The Republican Road to the White House Runs Through…
Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday accused former President Clinton of not responding forcefully enough to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or later terrorist attacks.
The former New York mayor criticized Democrats, accusing them of weakness and naivete in dealing with terrorism. Giuliani made the comments to about 650 business, corporate and political leaders at Regent University, the conservative Christian college founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.
“Islamic terrorists killed more than 500 Americans before Sept. 11. Many people think the first attack on America was on Sept. 11, 2001. It was not. It was in 1993,” said the former New York mayor.
Giuliani argued that Clinton treated the World Trade Center bombing as a criminal act instead of a terrorist attack, calling it “a big mistake” that emboldened other strikes on the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in Kenya and Tanzania and later on the USS Cole while docked in Yemen in 2000.
“The United States government, then President Clinton, did not respond,” Giuliani said. “(Osama) bin Laden declared war on us. We didn’t hear it.”
In hindsight, Giuliani said, maybe it’s all clearer now, “but now is now, and there is no reason to go back into denial, and that is essentially what the Democratic candidates for president want to do: they want to go back, to put the country in reverse to the 1990s.
ATTN: Republican Candidates
The President you want to attack to help yourselves in the polls is named BUSH, not Clinton.
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My Authoritative Takedown Of Liberal Economic Theories
Taxes bother me. Last April I had to eat at home more often because my tax guy told me that I didn’t withhold enough on my state returns. I’m a pretty crappy cook* which means that for like a month I had to eat burnt pasta and occasionally defrost a shepherd’s pie which was actually pretty good but not as good as a restaurant burger. Sure you can chart a bunch of crapola about public safety and maintaining the roads, but where on the chart does it cover how taxes piss me off? Please abolish them.
***
Maybe you think that the above argument wouldn’t make it past Paris Hilton’s GED tutor. You’re right of course. I could make a more persuasive case by grunting, or if I asked David Addington to write a brief. Yet somehow the genius Washington Post op-ed page let it through more or less verbatim.
As Brad likes to say…
(*) Note: not actually true.
(**) Commenter DJ prodded me into writing about this, which I earlier passed on doing because presenting arguments this stupid strikes me as a form of trolling. The management aims to please.
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Bad News For Foie Gras Fans?
As if the animal rights backlash wasn’t enough.
Here we report that commercially available duck- or goose-derived foie gras contains [plaque precursors] composed of serum amyloid A-related protein that acted as a potent [amyloid enhancing factor] in a transgenic murine model of secondary (amyloid A protein) amyloidosis. When such mice were injected with or fed amyloid extracted from foie gras, the animals developed extensive systemic pathological deposits. These experimental data provide evidence that an amyloid-containing food product hastened the development of amyloid protein A amyloidosis in a susceptible population.
Amyloid A plaques are a hallmark of rheumatoid arthritis and other types of chronic inflammation. While we already know that brain-wasting prion diseases can be transmitted from animal to animal like an infectious agent, this is the first time someone has shown that other forms of protein plaque disease can be passed on the same way.
However time: to my knowledge nobody has connected foie gras and arthritis in an epidemiological study. More of a concern for me is that prions and amyloid diseases critically turn on small details of protein folding, which means that any small change in the amyloid precursors during the extraction process could have pushed the protein used in this study towards becoming more pathogenic.
As with all such studies, treat as interesting but (1) needs to be repeated, and (2) needs to be backed up with epidemiology.
No, The Ocean Did Not Cool Between 2003 And 2005
Trouble for greenhouse skeptics in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Observations show both a pronounced increase in ocean heat content (OHC) over the second half of the 20th century and substantial OHC variability on interannual-to-decadal time scales. Although climate models are able to simulate overall changes in OHC, they are generally thought to underestimate the amplitude of OHC variability. Using simulations of 20th century climate performed with 13 numerical models, we demonstrate that the apparent discrepancy between modeled and observed variability is largely explained by accounting for changes in observational coverage and instrumentation and by including the effects of volcanic eruptions. Our work does not support the recent claim that the 0- to 700-m layer of the global ocean experienced a substantial OHC decrease over the 2003 to 2005 time period. We show that the 2003–2005 cooling is largely an artifact of a systematic change in the observing system, with the deployment of Argo floats reducing a warm bias in the original observing system.
Forecasters predict heavy drinking at TCSDaily and the American Spectator.
The froofaraw stems from a 2006 paper by John Lyman and colleagues in Geophysical Research Letters claiming that sea surface waters grew cooler between 2003 and 2006. Gavin Schmidt noted in April that the authors corrected their paper to account for the probability that a large-scale change in the sampling method could entirely explain the anomalous cooling, and this week’s paper confirms that. In a commentary on the Lyman work linked enthusiastically by rightwing bloggers the skeptic/contrarian researcher Roger Pielke wrote:
If the ocean absorbs most of the heat (which Climate Science agrees with), than that is the climate metric that should be reported on with respect to global warming, rather than the global average surface temperature trend data.
Indeed. Like creationists, greenhouse doubters really need to stay away from testable predictions.
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Actually, No
The silliness continues:
Vice President Cheney’s office offered its first public written explanation yesterday for its refusal to comply with an executive order regulating the handling of classified material, arguing that the order makes clear that the vice president is not subject to the oversight system it creates for federal agencies.
In a letter to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), Cheney Chief of Staff David S. Addington wrote that the order treats the vice president the same as the president and distinguishes them both from “agencies” subject to the oversight provisions of the executive order.
Addington did not cite specific language in the executive order supporting this view, and a Cheney spokeswoman could not point to such language last night. But spokeswoman Lee Anne McBride said the intent of the order, as expressed by White House officials in recent days, was “not for the VP to be separated from the president on this reporting requirement.”
Discuss.
Freep Physics
Fester responded exactly the same way I did to a column by Larry Sabato about Clinton and the freep, except that Fester got off his butt and wrote a longer, better post than I would have. He wraps up:
So if my assumption that the Freepers and their ridiculous attacks are a short term constant, what should we do? We could appease and only elect reactionary Republicans, or we can actually behave like adults and not allow these political two year olds dictate our entire political discourse. We can do it by ignoring the obvious conspiracy theories, the wildly contradictory and lurid tales, and by actually bringing facts into the debate. Otherwise, we give a loud and wrong quarter of the country a de-facto veto.
Yes indeedy, the Clintons only brought on so much hate because they sat in the White House for eight years, and they knew better than to apologize for every hysterically overblown socksgate that Drudge and Lucianne Goldberg could cook up. Sabato completely breaks down when you look at the next two Democratic candidates. Al Gore, a genial milquetoast and the personal opposite of Bill Clinton in every imaginable way, picked the Senate’s most sanctimonious Clinton scold for veep and banished Clinton from his campaign altogether.
It practically boggles the mind to think that the Clinton hate squad would get terribly worked up about Gore’s campaign and yet, gosh, they found a way. Dems nominated John Kerry, another anti-Clinton, and what do you know! The hate squad hated him just as much.
Dems seem painfully slow to internalize the simple message that frothy rightwing hate is not a variable. Like the speed of light and Avogadro’s number, Bush’s stalwart 26% will hate anybody who doesn’t wear their team colors just the same as any other, regardless of personal character or outreach efforts. It’s tribal for these guys. By summer 2008, no matter who Dems nominate, some chump with a camera and a couple of swiftboat vets will chum the base into the exact same state of hysteria (my bet: twelve OIF vets and some old-fashioned Dolschtosseglende).
Please, let’s stop worrying about what will make crazy people crazy.