and catches a really nasty chest cold.  Cough. Cough.  Sniff.  Headache.

Have lots of travel stuff to catch up on posting here, but don't feel up to it quite yet.  Stay tuned.

Thomas Sowell takes Barack Obama to the woodshed:

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.

The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.

There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That's bringing us all together?

Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright?

If you don't know who Thomas Sowell is, you should.

Obama appears to me to be in the "silver-tongued orator" class of politician.  Now that in and of itself is not necessarily enough to raise too many alarm bells.  After all, politicians are supposed to be able to communicate.  The trouble is with what is being communicated.  Words floating through the air can give one impression.  Those same words, written and read, can give another.  The problem with listening is that it happens in real time.  You don't have the opportunity to think deeply about the words you're hearing, as the flow of language continues to wash over you.  Only later, perhaps, if you're the kind of person who is naturally skeptical but also open, do you wonder about what was said.

(By the way, the combination of naturally skeptical and also open to new ideas is, or used to be, the hallmark trait of an enlightened mind.  Perhaps one day it will be so again."

As Sowell indicates, what Obama says is largely a soothing, "can't we all get along" sort of talk.  If you're inclined to Believe, then you'll sit and nod your head in agreement as the pleasant words wash over you.  Change.  Hope.  But based on Obama's grandmother comment and his non-disavowal disavowal of his former religious leader and mentor, I wonder if Obama's mindset is still locked into the judgment of a person's character based on the color of their skin.  That's precisely the opposite of what Martin Luther King so eloquently spoke of, where it was the character that mattered, not the color.

Until enough people, black and white, can get beyond the melanin content in someone's skin, the issue of race will never go away.  Some of Obama's words seem to move us towards that goal.  But it's not his words which are of concern, it's his actions.

In the WTF department, we present this from the Kansas City Star:

Patsy D. Long, 34, of Deep Water, was pronounced dead early Saturday evening after being shot in the chest with a .22-caliber handgun. Her husband, Ronald Long, fired the shot from the inside of their home after several unsuccessful efforts to punch a hole through the exterior wall using other means.

OK, I'm a big advocate of responsible individual weapons ownership.  I'm a big advocate of responsible everything, pretty much.  But I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything more irresponsible than using a firearm to advance your home improvement projects.  Word to the wise home handyman--get a good drill and better drill bits, m'kay?  Use The Proper Tool For The Proper Job, as my father would have said.

Sheesh.

UPDATE:  No, I didn't miss the story about the US Air pilot's gun going off in flight, which seems to somehow relate to this.  It is true, stories like this go in threes.  And yes, I was traveling at the time.  On a really big boat, if you must know.

OK, so what we have is:

A bunch of banks lend money to people they really had no business lending money to.  Those people were, in old-fashioned language:  credit risks.  Surprise, surprise, they couldn't pay back their loans.

Who's to blame?

Well, first, the poor stupid dupes who got convinced that home ownership was the key to their financial success, if only they could somehow get a mortgage they couldn't really afford.

Second, the financial institutions who loaned the money to the aforementioned poor stupid dupes.

But most of all, the ones to blame are the politicians who forced the financial institutions to loan money to poor stupid dupes, in order to buy the votes of the aforementioned poor stupid dupes.

There is a place in Hell reserved for these politicians.  This should be a cautionary tale regarding the power of government to do harm while saying it is doing good.  But of course, the politicians will, again, get off scott-free and successfully redirect the blame--in this case to those evil financial institutions (and, usually, the Republican Party just, you know, because.)

Turns out that reporters at the New York Times, besides being unreconstructed liberal collectivists, have a reading comprehension disorder.

From PowerLine:

The Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes is the man who wrote the book on The Connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. He also wrote the Standard article on "The connection."

The Bush administration long ago gave up trying to tell the truth about the issue, as it has on so many others where it has been beaten into submission by the elite media. And so when the Pentagon recently released its 59-page report confirming Hayes's reportage, the media have been left free to misrepresent it with impunity, as McClatchy's Warren Strobel does here, as the New York Times blog does here, and as the ABC blog does here.

Steve has now obtained and reviewed the report in its entirety. In a post previewing his article in the forthcoming issue of the Standard, Steve writes:

A new Pentagon report on Iraq and Terrorism has the news media buzzing. An item on the New York Times blog snarks, "Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link." The ABC News story that previews the full report concludes, "Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda."

How, then, to explain this sentence about Iraq and al Qaeda from the report's abstract: "At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust"? And how to explain the "considerable overlap" between their activities which led not only to the appearances of ties but to a "de facto link between the organizations"? (See the entire abstract below.)

And what about this revelation from page 34? "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda -- as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision." (The example given in the report is the Army of Muhammad in Bahrain, a group the Iraqi Intelligence Service describes as "under the wings of bin Laden.")

And there is this line from page 42: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives."

Really? Saddam Hussein "supported" a group that merged with al Qaeda in the late 1990s, run by al Qaeda's #2, and the New York Times thinks this is not a link between Iraq and al Qaeda? How does that work?

Anyone interested in the "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism" -- that language comes from this report, too -- should read the entire thing for themselves, here.

Emphasis added for the reading-comprehension-impared.

No particular reason to draw attention to this, other than it gives an excuse for the obvious post heading:

Yahoo News:

Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island," is serving six months' unsupervised probation after allegedly being caught with marijuana in her car.

It should be amusing to see how many bloggers use some variation of the same headline in the next day or so.

And yeah, when I was growing up, I thought Mary Ann was the hot one.  Never had much use for Ginger.

Canadian scientists are still in doubt as to the cause of global warming:

EDMONTON - Only about one in three Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.

The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.

(Yeah, I said "global warming," not "climate change."  Anybody who grew up and spent 40 years living in South Dakota, as I did, is intimately aware that the climate changes all the time.  Twenty years of dry, then ten years of wet, then another ten years of not-so-wet.  Such is life on the Middle Border. 

It's much, much, much, much, much, much, much (yes, six degrees of much) easier to determine "the climate is changing" than it is to determine the root causes.  The ecosystem is a marvelously complex system.  The models which predict the most dire effects . . . aren't.  The scientists are divided, and there is no clear picture of what is really happening, and why.

More science, less politics, please.
Via the Heartland Institute.

Hungarian researcher resigns from NASA after his supervisors try to suppress his research into climate change.

Work of the Deniers?  Not quite . . .

DailyTech:

Miskolczi's story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution -- originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today -- ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.

NASA refused to release the results.  Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple.  "Money", he tells DailyTech.  Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research.  Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.

Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, "Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate.  My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."

Some wacko Hungarian kook, you say?  Well, how about this, from the same article:

The conclusions are supported by research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last year from Steven Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs, who gave statistical evidence that the Earth's response to carbon dioxide was grossly overstated.  It also helps to explain why current global climate models continually predict more warming than actually measured.

The equations also answer thorny problems raised by current theory, which doesn't explain why "runaway" greenhouse warming hasn't happened in the Earth's past.  The new theory predicts that greenhouse gas increases should result in small, but very rapid temperature spikes, followed by much longer, slower periods of cooling -- exactly what the paleoclimatic record demonstrates.

More science, less politics, please.

Is anybody but me suspicious that oil prices are spiking just when it seems that the American economy is slowing down?

Nope.  Others are suspicious as well--Environmental Republican:

Most economists have been saying that it's been speculation, not demand that is driving higher prices. Americans have been using less fuel of late and that alone should have reduced prices by several dollars a barrel.

I keep thinking about how George Soros broke the Bank of England.  I'm trying hard not to be a tin-foil-wearing conspiracy theorist, but dang it, sometimes it's hard.

Reason magazine:

Instead of an increase in violence, adoption of Florida-style concealed carry policies has been followed by a decline in violence. The extent to which that decline can be attributed to more guns in the hands of law-abiding people in public places remains a matter of much controversy. But one thing seems pretty clear: The fears stoked by opponents of concealed carry liberalization were unjustified. Are there good reasons to think their dark predictions about guns on campus will be any more accurate?

The easy, knee-jerk reaction is to say "well, of course there shouldn't be guns on college campuses."  But what we know know, much to our sorrow, is that easy reaction leaves an entire community virtually defenseless against those among us who get pushed over the edge.

The solution here isn't to perpetuate the defenselessness of good people when the crazy ones attack.  But that's what gun bans essentially promote.  Law enforcement can't be everywhere, and can't respond fast enough to deal with imminent, deadly threats to the community.

This country was built on the concept that political power comes from the people, and portions of that power are delegated to the government.  Gun bans are an instance where, at a fundamental level, that delegation can not, will not ever keep us as safe as we would be if we allowed responsible members of our society to fill the gaps that law enforcement in a free society will inevitably have.

Gun bans are, in short, a good idea that simply doesn't work in the real world--unless you're willing to tolerate a level of police intrusion into our daily lives that, God willing, Americans will always reject.