The Classic Triad Strikes Again: Clinton the Forerunner, Bush the Master, Obama the Decadent.

Lincoln or Reagan? TR or Ike? Washington or Wilson? Camelot or Campobello? Offshore oil drilling may be stalled for the duration, but nothing can stop the round-the-clock mining of clichés and the deep-earth probes in search of historical metaphors for President Obama. Journalists are running three shifts in quest for original models, new figures of speech, and fresh paradigms to express the nobility, brilliance, novelty, cool, and cunning of a president who--if I may coin a phrase--is still only in the first hundred hours of his administration.

The effort is straining America's cranial infrastructure. Christopher Hitchens dusted off the word "hepcat" to describe Obama. E.J. Dionne must have awakened in horror one morning last week--had he really reminded readers that Obama is fond of the word "audacity"? And Maureen Dowd--well, to quote anything she published during inauguration week would hardly be the act of a gentleman. Four more years spent shouldering the Obama burden will mark the bodies of our best writers in dreadful ways. Pastor Warren must pray on behalf of their families and their dustjacket photographers.

So in the new spirit of solidarity with the suffering, I offer freely to these heroes a fresh face to fasten on Obama--though not a pretty one: Michael R. Bloomberg. Obama must soon reveal himself as the Bloomberg of presidents--depending uncomfortably but inescapably upon the achievement of his predecessor Bush while avoiding the mistakes of Bush's predecessor Clinton, just as Bloomberg must do with Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch.

An unlovely and unlovable mayor and our adorable new president: an odd comparison, but one that describes the limits and possibilities of an Obama presidency more precisely than any metaphor that Will or Wieseltier might happen upon. Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg form a classic triad of human achievement: the Forerunner, the Master, and the Decadent. Among Greek tragedians, Ed, Rudy, and Mike are played by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Among the Elizabethan dramatic geniuses, Marlowe is Koch, Shakespeare is Giuliani, and Ben Jonson is Bloomberg. In "Music Appreciation" class, we were once taught the three Bs: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Among Italian movie directors: Rossellini, Fellini, Visconti. Among sacred books: Torah, Gospel, Koran.

The three mayors exemplify this pattern beautifully. Ed, the forerunner of reform: His methods are primitive, his manner is experimental, his effect futile. Rudy: the outwardly supreme but inwardly tortured master craftsman who actually seized control of the city and transformed it for its citizens. Mike: the decadent smoothie, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who rode into an office transformed by the efforts of the unpopular Rudy. Mike ignores Rudy, but he remains--so far--successful and adequately popular by keeping the situation for New Yorkers only a little worse--so far--than Rudy left it.

Koch, for all his failures, made Giuliani possible. Taking control of the city after a near-financial collapse, Koch discerned in the mists the path that his successor actually walked. Despite Koch's realism and tough-mindedness, and his willingness to burn bridges with his former left-wing supporters, he proved to his contemporaries that the city was ungovernable. When, after three terms, the voters replaced him with David Dinkins, a true left purist, it hardly made a difference in the lives of those of us who lived there.

From the ashes emerged the master. Giuliani accomplished all that Koch promised, and never asking, "How'm I doing?" Giuliani set about making the streets and homes of the city safe for those who lived there--most particularly for the poor. His public order policies--snarlingly publicized--made life for ordinary New Yorkers almost unimaginably better. In every year since he took office, at least a thousand citizens have been spared a violent death, an equal number have been saved from becoming murderers, and for every murder prevented, perhaps fifty or a hundred relatives and friends are saved from grief, fear, and bitterness. Rudy's achievement allowed New Yorkers to take as normal a level of civility in urban life.

In the wake of 9/11, Mike Bloomberg took over. Observe him, Mr. President. He moved first to restore the reputation and likability of the mayor's office by sitting down and talking to the community leaders whom Giuliani scorned for being unrepresentative. He also noisily ordered uncourageous "crackdowns" on harmless practices with no discernible victims and no discernible advocates: smoking in restaurant bars and consuming trans fats. He refused to reduce the size of the city's immense workforce, proclaiming that living and doing business in the city should be a luxury for the discerning. Bloomberg's single Giulianiesque accomplishment--replacing the old school board with a new blue-ribbon entity--has made scant difference to the children forced to remain in the city's public education system.

All Mike's noise made for popularity with the New York Times-reading classes. But one thing would never be permitted him. Bloomberg made sure not to weaken the public-safety regime in such a way that it would send the murder rate up. The result is that, gradually, Bloomberg has donned Giuliani's reputation for making New York safe--but without summoning up charges of racism and police brutality. Having done the tough and unpopular work that made the Bloomberg regime possible, Rudy has been discarded.

President Obama is in much the same lucky but precarious position--and has a similar relationship to his two predecessors. Obama's first avatar, Bill Clinton, was as noisy as Koch but was an indolent president--a forerunner. Like Koch, he was a big personality with a small list of accomplishments, and his term ended in recession, a futile war, and unavenged attacks against American forces that prepared the way for 9/11.

To Clinton's Koch, Bush played Giuliani. Bush's successes took too long to achieve by the political clock, but the ultimate result was safety at home since 9/11, the defeat of two of our most potent enemies on the battlefield of Iraq (Saddam and al Qaeda both), and an improvement in the lives of non-Saddamist, non-Islamist Iraqis that far exceeded Giuliani's improvement in New York City. Had Bush been quicker to find a strategy for victory (in the teeth of ferocious opposition, much of it opportunistic, much of it demanding an impossible perfection, all of it unwise), he might have turned his attention to reforming the financial system in his second term. That's just what he did, of course, but his efforts were easily outmaneuvered.

Like Bloomberg succeeding Giuliani, Obama inherits a far better hand than Bush had done. The worst is over. The disasters happened in the last September of the last year of both Giuliani's and Bush's terms. Like Bloomberg, Obama will find it easy to adopt a style of governing that is less challenging to the opinion-making classes than his predecessors.

But there is one terrifying exception to Obama's easy pathway to esteem. Obama can do whatever he wants as long as domestic security remains merely Bush-perfect. Bloomberg knows he may raise taxes, drive jobs out of town, indulge his health fads, but only so long as the murder toll never rises above, say, 699. Just as New Yorkers now read about a Central Park mugging on the front page, Americans have come to believe that our freedom from more terrorist attacks is normal. Pity Bloomberg and Obama for a moment--for they know there is nothing normal or easy about the security achievements of the despised masters they have succeeded.

Obama and Bloomberg sit on the horns of a dilemma. In every way but this, they needn't actually outdo the masters they have succeeded as long as they govern with style (like Brahms in his music and Visconti in his films). Obama beat Bush with taxes, interrogation, and Guantánamo. He has hired not ideologues but cynical operators to manage the crucial economic and military tasks of his administration. Geithner and Holder, each of them with a proven record of moral pliancy, can be relied on to do what is necessary, even if it means keeping taxes low, interrogations harsh, and some equivalent to Guantánamo in business. Behind the scenes, such men will ensure the Obama administration's clock will still run on "Giuliani time," while in press conferences Obama can act as Bloomberg.

In his ungracious inaugural address, Obama spent a lot of energy outlining his moral superiority to the defeated man to whom he owes so much. With an admiring audience before them, decadent smoothies like Bloomberg and Obama really can get away with murder. Fortunately for us, Bloomberg and Obama also know that they can't permit the actual murder of large numbers of their audience. Or so I hope.

Sam Schulman, a writer in Virginia, is publishing director of the American.

Cheney Speaks Out on Libby

Former Vice President Dick Cheney disagreed publicly with his boss just four times in the eight years they served together. Yesterday, however, on the first day after the official end of the Bush administration, Cheney disagreed with George W. Bush once more.

Cheney told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, whom he described as a "victim of a serious miscarriage of justice," deserved a presidential pardon.

Asked for his reaction to Bush's decision Cheney said: "Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and honorable men I've ever known. He's been an outstanding public servant throughout his career. He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush's decision."

Bush's decision not to pardon Libby has angered many of the president's strongest defenders. One Libby sympathizer, a longtime defender of Bush, told friends she was "disgusted" by the president. Another described Bush as "dishonorable" and a third suggested that refusing to pardon Libby was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield. They believe that the prosecution of Libby was riddled with inconsistencies and double-standards. Not least of those is the fact that former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who leaked the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame to at least two reporters, was never charged. And Fitzgerald had known from the outset of his investigation that Armitage was the leaker.

Others, including some who believe it's possible that Libby did lie to the grand jury, argue that Libby should have been pardoned because his conviction came as a result of highly-charged political fight between the Wilson, the CIA, and the Bush administration. The entire chain of events that led to Libby's conviction started with a lie from Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, who claimed to have debunked forged documents related to intelligence reports on Iraq, Niger and uranium. But Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to investigate the reports after his wife recommended him, could not have discredited the reports as forgeries because the U.S. government did not yet possess them at the time he made his trip.

Despite the many problems with Wilson's stories--at one point he justified his falsehoods by acknowledging he had used a little "literary flair"--they became the narrative that drove media reporting on the story and shaped Fitzgerald's understanding of the case.

So why did Bush refuse to pardon Libby? There are some indications that he believes Libby was guilty. When Bush commuted Libby's 30-month prison sentence in the summer of 2007, he issued a statement that suggested a pardon for Libby would be unlikely. "I respect the jury's verdict," Bush said at the time, noting only that he found the sentence "excessive." He added: "The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant and private citizen will be long-lasting." Earlier, Bush had praised special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for running his investigation in "a very dignified way."

A second reason is less defensible. Two sources believe that the White House was concerned with public relations and simply did not want to defend or justify a Libby pardon.

In an interview on Larry King Live yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that she spoke to Bush about his views on pardons.

Larry King: Were you surprised the outgoing president issued no pardons.

Pelosi: I spoke to him about that yesterday at breakfast before we came to the Capitol and he was very proud of that. He said people who have gotten pardons are usually people who have influence or know friends in high places--is not available to ordinary people. So he was very proud of that. It was interesting .He thought that there was more access for some than others and he was not going to do any.

Cheney spoke Wednesday to Wyoming state legislators in Cheyenne. He recalled his time in the capitol as an intern and avoided much serious discussion of his role in the Bush administration.

Still, it was a big role and Cheney won far more arguments than he lost. Of the four times that Cheney had publicly disagreed with Bush--on a gay marriage ban; on firing Donald Rumsfeld; on Washington, D.C.'s gun ban; and on North Korea--two of them involved personal loyalty Cheney felt to someone other than the president. On one occasion it was his daughter, Mary Cheney, and on the other it was his longtime mentor, Donald Rumsfeld.

Libby makes it three.

Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins).

Time to Beam Down to Earth, President Obama

Last week the United States got lucky again and took out several suspected terrorists by Predator drone attacks over Pakistan. Anti-war critics prior to Jan. 20 used to decry “collateral damage” from such controversial strikes. But there was a weird silence here about the Obama administration’s successful first attack—despite the usual complaints from abroad that several civilians perished.

President Barack Obama just announced, to great applause, that he wants to close Guantanamo right away—sort of. But in the meantime he rightly worried over the immediate consequences. So, instead, in circumspect fashion, he appointed a “task force” to prepare for such closure within a year.

We forget that a less politically adept George Bush years ago conceded that he likewise wanted Guantanamo closed at some future date. But the media then, unlike now, largely ridiculed such pedestrian worries over what to do with unlawful wartime combatants who would either have to be released or tried as criminals in U.S. courts.

A saintly Obama upon entering the presidency announced to great fanfare that he would once and for all stop revolving-door lobbyists and end shady business as usual in Washington. But during the transition and the first two weeks of governance, Obama’s team has already experienced a number of ethical problems of the sort that often plague incoming administrations.

Obama’s commerce secretary nominee, Gov. Bill Richardson, of New Mexico, has been under federal investigation and withdrew from consideration.

Attorney General designate Eric Holder, as Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general, helped pardon a fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list who was a big Clinton campaign donor.

Timothy Geithner, just confirmed as secretary of the Treasury, cannot adequately explain why he didn’t pay thousands of dollars in Social Security and Medicare taxes and took illegal tax deductions.

Obama’s staff already has already waived its new ethics rules for former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn, who was nominated for deputy defense secretary.

Such embarrassments sometime happen in politics—but to humans, not gods—and they often create media firestorms, not a mere flicker or two.

Throughout the campaign and after the inauguration, Obama also talked grandly of bipartisanship. The fact that he once had the most partisan record in the U.S. Senate, played tough Chicago-style politics to win elections, and toed a strict liberal line in the Illinois legislature caused few in the media to wonder about such promises.

Yet despite aspiring to be an Olympian president, Obama just warned Republicans not to listen to earthly Rush Limbaugh. In words more like those of George Bush than of Mahatma Gandhi, Obama privately rubbed it in with, “I won.”

Despite the near-evangelical sermons, Obama, like most savvy presidents, assumes bipartisanship is the art of persuading—and coercing—the opposition into following his polices. George Bush likewise called for an end to acrimony while he pushed his agenda. The only difference is that the media mocked the “divider” Bush’s clumsy talk of bipartisanship but so far is still hypnotized by the “uniter” Obama.

Why is Obama’s grand talk already at odds with his actions?

For one reason, he is unduly empowered by a media that too often roots for him, rather than reporting critically about his actions.

Second, in the last two years, Obama and his supporters advanced two general gospels that are coming back to haunt him:

First, that George W. Bush was a terrible president, and that his toxic policies had done irreparable damage to the United States.

Second, and in contrast, that Obama was an entirely novel candidate with fresh hope-and-change ideas that would bring a renaissance to the United States and the world.

Bush’s Texas twang and occasionally tongue-tied expressions strengthened the first supposition. Obama’s youth, charm, and multiracial background enhanced the second.

But we are already seeing that simplistic polarity was infantile—even if the enthralled media desperately wanted to believe in the mythology.

In truth, Bush, after the left-wing hysteria over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, governed mostly as a traditional conservative rather than a reactionary extremist. Meanwhile, newcomer candidate Obama predictably embraced old-style and well-known liberal orthodoxy.

The result is that President Obama is quickly discovering that many of those easy Bush-blew-it issues of the campaign really involved only bad and worse choices of governance. Most solutions now call for realism instead of doctrinaire leftwing bromides and catchy speechmaking.

Obama should decide quickly whether to beam back down to earth. If he doesn’t, at some point even a sympathetic media won’t be able to warn him that his all-too-human actions are beginning to make a mockery of his all too holy sermons.

Stimulus Criticism Mounts

Team Obama is now regrouping in the face of mounting criticism of this incredibly unmanageable $900 billion behemoth of a stimulus package. LARRY KUDLOW

LEVIN: Did Obama Waste His Time on the Hill? FRANC: Why Liberal Democrats Spend Your Tax Dollars So Merrily STUTTAFORD: Want Inflation Now? GELINAS: No Republicans Is Not Enough WAPO: Stimulus Bill Gets No GOP Votes; On to the Senate

Let 1,000 Republican Flowers Bloom

The ceremonies, unity, and patriotism of Inauguration week were nice. The bloviating, fawning, and gushing from celebrities and the media were a bit much. It's not surprising that we are beginning to hear expressions of frustration from the Republican grass roots, and exhortations to action: "Why can't the Republican congressional leadership get its act together? Where's the coherent message? What's the strategy? Why the disunity? Who's going to lead us out of the wilderness?"

To which the answers are: Calm down and be careful what you wish for.

Calm down because Obama has just become president and the ball is in his court. There are severe limits to what the GOP can do over the next couple of months. In fact, Republicans might be better off doing nothing at all. Since Election Day, the GOP has been nowhere to be seen and Obama's popularity has soared, but the Democrats' edge over the Republicans in the generic congressional ballot of the Rasmussen poll hasn't increased at all.

George W. Bush, the leader of the party--and, let's face it, of conservatives--for the last eight years, has only just left town. Fairly or unfairly (mostly unfairly), he ended up a very unpopular guy. It's going to take a while for Republicans to shake free of the Bush effect. And, more important, to shake free of the fact that for the last 14 years, and 26 of the last 28, there's been a Republican president in the White House and/or Republican control of Congress.

That's why one has to be careful about what one wishes for. Republicans, newly liberated, need to resist calls to shackle themselves to prematurely announced agendas and already anointed leaders. This is the time for a thousand Republicans to bloom. Congressmen used to looking to the White House for guidance or approval--or fearing disapprobation--should show some healthy ambition and unleash their inner policy entrepreneur. Backbenchers need to come forward with heterodox ideas. There should be vigorous debate. Disharmonious disarray is in the short term much less of a danger than a false and stultifying unity.

Everyone looks back nostalgically to 1993-94, the last time Republicans were out of power, but that example is a bit misleading. In 1992, Clinton had won only 43 percent of the vote, and the Republicans had gained congressional seats. The successful Reagan years remained fresh in voters' minds. The task was simply to reclaim and revivify the Reagan agenda. The task today is both harder and less well defined.

The situation is more like 1977. For one thing, given the unlikelihood of Republicans taking back Congress in 2010, it requires a four-year horizon rather than a two-year one. More important, it requires serious rethinking in fundamental areas. Consider how far the party moved from 1977 to 1980. It was a period of vigorous, even hectic, political, policy, and institutional entrepreneurship, among conservatives both old and new. Thanks to the controversial efforts of backbenchers like Jack Kemp and Bill Steiger, the party rejected green eyeshade budget-balancing and embraced pro-growth supply-side economic policies. Thanks to the emergence of the neoconservatives, Kissingerian détente gave way to Reaganite freedom-fighting. Religious conservatives moved en masse to join the ranks of the GOP. All of this in four years.

This happened through an unruly mix of debate--in magazines and op-ed pages as well as in Congress and the states--through a host of uncoordinated legislative initiatives, most of which went nowhere but some of which took off, and through uncoordinated, often ad hoc, reactions to the Carter administration and developments around the world.

If party leaders and ideological guides had succeeded in buttoning everything down, if there had been harmonious unity and a coordinated strategy and an agreed-upon message in early 1977, there would have been no Reagan Revolution. And if politicians--or for that matter pundits--had been deterred from changing their minds, worried over charges of inconsistency, there would have been less progress during those years. When you're out of power after having been in power for a long time and when there are new realities requiring fresh thinking, a foolish consistency really is the hobgoblin of little minds. Or at least politically unsuccessful ones.

So a little chaos, lots of debate, tons of political entrepreneurship--that's what we need.

The new U2 album: track by track

The first U2 album since November 2004 received an exclusive first play in Dublin last night.

The Residence private members club on St Stephen's Green in Dublin hosted a playback of the eagerly awaited album.

It has been the longest gap between releases in the band's entire career.

Media and record company personnel gathered to hear No Line on the Horizon in full in the club's luxurious surroundings. The quartet's 12th studio album will be released in Ireland on February 27, a full weekend before its worldwide release.

Sessions for the album were recorded in Fez, Morocco, before moving on to the band's Dublin studio on Hanover Quay, New York's Platinum Sound and Olympic Studios in London.

The album will be available in five different formats, including vinyl, standard CD, a deluxe box set and a special edition with a limited 64-page magazine.

The lead single "Get On Your Boots" will be available both as a digital download and on physical formats from February 13. The download, CD and 7-inch vinyl will all be priced at 99 cents, a first for a single release in this country.

The accompanying video for "Get On Your Boots" will receive its world premiere exclusively here on www.independent.ie tomorrow at 4:55 p.m.

Adam Clayton signs autographs outside the band's Dublin studio this week

1. "No Line on the Horizon"

The opening title track kicks off with a crunchy, distorted guitar riff from the Edge.

2. "Magnificent"

Dancey electro flourishes introduce an atmospheric track with moody leanings.

3. "Moment of Surrender"

This particular moment of surrender sees a slowing down of the tempo and some delicate, bluesy guitar playing from the Edge.

4. "Unknown Caller"

More intricate guitar fretwork that builds into a mid-tempo rocker featuring an organ and one of the album's lushest productions.

5. "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight"

Chiming guitar intro, a rousing Bono falsetto and the lyric, "Every generation has a chance to change the world."

6. "Get On Your Boots"

The belting single that shot straight to the top of the Irish airplay charts here stands as the halfway tune. The video will be premiered tomorrow on www.independent.ie from 4:55 p.m.

7. "Stand Up Comedy"

Grungy pop with strident drumming from Larry Mullen.

8. "Fez -- Being Born"

On first listen, easily the album's most adventurous and challenging track with ambient synthy hooks.

9. "White as Snow"

A stark, stripped back and striking tune with imploring vocals.

10. "Breathe"

Starts off with a trip-hop beat and cello playing before transforming into an all-out rocker.

11. "Cedars of Lebanon"

A reflective parting glass for album number 12, finishing on the line, "Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you."

Stimulus aids illegal immigrants

he $800 billion-plus economic stimulus measure making its way through Congress could steer government checks to illegal immigrants, a top Republican congressional official asserted Thursday.

The legislation, which would send tax credits of $500 per worker and $1,000 per couple, expressly disqualifies nonresident aliens, but it would allow people who don't have Social Security numbers to be eligible for the checks.

Undocumented immigrants who are not eligible for a Social Security number can file tax returns with an alternative number. A House-passed version of the economic recovery bill and one making its way through the Senate would allow anyone with such a number, called an individual taxpayer identification number, to qualify for the tax credits.

The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam

By John Coleman, January 28, 2009

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have lead to a rise in public awareness that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a significant greenhouse gas that is triggering runaway global warming.

How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government we have to struggle so to stop it?

The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle saw the opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy for doing measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute’s areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago, who was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle tagged on to Suess studies and co-authored a paper with him in 1957. The paper raises the possibility that the carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. It seems to be a plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle’s mind was most of the time.

Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of Carbon dioxide. In 1960 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels.

These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.

Now let me take you back to the1950s when this was going on. Our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution from the crude internal combustion engines that powered cars and trucks back then and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. Cars and factories and power plants were filling the air with all sorts of pollutants. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution and a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action. Government accepted this challenge and new environmental standards were set. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed for cars, as were new high tech, computer controlled engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer big time polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. Likewise, new fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced, as well.

But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis issue. So the research papers from Scripps came at just the right moment. And, with them came the birth of an issue; man-made global warming from the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants began to flow and alarming hypothesis began to show up everywhere.

The Keeling curve showed a steady rise in CO2 in atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man. As of today, carbon dioxide has increased from 215 to 385 parts per million. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. While the increase is real, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about .41 hundredths of one percent.

Several hypothesis emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. Years have passed and the scientists kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on building up.

Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation’s bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meeting.

Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations, a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But, he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was not a pure climate study scientific organization, as we have been lead to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved the UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last 25 years they have been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, the UN IPCC has made its points to the satisfaction of most and even shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

At the same time, that Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950’s as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus.

He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students to become a major global warming activist. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming," That student was Al Gore. He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992.

So there it is, Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his movie, his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business.

What happened next is amazing. The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause celeb of the media. After all the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling". The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.

But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer."

And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge negative impact on the economy and jobs and our standard of living. I have discussed this collaboration with Dr. Singer. He assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem.

Did Roger Revelle attend the Summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in the Summer of 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore onto this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is, "I think so, but I do not know it for certain". I have not managed to get it confirmed as of this moment. It’s a little like Las Vegas; what is said at the Bohemian Grove stays at the Bohemian Grove. There are no transcripts or recordings and people who attend are encouraged not to talk. Yet, the topic is so important, that some people have shared with me on an informal basis.

Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam.

Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s Mea culpa as the actions of senile old man. And, the next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate, From 1992 until today, he and his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when ask about we skeptics they simply insult us and call us names.

So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint which we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.

We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by no drilling and no new refineries for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that the whole thing about corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies. That also has driven up food prices. And, all of this is a long way from over.

And, I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.

Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a highjacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history.

To email John Coleman, click here.

The Obama White House May Be a Crowded Mess

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama criticized Washington for being "obsessed with the perpetual campaign." As president he is the first occupant of the Oval Office to give his director of political affairs -- who coordinates the president's involvement with his party and other campaign related activities -- an office in the West Wing.

Many Americans may assume that the president's entire staff is in the West Wing. It's not. The West Wing is actually a very small place, so the vast number of people who work "at the White House" actually have offices across the street at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB).

Under Mr. Obama, the political director won't be in the EEOB, where other presidents have placed him. He'll occupy a West Wing office usually given to the head of presidential personnel. That's a sign of the importance of politics for Team Obama.

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Obama Made a Rash Decision on Gitmo: The president will soon realize that governing involves hard choices.

During his first week as commander in chief, President Barack Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and terminated the CIA's special authority to interrogate terrorists.

While these actions will certainly please his base -- gone are the cries of an "imperial presidency" -- they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001. He's also drying up the most valuable sources of intelligence on al Qaeda, which, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, has come largely out of the tough interrogation of high-level operatives during the early years of the war.

The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.

What such a review would have made clear is that the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks. What is needed are the tools to gain vital intelligence, which is why, under President George W. Bush, the CIA could hold and interrogate high-value al Qaeda leaders. On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)

Mr. Obama has also ordered that all military commission trials be stayed and that the case of Ali Saleh al-Marri, the only al Qaeda operative now held on U.S. soil, be reviewed. This seems a prelude to closing the military commissions down entirely and transferring the detainees' cases to U.S. civilian courts for prosecution under ordinary criminal law. Military commission trials have been used in most American wars, and their rules and procedures are designed around the need to protect intelligence sources and methods from revelation in open court.

It's also likely Mr. Obama will declare terrorists to be prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration classified terrorists -- well supported by legal and historical precedent -- like pirates, illegal combatants who do not fight on behalf of a nation and refuse to obey the laws of war.

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. Mr. Obama has also ordered that al Qaeda leaders are to be protected from "outrages on personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" in accord with the Geneva Conventions. His new order amounts to requiring -- on penalty of prosecution -- that CIA interrogators be polite. Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country.

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial.

The first thing any lawyer will do is tell his clients to shut up. The KSMs or Abu Zubaydahs of the future will respond to no verbal questioning or trickery -- which is precisely why the Bush administration felt compelled to use more coercive measures in the first place. Our soldiers and agents in the field will have to run more risks as they must secure physical evidence at the point of capture and maintain a chain of custody that will stand up to the standards of a civilian court.

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us. If terrorists are now to be treated as ordinary criminals, their defense lawyers will insist that the government produce in open court all U.S. intelligence on their client along with the methods used by the CIA and NSA to get it. A defendant's constitutional right to demand the government's files often forces prosecutors to offer plea bargains to spies rather than risk disclosure of intelligence secrets.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only member of the 9/11 cell arrested before the attack, turned his trial into a circus by making such demands. He was convicted after four years of pretrial wrangling only because he chose to plead guilty. Expect more of this, but with far more valuable intelligence at stake.

It is naïve to say, as Mr. Obama did in his inaugural speech, that we can "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." That high-flying rhetoric means that we must give al Qaeda -- a hardened enemy committed to our destruction -- the same rights as garden-variety criminals at the cost of losing critical intelligence about real, future threats.

Government policy choices are all about trade-offs, which cannot simply be wished away by rhetoric. Mr. Obama seems to have respected these realities in his hesitation to end the NSA's electronic surveillance programs, or to stop the use of predator drones to target individual al Qaeda leaders.

But in his decisions taken so precipitously just two days after the inauguration, Mr. Obama may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil by shattering some of the nation's most critical defenses.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting professor at Chapman Law School. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Entitlement Stimulus: More giant steps toward government health care.

The more we dig into the pile of spending and tax favors known as the "stimulus bill," the more amazing discoveries we make. Namely, Democrats have apparently decided that the way to gun the economy is to spend even more on health care.
This is notable because if there has been one truly bipartisan idea in Washington, it's that the U.S. as a whole spends too much on health care. President Obama has been talking up entitlement reform as a way to free up the money for his other social priorities. But it turns out that Congress is using the stimulus as cover for a massive expansion of federal entitlements.
Only the bill's $20 billion or so devoted to electronic health records can be reasonably called an investment. More typical is the $87 billion that will go to Medicaid, which -- silly us -- we underestimated by about $6 billion in our stimulus editorial yesterday. This pot of money will be used to blow out the federal matching rate by 4.9 percentage points across the board. Medicaid is nominally a joint state-federal program, but the feds pick up 57% of the Medicaid bill on average and are willing to go as high as 82% in some states. In other words, Democrats want to bail out the states that make unaffordable health-care promises and haven't tried to control costs. This latest rescue will give Governors more incentive to do so, given that the more they spend, the more Congress pays.
National taxpayers will also fund a new program allowing some laid-off workers receiving unemployment checks to enroll in Medicaid. For the first time ever on a large scale, the federal government will pay 100% of the costs they incur, and states are explicitly prohibited from means-testing this benefit. Supposedly the $11 billion plan will expire in 2010, but the word "temporary" does not exist in the entitlement world -- and Democrats will fight furiously to extend these benefits before they sunset.
Another damaging inspiration is the plan to throw $30.3 billion at Cobra insurance plans. The unemployed are currently allowed to keep their work health benefits for 18 or 36 months since 1986. While they search for a new job, they must pay 102% of the full insurance premium, including the employer's share. But Democrats now plan to subsidize these plans to the tune of 65%.
Are they making Cobra a new entitlement? Cobra was never intended as an option to assist the long-term unemployed -- considering that adverse selection means Cobra enrollees cost businesses about 145% as much as covered employees. Since Democrats want to boost participation by propping up Cobra use, that will result in less capital to invest in new jobs in the middle of a recession. It will also mean adding another disincentive (in addition to unemployment insurance) to get a new job. When you subsidize people not to work, you get more nonworkers.
Not for nothing did Democratic health-care commissar Pete Stark tell the New York Times that "We accomplished more today than in the last eight years" after his committee approved the Medicaid and Cobra pieces of the stimulus. In one swoop Democrats will make employer-sponsored health care even more expensive and expand opportunities for an anxious public to join, or remain on, the welfare rolls. The pretext of "stimulus" is being leveraged to capture ever more of the private health-care market and transfer those costs onto government.
But don't forget that everyone agrees that health spending is already too high. So the stimulus also devotes $1.1 billion to create a new bureaucracy called the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. A billion dollars isn't nearly enough to conduct the rigorous clinical studies needed to provide more information on what medical treatments result in the best outcomes. But Democrats want to get this "health-care Fed" on the books now so it's around when they pass the next entitlement expansion -- for the entire middle class.
When government finances start to buckle under that subsidy, the comparative effectiveness outfit will start to ration care to control costs, much like the United Kingdom's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). The draft report accompanying the House portion of the bill notes that procedures and drugs "that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed."
In sum, what we are really getting in this stimulus bill are several more steps in the gradual government takeover of the health-care market.

How About a Payroll Tax Stimulus?

Congress and the Obama administration seem near to deciding the details of an economic stimulus package. Unlike the efforts of President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush, who also inherited declining stock markets and shrinking economies, this package is heavily weighted toward direct government spending, transfers to state and local governments, and tax changes that have virtually no effect on marginal tax rates.

Today the Reagan tax cuts are widely viewed as successful. Opinions on the longer-term effects of the Bush tax cuts are more diverse, but the short-term effects of the 2001 and 2003 cuts are generally credited as having been well-timed.

And what of the plan being put forward now? As crafted, it is unlikely to produce the desired results. For a similar amount of money, the government could essentially cut the payroll tax in half, taking three points off the rate for both the employer and the employee. This would put $1,500 into the pocket of a typical worker making $50,000, with a similar amount going to his or her employer. It would provide a powerful stimulus to the spending stream, as well as a significant, six percentage point reduction in the tax burden of employment for people making less than $100,000. The effects would be immediate.

By contrast, the stimulus now under consideration would suffer from the usual problems of government spending. The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation have calculated that only $170 billion, or about one-fifth of the $816 billion package will be spent in fiscal 2009. An additional $356 billion will be spent in 2010. That leaves $290 billion to be spent when even the most pessimistic forecasters think the economy will be in recovery mode.

Some of the longer-term investment projects proposed are quite worthy; some are not. Either way, they are not stimulus. The administration and the Democratic congressional leadership claim that the infrastructure projects, mainly carried out by state and local governments, are "shovel ready." In fact, the legislation gives states a full year to merely sign a contract to begin spending half the money, and another year to sign a contract to spend the second half. As anyone who has ever dealt with a contractor knows, the money tends to be spent months or years after the contract is signed.

The criticisms generated by the Congressional Budget Office analysis have been brushed aside by President Obama. As he correctly pointed out in a recent meeting with bipartisan congressional leaders, he won the election. His party has large majorities in both houses of Congress, and elections do and should have consequences.

Administration economists Christina Romer (chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers) and Jared Bernstein (Vice President Joe Biden's chief economic adviser) recently released a document that will allow us to benchmark those consequences. "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan," issued on Jan. 9, lays out the course of the economy they expect if the administration's stimulus proposals are adopted, compared with what they expect if no stimulus is implemented.

Without a stimulus plan, the report predicts the unemployment rate will peak in the middle of 2010 at about 9%. With their plan, it estimates unemployment will peak at about 8% in the third quarter of this year. Longer term, they expect the unemployment rate to drop to roughly 5.5% by the end of 2012 with the recovery plan, compared with 6% without a plan.

This document provides a great service. We may know as early as the end of this year whether the spending approach now being undertaken is being successful, or whether it might be wiser to change course and focus on supply-side approaches that combine reductions in marginal rates and improved incentives with improved cash flow for the household and business sectors.

If, for example, the unemployment rate appears to be peaking at around 8% and shows some modest signs of declining by year's end, then the administration should take comfort that it took the right approach. But if the unemployment rate is over 8%, and more important, still appears to be climbing, then it might be advisable for the administration to propose tax cuts and less spending in its budget next year.

One other metric in the report should also be watched -- the composition of employment. Mr. Obama has stressed that he believes that his plan is essential to the revival of the private sector. This makes sense; merely expanding government would simply increase the burden on the private sector, but a larger private sector could easily cover the added costs of a larger government.

The administration's "Job Impact" report estimates that nearly 3.7 million jobs will have been either created or saved by the end of 2010. Of these, only 244,000 will be in government. Since the unemployment rate is estimated to be 1.5 percentage points lower at the end of 2010 as a result of the plan, this gives us a rough estimate of total jobs saved by the plan at 2.2 million. This means that the administration projects that the number of private-sector jobs will grow by about 1.25 million and the number of government jobs will grow by about a quarter million between now and 2010.

This ratio of roughly 5-to-1 of private sector versus government jobs roughly mirrors the current makeup of the job market. Thus, a second test of the stimulus package's effectiveness is that the mix of private-sector to public-sector jobs at the end of 2010 should be roughly what it is today. That would suggest to this administration and future policy makers that a stimulus bill oriented toward public-sector spending is an effective way of expanding the private economy, an essential ingredient toward sustainability of the higher level of spending.

Making the safe assumption that the stimulus bill is enacted, America will get a fair test of the spending approach to economic stimulus. The analysis of administration economists Ms. Romer and Mr. Bernstein provides a good framework for evaluating its success. Let's hope it succeeds. If it does not, next January we will find ourselves another year older and much deeper in debt.

Mr. Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor and assistant to President George W. Bush for economic policy, is president and CEO of the Lindsey Group.