Last week CNN.com published an article from Jesse Jackson, the founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network.  The article was meant to promote a march (also supported by the UAW) on behalf of the so-called “green jobs” movement.  The idea is government should be targeting investment into green technology, thus creating American jobs and improving the environment. The slogan “green jobs” is an attempt by the environmental movement, supported by opportunists in big labor, to address its main shortcoming; that is, the environmental movement is often anti-growth, and in tough economic times, people aren’t as willing to save the whales if it means losing their job.

Enter the “green jobs” mantra as a way to recast the message.  Here we have a policy where everyone wins—we have more jobs and cleaner air.  From a social perspective, it's nice sounding policy.  From an economic perspective, however, it’s indefensible.  Let’s take for instance the quite mainstream arguments of Jackson and Rogers: 

“A key component of stable job growth is our nation's energy policy. If our country gets serious about energy savings and independence from oil, we could rebuild domestically and power the U.S. economy with American jobs.”

While saving energy is a worthy goal, there is no link between saving energy and job growth.  If that were true, North Korea would be an economic powerhouse.  Of course, if a company develops an energy saving device or a way to replace oil, more people are employed creating that device.  But the same goes for any other industry, and the private sector is much better at R&D than the government.

“We need an economy that creates employment that can't be shipped overseas. You certainly can't retrofit a house in the Midwest from China or India. Home-grown American labor will be installing windmills and solar panels.”

There is nothing unique about “green jobs” in these examples.  One could just as easily say, “You certainly can’t paint a barn in the Midwest from China or India.” Or “You certainly can’t mow a Milwaukee lawn from China or India.”  The industry in question is not the issue; what matters is the strength of the economy.  Does the family in Milwaukee have enough surplus capital to retrofit their home, paint their barn, or hire someone to mow their lawn?  That’s the question. 

But it’s a question the left believes it doesn’t need to answer.  If resources are limitless, the government can simply give the family enough money to pay for the retrofit.  And there you have it.  Someone has a green job and a house is more energy efficient. 

But the economy doesn’t work that way; government expenditures must come from the private sector’s pocket.  In our example, while both the person hired for the retrofit and the Milwaukee family temporarily benefit, the family next door does not.  The neighbors live in a global and open economy, where the private sector needs surplus capital to expand production, research new products, and create jobs.  The global economy is harmed each time government robs from the marketplace to fund its pet industries.

“Some reports estimate that a clean energy industry can provide 3.2 million jobs. As just one example, since initiating its clean energy plan, Assembly Bill 32, California has added 500,000 green jobs.”

And how many jobs did California lose to add 500,000 green jobs?   How much productive capital—that could have been used in more efficient, sustainable job creation—did California pull from private industry to pay for those jobs?  (The same question, by the way, should be asked of the Stimulus.)  As of June 2010, California had 12.2% unemployment, well above the national average.  These numbers are a product of a well-meaning but imprudent state government, famous for its intense belief in unlimited capital.

“Even now, the only sector of the economy that has seen job growth during the recession is the green job sector.”

Real growth must be sustainable.  Like the “cash for clunkers” program, government sponsored growth is spurned by artificial demand, demand that exits when government either runs out of cash or changes priorities.

“Our current path favors big oil and coal interests, which don't offer the potential job growth of a clean energy economy. Offshore drilling and mountain top removal provide a few thousand jobs nationwide, but, as the BP oil spill recently demonstrated, can jeopardize millions of other jobs in other industries such as fishing and tourism.”

Offshore oil drilling and coal mining provide only a few thousand jobs nationwide?  This is probably news to the heavy equipment manufacturer, the coal coking plant, the logistics firm, the catering service, the electricity provider…and the thousands upon thousands of other interconnected benefactors.  We live in an open economy. The end of coal harvesting and offshore drilling, if not replaced by something economically superior, would have damaging effects far beyond the people who actually work in the coal mines or on the oil rigs.

“The European Union and China are investing considerably more than the U.S…We can sit idly as China and Germany invest in clean energy -- a soon-to-be $8 trillion world market -- or we can step up, get Americans back in the work force and export the best clean energy vehicles and technology.”

China’s investments into clean technology are strategic and reflect China’s ever-growing demand for a national infrastructure to support 1.4 billion people rising from poverty, not a need to satisfy left wing pressure groups.  This is why China has made the construction of nuclear power plants the cornerstone of its energy policy, something impossible to support within the American left. America needs an energy policy, to be sure, one designed to promote its national interests, not one designed—under the cover of green jobs—to promote the interests of organized labor and the global warming crowd.

And as for the “soon-to-be $8 trillion world market…” Assuming this number is even knowable, there is no potential 8 trillion dollar market that needs any help finding capital.  Green technology is and will be a large market, but it’s best to let private capital decide how to place investment in the most efficient areas with the highest returns.  Only in this way will we see any meaningful improvement in American jobs.

Does this Muslim group or any other Muslim group have a right to build a mosque near ground zero? Yes, of course. No serious person argues differently.

Will the GZ mosque be a symbolic loss in the war on terror? Ehhh, I don’t really think so.

Will building the GZ mosque tangibly harm the country? Nah.

Should the GZ mosque get built? No.

Why? Well….

There is an important, much larger cultural point to be made here. Ground Zero is sacred ground. Sacred. And we as a culture do not give proper respect to those things that ought to be held as sacred.

Childhood innocence ought to be held sacred, yet we litter the airwaves with sex and profanity and label those who might object as Puritans.

The practice of law ought to be sacred, yet we allow attorneys to have cheap, gimmicky ads insinuating that lawsuits are some sort of get-rich-quick options.

The office of the presidency ought to be sacred, yet our own vice president refers to the president he serves as “Barack.”

Ground Zero is sacred ground. And what happens in and around Ground Zero ought to happen with the extreme sensibilities of those who lost their lives there solely in mind. Ground Zero is not that place to make a point about how building a mosque would show off the best of America. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But Ground Zero is and should only ever be the place where the victims are honored. Some say the terrorists win if we don’t build the mosque. Poppycock. The terrorists win when we stop honoring the victims.

Maybe we can talk about building a mosque when we finally have a memorial built at Ground Zero. In fact, that would be a great time to talk about building a mosque a few blocks down from a respectful, honoring memorial.

You wouldn’t build an NRA museum next to the location of a gun crime. You wouldn’t air an anti-Semitic ad during a showing of Schindler’s List. And you shouldn’t build the GZ mosque. Certainly not now, without a memorial to honor the victims first.

So I took the bait and clicked on the Forbes.com article titled “Fire David Axelrod.”  I thought the author, Dan Gerstein, would cite the problem with leaders surrounding themselves with sycophants and the pitfalls of being advised by pure political operators.  I resented Karl Rove’s intimate involvement in the Bush White House and now feel the same about Axelrod.  After an election, leaders should be prudent in their decision-making and stop campaigning.

But that wasn’t Gerstein’s point at all.  Instead he was upset that, according to a recent poll by Democracy Corps, 55% of Americans believe “socialist” is a suitable label for President Obama.  This “shocking” result was to Gerstein proof the President’s team had failed to adequately communicate its message. 

According to Gerstein, “most economists” (read, his three friends at Morgan Stanley) believe the stimulus was an economic savior rather than a wasteful slush fund that failed by the President’s own measure.  The health care reform package was a similar success; it was a moderate push for more coverage, rather than the first step toward government-run care and an assault on liberty. The public would know the truth, Gerstein reasons, had Obama fought against the “uncountered conservative message machine,” presumably with words crafted by Gerstein.

This article was inevitable.  When politicians fail—and especially liberal ones—sympathetic media often find a suitable scapegoat in communication.  Media types think their polished rhetoric is needed to turn things around, not a change in policy. What Gerstein and his peers don’t realize, however, is that after an election communication must precisely match policy.   When one governs, he can no longer hide behind his words.  His actions are on the front page every day, and people live the results.  If his words don’t match reality, voters notice.

Communication is not Obama’s problem.  Dishonesty is.  Obama says he believes in the free market, but he advances big government.  He says he’s focused on jobs, but he pushes job killing policies. At every step, he supports the state over the private sector, redistributing taxpayer dollars to fund pet projects and his idea of social justice.  All this meddling has some—a majority, in fact—wondering if Obama isn’t a socialist after all.

But instead of blaming Obama for this perception, Gerstein prefers to blame Axelrod and by extension the American people.  Implicit in this argument is the assumption that voters have it all wrong; they've been duped by the opposition.  If only Axelrod had explained Obama more clearly, the simple-minded masses would have never misunderstood their leader.

I’ve argued before that Obama is not a socialist in the pure sense; I believe he’s more of an interventionist—one who knows the value of the free market but believes it is his job to right its wrongs. Obama is smart enough to know public ownership of the means of production doesn’t work, but he’s arrogant enough to think under his leadership there are exceptions. 

This isn't socialism, but it's awfully close.  And the American people shouldn't have to make the distinction. 

Senator Arlen Specter was a registered Democrat in Pennsylvania from the age of 21 to 35.  Like any sensible person, he became a Republican in his 30s, even though he switched parties not so much to suit his changing political philosophy as to be able to challenge an incumbent Democrat for the job of district attorney in Philadelphia in 1965.

A funny thing happened when Senator Specter turned 79 last year: he decided that his 21- to 35-year-old political self had been wiser than his 35- to 79-year-old self.  (Given his voting record for most of his Senate career, it’s hard to quibble with this point.)

Arlen Spectacle (as Mark Levin calls him) categorically stated in March 2009, “To eliminate any doubt, I am a Republican, and I am running for reelection in 2010 as a Republican on the Republican ticket.”  A month later, after genuine conservative Pat Toomey had thrown his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination, Specter announced that, to eliminate any doubt, he was a Democrat, and was running for reelection in 2010 as a Democrat on the Democratic ticket.

Specter inarguably changed parties to avoid a repeat of his close race in 2004 with Toomey, whom Specter beat with a measly 51% of the vote, despite the advantages of incumbency and overwhelming support from the national and state party establishments, including President George W. Bush and fellow Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.  As early as April 2009, just three months into Obama’s presidency, Specter must have sensed that the burgeoning anti-incumbent mood would smother him by the time of the 2010 primaries, and so he deserted the GOP.

Arlen “Act Like a Lady” Specter claims he didn’t leave the party—the party left him.

It’s funny how the exact same thing recently occurred with that paragon of political integrity, Charlie “Lincoln” Crist of Florida, who just happened to be down in the polls to Marco Rubio before he decided his newly evolving political ideology compelled him to become an Independent.

And it’s a bit funny that Specter used the exact same line to explain his party-hopping maneuver back in 1965.  As the Boston Herald quoted him on the campaign trail, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party…  The party left me.”

The Senator’s party affiliation isn’t the only thing he’s flip-flopped on.  In May 2009, The Sphincter (Monica Crowley’s nickname for him, not mine—honest!) was asked whether he supported a government-run public option in Congress’s health care overhaul bill, and insisted he did not.  By July, when it looked as though momentum were on the side of the public option, he was for it.

Specter voted in favor of pro-union leadership card check legislation in 2007; then announced he was against it in 2009; then, after switching parties, announced he was in favor of it again.

The Philadelphia Enquirer’s Dick Polman summarizes Benedict Arlen’s vast matrix of flip-floppery: “He has seemingly been everywhere, which arguably leaves him nowhere.  He says he voted for Bush-Cheney and McCain-Palin… but says he’ll vote for Obama in ‘12.  He voted against Elena Kagan for solicitor general, but says he has ‘an open mind’ about her ascent to the Supreme Court…  He voted against Robert Bork for the high court, but famously defended Clarence Thomas and voted for John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr., although now, with respect to Roberts, he says that he made an error in judgment.”

Specter doesn’t just flip-flop—he does double lutzes and triple toe loops and tops it all off with a quadruple salchow, all before his supporters and opponents can catch their breath and figure out where he stands on an issue and whether his position has changed in the past five seconds.

FiveThirtyEight.com documents that Arlen Sepulcher voted 58% of the time with Democrats from January to March 2009, before Pat Toomey joined the Pennsylvania primary race.  After Toomey entered, but before Specter had switched parties, Specter voted 84% of the time with Republicans.  Then, during the period after Specter had switched parties but before liberal Joe Sestak had entered the race, he voted 69% of the time with Democrats again.  Finally, after Sestak emerged as his primary challenger, Specter tacked to the left and voted a whopping 97% of the time with Democrats.

The clincher that Specter is all about expediency, not principle, is that Obama’s grassroots group Organizing for America is working furiously to get Specter elected—even though there is a bona fide left-wing liberal, Joe Sestak, in the race—in exchange for Specter’s votes last year on the stimulus and health care bills.  With the cozy Obama-Specter alliance firmly in place, what does Obama need with a politician who might actually vote for his policies out of principle?

In a final ironic development capping Specter’s dishonorable career (proof of such: Time magazine named him one of the U.S.’s 10 best senators in 2006!), Specter discovered yesterday that his party switch was all for naught, and even harmful to his aspirations.  Specter recently admitted, before he was trounced in yesterday’s primary, “Well, I probably shouldn’t say this.  But I have thought from time to time that I might have helped the country more if I’d stayed a Republican.”

Democrats will no doubt claim that Sestak won the race because the country is clamoring for more socialism.  But really it’s because Americans loathe political opportunists like Specter.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

As the newly appointed Dean of Harvard Law School, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan decided, in the middle of the War on Terror, to cripple the Reserve Officer Training Corps’ recruitment capability on campus by denying it crucial access to funding, operating space, and assistance from the Office of Career Services.

Kagan’s action fits into a shameful history of antiwar college administrators’ kicking ROTC off university campuses nationwide, most visibly at Ivy League schools, out of opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 60s and 70s.  After the war ended, officials extended the policy out of supposed concern over the military’s ban on gays in the 80s and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the 90s.

After the Solomon Amendment barring federal funding to universities that ban military recruitment on campus was fully implemented at Harvard in 2003, Kagan signed on to a legal challenge to the amendment.  The Third Circuit Court overturned the amendment in 2004, but stayed its ruling pending Supreme Court review.  Kagan, impatient with the vagaries of the legal system, decided to force Harvard back onto its anti-ROTC policy, even though the law hadn’t yet been changed.  The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Third Circuit ruling in 2006, at which point Kagan reversed her actions to comply with the ruling.

Gay rights supporters defend Kagan’s actions as a necessary stopgap against government-sponsored military discrimination.

It is instructive to reconsider Kagan’s stance in the context of the role our military plays, the people and the rights it protects, and our enemies’ attitudes toward individual liberty and their treatment of gays.

Who, for example, benefits from the protections the U.S. military provides its citizens—only straight people, or gays as well?

Who protects the rights of citizens of our country, in which gays may live more or less as they please; form relationships with same-sex partners; enter (in a growing number of states) into civil unions, domestic partnerships, and marriages; adopt (in a growing number of states) and raise children; file lawsuits if they believe they have been unlawfully discriminated against; push to change laws to promote equality with heterosexuals; protest for their rights and hold rallies and parades in America’s major cities; and engage our political leaders in debate about allowing gays to serve openly in the military?

How do governments treat gays in countries that are our adversaries—in particular, those that fund, sponsor, and sympathize with the war to defeat gay-tolerant Western civilization and promote radical Islam around the world?  Do these Islamic governments have the same enlightened perspective on gays as the U.S., or do they condemn gays and throw them in jail or execute them for homosexual behavior?

The left in this country has traditionally devalued or demonized the military—at worst, it is for them a barbaric, fascist, industrial complex that sparks unnecessary wars and engages in brutal imperialist conquests.  At best, it is for them a largely unseen, slightly tacky presence whose benefits they take for granted, just as they take for granted our capitalist economy’s wealth, which they seek to appropriate and redistribute with no concern for the effort required to create it.

As many soldiers pointed out during the Iraq War, our military protects the right of antiwar liberals to protest the military’s actions.  What a slap in the face it is to bar or hobble the military in recruiting the brightest students from the best universities across the country to help complete its mission.  Imagine if military recruiters were similarly barred from other U.S. institutions and were unable to recruit enough members to fill its ranks.

As liberal, DADT-opposing Peter Beinart wrote, “The United States military is not Procter and Gamble.  It is not just another employer.  It is the institution whose members risk their lives to protect the country.  You can disagree with the policies of the American military; you can even hate them; but you can’t alienate yourself from the institution without in a certain sense alienating yourself from the country.”

Kagan’s ROTC-bashing position is also counterproductive, in that it further isolates the military from liberal views and entrenches in the left the mindset that the military is hard-line and unreformable.  And how is spitting on ROTC fair to soldiers, commanders, and potential recruits who oppose DADT or might be gay themselves?

The American Spectator’s John Tabin, who also supports repealing DADT, notes, “[I]f you want a military leadership with more liberal views on homosexuality, you should be more reluctant to entrench this cultural estrangement, not less.”  The policy of banning or restricting ROTC is just another example of leftists prematurely deciding that debate on an issue is over, those who disagree with them should no longer have a voice in the conversation, and dissenters do not deserve to be persuaded out of their positions or treated with respect.

Although DADT is misguided, treating recruiters shabbily is merely one way for liberals to disguise their contempt for the military and its unapologetic defense of American values around the world.  The day that DADT is repealed, leftist college administrators will be scouring the horizon for some other excuse to ban recruitment at their schools.

As Beinart wrote, “Barring the military from campus is a bit like barring the president or even the flag.”  But liberals can’t ban the American flag, can they?  Oh, wait—yes they can!

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

There are four main reasons why.

1. She’s likely the best nominee conservatives could hope for from the Obama administration

Pres. Obama did win the election, and the president ought to be able to appoint the qualified nominee of their choice. Conservatives who argued for a more lenient path for Bush’s nominees should not in turn disqualify Obama’s nominee via policy nitpicking.

Elena Kagan seems to be by all accounts, a center-left mainstream Democrat. Her conservative colleagues respect her, and she seems amenable to at lease some of the Roberts-Scalia-Thomas-Alito views, particularly as they pertain to executive power and rights for suspected terrorists.

True, her lack of a judicial record leaves some guesswork as to what kind of justice she’d be. However, her professional track-record over several decades shows little evidence of the sort of ultra-left, “activist” philosophies—you know the sort that conservative groups have nightmares about.

2. At worst, she moves the court slightly to the right

Fox News’s excellent legal analyst Megyn Kelly made the very valid point that the outgoing Justice Stevens is the court’s most leftwing justice. So Kagan, at worst, is still going to move the court further to the right. She’s exactly right. Replacing Stevens with Kagan would likely be a net gain for conservatives.

3. The criticisms of her don’t hold much water

The two main criticisms of Kagan are that she hasn’t been a judge before and she is something of an elite. Regarding her lack of judicial experience, no big deal. Justice Rehnquist had no judicial experience before his appointment and that was no hindrance. Furthermore, she has tremendous non-judicial experience in the legal world as a White House council, Dean of Harvard Law School, and Solicitor General.

As to the charge of being an elite, eh, so what? Would I rather her have a law degree and legal experience from somewhere in the South or the Heartland? Yeah. Is it a little ridiculous 8 of 9 justices would be from Harvard and Yale? Yeah. But if Kagan is an elite, so is Alito and so is Roberts. And the charges of elitism weren’t a concern during their conformations and shouldn’t be now.

4.  Conservatives ought to use their energy on other fights

Spending. Cap and Trade. Immigration. The 2010 Midterm Elections.

There are so many other areas on which conservatives need to use their focus and energy. Mounting a colossal opposition to a Supreme Court nominee who is not a radical lefty seems like a waste of time and resources. Now don’t get me wrong, Kagan deserves tough questions and thorough investigation. However, if at the end of the day, she’ll move the court rightward, why stand in knee-jerk opposition? I’d much rather defeat Cap and Trade legislation and have Kagan skate onto the court fairly easily.

Conservatives need to be focus on holding the line on spending, arguing effectively against harmful legislation, and crafting a winning message to take back the House and the Senate in November. Elena Kagan is a qualified, center-left nominee taking the place of a hard-left justice. She’s simply not worth a huge fight.

For conservatives to mobilize their infrastructure of legislative leaders, think tanks, websites, talk radio, interest groups, and the like, in order to support or oppose something, it takes an enormous effort with no guarantee of success (see: healthcare). Cap and Trade legislation and new spending are well worth these efforts. Spending the time on opposing Elena Kagan is akin to having a son who is cutting class, doing drugs, and having unprotected sex, and then choosing to lecture him about his haircut.

As long as nothing unqualifying comes out about Kagan (and if rumors about her sexuality are true, that does not count as unqualifying), and she performs well at the conformation hearing, then conservatives shouldn’t raise hell in opposing her. They don’t have to enthusiastically support her, but they ought to vote yes with full confidence she’s tilting the court more in their preferred direction. 

I’ve got it—an excuse the Obama administration can use to explain why it waited so long to take substantive action in dealing with the Gulf oil spill, an account that also manages to stick it to George W. Bush: Obama was so busy cleaning up Bush’s messes that he didn’t have time to clean up the mess in the Gulf!

The timeline of events since the explosion of the British Petroleum-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20 reveals a less than flattering picture of the acuity and alacrity of the government in fulfilling its role in handling the crisis.

Three days after the explosion, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insisted to reporters that the catastrophe would not affect the President’s plans to open several microscopic pockets of our vast offshore oil reserves for drilling, the only reassuring result of this debacle.

It is important to understand that in Obama WhiteHouseSpeak, Gibbs’ statement is tantamount to announcing, “It’s a teeny-tiny spark that’ll be put out by morning, and we’re not remotely worried about it.  Why bow over spilt milk?”  The administration that popularized the saying “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” and would love any excuse to backtrack on its recent Democrat-infuriating promise to minimally expand drilling would not have let the opportunity to renege on its promise go by if it had truly apprehended the full extent of the impending disaster.

True, the first Deep Horizon oil leaks were not discovered until the next day, after the Coast Guard had called off its search operation for the missing rig workers.  Yet somehow it took until the following Tuesday, a full week after the explosion, for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to announce that he would be launching an investigation into the incident.

One might wonder whether the department had fully grasped the enormity of the situation even then, given that on the same day, Salazar’s chief of staff, Tom Strickland—whom Salazar had assigned to be the “point person” on this issue—set off with his wife for a three-day “work-focused” trip to the Grand Canyon that apparently included a day of “work-focused” rafting.

Days later, when the potential danger of the spreading oil spill was beginning to dawn on department staff, the National Park Service rushed a helicopter to the 55th state to airlift Strickland out of the Canyon and whisk him off to New Orleans.

In the meantime, Homeland Security Secretary Janet “The System Worked” Napolitano, whose department was supposed to be working closely with the Interior Department to address the crisis, told reporters that the Defense Department had no involvement in addressing the spill: “If and when they have something to add, we’ll certainly make that known,” she snapped.

Just as Napolitano had changed her answer regarding the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing from “The system worked” to “The system didn’t work,” three days after her disavowal of Defense Department involvement in the cleanup she told “Meet the Press” that the Defense Department had been in the Gulf “from Day One.  This was a situation that was treated as a possible catastrophic failure from Day One.”  (The administration later flirted with the idea of claiming Napolitano had actually said “May One,” but then decided even they weren’t dishonest enough to pull that off.)

To reconcile her conflicting comments, a department spokesman claimed that in her latter statement, Napolitano had been referring to the presence of the Coast Guard, which had been in the Gulf since Day One.

Yes, the Coast Guard was very probably on the scene since Hour One, since that is their mission whenever such an accident happens at sea.  For Napolitano to claim that a search mission by the Coast Guard was equivalent to sending Defense Department resources to the area to deal with “a possible catastrophic failure” is like saying that flight attendants collecting trash from passengers on Northwest Flight 253 reflected the Transportation Security Administration’s initiative in helping stop underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

At least Obama is pointing the finger at BP for their role in the disaster—a potential conflict of interest, one might think, given the recent revelation that Obama is the federal candidate who has received the greatest amount in campaign contributions from the oil company over the past 20 years.

Normally I wouldn’t rag on Obama for failing to address the oil spill crisis sooner, but he brought it on himself when he parachuted into New Orleans as a newly elected Senator in 2005 to make a big show of mouthing off, Kanye West-style, about the incompetence of the Bush administration in dealing with the Katrina aftermath.  Obama stepped into this oil slick all by himself, so to speak.

To combine two Kanye West malapropisms: “BP, I’ma let you finish cleaning up the Gulf… But Barack Obama doesn’t care about Louisiana jumbo shrimpers!”

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

Everyone’s bemoaning Florida Governor Charlie Crist’s “political” decision to run for Senate as an Independent instead of a Republican, since he knows he’d lose the primary to Marco Rubio.

Everyone’s missing the point.

The political rule-bending is tied to the ideology.  Liberals and centrists are more likely to bend the rules to win elections and votes than conservatives.  It’s part of their political philosophy.

Behold the following Democratic party-hoppers in recent years:

•    Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republicans in 2001 to swing the balance to Democrats early in George W. Bush’s first term, after being promised cushier arrangements by Democratic leaders

•    Liberal Mayor Mike Bloomberg switched from Republican to Independent in 2007 to garner greater support for his nanny-state governing style in New York

•    Arlen Specter left the Republicans for the Democrats last year in anticipation of a difficult primary race

•    New York Senate Democrats Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada, Jr. became Republicans temporarily last summer in an attempt to enhance their leadership positions, then switched back to being Democrats when their bid failed

•    RINO Dede Scozzafava endorsed Democratic candidate Bill Owens over conservative Doug Hoffman after dropping out of NY-23 last November

Also witness the following liberal rule-bending over the last decade:

•    Al Gore’s campaign pushed for hand recounts using loosened standards in select counties in the 2000 Florida presidential recount

•    Democrats won other elections by finding judges to approve different counting standards in Minnesota (Al Franken, Senate) and Washington (Christine Gregoire, Governor)

•    New Jersey Democrats put Frank Lautenberg on the ballot in 2002 after their candidate Robert Torricelli was hit with corruption charges, despite a law on the books against changing candidates so late in the election

•    Massachusetts Democrats withheld the right of Republican Governor Mitt Romney to appoint a successor in 2004 if John Kerry became president, then changed the rules in 2009 so Governor Deval Patrick could install a Democrat to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat until the special election

•    Mayor Bloomberg successfully pushed in 2007 to change the rule he had argued for in 2001 that had prevented Republican Rudy Guiliani from serving more than two terms, so that Bloomberg could go on to serve three terms himself

•    Democrats recently maneuvered to pass their health care bill, including using budget reconciliation to overcome a non-filibuster-proof Senate majority and an unenforceable executive order banning abortion funding to overcome their absence of a House majority in favor of the bill

In contrast, whenever a conservative abandons Democrats, it’s almost always due to newfound disdain for the party’s agenda.  It also almost always seems to happen at a completely inconsequential time, when there’s no crucial vote at stake or favors to be handed out, or even when the candidate has something to lose.

Alabama Representative Parker Griffith switched parties last December, citing revulsion over the direction in which House leaders were taking the country.  Griffith did not switch to join a majority party like Specter or improve his electoral chances like Crist—he did it because, as he put it, Democratic leaders “continue to push an agenda focused on massive new spending, tax increases, bailouts, and a health care bill that is bad for our healthcare system…  [A]fter watching this agenda firsthand, I now believe that the differences in the two parties could not be more clear, and that… I must align myself with the Republican party.”

New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg rejected President Obama’s offer of Commerce Secretary last year, after having met with Obama about the position and coordinated with Governor John Lynch to name a replacement Senator.  When Gregg got a closer look at Obama’s massive stimulus proposal and plans to politicize the Census, he ran for the hills.  There was nothing opportunistic above Gregg’s move—if anything, it cost him a prestigious position and soured relations with the new administration.

Texas Representative Ralph Hall became a Republican in 2004 after 54 years of being a moderate Democrat.  Rumors had been circulating since the Republican Revolution that he would switch parties, but he didn’t do so when it was expedient, preferring instead to “pull my party back toward the middle.”  Hall was instrumental in forming the moderate coalition of Blue Dog Democrats.  After years of watching his party bash President Bush over Iraq, Hall changed parties, explaining, “When the country is at war you need to support the president.  Some of my fellow congressmen have not been doing that.”  Far from showering him with plumb assignments, Republican leaders refused to allocate funding for Hall’s district—as Hall said, “the only reason I was given was that I was a Democrat.”  The party eventually embraced him; but the point is that Hall did not switch for political opportunism, but rather at great cost to himself.

Virginia Representative Virgil Goode switched parties in 2000 after Democrats gave him hell over voting for three of the articles of impeachment against President Clinton.  Goode is rather ideologically conservative anyway, having voted for the Iraq War, the surge, and tough anti-amnesty immigration and veterans’ rights legislation.  He won reelection in 2000 as an Independent—a politically risky move, but one that genuinely reflected his evolving ideology—before joining the Republicans in 2002.

While hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman did leave the Democratic Party in 2006 to run in the general election as an Independent Democrat, he at least had the guts to face his opponent Ned Lamont in the primary first.  Lieberman did not, like Crist, go around quoting Abraham Lincoln, saying that he was switching parties so he could better serve the cause of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” and that his change in party had nothing—absolutely nothing!—to do with his reelection prospects.

There’s a reason liberals and moderates are more likely to switch parties or bend election rules in their favor.  They do not, at their core, all the way down, believe in a stable, predictable rule of law, as clearly stated and adhered to by all citizens in a system of government known as a republic.  They believe in doing whatever they can get away with, if they can convince enough people at the time that it’s right for them to do it—hence the “democracy” in Democratic.

Show me a DINO who bolted for the Republican Party for ulterior motives, and I’ll show you a rare creature indeed.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

What follows are passages from the Newsweek story "A Surge of Hate," followed by some reaction.

"This is a season, or perhaps an era, when politics seem more intense than usual, and the domestic extremist threat seems more real. Partisan disputes are rarely pretty, but lately they have taken a particularly ugly, menacing turn. Last week the FBI arrested individuals for making death threats against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington for their votes on health-care reform. A series of expletive-strewn voice-mail messages left for Senator Murray were particularly creepy: "You're gonna have a target on your back for the rest of your life," the caller warned. "How long do you think you can hide?" Federal authorities have charged a man with multiple-personality disorder with threatening in a YouTube video to kill Rep. Eric Cantor; the suspect is not competent to stand trial."

So... people who threaten Democrats are dangerous, creepy, right-wing extremists. People who threaten Republicans are simply mentally incompetent. Got it.

"Economic distress and social change make for fear, and fear makes for anger, now and always... Huey Long, governor of Louisiana, later a U.S. senator who wanted to soak the rich, and Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest whose radio show reached 40 million people, seemed a political threat to FDR, until Long was assassinated and Coughlin became increasingly unhinged."

While true, there are two critical pieces of information left out of this piece. Huey Long was... get ready for it... a Democrat. Father Coughlin attacked FDR from the left.

""There was a lot of hatred in the 1930s," says Alan Brinkley, the Columbia University historian and expert on populist movements. But the currentsurge of fear and loathing toward Obama is "scary," he says. "There's a big dose of race behind the real crazies, the ones who take their guns to public meetings. I can't see this happening if McCain were president, or [any] white male." (Secret Service spokespeople reported spikes in threats against Obama after his election and inauguration, but they've also said the president generally receives about the same number of threats as did Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They've declined to comment on whether there's been a spike in threats related to health-care reform.)"

Why is the sentence about the current president receiving basically the same amount of threats as previous presidents in parenthesis? Is this not a fairly significant fact? Doesn't it sort of undermine the whole theme of the article?

"(McVeigh) He has, or had, some potential heirs apparent in a recently indicted group called the Hutaree, a Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio-based militia."

You mean the militia that hated Pres. Bush and whose only member affiliated with a political party is a Democrat? Got it.

"It is hard to know how much such grim fantasies are stirred by the steady stream of conspiracy theories pushed by talk-radio hosts. Rush Limbaugh talks about the Democrats planning to "kill you" with health-care reform and suggests (agreeing with black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan, of all people) that it "seems perfectly within the realm of reality" that the H1N1 vaccine was "developed to kill people.""

I've listened to the clip they're alluding to here several times. This is misleading, Rush never said Democrats are planning to "kill you" with the vaccine, he was quoting Louis Farrakhan. Rush then put the quote in the context of rationing health coverage and a few other stories specific to the day about lack of respect for life. This was not Rush at his finest or most eloquent, but it seemed pretty clear to me that Rush was being hyperbolic to make a point.

This was the best evidence Newsweek had to offer on the alleged surge of hatred from the political right. Turns out, it was an exercise in the all too common practice of smearing and generalizing.

As the Senate gears up to introduce its version of the House’s cap-and-trade global warming legislation next week, it’s instructive to consider the impact of myriad geological, meteorological, and astronomic effects on climate change, as exhaustively chronicled in Australian scientist Ian Plimer’s essential new book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science.

Plimer’s book, published last year, boasts 2,000 footnotes from an array of sources including top peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, and Geophysical Research Letters; journals on solar physics, hydrological science, and glaciology; books on climate change, environmentalism, and the history of science; and research by dozens of climate change skeptics.  Plimer also dissects the various contradictory iterations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports.

His evaluation of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis?  Pure, unadulterated waffle.

If “agnostic” is to “atheist” what “skeptic” is to “denier,” then Plimer would happily plant himself in the denier camp.

Plimer demolishes AGW by broadening the scientific timeline under consideration to incorporate thousands, at times millions, of years to show how climate has been changing through hot and cold swings much wider than anything we’ve seen in recent centuries, and all in the absence of disposable Starbucks cups.

In graph after graph, Plimer depicts the cyclical effects of sunspots, glaciation, tilts in the earth’s orbit, ocean currents, CO2 reabsorption by the oceans, plate tectonics, clouds, and volcanic eruptions on global temperature.  He covers the Medieval Warming period from 900 to 1300 AD, which was warmer than today, and points out the vastly higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during previous Ice Ages.  He details the beneficial effects that warmer periods historically have had on crop growth, species survival, and human longevity.  He documents the inadequacy and inconsistency of land temperature measurements, relative to satellite measurements, the latter of which show global cooling.  He notes the utter failure of any global warming model to correctly predict that the earth would start cooling in 1998.

Plimer mentions Al Gore’s camp classic An Inconvenient Truth, and cites a British court’s 2007 ruling that there are nine major factual errors in the movie, and that in order to be shown in public classrooms the film has to be accompanied by a written manual and teacher instruction to correct all of the alarmist falsehoods.  One of the nine gaffes is the movie’s failure to note that CO2 emissions have not been shown to cause temperature increases, but rather have historically lagged behind temperature increases.  That’s right—a British court actually ruled that there is no evidence that carbon dioxide emissions, human or otherwise, cause or even precede temperature increases—only that they lag slightly behind.

And Plimer’s book was published before last November’s Climategate, in which a whistleblower in the UK publicly exposed researchers from one of the three leading climate data collection centers in the world as having evaded Freedom of Information requests, colluded to keep skeptics’ research from being published, and failed to be able to reconstruct tortuous data manipulations they had applied in order to generate the conclusions they wanted.

Lest closed-minded warmists dismiss Plimer as a religious, right-wing knuckle-dragger, Plimer has also authored books deconstructing the scientific case for creationism, and has received criticism from conservatives for this line of work.

Plimer’s thesis also happens to be perfectly embodied by last week’s historic volcano eruption in Iceland.  The eruption at Eyjafjallajökull, whose name is almost as long and complicated as the House’s cap-and-trade bill, left Europe covered in clouds of dark ash and shut down virtually all air transportation across the continent.

In his book, Plimer delineates the historic effects of volcanic activity on climate.  For example, in just a few days, a major volcano can spew more CO2, dust, and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere than humans can in a year.  Yet significant volcanic eruptions typically lead to years-long drops in temperature, due to the extra cloud cover and solar reflection they create, which means that skiing in St. Moritz should be lovely this winter.

Last year the Australian parliament considered and, in large part thanks to the efforts of Plimer and other skeptics, narrowly rejected a cap-and-trade scheme that would have crippled the continent’s energy production systems.

Due to U.S. Congressional Democrats’ politically suicidal stubbornness, cap-and-trade is evidently going to be this year’s health care reform.

To reiterate the point crystallized in Plimer’s book: if there’s so much uncertainty regarding whether human carbon dioxide emissions have any measurable influence on temperature increases, and a greater probability that temperature increases are beneficial than harmful, why are we rushing to shoot the world’s greatest economies in the foot?

Molecular biologist Henry Miller wrote in Forbes last week, “Every schoolchild these days seems to be a devoted environmentalist, able to spell ‘sustainable’ before ‘dog.’  However, much of the indoctrination about environmentalism—especially in schools—is of the passion-is-more-important-than-fact variety…  Too often the objective of student projects seems to be ‘empowering’ the kids and giving them a feeling of accomplishment instead of getting the right answer and learning scientific principles.”  In other words, the first step to “empowerment” in the natural world is learning what you can and can’t change through being empowered.  It seems many adults have yet to learn that lesson.

Though I regret the disruption caused by Eyjafjallajökull to Western Europe’s economies (such as they are), I have to chuckle at the fact that terrible, wasteful, carbon dioxide-emitting air travel has been suspended throughout the sacred Continent of the Greens—and during the same week as Earth Day, at that.  I only wish it had happened right before the Copenhagen summit.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.