First, dispense with a couple of questions beaten to a pulp by the press over the last twenty four hours.

Were the 09 elections a referendum on President Obama?

No. It is no doubt true that the Democrats would have done better if voter approval of the President's policies and those of the Democratic Congress were stronger. However, in an election, voters only get to make a limited number of choices. If an election is a referendum, it is because one of those choices involves someone or something that has been explicitly referred to the voters. President Obama wasn't on the ballot.

Do the Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey mean that the Republicans will win a big victory in 2010?

Again, no. The 09 election shows us that independents are still, well, independent, and that they can swing decisively toward the Republicans. And it shows that a serious enthusiasm gap favored the Republicans. If those circumstances repeat in 2010, then Republicans in deed will deal a bitter blow to the Democrats. But the election last night doesn't tell us whether independents will still be inclined to swing Republican, or whether the GOP will continue to enjoy the momentum.

Now: do this week's election results change political circumstances right now?

Yes, and maybe in a big way. Consider the progress of the healthcare bill. Or lack thereof. From ABC News:

Senior Congressional Democrats told ABC News today it is highly unlikely that a health care reform bill will be completed this year, just a week after President Barack Obama declared he was "absolutely confident" he'll be able to sign one by then.

"Getting this done by the by the end of the year is a no-go," a senior Democratic leadership aide told ABC News. Two other key Congressional Democrats also told ABC News the same thing.

Of course the Democrats have been missing deadlines so consistently in this process that the only meaning left in the President's "absolute confidence" is that the bill absolutely won't be done when he says it will.

But this delay is more problematic than previous ones. It pushes the process over into the real election year, when Congressmen and some Senators who do not enjoy safe districts have to start really worrying. This happens just as we learn that the President cannot be relied on to bring out Democrats and attract young and independent voters as he did during the last election. If he can't save Jon Corzine in New Jersey, who can he save?

A lot of counties in Virginia and New Jersey that voted heavily for Obama voted even more heavily for McDonnell or Christie respectively. What effect might it have on a newly minted house Democrat from one of these two states who saw his own district turn deep red yesterday? It might not in encourage him or her to stand by the President or Nancy Pelosi on a health care bill that will cost a lot more than the President promised and add a great many dimes to the deficit.

The bluedogs have been a problem for reform all along.  They aren't likely to get any easier to deal with now.  Indeed, a lot of dogs might start acting bluer than they did in the past.  The path to ObamaCare got steeper when Jon Corzine conceded last night.

Blanchard's Wise Predictions (and retroactively wise non-prediction)

As expected, yours truly correctly predicted the outcome of tonight's gubernatorial elections. As I said, Robert McDonnell crushed Creigh Deeds in Virginia. In American elections anything over 10 percent is considered a landslide. With 99% counted, McDonnell won almost 59% of the vote to Deeds' 41%. That is considerably better than McDonnell polled. Only Survey USA got it right, predicting an 18% margin. The rest of the polls were under 15%.

Likewise, Republican William T "Bill" Bolling beat Democrat Jody Wagner for Lt. Governor 56/44%, and Ken Cuccinelli beat Stephen Shannon 58/42.

Somewhat braver (though not all that brave, as I hedged my bet) was my prediction of a narrow victory for Chris Christie over Jon Corzine. Christie won 49/45%.

I neglected to make a prediction in New York 23, which was a good thing for me. Results are still coming in at this hour, but it looks like the Democrat Bill Owens will take the House Seat by a narrow margin over Doug Hoffman. With 77% reporting, Owens leads 49/47%.

Analysis NY23

If Owens does win NY23, that will be a sign of God's grace towards Democrats. They will want to talk all about this one. Maybe exit polling will give us a clearer picture of what happened, but it will be undeniable that the Republicans self-destructed, handing the Democrats a seat they hadn't won in a hundred years. My Spin Witch says they will talk about extremists taking over the party, and the Republican Party splitting at the seams.

But the blame for the loss has to sit with the Republican leadership that nominated Scozzafava. Without a primary to test the voter's sentiments, the party leadership has to be competent to choose a palatable nominee. They didn't have to pick a strict conservative, but surely they could have picked someone who didn't look like (and turned out to be) a Democrat in Republican clothes. Now the Democrats get another House vote, but then, that's what they would have had with Scozzafava.

Analysis Virginia

This was a really significant victory for the GOP. Barack Obama beat John McCain 53/46% in Virginia. Democrats have held the state house in 12 years. This resurgence in Virginia clearly shows that the momentum and enthusiasm has shifted dramatically, from strongly unfavorable to Republicans to strongly favorable, in the months that Obama has been President. It also means that Republicans hold the offices from which future governors and senators can easily launch their campaigns.

Why did McDonnell and company win so big? McDonnell is as conservative as they come, but he focused on the economic issues motivating his base and, just as important, motivating independents. The latter seem to have broken for the Republicans in a big way.

Analysis New Jersey

This was the really big achievement for the GOP today. New Jersey is a solidly blue state (about 2/1 Democrat/Republican in registration). Barack Obama visited the state four times at least in recent weeks, and Joe Biden campaigned there as well. No, New Jersey wasn't a "referendum on the Obama Presidency." It was a referendum on the Corzine governorship and on the government of New Jersey in general. But it was a test of the old Obama magic, and his get up and go has got up and went.

Why did Christie win? The factor that made victory possible was the deep hole that Corzine dug himself in his previous term. What made a Republican victory actual was the tremendous surge in Republican enthusiasm. In some New Jersey counties, Republican turnout was three times greater than in the last gubernatorial election. Or so I think I heard Karl Rove say. Even in New Jersey that can make a difference.

On the other hand, Corzine wouldn't have had a chance without two big advantages. One was independent Chris Daggett. If Daggett had drawn support in the double digits, Corzine would probably have survived. Under 6% (according to the numbers crunchers) and Daggett ceased to be a factor. He drew 5.5%. The other factor was Corzine's deep pockets. He has personally purchased a Senate seat and state house. He spent, I kid you not, $30 million in his attempt to win reelection. Talk about a bad investment. I think he qualifies for a Federal bailout.

Complaints about the "opinion side" of Fox News Channel usually mention Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly. Beck, of course, is a professional crank. He's good at, and there's obviously a market for it. O'Reilly is in fact pretty reasonable as opinion journalism goes. For all sorts of historical and functional reasons, newspapers limit editorials and commentary to a small part of their total print. But if the New York Times ran a Fox style cable news network, one can imagine that Frank Rich would be on it.

Well, here is something Rich had to say about the election in New York's District 23:

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats' prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we're seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era's equivalent to today's tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society's "ruthless prosecution" of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

Now there is a paragraph that makes Glen Beck look like a moderate. Let's consider what is happening at "this moment." When Republican leaders tapped Dede Scozzafava to run in District 23, a lot of conservatives decided that they couldn't support her. So they coalesced around Doug Hoffman, a Republican running on the Conservative Party ticket. With Hoffman running ahead of Scozzafava, her support collapsed and she has now withdrawn. Hoffman looks poised to win.

Somehow all of this seems strangely familiar. Let's see…a major member of Congress, I seem to recall he was a candidate for Vice President, is deemed insufficiently liberal by his party and they engineer his defeat in the Democratic Senate Primary. Oh, I know! It was Joe Liebermann. Of course, Joe went on to run as an independent and win.

You might think is the prerogative of voters to ignore the decisions of party leaders and go with someone they think might better represent them. But when conservatives do it, it's pathological, radical-right hysteria. I am sure that Rich loves government by the people. He just can't stand most of the people. But his next lines are priceless.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.

Matt Welch, writing at the libertarian journal Reason, shows what an utter fool Rich is.

How do you even get to a place like that? For those of you keeping metaphorical score at home: Stalin's Great Purge (just to name his most famous one) included roughly 1,000 executions a day, over two years. The alleged Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin purge, meanwhile, has resulted...brace yourself...in a moderate Republican suspending her campaign for Congress to make way for a conservative independent. Yeah, totally the same.

What is it about the Left today that it cannot allow for the possibility of an honest opposition?

The House healthcare bill, all 1,990 pages of it, has landed in the Republic's lap. I am guessing you could global warming back on track just by burning a few copies of it. Instead, we will burning through a lot more money. Here is one account, from NASDAC:

The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday a U.S. House health-care system re-write would extend health insurance to 96% of the nonelderly U.S. population by 2019, and spend $1.055 trillion to do so.

Penalties imposed on individuals who did not purchase insurance, and employers who did not offer coverage to their workers, would raise $161 billion over that time-frame. That brings the net cost of the bill to $894 billion through 2019, CBO said.

I suppose the new definition of cheap is "under a trillion." But will this policy really be even that cheap? Republicans doubt it, but then, that is their job. From the Washington Post:

Republicans on Capitol Hill are challenging an assertion by House leaders that their new health-care package comes in under President Obama's spending limit of $900 billion over the next decade. The true cost of the measure, the GOP argues, is more than $1 trillion. A House leadership aide dismissed the charge as "GOP spin." But, in this case, the spin is essentially true.

What brings the House bill under a cool trillion is all the money that is expected to come from scofflaws who refuse to buy insurance. That, and big cuts in existing Medicare programs. That's reassuring, except that Congress will never actually make such cuts. The cost of this kind of program is always more, a lot more, than initially projected.

But you don't have to speculate. Just look at the provisions in the bill that are specifically designed to avoid cost control. Here, from Breitbart's Big Government, is one juicy morsel in the bill:

Section 2531, entitled "Medical Liability Alternatives," establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But]…… a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys' fees or imposes caps on damages.

Now it's one thing for Congress to refuse to enact tort reform as part of its healthcare reform. It would save $54 billion over ten years, but whoever pays for healthcare reform, it ain't going to be lawyers. It's another thing to penalize states for trying to enact tort reform on their own. This is a bit more love than trial lawyers probably deserve.

If Congress can't say no to the trial lawyers, who can they say no to? I mean, besides the insurance industry? The idea that this legislation will be cheap or affordable is sheer fantasy.

The Pennsylvania Avenue Hamlet will, sooner or later, decide what his Afghanistan strategy is going to be. It seems unlikely that he will pull out altogether, so he is apparently trying to decide when he will decide whether to insert the troops that his handpicked general thinks are necessary, or, probably, insert some but not all of the requested reinforcements and announce a new strategy that makes sense of the decision.

I can't quite think of anything like this in recent history. To be sure, the President needs to make such a decision carefully. But to leave everyone hanging, month after month, while our troops are fighting and dying on Afghanistan's plains, does not inspire confidence.

The U.S. is expected to provide world leadership. Where else would it come from? The President right now is in danger of losing confidence among our allies. Here is the London Times:

It is now two months since General Stanley McCrystal, the commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, told President Obama that a surge of at least 40,000 troops was required for the international mission in that country to succeed. Mr Obama is not obliged to follow his recommendation, but he is obliged to do something other than sit on his own hands. "I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way," Mr Obama told the military, in a speech this week. This is not an unattractive sentiment. There is deliberation, nonetheless, and then there is dragging one's feet.

Now is not a time for a president to dither. Yesterday, a Taleban suicide squad stormed a United Nations guesthouse in Kabul, leaving six international staff dead and nine injured. The Taleban do not carry out such attacks at random. They understand well the context in which they act, and do so in order to sway a decision that they believe can be swayed.

And here is Der Spiegel:

The world has been waiting for clear words from the White House for months. Obama has had government and military analysts studying the military and political situation in the embattled Hindu Kush region since early January. He appointed Richard Holbrooke, probably the US's most effective diplomat in crisis situations, to be his special envoy to the "AfPak" region, he has replaced generals and he has deployed more troops. The answers Obama asked his experts to provide after taking office have been sitting on his desk for a long time.

There is no doubt that hardly a day passes in Europe without criticism of US policy. This has become a trans-Atlantic ritual. But despite this ritual, Europeans are still looking for one thing from the White House: leadership.

We're waiting, Mr. President.

Well, we are all waiting: Americans, Europe, our troops in the field, and the Taliban. But so far Hamlet is making lots of good speeches, but he isn't doing anything. This is looking like a pattern. It is eroding the President's respect among allies and enemies alike.

Two governor's seats will be awarded on Tuesday, in Virginia and New Jersey. An unusual amount of attention is focused on these two races. The reason is that they are the first real test of political climate change. Almost a year ago a lot of people were writing obituaries for the Republican Party. That was not completely silly. Two elections do not a realignment make, but they surely could have been the beginning of a strong and long lasting realignment toward the Democratic Party. What a difference eleven months make!

Virginia Projection

The Republican candidate in Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell, looks poised to crush the Democrat, Creigh Deeds. Less attention has been paid to the Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General races. Republican candidates seem likely to take both of those seats by similar margins.

Virginia Tea Leaves

Virginia has been moving left in recent elections. Democrats have held the State House for a decade, and Barack Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in 45 years. The President has been vigorously campaigning there for Deeds. A Republican sweep of the top three offices will look like a resurrection for the Virginia GOP. Republicans will spin the election as a referendum on Obama and the Democratic Congress. Democrats, and the White House in particular, have written it off as a lost cause. Their spin: Deeds ran a bad campaign and ran away from the President.

New Jersey Projection

Incumbent Jon Corzine has been trailing Republican Chris Christie for most of the year, but in some recent polls Corzine now has a small lead. If the Quinnipiac poll is right, Corzine will win by a small but comfortable margin. If Rasmussen and PPP are right, Christie will squeak out a victory. The wild card is independent candidate Chris Daggett. Daggett can't win, but he may get 10% of the vote. The question is how big his margin is and whose voters he takes. I don't know which way to call this one, but I predict a narrow victory for Christie. Why? Because if I am right I will look smart, and if I am wrong, I will be funny.

New Jersey Tea Leaves

If the Republican does win in New Jersey, that will be very hard news for the Democrats. The GOP will spin a story of shifting tides and a spendthrift President and Congress alienating their own base. Democrats will argue that Corzine did better than Deeds because he ran left and supported the President. That same Democratic spin will work a lot better and be a lot more fun if Corzine survives. Republicans will say that Corzine once again bought an election by spending a lot of his own money, which will be true. Still, he bought it fair and square.

Summary

If Virginia goes as expected the day will belong to the Republicans. Virginia has been one of the most watched states in recent elections. Republican presidential candidates can't win without it. If Christie wins in New Jersey, it won't mean much for the long term. Republicans have no future in that state. But it will put big wind in the sails of the party nationally. If Corzine holds on, it will feed the Democratic narrative that the Party can be successful if only it holds true to its basic principles. That might be the message that saves the party, and it might be the message that wrecks it.

Consider this my first Halloween Post. There have been a couple of well publicized chimpanzee attacks in the U.S. in recent years. A man was mauled in an animal shelter in California by two teen age chimps, and earlier this year a woman was attacked by her friend's pet chimpanzee. Both attacks were extremely brutal, and the more recent one was fatal.

There is a very real horror story in this photograph. We see a happy family: St. James Davis, his wife, and Moe, a chimpanzee they raised from infancy. It was not Moe that attack Davis, but two other chimps in the animal shelter where Moe lived after animal control authorities decided he was too dangerous to keep in a residential neighborhood. It is pretty clear that the older of the attackers saw Davis' visit to Moe as an alliance that was a threat to his alpha status.

To anyone who knows much about them (I know a little), Chimpanzees are fascinating and frightening creatures. They are not people, and people who don't understand this sometimes come to grief for it. But they are more like us, and we like them, than either species is similar to any other.

Like us, Chimpanzees fight wars. Their sole strategy (so far observed) is to penetrate the territory of a rival group, isolate an individual, and them stomp him to death. Oh, and biting off the targets genitals (always the target is male) is a favorite moment. As forests in chimpanzee territories have been logged, chimps groups are being forced into the territory of other groups, thus increasing the incidence of war. Right now, the chimpanzees may be killing each other faster than humans are killing them.

Like us, Chimpanzees also hunt. They do so not for any real need, but more for entertainment and for political reasons. Sharing meat is one way to cement alliances with other chimps. Their favorite prey is the red colobus monkey, which they hunt in well organized teams and with rather sophisticated strategies. Advanced hunters will take advanced positions while the rest of the group funnels the fleeing monkeys toward them. The preferred target is a female with an infant. She is slower and has to keep one limb holding on to her baby. The infant is the easy meat. When they catch a monkey, they eat it alive. Here is a clip of a Chimpanzee hunt. 

But here is where the real horror comes in. Chimps in Uganda have discovered that there is a slower primate to prey upon. From the London Times:

At least eight children have died in the past seven years in Uganda and Tanzania after being taken by chimpanzees, and a further eight injured. The children were found with limbs and other parts of their bodies chewed off.

In one of the most recent attacks Jackson Alikiriza, a three-month-old baby, was snatched as he was being carried by his mother, Anet, while she harvested potatoes.

Mrs Alikiriza fled when she saw a chimp approaching, but could not outrun the animal. She said: "It grabbed my leg and I fell. Then it took my baby."

By the time help was summoned and the chimp was chased away by a man armed with a spear the baby's nose and upper lip had been eaten away. He died a week later.

This is real horror. It is typical chimpanzee behavior. We are modified chimpanzees.

I love chimpanzees. They tell us a lot about ourselves. I would like to think that their species will survive, but I don't think that it is. Stories of chimpanzees preying of human infants won't help their case.

Violence is much less common in modern civilizations than it was in any earlier period of human history. A male in any contemporary society is much less likely to die by violence than would have been true at any previous point in our past, and that is true even with all the deaths in all the modern wars combined. It gets worse the farther back you go. It might be a good thing to keep this in mind, and do whatever we can to make sure it continues. Chimpanzees provide a useful reminder.

Happy Halloween.

The New York Times reports that CNN has hit the basement floor. Hat tip to intrepid reader George Mason.

CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks with the audience that all the networks rely on for their advertising.

Individually, the CNN shows were beaten resoundingly by all the Fox News programs, but also lost to all of the MSNBC programs, including a repeat of Keith Olbermann's 8 p.m. edition of "Countdown," which beat the 10 p.m. hour of CNN's signature prime-time program, "Anderson Cooper 360."

For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 – the group that television news organizations use as their basis of success because of their advertising sales. That was far behind the dominant leader, Fox News, which averaged 689,000. But it also trailed MSNBC, which had 250,000 viewers in that group and HLN, which had 221,000.

Now that is about as bad as bad news gets for a TV network. When your "signature" prime time show gets beat by a two hour old rerun on the second place network, well… CNN's decline has been precipitous. By contrast, Fox News' dominance continues to be amazing. Fox is drawing more views than the next three networks combined.

All this calls for some explanation. The Times thoughtfully provides one:

The results demonstrate once more the apparent preference of viewers for opinion-oriented shows from the news networks in prime time.

That would provide a little emotional comfort to CNN: we are dying because we are more virtuous. Except that it isn't true.

At 7 p.m. CNN's host, Lou Dobbs was fourth, barely beaten by Jane Velez Mitchell on HLN, 166,000 to 162,000. The big winner was Shepard Smith on Fox with 465,000 viewers. Second was Chris Matthews and "Hardball" on MSNBC, with 179,000 viewers.

Shepard Smith's show is a traditional news hour, presenting a series of stories from the day's news. Lou Dobbs and Chris Matthews are "opinion-oriented" if anyone is. Dobbs, in fact, is on the other side of Glen Beck. But Shepard Smith still draws more than twice as many viewers as both shows combined.

Why do people watch cable news in prime time? They watch it because they don't want to watch what is offered on the main networks (mostly non-news programming) or the non-news content of cable. Among that news hungry crowd, Fox is cleaning up.

Fox News is not only a real news network, it is the only news network that is singularly necessary in today's media environment. If you don't believe me, ask the New York Times.

I often rake the Gray Lady over the coals and for good reason. The Times has been guilty of a lot of embarrassingly partisan and irresponsible journalism. But it is not without redeeming qualities, one of which is that is it quite capable of being embarrassed.

Consider Public Editor Clark Hoyt's mea culpa for the Times' tardiness in picking up the ACORN story. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the best paragraph, out of several describing letters to the Paper of Record:

Here's an example, from Leigh Allen of San Francisco, who said she relies on The Times to keep her informed: "I often don't hear about the latest conflict until I read a Facebook rant from an old high school friend or talk on the phone with my mother (both in conservative Orange County, Calif.). It's embarrassing not to be able to respond with facts when I hadn't even heard about the issue." Michele Cusack of Novato, Calif., said that when someone asked if she had heard the latest about Acorn, "I had to answer 'no' because I get all my news from The New York Times."

It seems to me that that last sentence is damning for the country's most famous paper: I didn't know what was going on because I read the New York Times. In fact, you wouldn't have known if you relied on the rest of the mainstream media. But you knew if you watched Fox or keep in contact with an old high school friend who watches Fox.

It is this fact that motivated the Obama Administration's decision to go to war against Fox. Jim Rutenberg at the NYTs has this:

Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Palm steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.

An attempted rapprochement! However:

By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration's chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early.

The rest of the news networks were realizing that Fox was consistently scooping them. In other words, it wasn't Fox and its stories, exactly, that the Administration was worried about. It was that the other networks might be forced to drop the protection that they had so far provided to Obama and Company. They might start covering stories as soon as they appeared on Fox or, horrors, actually start doing such stories on their own. That is why the Administration went to war against Fox News.

Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.

That is the sort of room in which Barack Obama is comfortable: one in which everyone loves him and vows to protect him. Except, I'd keep an eye on Maureen Dowd. She's unpredictable.

It is also clear from the Rutenberg article that Fox's account of the Feinberg incident was fair and balanced.

In a sign of discomfort with the White House stance, Fox's television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg that was to be conducted with a "pool" camera crew shared by all the networks. That followed a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration's treatment of "one of our sister organizations."

The Administration tried to exclude Fox from the circle of "real" news networks, and the other networks, acting responsibly, defended their "sister organization."

Barack Obama set out to marginalize and neuter a network that did not report the news to his liking. Though we can now understand the strategy, it still looks stupid. The actual result was to confirm Fox's status as a legitimate news organization and, I suspect, to make it more visible and influential that ever before. Fox is not only real it is indispensible, at least if you care about a free press.

Well, the President may be dithering over Afghanistan, but he is not dithering over the H1N1 pandemic. From RealClearPolitics:

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients.

No doubt the fringe elements among the President's critics will see this as another step in the establishment of a police state. As for me, the extension of the government's powers to pay hospitals for tents more than three hundred yards away from the hospital doors is very low on my list of concerns. I am more concerned that the distance from the hospital doors makes a difference.

It's hard to blame the President for wanting to get out in front of this one, and he pretty much has to take the most authoritative medical advice he can get. But when you step back and look at this thing, it's hard to see why the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control are treating it as a global emergency.

Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity.

Well, that sounds pretty serious, doesn't it? But then there is this bit:

"Many millions" of Americans have had swine flu so far, according to an estimate that CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden gave Friday. The government doesn't test everyone to confirm swine flu so it doesn't have an exact count. He also said there have been more than 20,000 hospitalizations.

Well, they don't really know how many hospitalizations and deaths are from swine flu and how many are from non-swine flu, do they? Meanwhile, how do these numbers compare to the garden variety types of flu that sweep the nation every year? The CDC has this:

CDC estimated that about 36,000 people died of seasonal flu-related causes each year, on average, during the 1990s in the United States. This figure includes people dying from complications of seasonal flu. This estimate came from a 2003 study published in the Journal of the American Medication Association (JAMA), which looked at the 1990-91 through the 1998-99 flu seasons [10]. Statistical modeling was used to estimate how many flu-related deaths occurred among people whose underlying cause of death on their death certificate was listed as a respiratory or circulatory disease. During these years, the number of estimated deaths ranged from 17,000 to 52,000.

Michael Fumento points out that WHO did a very strange thing when it declared an H1N1 pandemic:

When the sacrosanct World Health Organization (WHO) made its official declaration in June, we were 11 weeks into the outbreak, and swine flu had only killed 144 people worldwide — the same number who die of seasonal flu worldwide every few hours. The mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide. And even after six months, swine flu has killed about as many people as the seasonal flu does every six days.

In order to justify the pandemic label, WHO eliminated severity (large numbers of deaths and illnesses) as a criterion.

That's also how we can have a "pandemic" when six months of epidemiological data show swine flu to be far milder than the seasonal variety. New York City statistics show it to be perhaps a 10th as lethal.

In Australia and New Zealand, flu season has ended, and almost all cases have been swine flu. Yet even without a vaccine, these countries are reporting fewer flu deaths than normal. (In New Zealand, that's just 18 confirmed deaths compared with 400 normally.) Swine flu is causing negative deaths! The best explanation is that infection with the milder strain (swine flu) is inoculating against the more severe strain (seasonal flu) it has displaced.

If Fumento's account is accurate, the reaction of public health agencies is altogether disproportionate to the threat. That matters, because we all have to trust these people to get it about right, most of the time. Crying wolf when all you are faced with one of the lesser pigs will make it all the harder to mobilize the public when and if the wolf actually shows up.

I don't know what's going on here, but I know this: the ability to rationally evaluate a health threat, which means above all to put it in context, is fundamental to an effective public health regime. Just right now it is hard to see that the CDC and WHO have such an ability.

When I first joined the faculty at Northern, I enjoyed the company of a couple of old school liberals. These guys were uncompromising leftists, of various degrees, but they were scrupulously respectful of people like me. I never heard them suggest that the conservative position was illegitimate.

The American left has changed. When thousands of people show up at town hall meetings or the U.S. capital to criticize their elected representatives, these aren't real people. They aren't real citizens showing up to express their opinions. They are astroturfed people! Only anti-war rallies, hostile to a Republican administration, are real.

When one cable news network is slanted to the right, instead of reflexively solicitous of a Democratic administration, this isn't a real news network! It's Fox.

The President and the left in general have every right and reason to criticize Fox News and its culture. But in claiming that Fox News isn't a real news network, they discredit themselves. Fox adheres as well or better than the other networks to the standards of responsible journalism. It is far less often embarrassed by getting the facts wrong is less prone to fall for partisan canards. It doesn't try to spike stories that depart from some party line agenda. If it is biased in one direction, it is hardly more so than the other major networks in the other direction.

But Fox's status as a real network has been confirmed in an unambiguous way, and Fox has the Obama Administration to thank for this. This week the Administration convened the White House Pool, a rotation of five news agencies that report on daily events at the President's house. The pool was to meet with White House "Pay Czar"

Obama's people made it clear that Fox News alone was not welcome. The bureau chiefs of the other four networks met together, and made it clear that unless Fox was included, they weren't coming either. The Administration caved in the face of the unlooked for opposition.

This was an unlooked for moment of backbone and professional responsibility. If Fox News is banned for not toeing the Administration line, that is a threat to all the news agencies. It's one thing to reflexively protect Obama. It is another for the Obama to lay down the law to any network, even Fox.

The Obama Administration's behavior is outrageous. The President does not get to decide how the press will behavior, or what kind of stories it will publish. This incident makes it perfectly clear that Fox News is a "real" news network. If anyone has the right to decide that question, it is the community of news networks. By that standard, Fox has been confirmed.

The confirmation came in a way that is very happy for a free republic. Democratic governments need a free and vigorous opposition. Only Fox News consistently provides that. It is a bad mark on Obama and his team and his legion of defenders that they refuse to acknowledge this.

If you Google the coinage "Richard Milhous Obama" you get a lot of hits. President Nixon was famous for, among other things, having a enemies list. President Obama seems to have no problem with a five o'clock shadow, but he does have his own enemies list.

The health insurer Humana got on it this way:

The government is investigating a major insurance company for allegedly trying to scare seniors with a mailer warning they could lose important benefits under health care legislation in Congress.

One might have thought that even an insurance company could send a letter expressing a particular political opinion without being investigated for that.

The health insurance industry as a whole is now on it for sponsoring a report arguing that the Baucus plan would lead to increased premiums for most Americans who now have health insurance. The Administration responded to the heinous act of doing a study by threatening punitive legislation.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on it for, well, being the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Fox News, however, seems to be occupying the position of enemy number one. The White House has waged a public campaign against Fox. A number of Administration officials have openly declared that Fox News isn't a real news agency. The Administration also seems to be boycotting Fox. This is less serious than the sort of legislative threats and investigations that insurers have to worry about, but it is serious nonetheless.

Fox News is biased. Its straight news programming is clearly slanted in favor of conservative positions and Republicans in general. The Fox panels are usually stacked about three to one with conservative and liberal pundits respectively. Its opinion shows, with the likes of Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Shawn Hannity, are clearly conservative shows.

That said, Fox is no more biased than the major news networks. Consider that curing the recent election campaign the New York Times ran a piece suggesting that John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist. The piece was utterly without foundation, and the Times was duly embarrassed. But the Times couldn't be bothered to investigate credible, and as it turns out, true rumors about John Edward's love child. CNN recently fact checked a Saturday Night Live routine poking fun at President Obama, for which they were justly skewered by John Stewart. The fact is that all the major networks, along with the public networks, are biased in favor of Democrats and the Left.

I am a conservative, but I have long read more left-center periodicals than conservative ones. I know what the conservative ones are going to say, and I prefer to be challenged by the sensible left (the New Republic) and occasionally even the Twilight Zone left (Harpers). But when it comes to daily TV news, I watch Fox.

The reason is simply that Fox News is more reliable. When I compare Fox reporting with that of any TV news outlet, or news magazine, or newspaper, Fox usually presents more interesting information and more points of view. More importantly, I can't think of one major story that Fox missed but the other networks picked up on. I can think of several that would never have seen the light of day had not Fox gone after them.

That, of course, is why Fox is on the President's enemies list. With Fox around, he can't count on getting away with as much. Fox runs circles around other cable news networks, and speaks to a large portion of America, including a lot of independent voters. When the President boycotts Fox, he is writing off a lot of Americans. So much for his promise to be a uniter rather than a divider.

My friend and fond interlocutor, A.I. has this to say about my previous Fiscal Madhouse post:

If being conservative has some connection with being Republican and managing debt is supposed to be the forte of both, history doesn't bear that out. Here are the stats on public debt under Republican and Democratic administrations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms. They may just indicate Republicans have borrowed attempting to buy prosperity while Democrats have borrowed to build self-sustaining economies. I'm not sure if that is a thought or liberal regurgitation, but it will have to do for now.

I think that rather proves my point. The nation is driving toward a fiscal precipice, Thelma and Louise style, and A.I. want to argue about whose fault it is. Maybe we should figure out where the breaks are first?

Not to doubt Wikipedia, I went to the CBO. Here is an interesting chart..

This presents Federal Debt as a percentage of GDP. Now look at the two dotted lines on the right of the chart. Those are two projections of the debt into the future. Both see the public debt climbing with time. That means that no one in Congress or the White House has any plans for reducing the public debt or halting its growth up to at least 2035.

But also notice that one line is a lot more alarming that the other. If it is what happens , then public debt will approach 200% of the GDP in about 30 years.  Two hundred percent.

Now: what's the difference between the two. The lower line represents what happens if Congress keeps all the promises it is making or has made in the past to cut spending in the future. The latter shows what happens if Congress instead behaves like it has always behaved.

For example, suppose Medicare reimbursements to physicians are cut as current law requires? That, among other provisions in current law, gives you the lower line. But suppose Congress continues to wave the cuts, as it has always done in the past? That gives you the upper line.

Well, what did the Senate just do? While the Baucus plan projects the cuts that have never happened yet in order to appear fiscally sound, Senator Debbie Stabenow was busy restoring the money in a separate bill.

So you tell me which line is the realistic one. This is five kinds of crackers.  Is there any realistic way of paying this down without a major blow to American prosperity?  I doubt it.  But right now neither the Congress nor the White House are paying the slightest attention.  

Corruption at the top of a political party gets the lion's share of attention. If you don't believe me, ask the lion of Harlem, Charlie Rangel. Corruption at the bottom often goes undetected, but it is far more pervasive, far more debilitating institutionally, and usually has much worse consequences for a lot more ordinary people.

The recent scandal involving ACORN was an unusual case in so far as a culture of corruption was exposed in a way that made for a flamboyant story. But now comes a story of a much more concrete and bitter kind of corruption, and I am guessing, one that will get a lot less attention.

The Washington Post runs Debbie Cenziper's "Staggering Need, Striking Neglect" in its Sunday edition. It is an appalling read.

In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to nonprofit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting.

More than $1 million in AIDS money went to a housing group whose ailing boarders sometimes struggled without electricity, gas or food. A supervisor said she was ordered to create records for ghost employees.

About $400,000 was paid to a nonprofit organization, launched by a man who once ran one of the District's largest cocaine rings, for a promised job-training center that has never opened.

More than $500,000 was earmarked for a housing program whose executive director had a string of convictions for theft, drugs and forgery. After the D.C. Inspector General's Office could find no evidence that he was operating an AIDS nonprofit group, the city terminated the grant but never sought repayment.

All told, the Health Department's HIV/AIDS Administration awarded more than $25 million from 2004 to 2008 to nonprofit agencies marked by questionable spending, a lack of clients, or lapses in record-keeping and care, a 10-month Washington Post investigation found. Many of the groups have since closed or are no longer providing AIDS services.

That's just the first five paragraphs in a rather long article. But it presents a pretty good summary of what follows. Allow me to boil it down a little more: $25 million was went to organizations that were essentially fraudulent, and provided little if any benefits to the sick and needy. Meanwhile, honest and legitimate organizations have had to cut back services for lack of funding. What does that mean in human terms?

Renee Paige, 50, once threw birthday parties for her two daughters in her apartment in Southeast Washington, where she'd cook beef stew for elderly neighbors and always had bus fare for a friend. But AIDS and two bouts of pneumonia had left her weak, homeless and unable to care for herself.

She came to a community meeting in April after spending the night on a park bench in heavy rain, with no place to go. "I have AIDS," she told the group, "and I am soaking wet."

Weeks later, she died alone, on the bench, one mile from the HIV/AIDS Administration and within two miles of a dozen nonprofit groups that help people with AIDS.

That's what corruption means. It means Renee Paige died on a bench, a mile from the Office that was supposed to help her.

Cenziper lays out, in disgusting detail, the dysfunctional history of the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration. A few things stand out. One is that an awful lot of the people who ran the Administration itself and the numerous "nonprofit agencies" had no obvious qualifications other than a history of criminality. Consider the case of Debra Rowe, the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration Housing chief.

Rowe had rebuilt her life after a troubled past, like others in the city's network of AIDS workers. In 1991, when Rowe was 31, she was convicted of heroin possession and cocaine distribution, serving 15 months in prison. Months after her release, Rowe's husband, who had been convicted in a separate case of felony drug distribution, was shot and killed on U Street NW, records show.

Rowe later received a master's degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and joined the HIV/AIDS Administration in 1999. In 2004, she was promoted to run the $10 million-a-year AIDS housing program, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Rowe enjoyed what the Left calls "authenticity": heroin, prison, and a master's degree. That, and five years on the job, qualified her to run a $10 million-a-year program. She ran it into the ground.

Like most cities, D.C. is monolithically Democratic. There is no Republican Party to complain about misspent millions. So it is left to the press. The WaPo did its job. But how many more such stories are waiting for the New York Times and other national newspapers?

Well, Glenn Beck continues to score points against Obama Administration apparatchiks, if only because the later seem to go about pointing to the big red targets on their chests. In case anyone doesn't know it, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has taken point in one war the Obama Administration isn't conflicted about, against Fox News, said some interesting things about Mao Tse-tung. Apparently giving some kind of pep talk earlier this year, she said this:

The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa -- not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is 'you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.

And this:

In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai?shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?" And Mao Tse Tung said, you know, "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine."

Now I think it is silly to suggest that Ms. Dunn ought to resign over this. Saying something painfully stupid, especially when she didn't seem to be acting in her official capacity, is not usually a firing offense. Give enough speeches, write enough blog posts, and sooner or later you will discover that you have done it.

But it was painfully stupid. To begin with, whatever Mother Theresa and Mao were, they weren't political philosophers. I remember when George W. was asked to name his favorite political philosopher, and he named Jesus. Christ wasn't a political philosopher either. Bush didn't escape criticism, and neither should Ms. Dunn.

And it doesn't help to claim that she got the comparison from Bush 41 advisor Lee Atwater or to say, as some of her defenders have said, that a strategist for Barry Goldwater once claimed to follow Mao's guidance. It was a dumb thing for anyone on either side to do.

Mao Tse-tung was the most prolific and monstrous mass murderer in the history of prolific and monstrous mass murderers. In raw numbers, neither Hitler nor Stalin can compete. He was probably responsible for the death of almost, and perhaps more than, a hundred million people. During the "Great Leap Forward," he caused the starvation of tens of millions. His personal physician recounted that Mao would eat turtle soup and listen to glowing reports of economic progress, while just outside his window the streets were lined with corpses. During the "Cultural Revolution" he set virtually every one of his subjects against every other, creating a horror such as the world may never have known before or since.

Now it's true that Mao was effectively ambitious, and it's logically possible to admire his ambition and some of his talents apart from the fact that he was a monster. But for purposes of rhetoric, this is a very bad idea. Imagine if George W. Bush had spoken admirably of the executive efficiency and fiscal management of Francisco Franco! This just isn't the best way to go about inspiring people. Besides, it risks sending some very bad messages.

Ms. Dunn spoke the way she did because she suffers from the common blindness of the Left when it comes to "progressives" like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. But that's okay. She only the White House Communications Director.

The chief concern of the United States Congress for most of the past year has been whether the Federal Government should enter the insurance business. While we have been thus at loggerheads over the public option, the Federal deficit for this year alone has swelled beyond the imagination of economists. From the New York Times:

The Obama administration said Friday that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945.

The shortfall for the fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, translates to 10 percent of the economy, according to a joint statement from the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter R. Orszag. For the 2008 fiscal year, the deficit of $459 billion was 3.2 percent of the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product.

Economists generally agree that annual deficits should not exceed 3 percent of the G.D.P., and that is the level President Obama had vowed to reach by the end of his first term in 2013.

Allow me to ask a couple of questions. Is there any realistic prospect that these astronomical deficits can be paid off? And if not, what then are we facing? I doubt that anyone knows the answer to either question, but that is not reassuring.

So what is Congress and the White House bending their minds and wills to? Creating a new, gargantuan, public welfare program. We were told at the outset that we had to address the healthcare system in order to get our fiscal house in order. Then we got to see what Congress actually had in mind. The House plan would add hundreds of billions to the deficit. The Senate's Baucus plan is nominally revenue neutral, but it is now clear that that is a shell game. Revenues are front loaded to make the first ten years look like a fiscal wash, but even that is a canard. Savings that balance the Baucus books are just spent in parallel bills. Cuts in Medicare that the CBO scoring includes are the kind of cuts that Congress has never been able to make in the past.

If Congress and the President were to pay attention to fiscal realities, what might they do? Tony Blankley has a thought.

Here's a thought: As shrinking the unsustainable deficit is a critical pre-requisite for a healthy economy, why not just enact the $400 billion of Medicare cuts and $400 billion of health insurance tax increases [included in the Baucus Bill] - thereby reducing the 10-year deficit by about $1 trillion (when you count reduced interest payments) - but don't provide the new entitlement benefits that were the purpose of the bill.

Helping the uninsured might be a nice notion some day, but the first priority now is to avoid permanently destroying our economic capacity - as we are rapidly doing - by the insanity of adding to entitlement programs while the dollar begins to fail and the CBO predicts we will never recover from the current debt and deficit level. So cut the 10-year deficit by that almost $1 trillion.

That's the kind of thing you might think of doing if you were concerned about

Polls show that Americans are most concerned with the economy. Healthcare reform is a very distant concern. The Democrats are all about healthcare reform, and seem to regard the economic fortunes of the Republic as a minor annoyance. What is the President's big idea just now? Since Social Security recipients aren't going to get a cost of living increase, because the cost of living hasn't increased, President Obama wants to give every old person $250. Well, what's another $14 billion among friends?

The inmates are in charge of the asylum.

The Nobel Committee has been somewhat rattled by the reaction to their recent award, and has for a second time publically explained why President Obama deserved the peace prize. From the Politico:

Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee defended their decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told AP, "We simply disagree that he has done nothing. He got the prize for what he has done."

Jagland cited Obama's outreach to the Muslim world and the way the president "modified" a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe as two key accomplishments.

That's two items. The first part continues a pattern that is well-established in the short history of this Administration: a confusion of sentiment with action. I have noted that, in his speech before the U.N., the President himself presented his decision to close the Guantánamo Bay prison as one of his achievements. I noted that the New York Times repeated his language in their defense of the President.

I also noted that the President had done no more than state a decision to close it. He has not in fact closed it, nor is there any indication yet of a coherent plan to close it. Maybe one will eventually materialize, but in the meantime a pious intention does not count as an achievement. To state boldly that it does, as the President and the Times both did, confuses mere words with deeds.

Something of the same is true of the President's "outreach to the Muslim world." To be sure, the President is talking nice. Perhaps his rhetoric is different from that of the previous Administration, and perhaps the fact that he is saying it, and not Bush, means a lot more. But granting that, has the President really proposed anything concrete that has promise of bring the two worlds together? It is difficult to see any real movement on any actual issue. Like the Times, the Nobel Committee can't seem to see the difference between pious words and effective actions.

By contrast, the President's decision to abandon our promise to include Poland and the Czech Republic under NATO's anti-missile defenses was a real deed. It effectively undermined the confidence of these central European nations that they are really part of NATO. See Ms. Flint's post on this topic. Does that advance the cause of world peace?

Well, it might have, conceivably, if it had resulted in a change in Russian policy toward Iran. The Russians have been one of two big obstacles to effective international sanctions against Iran (the other being China). If the Russians had come around, that would have been at least some substantial progress on dissuading Iran from its nuclear ambitions.

Well, now we know how that is working out. From the New York Times:

Denting President Obama's hopes for a powerful ally in his campaign to press Iran on its nuclear program, Russia's foreign minister [Sergey V. Lavrov] said Tuesday that threatening Tehran now with harsh new sanctions would be "counterproductive."…

Mr. Lavrov's resistance was striking given that, just three weeks before, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said that "in some cases, sanctions are inevitable." American officials had hailed that statement as a sign that Russia was finally coming around to the Obama administration's view that Iran is best handled with diplomacy backed by a credible threat of sanctions.

Now those two paragraphs alone tell the story of a foreign policy failure. The President left two young democracies feeling as though they had been betrayed and sold to the Russians. From Yahoo News:

"Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.

It is clear that the Administration what it thought it was getting out of this sale. Of course, Nobel prizes are not given for advancing national interests. But did giving the Russians the gift of more leverage over Central Europe advance the cause of world peace? Did the failure to move the world toward real pressures against a nuclear Iran really earn our President a Peace Prize? That the Nobel Committee thinks so is a sign of moral rot.

The Baucus Bill passed out of the Senate Finance Committee with one Republican vote (Olympia Snowe of Maine). Or at least an outline of the bill passed. We don't yet have legislative language. But it is clear that the Democrats are really intent on passing some kind of legislation. This is surely a temporary win for the reform side, but it raises more questions than it answers.

But the evil insurance companies, which up to now have been playing ball with the reform forces, have finally shown their color. The American Health Insurance Providers issued a report that projects rising insurance premiums for a lot of American voters. Of course they are evil, and, to be sure, motivated by interest. But the logic of the report is hard to escape.

If you are going to extend coverage to a lot of people who can't pay for it now, the money has to come from somewhere. One place a lot of cash was supposed to come from was young workers and others who can afford some insurance but choose not to purchase it. The bill had included a pretty severe set of sanctions to force them to open their wallets, and that would have been a source of revenue for private insurers. But the sanctions have been weakened to the point of ineffectiveness. Since the bill would also prohibit denying coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses, it will make sense for the recalcitrant uninsured to pay the modest penalties and keep on being uninsured. After all, if they do get sick they can pick up coverage then.

All this means that private insurers will have to cover a lot of new people with little if any new revenue. I'm no economist, but I think that means that premium costs will have to rise significantly. Of course a public option might take care of this, but that means the costs will be borne by public, and the price of the legislation will balloon. Houston, we have a problem.

Politically speaking, we now see two powerful forces arrayed against the Baucus plan. One is the insurance industry, and the other is the labor unions. They don't want their extremely generous healthcare packages, painstakingly negotiated, to be punitively taxed, as would happen under the Baucus plan.

It seems to me that a little momentum for reform has been generated, but that nothing much has been settled.

Eleven years ago today Matthew Shepard died in a Colorado hospital. He had been robbed and fatally beaten by two men: Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. He was left wounded and tied to a fence post for eighteen hours before he was found and taken to the hospital. Because Shepard was gay, and because his homosexuality played a role in his murder, he was elevated to the status of a martyr. His martyrdom is part of contemporary gay politics, and especially of the case for hate crimes legislation.

Several years ago the ABC News show 20/20 ran a story on the Shepard case that purported to debunk the standard account. I have not seen it, but I gather that the gist was that it was not a hate crime at all but merely a bungled robbery and that drugs may have been involved.

So what was it: a hate crime, or a bungled robbery? The answer is yes. It seemed unlikely from the start that McKinney and Henderson were primarily motivated by prejudice, though their lawyers did, unwisely, employ a "gay panic" defense. The two murderous thugs were motivated by two things that motivate such people: greed, and the desire to beat the daylights out of someone.

But the fact of Shepard's homosexuality is a vital element in the story. As I understand it, they lured Sheppard out of a bar with the promise of sex. That in itself doesn't make this a hate crime. But such predators as these choose their victims carefully, if unreflectively. They are frequently attracted to victims that they believe do not enjoy the protection of society. That is why prostitutes for example, or Blacks or immigrants in some situations, are deemed to be cheap targets. "Is it really illegal," one defendant in a 19^th century murder trial asked, exasperatedly, "to kill a Chinaman?"

Paradoxically, the Shepard case makes a better argument for hate crimes legislation if you assume that McKinney and Henderson were not acting primarily out of prejudice against homosexuals. People who are prepared to assault someone out of a murderous hatred of gays, Blacks, Mexicans, women, or Republicans for that matter, are least likely to be deterred by legal sanctions. But those who consider some category of the population to be easy marks can get the message that that criteria of victim selection will cause the law to come down on them like a ton of bricks.

For that reason, I am in favor of hate crimes laws. Most conservatives are not. They tend to think that such legislation creates special rights for favored groups, as if it were worse to kill a Black lesbian than a White, heterosexual, Baptist preacher. But such legislation can easily be crafted to protect everyone. All of us are minorities according to some criteria. I don't know if there is anyone out there who has it in for short, bearded, conservative, Darwinists, but if there is, I would like them to know that I enjoy the same protection as the Matthew Shepards of the world. The point is not that I need it, I hope I don't. The point is that such a wide definition of hate crimes would appeal to a much larger constituency.

There is nothing wrong with the fact that gay activists are using the late Mr. Shepard as a martyr. That's politics. But interpreting a crime in the way that is most emotionally satisfying is not always the best way to figure out what to do about it. McKinney and Henderson probably weren't textbook homophobes. They were textbook predators. We all have to fear such appalling creatures. If Shepard's memory helps us deal with them, we all will have a reason to remember his passing.

Paul Hudson is the "Climate Correspondent" for the BBC. The fact that such a job exists is evidence of the BBC's commitment to the climate change orthodoxy. You would think that his job would be to explain how the news, no matter what it is, confirms the theory. But that is not what he did. Perhaps he thinks his job is to accurately report the news of climate change. I will be more than mildly surprised if he is right about that. Here is what he says:

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on?

So let's consider this. There has been no increase of global temperatures over the last eleven years. That's curious because anyone who follows the climate news knows that all sorts of disasters are happening right now (glaciers receding, etc.) because of global warming. But how can this be if global warming isn't exactly happening, right now?

We also note that the climate models on which the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are based aren't accurate, over the last ten years. Man-made carbon emissions have sure enough been increasing, but clearly that has not produced warmer climates. What on earth is going on?

Hudson tells us this:

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences. The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature. And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees. He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month. If proved correct, this could revolutionize the whole subject.

Well, maybe Corbyn is right. If he is, it would indeed "revolutionize the whole subject," if by "revolutionize" you mean refute the orthodoxy. It's amazing how inconvenient science can be.

It's not just Corbyn or Hudson who have doubts.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers. But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

The theory of anthropogenic global warming has not been refuted at all. We should take it seriously, and be working on plans to deal with it if indeed it reemerges as a problem. But it's not a problem right now and we can't be sure how much of a problem, if any, it will be in the future.

Only relatively wealthy nations can afford to care about the environment. Or to put it more directly, only such nations will in fact care and act about it. If we act so as to hobble our economies on the basis of slim evidence, we run the risk of discrediting science and provoking an anti-scientific backlash. If you really want to promote responsible environmental policies, you have to make sure that economic growth is restored.