File this under “Well, Crap.” Kimberley Strassel has a real upper of a column at the Wall Street Journal today: “Reimagining Speaker Pelosi.” While the GOP and the Right are focused on the fight for the White House and getting rid of President Obama, there’s a creeping political menace that too many are not seeing: The 2010 takeover of the House could be short-lived. Conservatives are by nature optimists. They are intensely focused on retaking the White House and the Senate. But what if, in that optimism, they are missing a growing threat? That threat is to the House of Representatives. Republicans claimed a sweeping victory there in 2010, a win that stopped President Obama’s marauding legislative agenda. Yet that has led to a certain Republican nonchalance about the House in 2012. What the optimists are missing is that the House remains the linchpin of all their future ambitions. A Republican presidency will mean little with Speaker Nancy Pelosi redux. Mr. Obama may well win re-election. What leverage will a Republican-run Senate have in the face of that, and a Democratic House? Or consider the possibility that Republicans botch both the Oval Office and the Senate. True, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), under Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, is aware of the challenge and is energetically fund-raising and recruiting. True, the party is already coaching its newer members about the rigors of re-election. And true, John Boehner and Eric Cantor are going all out to collect money for their members. The speaker alone raised some $46 million in 2011—nearly double his take for the entire last election cycle. What Messrs. Boehner and Cantor know is that they’ll need all this, and more. The House is no sure thing. Read the whole thing for a sobering account of what could happen if the Right and the GOP don’t get their act together.
The Wall Street Journal is visiting three swing counties in swing states—Florida, Ohio and Colorado—periodically this year to gauge how the election campaign is unfolding.
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Swing Nation
This an amazing post at Watt’s Up With That, ” Legal exemplars cited in Michael Mann’s UVA email case “: The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is “being run by the baddies,” calling them “shills for industry.” In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money “thugs”. PE-18, 20 & 27 illustrate the typical fashion with which Mann used a UVa email account to accuse co-authors and other respected scientists of incompetence, berating them in emails copied to colleagues living throughout the world. UVA claims this is somehow exempt from VFOIA as scientific research. In PE-22, Mann alludes to his “dirty laundry” which cannot come out, requesting his correspondent to not pass the email or the data attached to it to anyone else (UVa has claimed no attachments to any emails were preserved on their system). In this email, Mann admits he has failed to follow the most basic tenet of science, to keep a record of exactly what he did in his research, and thus himself could not reproduce his own results. PE-24 & 25 characterize the efforts of this small group of academics to hide what they are doing and to avoid their work being held up to inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. In PE-26, Mann goes so far as to ask a federal employee — impossibly, as he send it to an email account subject to the federal FOIA — to “treat this email as confidential” though all the email does is complain about a Wall Street Journal author’s efforts to report the science impeaching Mann’s early work. PE-26, like many other emails UVA wishes to keep secret, is subject to release under the federal FOIA. Continue reading . PREVIOUSLY : ” Evidence Does Not Support Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming .”
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Michael Mann’s Emails
Why? Because “There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.” After a few paragraphs describing how not every scientist is a Warmist, and the numbers who are opting out of previous held beliefs that Mankind is mostly or solely at fault, we get to (h/t Climate Depot) (Wall Street Journal) In
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16 Concerned Scientists: Chill Out, No Need To Freak Over Anthropogenic Global Warming
Gingrich is outpacing Romney among GOP voters, but he also is showing evidence of vulnerabilities that could hurt him in a general election, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
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Gingrich Leading as Fight Intensifies
Romney attacked Obama’s stewardship of the economy, while a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll raised caution signs on the strategy.
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Economic Gains Aid Obama
Two polls fresh on the heels of South Carolina show Newt Gingrich pulling out a nice lead in the Sunshine State. At Rusmussen, ” Florida GOP Primary: Gingrich 41%, Romney 32% .” And also an InsiderAdvantage poll at Newsmax , ” Newt Surges to Lead in Fla., Romney Trails by 8 Points .” (Via Memeorandum .) The buzz on Florida is that it’s much more diverse than South Carolina, and hence way more unpredictable. A couple of weeks ago I expected Mitt Romney to basically clinch the nomination in Florida. But that’s obviously not happening now. He could win, but all that would do is establish a firm two-man race heading into the next series of primary contests. Frontloading HQ has more, ” Musings on the Republican Nomination Race, Post-South Carolina “: The notion of Mitt Romney sweeping or nearly sweeping the January contests and putting the nomination race to rest are gone — even with a Florida win. But the idea of a momentum contest — one that will typically develop behind the frontrunner, no matter how nominal — is not completely dead.
At Wall Street Journal : An Islamic militant group in Nigeria staged devastating bomb and gun assaults on government targets in the northern city of Kano, the latest in a series of attacks that appeared aimed at splitting Muslim and Christian communities in Africa’s most populous country. The attacks, which took place late Friday and Saturday, paired bomb blasts with shootings. An Associated Press count, based on hospital records, said that at least 143 people had died. A high-ranking Nigerian security official, who asked not to be identified, said the final toll may be higher than 200. The Islamic militia Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attack. A Boko Haram spokesman, with a nom de guerre of Abul Qaqa, said that, during the chaos, Boko Haram had freed several of its members who had been in police custody without a trial. The group, whose name means “Western Education is Sacrilege,” has long targeted government workers and buildings in Africa’s most populous nation. But since last month, the group has also stepped up attacks on Christians living in the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim north, in an apparent effort to sow divisions between the two groups. Plus, at London’s Daily Mail , ” At least 143 dead after multiple bombs rock Nigerian city in attacks aimed at government targets .”
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Attacks in Nigeria Kill at Least 143
An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal , “The Greece Next Door” [subscription required], makes a powerful comparison showing how the liberal progressive agenda of the Illinois legislature is causing the state to, well, look a lot like Greece — minus the fires and riots (so far — with the notable exception of Chicago, where a win by any professional team could spark a catastrophe in seconds). Quoth the Journal : Run up spending and debt, raise taxes in the naming of balancing the budget, but then watch as deficits rise and your credit-rating falls anyway. That’s been the sad pattern in Europe, and now it’s hitting that mecca of tax-and-spend government known as Illinois. Though too few noticed, this month Moody’s downgraded Illinois state debt to A2 from A1, the lowest among the 50 states. That’s worse even than California. This isn’t exactly what the Democrats in Illinois had planned: Only a year ago, Governor Pat Quinn and his fellow Democrats raised individual income taxes by 67% and the corporate tax rate by 46%. They did it to raise $7 billion in revenue, as the Governor put it, to “get Illinois back on fiscal sound footing” and improve the state’s credit rating. How’d that work out for the now-Greco-state? Moody’s didn’t like it, and once again we see that higher taxes are not the answer: In its downgrade statement, Moody’s panned Illinois lawmakers for “a legislative session in which the state took no steps to implement lasting solutions to its severe pension underfunding or to its chronic bill payment delays.” An analysis by Bloomberg finds that the assets in the pension fund will only cover “45% of projected liabilities, the least of any state.” And — no surprise — in part because the tax increases have caused companies to leave Illinois, the state budget office confesses that as of this month the state still has $6.8 billion in unpaid bills and unaddressed obligations. I’ll be darned, the liberal tax-and-spend agenda failed again. Who could have seen that coming? Even more interesting than the comparison of Illinois to Greece is how Illinois stands in contrast with Wisconsin. Remember when leeches and union thugs occupied Madison — before Occupying was cool? We were told that Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s agenda was going to bring about the end of the world . . . or something. So, were the protesters correct? In contrast to the Illinois downgrade, Moody’s has praised Mr. Walker’s budget as “credit positive for Wisconsin,” adding that the money-saving reforms bring “the state’s finances closer to a structural budgetary balance.” The editorial goes on to note that, as a result of Walker and the state GOP’s efforts, Wisconsin jumped rom #41 to #17 in Chief Executive magazine’s business-climate rankings of the 50 states. Illinois — that bastion of leftist policy — dropped from #45 to #48. Surely, as a result of his efforts, Gov. Walker is — if not adored — respected by the people of Wisconsin, right? Um, not so much. Even though he was able to balance the budget without hiking taxes, the governor faces a union-financed, union-backed, union-led recall effort this year. Wisconsinites should take notice: If Wisconsin voters want to see where a state ends up without the kind of reforms that Mr. Walker made, they need only look to the Greece next door.
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‘Illinois’: French for ‘Just like Greece’
