Placer County's Republican establishment is critical of the representative from California's 4th Congressional District because -- get a load of this -- he opposes earmarks in all their forms.

Yeah.

He's terrible.

If I had the money, where would I send my contribution? Here.

Barack Obama made a joke the other day -- again -- about blowing money in Las Vegas. Harry Reid just about died. The savvy ex-mob lawyer Oscar Goodman -- who has probably forgotten more about "the Chicago Way" than Obama could ever hope to know -- said the president "is a real slow learner."

And now the Mighty Penn Jillette weighs in at CNN:

Who cares about a magician losing money? Not even me. I'll be fine. My children will go to college if they want.

But, when people cancel trips to Vegas, I'm not the one who gets laid off. A few less people go to the Penn & Teller Theater, and we still do fine, but the hotels lay off other people. It's the people downstream of me who get punished for the president's joke.

Everybody knows, Penn says, what Vegas is all about. The problem is, "when the president of the United States of America makes his jokes about Vegas -- he costs real people real money."

There's more. Read the whole thing, as the sages say.

Turns out that of the weak lot of pricey commercials that aired during Super Bowl XLIV, the most politically charged and polarizing wasn't the Focus on the Family spot featuring Tim and Pam Tebow. (By the way, does anyone take the National Organization for Women seriously anymore? Anyone? Really?)

No, it was that Audi "Green Police" commercial.

I thought the ad was cleverly written and produced (the anteater was a cute touch)... and utterly horrifying. Two bits in particular really bothered me: The part where the Green Police put some hapless homeowner in the back of a squad car as a news reporter explains the perp was caught using incandescent lights; and the Cops-like scene where the bewildered couple is rousted for setting their hot tub's thermostat too high.

My first reaction watching the YouTube was entirely visceral. I've watched it three more times however, and I still don't like it. But I'm aware this may be an overreaction. (Maybe.) Steve Hayward's pithy analysis is perhaps among the more sensible from my comrades on the right:

Is it mocking environmentalism? Um. . . yeah. Your moral authority is pretty thin when a major advertiser finds it safe to take this approach. Think anyone would ever try something like this about the civil rights movement? Or the feminist movement?

Hayward suggests that Republicans could successfully exploit the part of the ad I hated most in the fall: "I'm guessing a winner will be a repeal of the forthcoming ban on incandescent lightbulbs. I know I'm running out of space stocking up on them for 2012 or whenever the ban goes into effect." (It will be phased in between 2012 and 2014, FYI.)

I wish I shared Hayward's optimism. Sure, arresting a guy for installing incandescent lights or raiding a house because some schlub committed a "composting infraction" might be over-the-top now. But how about fining and jailing people for not maintaining proper pressure on their car tires? California's Air Resources Board proposed to do precisely that, for real, but quickly backpedaled once the public got wind and started making ugly noises.

Certainly, some environmentalists viewed the ad the same as Hayward did -- to their great consternation. Our friend Lisa Schmeiser tweeted how she was "bugged by the demonization of environmental measures. Seemed counterintuitive to the sales pitch." And Audi itself appears to be unsure whether the ad is wholly irreverent or maybe just a little bit serious.

The Green Police are a humorous group of individuals that have joined forces in an effort to collectively help guide consumers to make the right decision when it comes to the environment. They’re not here to judge, merely to guide these decisions.

Right. They're "guiding" the guy who chose plastic over paper at the beginning of the ad where exactly? (Incidentally, the lyrics of Cheap Trick's Dream Police redo, which are basically identical to the 1979 hit single but for one word, say the Green Police are "judge and jury." So put that in your carbon-loaded pipe and smoke it, Audi ad geniuses!)

The Audi Green Police page goes on to helpfully explain how

there are numerous real Green Police units globally that are furthering green practices and environmental issues. For example, Israel's main arm of the Ministry of Environmental Protection in the area of enforcement and deterrence is called; you guess it, the Green Police. New York has officers within the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation that are fondly called the "Green Police". The Green Police is also the popular name for Vietnam’s Environmental Police Department and the UK has a group who dresses in green as part of the Environment Agency’s squad to monitor excessive CO2 emissions.

Oh, and there was one other Green Police force that the German-owned carmaker doesn't mention, probably because... well, go and read for yourself.

Pains me as it does to link to it, if you can get past the "teabagger" guff, I think Grist's David Roberts discerns perfectly the message Audi is trying to get across in the spot:

The ad only makes sense if it's aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police -- people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.

Ah, yes. What's a little loss of liberty for a life of contentedly "green" servitude?

The ad's payoff, don't forget, is that the guy in Audi's new clean diesel roadster gets to drive off when the Green Police wave him through their preposterous eco-roadblock. So if you want to keep the Green Police off your back, you can start by switching back to partially recycled paper bags, installing mercury-filled compact fluorescent lights, and driving a imported car. Brilliant. And, as I say, horrifying. It's just a commercial. Yep. Got it. I still hope the campaign blows up in Audi's face.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., has died, according to reports:

Congressman John P. Murtha died Monday at 1:18 p.m. at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA.

Murtha, 77, was Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.

Murtha had been hospitalized last week due to complications from gall bladder surgery.

Pennsylvania's longest-serving congressman was a lightning rod. In the past few years, he was the subject of numerous ethics investigations. Murtha was also a bete noire of conservatives, who particularly loathed the former Marine's reckless comments about the 2006 incident that left 15 civilians dead in the Iraqi city of Haditha.

There will be more commentary about that and Murtha's legacy in Western Pennsylvania in the coming hours, days, and weeks to be sure. For now, however, my condolences to Murtha's family.

Update: Here are obituaries from the Washington Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and a brief from the New York Times.

As Allahpundit at Hot Air writes, today we "accentuate the positive" (quoting the Washington Post story):

He entered the Marine Corps in 1952, during the Korean War period, and served until 1955. He returned to Johnstown to run the family car wash and finish his undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1962, and he joined the Marine Corps Reserve. During the Vietnam conflict, he volunteered for combat and served near Da Nang in 1966 and 1967.

In 1955, he married Joyce Bell. She survives, along with their daughter, Donna Murtha ; twin sons, Pat Murtha and John M. Murtha ; and three grandchildren…

Rep. Murtha, whose military decorations included the Bronze Star and two awards of the Purple Heart, was one of the first Vietnam veterans to sit in the House. His district returned him regularly to office, and after 10 years, Rep. Murtha had quietly established himself as a key Capitol Hill player who could woo lawmakers of divergent views to join forces.

A special election will be called within 60 days to fill Murtha's seat for the remainder of the year.

I'm movin' on up!
To the East Side (of LA ... where I already live.)
To a deluxe apartment in the sky. (A modest rental home actually.)
Movin on up,
To the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie. (Or a little piece of Breitbart's Empire.)

Your humble super-genius orangutan is now a contributor to the New Media Giant Andrew Bretibart's Big Government. Have a username and password and everything. How did I score this gig? I shared my reporting at the Energy & Environment Conference (EUEC) in Phoenix Feb. 1-3.

I was the only dude with a video camera recording the presentation of climatologist William A. Sprigg — who gave his fellow global warmists a stern lecture on the folly of ignoring the damage inflicted by ClimateGate. Sprigg received polite applause for his 24-minute presentation, but I heard a lot of murmurs among the silence from a shocked audience that was expecting to hear a denunciation of the scandal when they saw it on the agenda.

In short, Sprigg — who led the technical review of the first United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990 — said it's a huge mistake for his colleagues to defend the likes of "Hide the Decline" emailers Phil Jones and Michael Mann, keep raw climate data a secret, and blackball contrarian scientists out of "peer-reviewed" journals. A remarkable speech that was unexpected considering the venue.

You can find my full report on Big Government here, and watch the 9-minute video of highlights and commentary I produced for The Heartland Institute below.

So let's recap what we know about the National Tea Party convention in Nashville, shall we?

• Tom Tancredo opened the convention with a speech falsely asserting that President Obama was elected by non-English speaking foreigners and urging the reinstement of Jim Crow era voting rules.

• Joseph Farah, proprietor of the truly nutty World Net Daily site, followed up with a Friday night speech propounding "birther" accusations against President Obama.

• And on Sunday, Sarah Palin, the Republican Party's most recent vice presidential nominee, will be the convention's keynote speaker on Sunday.

Whenever liberals point out some of the nuttier stuff at the Tea Party gatherings -- the racist signs, the comparisons of Obama to Hitler or the talk of revolution and secession -- Tea Party sympathizers offer a couple of excuses: The nutty stuff is at the fringe, not really representative of the group as a whole and it's not fair that you focus on that! Or that the whole thing amounts to political theater, not to be taken that seriously.

But this convention is making it harder for a reasonable observer to distinguish between the nuts and the mainstream. They're all on the same stage together. That's a problem for the Tea Party folks -- but it's also a problem for the Republican Party that's tried to harness the Tea Party wind. Because if Sarah Palin -- vice presidential nominee and somebody who is still talked about as the GOP's presidential nominee in 2012 -- isn't a "mainstream Republican," who is? And if she's taking the same stage where Tancredo and Farah have been propounding their foolishness, why should the rest of us not believe that the birther and nativist nuts aren't welcome in polite Republican circles?

Palin, I suppose, could shock us on Sunday with a speech that decries the conspiracy theories that have taken the stage before her. Something like: "My friends, we are all united in our love of America, our belief in small government and the need for low, low taxes. But we cannot allow paranoia and falsehoods to be the foundation of our case. That's what's gone on here this week, and for the sake of our movement and our country it must stop."

Call in Palin's "Sister Souljah" moment. It would make folks like me stop and reconsider who Sarah Palin is and what she's all about.

Personally, I don't think Palin will do any such thing. She's done her own bit to whip up paranoia about the president and his policies. She and the Tea Party fringe are made for each other. And the Republican Party, it seems ever more clear, is OK with that.

Peggy Noonan in today's Wall Street Journal:

The biggest historic gain of this administration may turn out to be that Democrats in the White House experienced leadership in the age of terror, came to have responsibility in a struggle that needs and will need our focus. It wasn't good that half the country thought jihadism was some little Republican obsession.

Oh, what utter, irredeemable bullcrap.

Liberals, like conservatives, had a pretty good view of what happened in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania on 9/11. We were horrified by it every bit as much as conservatives were, too. Many of us dropped our dovishness to support the overthrow of the Taliban, and a few of us -- by no means all, and certainly not me -- even supported the invasion of Iraq because of the attacks.

I was watching Meet the Press the Sunday after 9/11, the famous interview where Dick Cheney told Tim Russert that America might have to work "the dark side" in order to fight terror. And I'll admit that I thought this: "Well, yeah." I backtracked from that over time as the implications of what "the dark side" actually entails.

Liberals, like conservatives, have always wanted to protect this country from terrorism. Always. Where we've differed from conservatives, though, is in our willingness to compromise longstanding American laws and values on torture, eavesdropping and the rule of law. We've wondered if the conservative rush -- and in some cases, the conservative glee -- to proclaim a "clash of the civilizations" didn't actually give Osama bin Laden and his ilk exactly what they wanted. We've suspected that certain methods of demonstrating American toughness have actually created more terrorists than they eliminated. And yes, we've had a fair amount of contempt for Republican politicians who wielded 9/11 like a battle-axe in the efforts to secure political gains for themselves. Most of all, we've wanted to apply a restraining hand on those who would have us become the evil we seek to defeat.

We've tried to find balance, knowing that Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" is, ultimately, untenable -- that we have to live with some risk in our lives and that crushing out everything that made America America might make us feel safer, but wouldn't ultimately eliminate the risk.

I'm certain that if you look hard enough, you can find groups and people who think that any American armed response to 9/11 was too much. Those people don't represent me, and I doubt they represent the mass of folks who make up the left, center-left and other Democratic voters who make up half the country.

I hate terrorism. I know the risks are real. But I also value American freedom and traditions. I don't blame Republicans for being very focused on terrorism; I blame them for doing it wrong.

They might have sent a video "Declaration" like this one to King George III. And we would all still be British subjects today.

(Hat tip: Ben Domenech on Twitter.)

Our friend Lisa Schmeiser, SFGate's "Dollars and Sense" blogger and occasional podcast guest, explores a subject that's weighed heavily on me since May 2008: How to stay soused on a budget. She was kind enough to ask me for a few tips and even linked to my Summer of Gin post on "decent gins."

Lisa praises BevMo, but I want to put in the good word for a chain that recently arrived in California called Total Wine and More. One opened a few months ago across the street from my local BevMo in Rancho Cucamonga. The store's prices are extremely competitive and often better than BevMo's. Also, their selection in certain cases is better. When the day arrives that I can afford to buy Vya vermouth again, I'm pleased that I can buy it at my local Total Wine instead of schlepping all the way to Glendale or Costa Mesa. BevMo doesn't carry it.

So, if I understand this Carly Fiorina ad correctly, Tom Campbell is a demon sheep or something. Yeah, well, you better watch out. There may be dogs about.

Update: Mary Katherine Ham predicts that people will one day ask where you were when the demon sheep made the American political scene. Meanwhile, Chuck Devore's media man, Josh Treviño, is quietly shelving "all client proposals for unholy human-animal-machine-hybrids-as-policy-metaphors." Good call.

"A Democrat points out Rahm apologized to Shriver, but not to the liberals he called 'retarded.'" More at Politico about this tempest in a teapot.

Steve PoiznerCalifornia Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner always struck me a smart, level-headed guy. You don't make a fortune in Silicon Valley if you're a dummkopf. Of course, business smarts don't always translate into political smarts, as voters are learning to their chagrin today.

Poizner called a bizarre press conference in Sacramento on Monday, in which he accused former eBay CEO Meg Whitman -- his main rival for the Republican nomination for governor -- of "criminal" campaign tactics. Poizner wants the state attorney general's office and the FBI to investigate Whitman's campaign consultants.

Torey Van Oot of the Sacramento Bee reports the gory details:

GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner today said he has reported "threats" made by the Republican rival Meg Whitman's campaign adviser to law enforcement officials.

Poizner said at a press conference that Whitman campaign strategist Mike Murphy issued "crystal-clear" threats to his staff in an attempt to effectively "cancel the election" by pushing him to drop out of the race.

"This is not an attempt to be hardball and to be aggressive, but this is an attempt to effectively manipulate the election process, the integrity of the election process, by issuing these threats behind the scenes to get me not to run," he said.

The campaign provided a copy of an e-mail in which Murphy asks an unidentified Poizner campaign consultant if there is any chance Poizner, who is trailing Whitman in the polls and in campaign funds, will reconsider his run.

The e-mail, provided by the campaign to reporters and in a letter to law enforcement officials, says the Whitman camp can spend $40 million "tearing up Steve if we must."

"I hate the idea of us each spending $20 million beating on the other in the primary, only to have a damaged nominee," Murphy wrote, according to the e-mail.

In the e-mail, Murphy offers that the campaign could "unite the entire party behind Steve right now to build a serious race" for U.S. Senate in 2012.

In a letter sent to the FBI, U.S. Attorneys Office, Fair Political Practices Commission and state Attorney General Jerry Brown, Poizner also claims Murphy told a senior adviser that the campaign would "put (Poizner) through the wood chipper" if he did not drop out of the race.

Poizner evidently believes Murphy -- who often appears as a guest and occasionally fills in for Dennis Miller -- was being literal. If that's so, then Poizner isn't politically smart at all.

Murphy tells his side of the story at the Whitman campaign blog (via Politico's Ben Smith):

It is true that I have been trying to find a way to avoid a costly and unnecessary Republican primary. I believe it is important that Republicans across California unite around Meg Whitman to defeat Jerry Brown in the fall. It is also true that I am not the only one with this view. Many Republican leaders are more and more concerned that the Poizner campaign, now 28+ points behind in the polls and still sinking, is becoming little more than a stalking horse for Jerry Brown and the Democrats, especially since Commissioner Poizner has been loudly threatening to run a multi-million dollar negative campaign against Meg Whitman for months.

Several weeks ago I was advised by a source close to Steve Poizner that his pollster, my old friend Jan van Lohuizen, had been expressing grave doubts about the viability of the faltering Poizner campaign. So I emailed Jan; this is the email the Commissioner is so excited about. About ten days ago I also placed a phone call to a second senior Poizner consultant. We had a nice talk and discussed the option of Poizner considering a race for Senate in 2012. The consultant offered to discuss this with Commissioner Poizner and asked for a number where I could be called back. I do not plan to make any further comment on these discussions, as I do not want to create even more embarrassment for his consultants or get anybody fired.

Judging from the Commissioner's rant today concerning the FBI and Jerry Brown, I take it the Commissioner's answer is "no."

There's more. (Murphy also expresses concern about Poizner's "mental condition.")

This is not good for Poizner, who is, in fact, trailing badly in the polls. No doubt his advisors thought he could portray Whitman as just another vicious pol disguised as a business-savvy outsider in an election year down on "politics as usual." Unfortunately, Poizner comes off as an underdog desperate to get traction. (Hugh Hewitt says much the same.)

It's really too bad, because Whitman is such a lame candidate. Her radio ads are as tedious as they are ubiquitous. She's currently traveling the country to peddle her new book of clichés. After Tom Campbell jumped to the Senate race, I had hoped Poizner would make a stronger showing. Instead, he's imploding. Just as well. If Poizner thinks Whitman is nasty, he wouldn't last five minutes in a stand-up fight with Jerry Brown or the SEIU.

The Republican challenge to the repeal of 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' is going to avoid overt homophobia. Instead, opponents are going to say we just can't do it right now. From NYT:

Gay rights groups are calling the hearing historic even as they question how quickly the administration is prepared to act. But Republicans are already signaling that they are not eager to take up the issue.

"In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat," Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Sunday on "Meet the Press" on NBC, "why would we want to get into this debate?"

It's a poor argument. Congressman Boehner needs no reminding, of course, but America has been embroiled in war for nearly a decade now. Troops are already drawing down in Iraq, but they're ramping up in Afghanistan -- and though the president has vowed to "start" bringing them home in 2011, the truth is that nobody knows when or if the state of war will ever end.

If we wait for the wars to end to end unjust treatment of gays in the military, we will wait forever.

Here's one benefit that war has traditionally had for America: It calls us to our better selves, sometimes in spite of ourselves. We spent World War II trying to bring down a racist tyrant with dreams of empire -- and we succeeded. But rallying against Hitler's regime was a big step toward making racism untenable here at home -- how could we fight for freedom we weren't granting here? -- and it wasn't long before Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces (in the face of opposition strikingly similar to today's); the performance of women in factories on the home front also gave lie to the idea of the "weaker sex" and paved the way for postwar feminism. Those developments have been good for our country, and for its citizens.

We face a similar challenge today. We're fighting terrorists who want to kill Americans -- and want to do so in the name of a theology that often (though not always) mutilates women and executes gays.

Besides, it's easy to make the argument that wartime is precisely when we don't have the luxury of casual discrimination. I'll repeat myself here: The downside to the current policy is obvious and tangible: Under 'Don't Ask Don't Tell,' we’ve discharged a number of military professionals — including linguists — whose skills are needed in the War on Terror. And a number of warriors have come out of the closet, post-combat, in recent years. Turns out they served with valor in combat; the closet was not a requirement for that valor.

Congressman Boehner asks how we can eliminate 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' during wartime. The real question is why we wouldn't.

:o/

Organizing for America?

The West's insistence on treating children as if they are the same as adults is a losing proposition. The trend was instituted in the late 50's and 60's with the almost-grown-up 18-20 year-old crowd. That worked out, to some degree. But then the drive was on to apply that to younger and younger children. In my day (as a child), it was down to about 16-17. Nowadays, I see children at my school as low as the 5th grade routinely being given the intellectual and social privileges of adults.

I won't claim societal collapse, but I have a hunch a societal "reboot" can't be far off.

Steve HaywardSteve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute and author of the Age of Reagan joins us again for something completely different. In addition to being a political historian, Hayward has also produced for 14 years the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. (Soon to receive a J.J. Abramsian reboot, as Steve reveals.) So Steve agreed to doff his green cap to talk about the politics of climate change, cap-and-trade, and other enviro-follies. As a bonus, Hayward discusses some of the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizen's United v. FEC.

(We recorded this a week ago, but some technical hurdles prevented us from posting it until now. Apologies. But it turns out that our timing may be better than we thought, especially with new revelations and questions about the International Panel on Climate Change.)

Among the questions we explore:

• What's the matter with Al Gore?
• What is the true significance of the "Climategate" controversy?
• Does Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts spell the end of cap-and-trade?
• Will California back away from its ambitious carbon-capping plans, too?
• How can casual observers make smart judgments in the climate change debate?
• What is the most important environmental challenge facing the world today? (Hint: It isn't warming, but it is real.)
• Why do corporations have free speech?
• Will the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United lead to more openness and transparency or much less of both?

Music heard in this podcast:

• "Warmer Than Hell," Spinal Tap
• "Al for All (and All for Al)," The Political Ice Caps
• "Acid Rain," Timbuk 3
• "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)," Marvin Gaye
• "Hungry Planet," The Byrds
• "Free Speech in America," Blusion
• "Swarfiga," Kasabian

Thomas Mitchell provides a terse lesson in constitutional law for his readers in The Las Vegas Review Journal:

Don't imagine what you want the Constitution to say or pretend it says something it does not.

If you, like the president, don't like what the Constitution says, amend it. An amendment banning corporate free speech probably would pass, because most people think the rest of us are too gullible to resist a message backed by money.

If that's the case, this experiment in democracy is over.

This BBC video featuring Charlie Brooker is making the rounds on the Internet this weekend. It may be the best -- and funniest -- illustration of the Bradbury Rule I've ever seen.

President Bush's infamous "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

These words were "infamous" because the left claimed (and still claims) that this was a lie. But it was not a lie. The British government believed that, shared that intelligence with the United States, and last I heard still stands by its word all these years later.

President Obama's infamous 29 words in his 2010 State of the Union address:

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”

This is, in fact — if not a lie — an egregious misrepresentation of the Citizen's United decision, which plainly states on pages 46 and 47:

We need not reach the question whether the Government has a compelling interest in preventing foreign individuals or associations from influencing our Nation’s political process.... Section 441b [of current campaign finance law] is not limited to corporations or associations that were created in foreign countries or funded predominantly by foreign shareholders. Section 441b therefore would be overbroad even if we assumed, arguendo, that the Government has a compelling interest in limiting foreign influence over our political process.

In other words, the court's decision in Citzens United does not do anything to weaken (let alone repeal) current law preventing foreign corporations "to spend without limit in our elections."

Because I was covering Congress at the time, I remember how much of a tizzy Bush's "16 words" caused in Washington. Members of Congress demanded he apologize (for starters) for supposedly misrepresenting the facts and misleading the American people — despite the fact that he did not misrepresent the facts and what he said was not misleading.

But here we have President Obama, a supposed constitutional scholar, stating something that is flat-out wrong about the Citizens United free speech case. There are only two explanations for why he said what he said: (1) he, or his speech-writers and his entire White House staff, didn't read the decision very carefully; or (2) he knows the truth and engaged in willingly false demagoguery. Either one warrants an apology. And I hope for Obama's sake that this resulted because of option No. 1.

Update: President Obama on Friday said the U.S. would aim to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent in 2020, the Washington Post reports. Evidently, "hope" is a governing philosophy.

Cap-and-trade, or at least the version of it envisioned by the execrable Waxman-Markey bill, is in peril in the U.S. Senate. But for the moment, California is moving forward with the expansive carbon cap regulatory regime mandated by AB 32. That's even though the state's Air Resources Board knows the economic collateral damage will likely be extensive.

Although "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg doesn't mention California specifically, he makes a good case in Friday's Wall Street Journal for why Sacramento should think twice about cap-and-trade and the headlong rush to slash carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020:

Despite all the optimistic talk about solar, wind and other green-energy technologies, the alternatives we currently have aren't anywhere close to being able to carry more than a fraction of the load fossil fuels currently bear. For two decades, we've been putting the cart before the horse, pretending we could cut carbon emissions now and solve the technology problem later. But as we saw in Copenhagen last month, that makes neither economic nor political sense.

If we really want to solve global warming, we need to get serious about developing alternatives to coal and oil. Last year, the Copenhagen Consensus Center commissioned research from more than two dozen of the world's top climate economists on different ways to respond to global warming.

An expert panel including three Nobel Laureate economists concluded that devoting just 0.2% of global GDP—roughly $100 billion a year—to green-energy R&D could produce the kind of breakthroughs needed to fuel a carbon-free future. Not only would this be a much less expensive fix than trying to cut carbon emissions, it would also reduce global warming far more quickly.

Are you listening, Governor Schwarzenegger? Do you care?

More fallout from President Obama's denunciation of the Supreme Court during Wednesday's State of the Union. The Wall Street Journal's editors "unpack the falsehoods" the president managed to load into three sentences:

The Court didn't reverse "a century of law," but merely two more recent precedents, one from 1990 and part of another from 2003. Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce in 1990 had set the Court in a markedly new direction in limiting independent corporate campaign expenditures. This is the outlier case that needed to be overturned.

Mr. Obama is also a sudden convert to stare decisis. Does he now believe that all Court precedents of a certain duration are sacrosanct, such as Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal, 1896), which was overturned by Brown v. Board (1954)? Or Bowers v. Hardwick (a ban on sodomy, 1986), which was overturned by Lawrence v. Texas (2003)?

The President's claim about "foreign entities" bankrolling U.S. political campaigns is also false, since the Court did not overrule laws limiting such contributions. His use of "foreign" was a conscious attempt to inflame public and Congressional opinion against the Court. Coming from a President who fancies himself a citizen of the world, and who has gone so far as foreswear American exceptionalism, this leap into talk-show nativism is certainly illuminating. What will they think of that one in the cafes of Berlin?

I think the last point is arguable, but the bottom line is strong.

Meantime, on the opposite page, Randy Barnett expands his criticism of Obama's demagogic assault on the judiciary:

Judge not the words themselves, but their effect on the audience. The president fully expected that his hundreds of supporters in the legislative branch would stand and cheer, while the justices remained seated and silent, unable to respond even afterward. Moreover, the president's speech was only released about 30 minutes before the event, after the justices were already present. In short, the head of the executive branch ambushed six members of the judiciary, and called upon the legislative branch to deride them publicly. If you missed it, check the YouTube video. No one could reasonably believe in their heart that this was respectful behavior.

Then there is the substance of the remark itself. It was factually wrong. The Court's ruling in Citizens United concerned the right of labor unions and domestic corporations, including nonprofits, to express their views about candidates in media such as books, films and TV within 60 days of an election. In short, it concerned freedom of speech; in particular, an independent film critical of Hillary Clinton funded by a nonprofit corporation.

While the Court reversed a 1990 decision allowing such a ban, it left standing current restrictions on foreign nationals and "entities." Also untouched was a 100-year-old ban on domestic corporate contributions to political campaigns to which the president was presumably referring erroneously.

That is a whole lot to get wrong in 72 sanctimonious words.

Ouch. Just imagine what would happen if Barnett turned his attention to the other 7,100.

Finally, I can scarcely believe I agree with everything Jonathan Chait writes here. But I do!

Hillsdale College's Kirby Center in Washington D.C. sponsors an excellent monthly speakers' series called "First Principles on First Fridays," in which Hillsdale academics or friends of the college discuss Big Questions. All of the talks are online and available for download as podcasts. I'm currently listening to Larry Arnn's November talk on The Crisis of American Constitutionalism. Good stuff.

CNN's State of the Union focus group reveals that independents are tired of "hope." Notes the American Spectator's Philip Klein, "As always with focus groups, this needs to be taken with a grain of salt." It's nice to know, however, that I'm not the only one who has a negative visceral reaction to the word in almost any context.

Still, one shouldn't get too cocky about President Obama's apparent reversal of fortune among independents, because that would be racist, says San Francisco Chronicle blogger Zennie Abraham:

But when the hangover from the SOTU cleared, and the GOP realized what happened, some conservatives went for the racial-code-word jugular and sounded like White Supremacists in the process.

One such example is Red State's Erick Erickson.

In his Red State blog post, Erick Erickson used a word that's has a totally racist connection to describe President Obama's delivery: "cocky."

What you did not know at home listening to Barack Obama's speech tonight is that he inserted a few quips that were not in the prepared text. They were cocky and snide.

Erick Erickson, forgetting that Barack Obama is President of The United States, or perhaps upset about it, echoed the same views expressed over at the White Supremacist website Stormfront....

Abraham proceeds to quote from some obscure racist nobody's ever heard of, and concludes:

In other words, Erick Erickson and Red State apparently think that this African American President needs to be "slammed back" because he's too "cocky" and presumably like other black men should know his place.

Really? Really?

Apparently, Nat X moved to San Francisco and started a blog when The Man took his show off the air.

Does anyone seriously buy these tendentious claims anymore? Anyone who is not wholly invested in the race hustling racket, I mean? Good grief.

The mighty Hadley Arkes makes a brief but compelling case at the Corner for abandoning the State of the Union's "monarchical" format.

Arkes is on to something. (Mark Steyn agrees and riffs on the idea a little more.) The annual spectacle Americans know today is an innovation that dates only to Woodrow Wilson. The Constitution says only that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union." Until the vainglorious and megalomaniacal Woodrow showed up, every president simply wrote a report and sent it over to Capitol Hill. The old way was better.

I didn't watch Obama's address live; I heard a few minutes of it on the radio. And then I read the full text before I listened to more audio today. It reads better than it sounded.

John EastmanPolitics is tribal, and we often give our support and our votes to people with whom we most closely identify. I count myself a fellow Declaration of Independence conservative in the John Eastman tribe.

I heard a few weeks ago that the dean of Chapman University Law School was contemplating a run for attorney general of California. Last week, Eastman told Legal Newsline that he's the best candidate "to fix the mess that Jerry Brown has created for us." And now he has launched a Web site to help raise awareness and funds for his campaign. (He needs to get his Twitter feed up to speed, though.) I'm not sure I can send Eastman any money on my meager freelancer's wages, but I'm happy to lend my support in just about any other way.* That doesn't mean you shouldn't pony up, however.

Some Californians will know Eastman from his weekly appearances on the Hugh Hewitt Show. (Update: Here is audio of Eastman's hour with Hugh discussing his candidacy the other day.) I know and previously worked with Eastman at the Claremont Institute, where he was director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and I was director of publications and managing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Eastman has a long and distinguished career as a constitutional lawyer. His writings and amicus briefs are extensive and impressive. He clerked for Clarence Thomas. I've no doubt that the Democrats will try to smear Eastman as an extremist. (He's actually given speeches to the Federalist Society -- quelle horreur!) He isn't.

In an election year in which voters are more skeptical than usual of career politicians, Eastman is a highly attractive and rare sort of candidate: A competent outsider. And he's a good man. I look forward to voting for him in June and again in November.

* (In case anyone is wondering, no, he didn't put me up to this post. I think I saw John briefly at a Claremont event last spring, and I haven't corresponded with him since September 2008. I did send him an e-mail a few weeks ago when I first heard that he was exploring a run, but he has yet to reply. Not complaining; just saying. Update: E-mail answered!)

Update (1/29): Eastman has resigned as dean of Chapman University Law School. The race is on. And it's crowded.

I always liked the idea of JD Salinger more than I liked anything that Salinger wrote. Franny and Zooey was ok, I guess, but Catcher in the Rye is massively overrated. Generations of literary hipsters have named their children "Holden" because they saw Catcher's protagonist as the ideal; an authentic James Dean type, maybe, railing against the phoniness of modern life.

Me: When I got around to reading the book at age 17 -- during my year of reading classic novels that were often banned -- I simply couldn't believe what a whiny sonofabitch the kid was. I don't think it's because I had the soul of a College Republican; I was reading books like Johnny Got His Gun, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five that year and they were greatly influencing me. I just think that Holden Caufield was a whiny sonofabitch. Which makes me suspicious of all those who idolize him.

Salinger, of course, withdrew from public life after Catcher. The glimpses we got of him over the intervening decades were not flattering; he apparently had a pretty creepy sex life. But there's something fascinating and inspirational about an artist who produces One Great Work and gives it to the world, then hides himself forevermore. Too bad the reality of JD Salinger could never, ever live up to the hype.

Rest in peace, you old bastard.

Just how unprecedented was President Obama's pointed criticism of a Supreme Court decision in his State of the Union address?

Tony Mauro of the Legal Times has an informative post that looks at the way presidents since Woodrow Wilson have treated the Supreme Court in their annual addresses to Congress. Bottom line: It "was beyond unusual; it was almost unprecedented."

The operative word here is almost.

I discovered that Mauro piece by way of Glenn Greenwald's mendacious, hypocritical and utterly shameless denunciation of Alito at Salon. Here is a writer who has gleefully joined in the orgy of politicization of the court now denouncing the politicization of the court. I found myself shaking my head and mouthing "not true" from the first paragraph. But, hey, credit where it's due.

Tangina Barrons has joined Carol Anne in the light.

Or, rather, the actress who immortalized the character in three Poltergeist films has gone to her reward. Zelda Rubenstein was 76.

The diminutive Rubenstein did cartoon voice work before making her debut in the atrocious Chevy Chase-Billy Barty vehicle, Under the Rainbow. She went on to roles on television, including most memorably as the sheriff's radio dispatcher in Picket Fences.

But this will be how millions of fans will remember her:

(More Rubenstein clips here.)

At 47, Rubinstein -- a Pittsburgh native, Zaius will be happy to know -- abruptly decided to end her career as a medical technician. She told an interviewer:

“I had no idea what I would do next, but I knew it would involve advocacy for those people who were in danger of being disenfranchised,” she said. “I wanted a platform to be visible as a person who is different, as a representative of several varieties of differences. This is the most effective way for me to carry a message saying, ‘Yes you can.’ I took a look at these shoulders in the mirror and they’re pretty big. They can carry a lot of Sturm und Drang on them.”

Rest in peace, madame.

The takeaway from President Obama's first official State of the Union address may not be the (bogus) spending freeze, his call for a jobs bill, education reform, or the pledge to end the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Rather, the most significant moment was this passage from the speech assailing the Supreme Court's decision last week in Citizens United v. FEC, and Justice Samuel Alito's reaction to it:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.

Nice touch there with the bit about "all due deference."* Just after Obama finishes saying "including foreign corporations," Justice Alito -- who is already shaking his head -- can clearly be seen saying the words, "Not true."

As more than one blogger has pointed out, this is another "Joe Wilson moment"... not for Alito, but for the president. Rep. Wilson of South Carolina famously shouted "You lie!" from the gallery last autumn when President Obama last addressed a joint session of Congress on health care reform. Specifically, Wilson objected to Obama's claim that the bill then under consideration would not cover illegal aliens. Wilson's outburst may have been indecorous -- and he did subsequently apologize -- but it also had the virtue of being true.

Although Alito's more dignified retort may have appeared awkward to some -- Orin Kerr, Kashmir Hill and Allahpundit are among those who think the justice should have sat in silence and let the president "demagogue the First Amendment" -- he was also telling the truth.

The president, however, was not.

Bradley Smith, former FEC commissioner, says flatly: "The president's statement is false."

Smith elaborates:

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case. Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any "expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication... ."

Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett, author of the indispensable Restoring the Lost Constitution, is even more harsh:

In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen [sic]? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

But perhaps the most subtly devastating reply to Obama's attack comes from none other than the New York Times' former Supreme Court correspondent, Linda Greenhouse:

The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries — as opposed to their political action committees — on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election. It is true, though, that the majority wrote so broadly about corporate free speech rights as to call into question other limitations as well — although not necessarily the existing ban on direct contributions.

But this was a populist night and the target was irresistible. There are a variety of specific proposals floating around to address the Citizens United decision. The president offered no specifics and did not endorse any of them. Just as the decision doesn’t lend itself to a sound bite, neither do the fixes.

Greenhouse tries to offer the best possible spi... er, interpretation of what the president said, but there can be no denying that he botched a cheap attempt to score populist points. Worse, this one brief moment may completely overshadow everything else he attempted to do with the speech. If none dare call it "arrogance", may we at least call it folly?

* By the way, I reject the view that Obama's critique of the Supreme Court is somehow unprecedented or especially alarming because of the venue in which he made it. Here's an example of what I mean from The American Spectator's blog: "Has a president ever attacked The U.S. Supreme Court like that in such an august setting?" I don't know the answer to that, but I'm sure some enterprising blogger will fill us in before breakfast. (Update: See here.) Clearly, American history is replete with examples of U.S. presidents battling the High Court for political supremacy. Andrew Jackson, anyone? And as Kevin Mooney points out in that Spectator post, "President Franklin Roosevelt's attacks on the judiciary ultimately worked to his political disadvantage back in the 1930s." Obama can expect no different.

I just realized that I always buy Apple products about a year after they come out, and I get the next generation...Apple ][+, Mac 1024K, Mac IIci, iPod 10GB...and when I haven't done that, I've regretted it (like when I bought one of the first Intel iMacs, and missed out on a bunch of small upgraded added in the next few months).

So I urge everyone to go buy an iPad when it comes out, so it is successful...and I can buy one in March, 2011...