While reasonable Americans know that George W. Bush won the 2000 election – despite liberal uproar over the contested Florida ballot situation subsequent nonpartisan analysis of the Florida ballots showed Bush remained victorious with three separate standards of recounting.

That’s now in the past.

Now, there’s a new election controversy brewing up… this time it’s centered on Howard Dean and the Iowa caucuses.

The Gephardt and Kerry camps are accusing Howard Dean of having out-of-state supporters pose as Iowans to participate in the caucuses on January 19th.

John Norris, Iowa state director of the Kerry campaign said in a letter to the Dean’s Iowa state director Jeanni Murray:

I’m distressed to learn that staffers from the Dean campaign are misrepresenting themselves as Iowa caucus-goers to gain advantage against our campaign. You should know this is not how we campaign in Iowa, and I demand that you take action to remove these staffers from the Dean campaign immediately.

Click here to read the rest of the letter.

If that’s not enough for Deanites to swallow, Gephardt’s campaign manager, Steve Murphy, also has contacted the Dean campaign, claiming awareness of their intent to tarnish the Iowa caucuses.

We have been friends a long time and it is with a heavy heart that I write this letter.
In the past several weeks, it has come to our attention that your campaign in Iowa is engaged in an effort to violate caucus rules and send out-of-state supporters to pose as Iowa residents and caucus in cities and towns across the state.
…[O]ne of your staff members has contacted us to confess that efforts to send non-Iowans to caucus is indeed a critical piece of your “perfect storm” strategy. Despite your campaign’s claim in the Newsweek story that action taken to organize out of state voters were those of a single “kid from Burlington,” we have learned that the problem is much deeper than that.
…
An op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times … correctly points out that one doesn’t need “a valid voter registration card or proof of residency – any identification at all – to take part in Iowa’s caucuses.

The necessary course of action for your campaign is clear. You must identify those in your campaign involved with this illegal endeavor and fire the individual or individuals organizing this effort within your campaign.

Perhaps this will be a bigger fiasco than Florida in 2000. With Dean’s lead slowly getting smaller – desperate situations require desperate measures. Is Dean desperate enough to resort to dirty tricks to help solidify his victory in Iowa?

I wouldn’t doubt it.

As some of you may know, aside from this website and blog, I also own and write for Blogs For Bush, a grassroots website dedicated to reelecting George W. Bush as President of the United States. One of the unique features of the site is the Blogroll For Bush, the largest list on the internet of pro-Bush bloggers. In the past week, sixteen eighteen twenty-two bloggers were added to the Blogroll For Bush, I encourage my readers to check them out:

Bloggers interested in joining the Blogroll For Bush should click here for more information.

Ron Rapp of The House of Rapp wrote a great debunking of Howard Dean’s Bush Tax website.

You can read the piece, titled, “The Dean Tax” over at Blogs For Bush, where Ron guest blogged. His personal blog is also now on my blogroll.

Gaffe after gaffe, Howard Dean’s mouth has been getting him in trouble. Howard Dean’s off-the-cuff remarks may not have hurt him in the polls, but with General Wesley Clark’s gains in national and New Hampshire polls, one thing is certain: Dean’s comments aren’t helping him.

The price Dean is now paying for his ingenuity? His advisors are telling him to keep his mouth shut!

With a wary eye on Gen. Wesley K. Clark’s rise in national and New Hampshire polls, Howard Dean’s campaign has begun to limit his availability to the press, and the candidate himself is watching his words after several recent statements unleashed a storm of criticism from opponents.

Dr. Dean, who has spent two years campaigning as the candidate willing to say what he thinks, initially told reporters that he would be “happy” to discuss his tax policy. Then, as aides glared at him, he immediately said a senior adviser had “veto power” over what he would say.

“I’m not allowed to say I’m happy to do anything anymore,” he added.

The Dean camp has realized that the biggest threat to Dean’s frontrunner status is himself. Dean may still survive in time to receive the nomination, but his mouth is will be sending independent voters to the ballot box to vote for George W. Bush in November - the Dean camp obviously realizes this.

Howard Dean, formerly the “Says-What-He-Thinks” candidate is now the “Says-What-His-Advisors-Tell-Him-To” candidate – meaning that Dean will now be tip-toeing towards the center, abandoning is convictions and warming up to preaching what sells.

I guess that just makes Howard Dean “just another Washington politician.”

Good luck Howard Dean, I can’t wait to hear what your advisors tell you to say next.

Well, here’s a strange study from the prognosticating crystal ball wielding branch of science.

Climate change could drive more than a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to a major new study published in tomorrow’s edition of the journal Nature. The study estimates that climate change projected to take place between now and the year 2050 will place 15 to 37 percent of all species in several biodiversity-rich regions at risk of extinction.

Now is that a quarter of land animals and plants, or a quarter of all land animals and plants in several biodiversity-rich regions?

Scientists studied six regions around the world representing 20 percent of the planet’s land area and projected the future distributions of 1,103 animal and plant species. Three different climate change scenarios were considered - minimal, mid-range and maximum, as was the ability of some species to successfully “disperse,” or move to a different area, thus preventing climate change-induced extinction. The study used computer models to simulate the ways species’ ranges are expected to move in response to changing temperatures and climate. It represents the largest collaboration of scientists to ever study this problem.

I’ll bet Kansas wasn’t one of the “bio-diversity rich” regions in the study.

“This study makes it clear that climate change is the most significant new threat for extinctions this century,” said co-author Lee Hannah, Climate Change Biology Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science (CABS) at Conservation International (CI).

Well, if you don’t count Nuclear Winter, asteroid impacts, a nearby supernova, pesticides, deforestation, human overpopulation, or free market capitalism. What’s more interesting is that they’re not really conducting science so much as just pedaling their new flavor of “disaster flakes”.

As this Tech Central Station article points out, such things aren’t nearly so cut and dried.

Early Vostok data analysis looked at samples centuries apart, and concluded (correctly) that there is a very strong relationship between temperatures and CO2 concentrations. The conclusion for many was obvious: when CO2 goes up, temperatures go up, and vice-versa. This became the basis for a number of scary-looking graphs in books by the scientist Stephen Schneider, former Vice President Al Gore, and others, predicting a much warmer future (since most scientists agree that CO2 will continue to go up for some time).

Well, it’s not as simple as that. When the Vostok data were analyzed for much shorter time periods (decades at a time rather than centuries), something different emerged. H. Fischer and coauthors reported in Science (283: 1712-1714, 1999) that “the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years.” In other words, CO2 changes are caused by temperature changes! Many other recent studies have shown similar results. Studies by Indermuhle et al (2000), Monnin et al (2001), and Mudelsee et al (2001) indicated a lag of 800-1500 years between temperature and CO2. References are available on request.

But for a fascinating insight into the loopy side of science, this speech by Michael Crichton is a must read. How space aliens cause global warming. If you start reading it, you certainly won’t stop. It’s Michael Crichton, for goodness sakes.

This Drudge link was too sweet to pass up. “Kucinich Shows Pie Chart on Radio Debate”

As Kucinich challenged Democratic front-runner Howard Dean for refusing to acknowledge that the Pentagon budget needs to be cut, debate moderator Neal Conan of NPR interrupted.

“Congressman Kucinich is holding up a pie chart, which is not truly effective on radio,” Conan told his listeners.

David Brinkley tells a story of a midwest congressional debate held at a fairground. The challenger spoke a great length from the podium, at one point pausing to refill his drinking glass from the pitcher, which he botched when he poured water all over some blue-haired lady’s head. When it came time for the incumbent to speak, the incumbent merely said “Is anyone here really going to vote for someone who’s too dumb to pour water?” He was re-elected in a landslide.

I think Kucinich just topped that. You can’t accidentally hold up a pie chart on the radio. That really does take stupidity.

Here’s a paranoid conspiracy article from the Arab News of Saudi Arabia. So just where do Saudi Jihadis get their insane ideas? It’s not just from the Mosques but also from their newpapers, which horribly enough run articles written by people who hate the West even more than Jihadis do, the Marxist academic elites in the West.

CAIRO, 6 January 2004 - In a recent interview former Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark said: “I don’t know why we went to Iraq. It’s never been explained.” And all this time silly me thought it had been. Wasn’t it something to do with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction with which he was poised to destroy his neighbors? Or was it to liberate the Iraqi people from a devilish dictator? Ah! Now I remember. Good old Uncle Sam wants to remake the region in its own “free and democratic” image.

And yet this same Saudi paper also runs articles saying that if the Bush administration actually has the guts to follow through on their aim of democratizing the Middle East, he will be the most loved American President since Eisenhower. Of course, those articles are written by Arab Muslims, not their “cultural superiors” who haven’t actually bumped into the real world before.

Certainly, the good general meant the reasons for the invasion hadn’t been explained to his own satisfaction. Who can blame him? Iraq’s WMD have been relegated to such childish myths as Santa and the Tooth Fairy. However, those who indulged in speculation that American designs on Iraq were tied up with power and oil have been vindicated. The label of conspiracy theorist no longer applies.

Tell that “myth” story to all the dead Kurds and Iranians. Further, you know you’ve really, really fallen for a vast conspiracy theory when you think it’s been “proved”.

A recently declassified British government memorandum indicates that following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war when OPEC retaliated against the US for its support of Israel, there was an American government plan to invade the Gulf region and seize its oilfields.

Actually, if you read the documents in question, they merely say that they felt pretty sure that we would do something. In 25 more years maybe the US will release some classified documents that speculate that maybe the British Royal family would bump of Diana, thus “proving” that they did. The BBC doesn’t know the difference between speculating on what a foreign country might do, and that country actually going ahead with doing it.

The newly released document shows that Nixon’s Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger alerted British Ambassador in Washington Lord Cromer of the plan, which was to be implemented as “a last resort”.

The documents in question show nothing but some idle speculation on Schlesinger’s part. “it was no longer obvious to him that the US could not use force”. Oooo. It was no longer obvious we couldn’t act! From this snippet the leftist idiot has visions of war plans floating in her head. The same reports say “Schlesinger did not draw any specific conclusion.” Maybe Schlesinger didn’t, but leftwing nutcases sure did.

Schlesinger told Lord Cromer that the US would not tolerate threats from “underdeveloped, underpopulated” countries. Pre-emptive strikes were not ruled out in the event that Arab governments “elated by the success of the oil weapon” issued greater demands.

Interesting that the word “pre-emptive” doesn’t appear in any such comments. The hippie just threw that in. She should’ve tossed in some “unilateral” and “BUSH=HITLER” while she was at it.

Then there is the Iranian precedent. It is common knowledge that the US engineered the ousting of democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh after the Iranian leader kicked out foreign oil companies in the 1950s.

It’s also common knowledge that a frathouse worth of CIA boys can overthrow any government whenever they get the itch, which does however make one wonder why we can’t seem to do this to governments who actually piss us off, such as Iraq, Iran, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Chirac’s France, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Somalia, Syria, or Panama. But heck, it’s just “common knowledge” to people to “sophisticated” to believe in Santa Claus, yet gullible enough to believe in Marx.

Writer, academic and icon of the left Noam Chomsky, when asked why he thought the US invaded Iraq, said: “The primary goal is to control the immense energy reserves of the Gulf region, Iraq included.”

Well there’s the problem. She thinks Noam Chomsky is an “icon” instead of a babbling fool who even other linguists describe as a babbling fool. All he does is wrap paranoid self-hatred in linguistically interesting sentence structures, and the left swoons. He’ll surely get a statue next to other leftist icons like Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Ceausescu.

Chomsky warns that Iraq’s oil industry could be taken over by foreigners in the future “when attention turns elsewhere” and points out that under a Washington-imposed “status of forces agreement” the US will have the right to maintain its military foothold in Iraq “right at the heart of the world’s major energy reserves”.

I wonder if his little walnut brain is big enough to realize we invaded Iraq from Kuwait, which pumps more oil than Iraq ever will.

Not only is the US concerned with shoring up its own oil supplies; it is keen on preventing its foes and competitors from gaining a foothold.

Can you say “commodity”? Iraqi oil still doesn’t ship to the US. It ships it to France, Germany, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan. Somehow the idiot conspiracy theorists just can’t quite grasp the free market, never having run a lemonade stand. But heck, even the Communist Party of Great Britain says it wasn’t about the oil http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/493/oil.html

A former US ambassador and State Department strategist, George Kennan, suggested as long ago as 1949 that American control over Japanese oil supplies would give the US “veto power” over Japanese industries and military ambitions. His advice was followed. Today read “China and Europe” for “Japan” and you get the picture.

No, to get the picture maybe you should look at the strength of post war Japan.

US up-close-and-personal supervision of the region further ensures that oil producing countries refrain from changing over from petrodollars to euros or some other currency, which in turn means that any oil-purchasing state is obliged to keep large reserves of dollars, thus propping up the one major currency not related to the gold standard. Oil producers can also be “persuaded” to invest their wealth in the US and Britain.

No, if these countries sell the oil, why would they need large reserves of cash to, um, sell the oil?

Those who control the world’s oil, gas and water call the shots. A Washington-based think tank setup in 1997 by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, known as The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) knew this only too well when it drew up a white paper in September 2000 entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century”.

Um, it seems she went right from control of water supplies (what?) to Defense strategy. Time to to take her ritalin.

According to the paper, the US must permanently base forces in Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East; modernize US forces; deploy a global missile defense system; dominate space; control cyberspace and increase defense spending. Today its authors are ensconced in the White House and the Pentagon.

As opposed to already having forces based in Southern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. And boy, that idea of modernizing US forces must come as a shock, especially after the past millenia of continuous force modernizations in the West.

[pointless paragraph of blathering ommited]

Iraq was a test case indeed; one which proved to the world just how much Bush and Blair can get away with in the furtherance of their hegemonic ambitions.

She said “Hegemonic ambitions”!!!! Everyone take a drink! And just remember, the US spending about $600 billion trying to keep Saddam bottled up for 12 years, his refusal to cooperate with the UN, and his routine shooting at US aircraft patrolling the UN mandated no-fly zones had absolutely nothing to do with the war.

On July 10, 2002, Rand Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec gave a 24-slide presentation to the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon on defense matters. The last slide headed “Grand Strategy for the Middle East” read ominously: “Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot; Egypt the prize. The pundits have yet to figure this out.”

Egypt??? Egypt??? NO WAR FOR TOURISM!!!!

Anyone still shaking their head in the belief that invading Iraq was an essential component of the war on terror with the country’s mega oil reserves of little consequence might like to remember this. The Bush family fortune derives from oil; Vice President Dick Cheney formerly headed Halliburton, while American oil giants contributed more than $26 million to ensure George W. Bush’s election. There is even an oil tanker named after Presidential Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Ok, she’s fallen back to the Illuminati, Freemasons, and Sasquatch. I think she’s spent too much time nosing through the big book of Conspiray Theories.

In the absence of Iraq’s WMD and until Iraq is freed from foreign forces, the official US and British line just won’t wash. The US didn’t exactly help its “we don’t care about oil” case when it prioritized the securing of Iraq’s oilfields and Ministry of Oil, while allowing looters free access to hospitals, schools, private homes and museums.

Maybe it’s because the Iraqi economy is completely dependent on oil revenues, but then that’s probably to sophisticated for a blathering idiot to comprehend.

As Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is fond of saying: I don’t buy it. Do you?

This drivel was brought to you by Linda Heard, whose other idiot droolings include
Journalists Die, the Networks Lie, Iraqis Ask “Why?”
Which includes fabuluous writing such as

Sky’s David Chater said he saw the tank turn towards the hotel and spew out its deadly load. He wonders how independent reporters (as opposed to embeds) can continue to do their jobs when such danger emanates from their own side. Not from the Iraqi side but from ‘our boys’.

Which not only combines some of the worst in tank porn, but also has to put ‘our boys’ in scare quotes while pointedly making them more dangerous than the Iraqis, who fill mass graves when not busy making Americans commit suicide in the trenches and setting themselves on fire everywhere.

Of course, she’s also a lackey for the Palestinian jihadis, and writes screeds like this with such delightful bits as

Amid a background of burgeoning anti-Americanism, it would behoove the U.S. administration to take a long hard look at itself in the mirror. Like the portrait of Dorian Grey, the picture it is showing to the world is becoming more ugly each day. Any attempts it may make to claim the moral high ground in future are likely to be met with derision as long as it uses kidnap, torture, secrecy, human rights abuses and execution as its tools of trade.

Yes. A moonbat bleats, and the Jihadis are drinking it in. Next time we see thousands of civilians die in a fireball, we need not ask why. Linda Heard provides all the reasons the Jihadis need.

The UK Telegraph has a wonderful opion piece about Bjorn Lomborg and the environmental movement.

Lomborg was of course the environmentalist who actually took a look at the raw data and showed that many claims by environmentalists were daffy, if not disingenuous or even fraudulent. For this he was smeared, attacked, and lambasted in the environmentalist press. However, his book was recently vindicated, and the affair raises deep questions about the nature of environmentalists.

Concern about this is totally legitimate, but by the time this concern became a “movement”, its issues had already been hijacked by socio-political ideologies. These ideologies ranged from Leftist and anti-capitalist to the anti-humanist (people in the extremes of the animal rights movement for whom making our own species the measure and pinnacle of creation is seen as a fundamental error). It is no coincidence that when one collides with committed environmentalists they very often wear anti-war buttons, for saving Saddam’s regime has featured as prominently in their agendas, if not more so, than the saving of rainforests.

Environmentalists have been well described as “watermelons”. Green on the outside and red on the inside. It’s too true.