From war crimes to climate change

Obama the War Criminal?

A recent ruling by a federal judge has confirmed the CIA Interrogation policy for high value Al Qaeda assets is legal.

On Dec. 18, 2009, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York,
Preet Bharara, made the secret filing in response to a motion by Ahmed Ghailani,
an al-Qaeda terrorist facing charges for his role in the U.S.-embassy bombings
in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argued that those charges should be
dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations denied him his constitutional right
to a speedy trial.

This claim was denied by the judge. It appears while many on the left thought GWB was a war criminal, evidently President Obama must be one as well.

http://article.nationalreview.com/438740/cia-interrogations-have-brtheir-day-in-court/marc-a-thiessen-brdavid-b-rivkin-jr?page=2

Blaming Bush appears to be hitting the expiration date

The polls continue to drop for President Obama. It now appears that Hispanics are blaming the President for doing a less than stellar job.

Support for Mr. Obama has eroded among whites, independents, men and now
Hispanics, who were part of the coalition that powered him to the White House in
2008.

While the AP-Univision poll found that 57 percent of Hispanics
still approve of Mr. Obama, it revealed deep skepticism among the key Democratic
voting bloc. Only 43 percent of Hispanics said Mr. Obama is meeting their needs,
according to the poll, while 32 percent were unsure and 21 percent said he has
done a poor job.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/27/obamas-base-quits-blaming-bush/

This is not good news for the President and the Democrats. As the midterm election looms it appears the Democrats were hoping to run one more time against President Bush, but more and more voters are looking at the current state of America and crediting this Administration.

House Democrats head for a thumping at the polls

Here's a piece by Michael Barone that tends to back up my prediction from yesterday. He compares what is going on now to what happened in 1994 and the Democrats appear to be in much worse trouble.

So the Republicans' current lead in the generic ballot question suggests
they may be on the brink of doing better than in any election since 1946, when
they won a 245-188 margin in the House -- larger than any they've held ever
since

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/House-Democrats-head-for-a-thumping-at-the-polls-1004124-99388554.html#ixzz0uyVfjWnL

Why Climate Change is finding itself in the Garbage Bin of History

As fewer and fewer people take AGW seriously, warmist keep raising the ante.
Here is how the LA Times breathlessly opened its news story on a new PNAS paper:

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase
droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.

Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to
the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural
production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65.

Here is how Roger Pielke Jr. replied to it:

To be blunt, the paper is guesswork piled on top of "what ifs" built on a
foundation of tenuous assumptions. The authors seem to want to have things both ways -- they readily acknowledge the many and important limitations of their study, but then go on to assert that "it is nevertheless instructive to predict
future migrant flows for Mexico using the estimates at hand to assess the
possible magnitude of climate change–related emigration." It can't be both -- if
the paper has many important limitations, then this means that that it is not
particularly instructive. With respect to predicting immigration in 2080 (!),
admitting limitations is no serious flaw.

My first inclination was to laugh. Not only is it a ridiculous study, but with 11 million illegals here already it seems like this would be an improvement.