After doing some reading about the new Apple iPad, I have to agree with the conclusions of Gizmodo's Adam Frucci. I'm obviously just not enough of a hipster to "get it".

I'm an iPhone owner, and I think the Fisher-Price interface and technical limitations are perfect for a handheld mobile device, particularly one that primarily functions as a phone. However, all they've done with the iPad is removed the phone, made it several times larger and heavier, and handed it back to the consumer. It seems like a toy, a gigantic, clumsy iPod Touch, and, as far as I can tell, little more.

You still can't view Flash on the web, so it's not really a web device. You can't multitask, so it's not a productivity device. It's too large to be a convenient PDA. It isn't a phone. The screen is improperly proportioned to be an ideal media viewer. So what is it supposed to be? If it can't actually replace the netbook in a user's briefcase or backpack, does that user really want yet another expensive gadget when it offers them the same limited connectivity as the phone in their pocket?

I'll have more thoughts on this in the next day or two as I go through the full speech, but when Gibbs told us to expect President Obama to tell Congress why Americans are angry, I had hoped that this would mean Obama was going to first point a finger at himself, then slowly draw it across the room, leveling it at each member of Congress, one by one. I feel so disappointed.

As it turns out, Hillary Clinton isn't really that interested in a challenging, 24/7 job.

Good thing she wasn't trying to get an even more stressful job, right?

In the UK:

1) Job advertisements requesting reliable workers denied on the basis that they discriminate against the lazy.

2) Schools punishing children because their parents work hard and make responsible financial decisions.

3) ABBAWorld, the worst theme park on Earth.

The Washington Post has learned, via senior White House officials, that Obama has personally approved secret operations against terrorists in Yemen.

The far-reaching U.S. role could prove politically challenging for Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who must balance his desire for American support against the possibility of a backlash by tribal, political and religious groups whose members resent what they see as U.S. interference in Yemen.

He probably figured it would never come up, since it's a secret.

I hope nobody tells Dianne Feinstein.

You know, even giving him the benefit of the doubt, Obama just sets himself up for the teleprompter jokes now:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Obama Speaks to a Sixth-Grade Classroom
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

The Supreme Court's recent campaign finance ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, freeing corporate entities to donate to politicians on free speech grounds, gripped the left in an elegantly synchronized apoplectic fit. ChicagoNow blogger Stephen Markley's reaction neatly summarizes the thinking:

Campaign Finance: We Are All Really Screwed

Like I said yesterday, last week might have been one of the worst in modern American history.

People have not yet grasped the far-reaching and terrifying ramifications of this. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is basically the 9/11 of government corruption: It has opened the floodgates to a new, frightening era.

This ruling essentially opens the door for any corporation (and unions--big whoop), from Big Oil to Big Food to Big Health Insurance to spend as much money as possible defeating candidates who oppose their profits in the name of silly things like "the public good." It's not just corporations either: countries like China could very easily foot the bill to pick and choose candidates that will have policies beneficial to their interests. Hell, even al-Qaeda could set up a multi-national corporation and start funding their preferred candidates.

Clearly, we're all going to die in a fire caused by the safety regulations that will now be overturned, because up to this point, special interests have had little influence on the system. It's only a matter of time before the tobacco companies cram billions of dollars down the throats of innocent, helpless political candidates, leading unwitting voters to elect a Congress which passes mandatory, universal "cancer-for-all" legislation. Organized crime syndicates will be able to use front organizations to funnel money to their political allies, something which has never happened before. (Imagine the crazy, topsy-turvy world where some sort of "mafia" might use the noble labor unions in this way, or where an Islamic advocacy group might rake in massive funding from foreign backers. Unheard of.)

Besides, what? Now judicial review is only a good thing when it creates the results Democrats desire? In all seriousness, putting aside the horrors that can be easily justified in the name of "the public good" (who's to say that "Big X" is wrong, and why shouldn't voters be free to decide for themselves instead of having the concerns of major players in the debate suppressed?), it should be obvious that corporations would like to spend as little of their money as possible on politics and will only spend as much of it as actually gets a result. The real causal relationship here is not that large contributions cause otherwise honest politicians to turn into William Jefferson, it's that many politicians are effectively running a protection racket, and the scope of the harm they can do to those who slight them guarantees that their clout will be richly rewarded, one way or another. If there's anything voters should have learned from watching the death spiral of Rod Blagojevich, it's that even children's hospitals and the media are not safe.

(Personally, I learned the healing value of laughter, but my Blagojevich experience was somewhat different from most people.)

Aware of this dynamic, some executives are already worried:

Dozens of current and former corporate executives have a message for Congress: Quit hitting us up for campaign cash.

Roughly 40 executives from companies including Playboy Enterprises, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's, the Seagram's liquor company, toymaker Hasbro, Delta Airlines and Men's Wearhouse sent a letter to congressional leaders Friday urging them to approve public financing for House and Senate campaigns. They say they are tired of getting fundraising calls from lawmakers - and fear it will only get worse after Thursday's Supreme Court ruling.

It's a legitimate complaint, but public financing is certainly not an answer. The most disorganized, lazy, and unpopular candidates shouldn't be artificially elevated to the same level as others. Voters, whether they're acting on behalf of their economic concerns or their home and family, should not have to see any of their resources diverted to political causes they disagree with and should be free to support those that they do as much as energetically as they like. It's a marketplace of ideas, not a commune, and if we don't trust our politicians enough to let them accept donations freely and transparently, it's insane to think that they can be trusted to handle public financing responsibly, or even in a way that serves any purpose other than consolidating their power and securing their station. (Consider the Solomaic wisdom with which they've handled ballot access and redistricting.)

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court set out to address a very real and undemocratic injustice, "reforms" so restrictive that they criminalized private citizens who chose to work together as a non-profit corporation to finance the creation of a political documentary. As Matt Welch suggested, "let's boil it down to the essential words: Political documentary, banned, government." That's a poisonous and reprehensible notion, and in resolving it, they correctly reasoned that if they can't bar non-profit corporations from financing political advocacy and are exempting media corporations, they also can't arbitrarily bar other for-profit corporations. All the decision reaffirms is that the real responsibility lies with us. We elect our politicians, and no campaign donation or advocacy campaign can be so vast as to force our hand at the ballot box. If we want to dry up the money from special interests we don't support, all we have to do is stop rewarding abuses of power with our votes on election day. The money will quit flowing just that quickly. In the meantime, if we can't be trusted to actually consider what the few politicians on our ballot support and who supports them, then all the reforms in the world serve only to hide the fact that we have no idea what we're doing. There is no legislation that can fix that.

Update: Reason's Steve Chapman:

It is often argued that corporate speech may be banned because corporations enjoy certain privileges afforded by law. But it's a longstanding constitutional axiom that the government may not require the surrender of constitutional rights in exchange for state-furnished benefits - say, barring criticism of Congress by residents of public housing.

Once you grant the government that sort of power, it is bound to expand. Newspapers could be forbidden to make endorsements. Right now, media companies are exempt from the ban. But why should a newspaper be free to spend money urging voters to support a candidate, while other companies are not?

John Stossel:

So now we are being served dire warnings that "corporate money ... may now overwhelm both the contributions of individuals and the faith they may harbor in their democracy." (Are similarly freed wealthy labor unions potted plants?) But the same Post editorial conceded that corporate money was "never lacking in the American political process." So what's the difference?

The difference is that the Supreme Court has reminded Congress that there's actually a Constitution, and that they're actually bound by it. This angers the Leviathan.

Both parties share one important plank in their platforms: neither Democrats nor Republicans are all that serious about reducing the deficit.

I'll leave you with Keith Olbermann's most recent bout of hysteria.


...said the rabid, emotionally unstable, hyper-partisan shill.

He says Brown should have been "laughed off the stage" by conservatives as "unqualified" and "a disaster in the making" at any other time in our history? Are liberals even allowed to bring that up with Obama still in office?

The reference is obvious, but what's the implication here? That conservatives had a point?

Update: Despite the predictable the initial reaction (summary: "we just weren't liberal enough"), it seems that some Democrats are quickly realizing that the ship is, in fact, sinking, and are now moving to "distance themselves" from the whirling Obama vortex of destruction:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: "I am very upset by what he's not done in terms of rights of gays and lesbians."

Paul Krugman: "He wasn't the one we've been waiting for."

At least we might finally get some "change". Even John McCain is afraid that he might not be conservative enough to keep his seat, and California Republicans are locking on to Barbara Boxer:

"We hope Barack Obama will do for Barbara Boxer in November what he did for Martha Coakley this week."

Heh. As I said after the election, the Democrats overplaying their hand here and destroying themselves was as inevitable as sunrise.

I had wanted to post a substantial bit on the Brown victory today, as well as a few bits of trivia, but ended up at the office until 11 PM. The weather here is absolutely awful, and has been for some time, so I'm taking the girlfriend away to swim in a pool of spiced rum in the Bahamas this weekend, leaving Friday morning.

Naturally, I couldn't have picked a better time to be near the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault.

Anyway, I won't be around this weekend, and I'm not sure if I'll get the posting done before I go.

However, I hope you guys have a great weekend, and I'm really happy to see some of the familiar faces who are still around. Posting resumes Tuesday.

Really.

Massachusetts Democrats, watching the Martha Coakley trainwreck from front row seats, figure out who's really to blame.

As audience members streamed out of Pres. Obama's rally on behalf of AG Martha Coakley (D) here tonight, the consensus was that the fault for Coakley's now-floundering MA SEN bid lies with one person -- George W. Bush.

Really?

Even in light of the ad misspelling Massachusetts, Coakley's claim that there are no terrorists in Afghanistan, her staffer apparently shoving a reporter to the ground, her claim that devout Catholics don't belong in the emergency room, her bizarre attack on Curt Schilling, and that insane mailer accusing her opponent of wanting to deny care to all rape victims (a particularly unwise choice considering that Coakley is known as having once refused to charge a powerful union boss's son then set him free without bail despite his having been arrested for literally raping a baby with a curling iron)?

Ed Schultz extolling the virtues of election fraud certainly didn't help, nor did the union members getting caught taking payoffs to show up carrying Coakley signs.

How about this site, put together by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, purporting to document "Brown's Lies", but which essentially amounts to complaints about two murky votes on women's health (Greyhawk: "Did they really think emphasizing Brown's opposition to forcing Nuns to perform abortions was a vote-getter for their side?"), the apparent dark secret that he is actually a Republican, and, incredibly, that he has supported a couple of tax and fee increases.

What mini-Machiavelli at the DSCC thought that might be the smoking gun that would turn the election around for them? Democrats accuse Scott Brown of raising taxes? That's not just the pot calling the kettle black, that's the pot hurling reprehensible racial epithets.

I mean, I'm just throwing this out there, but Martha Coakley and the Democratic Party may very well have a hand, however small, in her political demise.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), speaking with a gaggle of reporters after the event, said that while state Sen. Scott Brown (R) offers voters a quick fix, in reality, the problems created by "George Bush and his cronies" are not so easily solved.

"If you think there's magic out there and things can be turned around overnight, then you would vote for someone who could promise you that, like Scott Brown," Kennedy said.

You might even vote for someone like Barack Obama. Maybe that's why former Obama voters are defecting!

For any mixed feelings anyone anywhere on the political spectrum might have about Brown, they shouldn't be mixed at all about Coakley. Putting aside ideology, on principle alone, her campaign deserves to go down in screaming flames.

Update: Representative Chris Van Hollen, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tries to defend Coakley and ends up putting his foot in the Chappaquiddick:

"Why would you hand the keys to the car back to the same guys whose policies drove the economy into the ditch and then walked away from the scene of the accident?" Van Hollen said.

Wait, who are we talking about here?

Is Coakley's race some kind of practical joke?

President Obama:

"We want our money back."

Ironically, once the debt catches up to us, that'll probably be his opponent's campaign slogan.

Hillary Clinton is the political "Topper", the Dilbert character who always has to one-up everybody else's anecdotes:

The Clintons have a long-running involvement with Haiti, where they spent their honeymoon.

According to her book, her honeymoon was in Acapulco. Bill's going to be ticked.

Really, it didn't sound good enough to say that she spent some time in Haiti? It has to become her actual honeymoon destination?

PowerLine considers King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

Longtime readers of Free Will may recall this blog's extensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Of the things that Bush screwed up, the one for which he was perhaps most widely criticized was the one that was legitimately not his doing. The police power, which provides for general safety issues like rescue work and evacuations, lies directly with the states, and Blanco was so fabulously irresponsible with that power that she not only rejected offers of evacuation help from Amtrak and other organizations with transportation resources at their disposal, but apparently had not even contemplated implementing the longstanding emergency evacuation plan until, by her own admission, Bush called her on the phone, wondering why she wasn't doing anything. Even when the evacuation did get started, it's as if nobody could find a surviving copy of the plan, so they just winged it.

Federal support ramped up in a few days, as Lousiana had been promised all along. All they had to do was hold down the fort until the cavalry arrived, but instead, New Orleans burned because the state of Louisiana's monolithic Democratic political establishment, rather than taking charge, expended every ounce of available effort pointing fingers in every possible outward direction, with Senator Landrieu even threatening to "punch" anyone who tried to suggest that they had performed with anything less than transcendent and shining genius. Blanco's non-performance was such a liability that rather than suffering the slings and arrows of a public which had seen nearly two thousand citizens die, she wisely chose not to run for another term, paving the way for voters to call a mulligan.

There's no doubt that FEMA's ultimate response was poorly coordinated, but no more so than would be expected from any agency which was picking up the slack from a number of other failed institutions, and trying to honor responsibilities that should have never been passed to it. There's also no doubt that Brownie did not, in fact, do a heck of a job, and Bush blundered in saying that he did. However, there's also little else the federal government could have been asked to do to alleviate the initial suffering or loss of life in New Orleans. That's what state and local agencies are there for, and Democrats who pretended otherwise, shielding Blanco from the public retaliation she so richly deserved, have never been properly held to account for it.

However, the media's narrative was already written, and, as too often happens, rather than fighting back, Republicans running for federal office raced to promise to fix problems that were outside of their jurisdiction to begin with. Democrats, of course, tripped all over themselves vowing to fix them even harder.

I bring this up because of this article, regarding Obama's apparent inability to round up the unicorns and sprinkle fairy dust over Haiti, something that, if the Democratic fury about Bush's handling of Katrina had any merit at all, should be a cakewalk for the Great One, since he cares and Bush didn't:

Anger built Saturday at Haiti's US-controlled main airport, where aid flights were still being turned away and poor coordination continued to hamper the relief effort four days on.

"Let's take over the runway," shouted one voice. "We need to send a message to Obama," cried another.

Control remained in the hands of US forces, who face criticism for the continued disarray at the overwhelmed airfield.

The crowd accused American forces, who were handed control of the airport by Haitian authorities, of monopolizing the airfield's single runway to evacuate their own citizens.

The disorder even appeared to cause diplomatic ripples, with French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet telling reporters he had lodged a complaint with the United States over its handling of the Port-au-Prince airport.

"I have made an official protest to the Americans through the US embassy," he said at the Haitian airport after a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned away.

A spokesman for the French foreign ministry later denied France had registered protest, saying "Franco-US coordination in emergency aid for Haiti is being handled in the best way possible given the serious difficulties."

"The Haitians haven't been notified about the arrival of planes. And when they do land, there's no one to take charge and a large amount of goods are arriving without coordination," said Haitian government official Michel Chancy.

On Port-au-Prince's streets, the consequences of the coordination breakdown are clear, as traumatized and starving quake survivors approached passing foreigner and begged them for food.

Angry mobs, starving people wandering aimlessly, corpses piling up in the streets, international criticism, people shouting wild conspiracy theories about how the President doesn't really care about the victims? Cripes, is anybody ever going to get all of those poor people out of the Superdome?

Presidentin', as it turns out, is hard work, and the institutional failures in Haiti are killing people in real time. The very best efforts of a lot of good people, as it turns out, aren't nearly enough to overcome the obstacles in front of them. However, you can expect little media comment on the topic beyond this post on a Newsweek blog, because those obstacles are not really Obama's fault, anymore than they were Bush's. Disaster management is hard, especially when you're trying to do it in a place where the infrastructure and local institutions have utterly crumbled, or, in Haiti's case, where they barely existed in the first place.

Actually, some people would say that about Louisiana, too, but I digress.

When you look at it that way, it would only be fair if Obama were scapegoated just the same, wouldn't it? After all, Democrats claimed that it was unreasonable to blame local officials during Katrina because the disaster was just "too big" for them to handle, and the federal government should've been expected to take total responsibility. Putting aside that we now know Blanco explicitly blocked Bush's efforts to do just that, Democrats can hardly duck out of this one by simply claiming that Haiti's disaster is "too big" for the world's leading superpower. Even under Bush, we were supposed to be able to save everyone in New Orleans, so there's no good reason that Obama shouldn't be able to save everyone in Port-Au-Prince, is there? Can't he fly around the Earth in reverse and unwind the earthquake, like in Superman?

An obvious answer, of course, would be that it isn't our job to save Port au Prince, but why not? Democrats acted as if only gross Presidential incompetence could explain what we saw in Louisiana and, now, in Haiti. It's supposed to be easy to save a broken city, Americans are supposed to be able to show the rest of the world how disaster relief is done, and admitting that it's more complicated than that would ruin the Katrina narrative.

Obama should, if we're interested in fairness, be held to at least the same standard on his commitments in Haiti as Bush was held to in New Orleans.

It's that, or the Democrats and liberal journalists who tore Bush apart over Katrina are going to let this slide, reminding us how the double standard works and suggesting that those individuals are, in fact, the vile hypocrites and opportunists Republicans accused them of being at the time.

I fully expect the latter.

(In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I worked with Michelle Catalano of the late A Small Victory to organize a charity drive and bring a truckload of school supplies to displaced children who had been sent to Baton Rouge and Houston. Now, if you have anything to spare, I encourage you to give to Doctors Without Borders, which has 800 personnel in Haiti, currently working without facilities, providing the life-saving skills that are most needed there right now. (Of course, you could give to the American Red Cross, but it's entirely possible that you could swim to Haiti with the money in your teeth before it will do the same good.)

Update: Instapundit:

Dr. George Milonas writes: "If Obama thinks Bush is such an incredible incompetent, why did he send Bush to help rescue the Haitians? Does he hate black people that much that he is willing to inflict Bush on them?"

I think we're starting a meme.

Update: Greetings to all the Instapunditeers. Sadly, I don't have an RSS feed up for you to subscribe to, and have only recently resumed blogging after an extended hiatus, but if you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll make the site a part of your regular routine, as there's a lot more regular content coming.

Consider this article from attorney, former police officer, and gun rights activist Ed Stone:

A United States Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld the constitutionality of pointing a gun at any citizen daring to carry, lawfully, a concealed weapon in public....The case stems from a lawyer who sued a police officer after he was detained for lawfully carrying a concealed weapon while in possession of a license to carry concealed. According to the case opinion, the lawyer, Greg Schubert, had a pistol concealed under his suit coat, and Mr. Schubert was walking in what the court described as a "high crime area." At some point a police officer, J.B. Stern, who lived up to his last name, caught a glimpse of the attorney's pistol, and he leapt out of his patrol car "in a dynamic and explosive manner" with his gun drawn, pointing it at the attorney's face.

Officer Stern "executed a pat-frisk," and Mr. Schubert produced his license to carry a concealed weapon. He was disarmed and ordered to stand in front of the patrol car in the hot sun. At some point, the officer locked him in the back seat of the police car and delivered a lecture. Officer Stern "partially Mirandized Schubert, mentioned the possibility of a criminal charge, and told Schubert that he (Stern) was the only person allowed to carry a weapon on his beat."

The attorney sued in federal court, but the District Court threw out his suit, ruling that Officer Stern's behavior is the proper way to treat people who lawfully carry concealed pistols. Mr. Schubert appealed, and the First Circuit upheld the District Court's ruling.

...in light of this article from the Boston Globe's Daniel Rowinski:

Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager's mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording. Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.

"One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,'" Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, "my phone was seized, and I was arrested."

The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.

Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.

Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.

Fortunately, both of these cases were eventually dropped, but others have been upheld, one by the state's highest court, with the apparent distinction between whether the recording itself was considered a public act or a covert one. That's asinine, if you consider citizens to have any right to monitor their government at all, since officers inclined to abuse their power would also be inclined to tone it down when they know they're on camera.

Schubert, meanwhile, is going to appeal, again.

The message here appears to be that Massachusetts cops can harass you, handcuff you, and potentially brutalize you for lawfully exercising a right explicitly protected in the Constitution, that you may be arrested and charged with a felony for trying to document any of it, and that there's a pretty good chance that the courts will back them in the whole exercise, depending on how willing the officers are to lie about the manner in which you attempted to capture their conduct. You may very well spend years trying to clear your name.

Lovely. I can understand why some people just pack up and leave.

Apparently, there's a "Quebec Brand".

Premier Jean Charest, his economic ministers and Quebec's diplomatic representatives in the United States met Thursday to elaborate an action plan to broaden Quebec's economic, cultural and education ties with the United States....A Quebec official said the U.S. initiative concerns all sectors and will be focused on a Quebec brand, noting that the Quebec-based Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion have made their mark in the U.S. market.

Heh.

I've been overextended this month, and have ended up neglecting the blog, but I did want to say happy New Year. I hope your holidays, whichever ones you may celebrate, were enjoyable and safe. I'll be posting more this week.

Late last week, hackers broke into the systems of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, Britain's leading "climate change" research center, and made off with in excess of a thousand documents, including hundreds of emails to and from the unit's director, Phil Jones, communicating with other climate scientists around the world.

Jones was a major contributor and active proponent of the claims and proposals contained in the official report issued by United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change, the document waved around these days to justify terrorizing children, terrorizing adults, terrorizing more children, and implementing an international super-bureaucracy to stifle economic growth around the world in the name of the environment.

If you support those justifications and believe they're backed up by objective scientists with the world's best interests at heart, those documents may be somewhat disappointing for you.

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

...I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

=====

Mike,

...Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

=====

Mike,

And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.

====

Phil,

...So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean - but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately....It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".

Tom.

=====

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann

...The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.

Yeah, it's the data's fault.

The emails are chock full of talk of concealing and destroying data and evidence (most likely illegally), seemingly frank discussions of massaging the data to get desired results, and coordinated efforts to silence critics, some of which involve Michael Mann, creator of the infamous "hockey stick graph", the popular image that purports to show sudden and continuing increases in global temperature coinciding with the industrial revolution, but based on methodology that came under fire because, well, he appeared to be doing exactly what Jones now admits outright that they're doing.

To me, this seems to support some of the very worst claims made about the IPCC, including scientists who claimed that their research was dismissed out of hand and their names used against their will when their research produced the "wrong answer". Jones appears to be unwilling to refute the authenticity of the emails, claiming simply that he "can't remember" what he meant by "hiding the decline".

Andrew Bolt, blogging for Australia's Herald Sun, has been doing a masterful job of exploring these documents and the (predictably limited) commentary from the international press, and I encourage you to check out his site. I suspect my long-standing suspicion, shared by many others, may be all too accurate: many prominent "climate change scientists" are, in fact, in the climate change business. No anthropogenic climate change means no grant money and no clout, so there's going to be a perpetual anthropogenic climate change emergency, whether there really is or not.

It looks like John Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, is planning to run for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat.