Barrel Strength

I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.  (Laughter.)

As is His wont, He chose not to name her and at the end of the Revelation, the Doubters laughed.  Barrack Hussein Obama is pictured below with the ever present halo.

The women in question was Melaine Shouse who died on Jan 30th, 2010 Anno Domini or 2 After Obama, in Overland, Missouri.  These then are the humble origins of Shroud of Overland.

One of the oft repeated remarks during the US presidential campaign was the Obama was qualified to be the president by virtue of managing the presidential campaign.  It was another one of long list of self-referential statement during the campaign which was devoid of common sense.   Financial Times wrote an interesting article that examines the success Obama is having in actually doing the job.

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief….

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”…

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser…

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”…

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”…

Give a child a hammer and lots of things need hammering down.  Give the child a screwdriver and lots of things need screwing down.  Obama is the same.  Everything is a campaign issue because that is all he knows.

This is the trial of the century. The increasingly popular Dutch politician, Geert Wilders is on trial for saying offensive things about Islam, and truth, apparently, is not going to be a defence.

The Dutch Prosecution Office replied to Wilders’ attempts to call witnesses thus:

“In response to Wilders’s request to bring in witnesses to establish the veracity of the opinions that got him in trouble with the law, that body issued this statement on January 17: “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct, what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.””

And what does our National Post do? Show Wilders snubbing his own nose with a pencil. The letter about Wilders which the Post printed was favourable, but the picture makes him look repellent, and thse things do not happen by accident.

Where are our conservative and libertarian bloggers? Asleep? And what’s up with the National Post? You came to the defence of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn with our own thought control commissions. Why is Wilders the exception?

And while we are on the topic of Mr Wilders, the following are important:

• Atlas Shrugs shows trial has been postponed, to resume at an unknown time at the whim of the Dutch government.
• National Review Online started to cover the trial.

Wake up, people! This is your issue!

When the climategate emails started to come out last fall, I wrote to a warmist colleague of mine for whom I have a high regard.  He deals in such matters as user-owned networks and other net-headed concerns. We have been on the same side in several carrier versus net-head issues. He is also obsessed with AGW and what the information technology  industry can do to help. Okay, so no one is perfect. But making energy use more efficient is the goal of all rational people, and if you can just leave aside the AGW thing, there is much that can and should be done.

I suggested that in the light of the HadleyCRU leaked emails that he might wish to back off a bit. I received in turn a tongue lashing for my impertinence and the crude imputation of stupidity and unworthiness for my position. I replied that this was no fair, and that one of the most odious  attrtributes of the AGW true believer was that no rational discussion would be tolerated. People might not be persuaded of AGW but they were convinced that believers in it were fanatics, and of the two phenomena, political fanaticism was more to be feared.

So now it is payback time. Actually it is just beginning to be payback time. Matt Ridley, who is a highly-successful and serious science writer, has just come out with this in the Spectator.

He makes several points:

• the complete failure and connivance of the mainstream media in this fraud
• the power of the Internet, and the amateur, to foil this plot.

The amateur has been the hero of this story: Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford,

“Notice that all of these sceptic bloggers are self-employed businessmen. Their strengths are networks and feedback: mistakes get quickly corrected; new leads are opened up; expertise is shared; links are made. Prejudice and ignorance abound too, but the good blogs get rewarded with scoops and guest essays so they tap into rich seams of knowledge.”

And the response of the MSM has been late, but they are starting to get there.

“When Climategate broke, the mainstream media, like knights facing archers at Crécy, mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found — by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages — that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.”

And now perhaps even the Globe and Mail.

I am waiting for Geoffrey Simpson, master of the Glebe Consensus on Everything Important, and ridiculous shill for AGW, to confess to error. Also for hell to freeze over.