans/Whigs, followed by the pre-Depression Republicans, and finally the post-Depression Democrats: all could consider the New England Commonwealth a stone-cold, lead-pipe lock.  Of course, there were a few times Massachusetts bucked its historical trend, but usually that was due to national landslides it could not resist: Jefferson’s re-election in 1804, Monroe’s elections, Taft and Roosevelt splitting a Republican landslide neatly in half in 1912, and the Eisenhower/Reagan landslides, but in all of these, the Bay State was bringing up the rear, with the outsiders riding a national wave to narrowly overcome the political equivalent of Helm’s Deep.

That said, I did write “seemed.“  In fact, there have been two occasions where Massachusetts threw everyone a curve – and those who were paying attention would have seen major national realignment in the offing.  They were: 1850 and 1928.

In the first, the state legislature was responsible for electing a U.S. Senator, thus providing a national importance to the profile of the state capitol (or General Court, as it’s called up there).  In the rest of America, 1850 was the year of the Compromise, the year the nation was pulled back slowly and mythically from the brink by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster (President Millard Fillmore and Stephen A. Douglas deserved the true “honor,” but for various reasons, they were happy to offload it).  In Massachusetts, however, Webster’s role in the Compromise (in particluar the odious Fugitive Slave Law) infuriated voters to such as extent that they rejected Webster’s Whig Party (which dominated Bay State politics since its founding) for a high-maintenance but partially stable alliance between Free-Soilers and Democrats.  That year, Charles Sumner became the only Massachusetts Senator in the Second Party era not to come from the Whigs or their National Republican predecessors.  Webster had already jumped ship for thr Fillmore Cabinet, but his political capital crashed.

Massachusetts politics went into an unprecedented and unequaled period of instability: Free-Soil/Democrat, Whig, Know-Nothing (that’s for another post) before finally settling on the Republicans in 1856.  In the meantime, the Whig Party disappeared everywhere outside New York by 1854 (one year later, Empire State Whig leaders renamed themselves Republicans).

The other year (1928) was a similar surprise.  Irish immigrants had been eroding the Republican majority in Massachusetts for decades.  Democrats even elected a U.S. Senator by popular vote in 1918.  Calvin Coolidge - elected Governor in 1918, Vice President in 1920, and President in 1924 – suppressed the trend before it could be noticed – but it returned with a vengeance in 1928 when Al Smith became the first Democrat to ever win the Bay State’s electoral votes.  At the time, more political junkies paid attention to the Republicans’ surprise strength in the South, but Massachusetts was the canary in the coal mine for the GOP, which was about to lose the nation’s major urban centers at the national level.  By 1932, Massachusetts was part of the FDR landslide, and the rest is history.

We need to keep in mind today just how rare Scott Brown’s victory is.  The smaller government party just doesn’t win in Massachusetts – unless a major realignment is on the way.

I’m not saying it’s a done deal – the future never is.  I am saying this: don’t be surprised if 2010 follows 1850 and 1928 as a year where the Bay State showed the way, and the nation followed.

Cross-posted to VV

Stat of the Night

Number of Republicans elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts: 1

Number of Republicans elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia: 0

Need to fix that.

Cross-posted to VV

Prediction . . . not

Are you kidding me?  With my track record, do you really expect me to venture a guess on this race tonight?

No dice.