…is the gift that keeps on giving.

I could not resist one more video:

>.

[Hat tip: American Digest.]

[NOTE: And (in unrelated news), for now I am keeping away from the Alvin Greene story. I don’t know what to make of it at this point; it is practically surreal.]

…hurts British pensioners.

That’s been remedied.

[See especially 2:58-4:31, and 7:10 to end]:

[ADDENDUM: And this is beyond parody. The degree of incompetence in this administration’s handling of the oil spill is quite shocking.]

Jon A. Krosnick is a professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford University. As such, he no doubt knows how to spin a story, and he has done a bit of that in an op-ed he wrote that recently appeared in the NY Times, in which he cited a new poll indicating a large majority of Americans still believe in anthropogenic global warming.

It’s not difficult to check out Krosnick’s statements against the poll itself, because the Times has very thoughtfully supplied a link to it.

So, let’s see. Krosnick states:

When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.

Sounds as though belief in AGW is pretty overwhelming and unequivocal. But look at the actual figures, and they seem to suggest something more muted and less clear. For example, after ascertaining in question Q13 that 74% of respondents believe that global warming itself is a reality, the pollsters then asked, in question Q14, “[assuming global warming is happening] do you think a rise in the world’s temperature is being [would be] caused by…” and then gives several possible choices. The answers ran as follows: “things people do” 30%; “natural causes” 25%; “both equally” 45%.

So a roughly equal number of people (30%, 25%) felt that warming was either caused completely by human activities or caused completely by natural forces. Anyone who believed global warming to be some sort of mix was not given a choice of an answer that expressed any possible degree of mixing except “equal.” So anyone who felt there was any possibility of even some slight degree of human-caused warming would be likely to choose that answer as the closest approximation of his/her beliefs. This would tend to overstate the scope and intensity of the belief in AGW.

The rest of the survey offers few surprises. People think industrial pollution should be limited (there are many reasons to favor this that have nothing to do with AGW, by the way). They are not in favor of higher taxes to do this, but are in favor of tax credits. And so on.

The Krosnick piece discusses Climategate and its revelations as follows:

Growing public skepticism has, in recent months, been attributed to news reports about e-mail messages hacked from the computer system at the University of East Anglia in Britain (characterized as showing climate scientists colluding to silence unconvinced colleagues) and by the discoveries of alleged flaws in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Our new survey discredited this claim in multiple ways. First, we found no decline in Americans’ trust in environmental scientists: 71 percent of respondents said they trust these scientists a moderate amount, a lot or completely, a figure that was 68 percent in 2008 and 70 percent in 2009. Only 9 percent said they knew about the East Anglia e-mail messages and believed they indicated that climate scientists should not be trusted, and only 13 percent of respondents said so about the I.P.C.C. reports’ alleged flaws.

So it seems that not many people in the survey lost faith in climate scientists as a result of the Climategate brouhaha. But Krosnick fails to mention a statistic that especially interested me, which is how many survey respondents had actually heard of Climategate in the first place.

This answer should be no surprise: relatively few, it turns out. If you look at question Q53, about whether respondents remember hearing anything in the news during the past six months about emails sent by climate scientists, 68% do not remember as compared to 32% who do. In the next question, when the 32% who did remember something about it were asked if anything about that story indicated whether climate scientists should be trusted or not, 12% said it indicated nothing about it, 9% said trusted, and 9% said not trusted.

This should be no surprise, either, considering how the MSM virtually ignored (or, if they did cover it, “swiftboated”) the Climategate story. Most people have neither read the story nor heard about it, and of the ones who did I would guess that many of them mostly read reports pooh-poohing it, exonerating the scientists, or even talking about whether the imaginary “hacker” who revealed the emails should be punished.

The situation is very similar (and even a bit worse) when a similar set of questions was asked about the mistakes made by the IPC in issuing its reports (see questions Q54 and Q54b). This time fully 76% had heard nothing of this versus 24% who had heard something. Of those who had somehow managed to ferret out (by hook or by crook) news of the mistakes in the IPC reports, only 4% believe the news indicates they should trust in the IPC reports, 13% believe they should not trust them, and 6% say the news of the errors does not indicate anything either way about whether the reports should be trusted.

It would have been instructive, as well, to have interviewed the people who trust and those who distrust and to have discovered whether their views had changed as a result of reading about Climategate or the IPC mistakes. But even without that information, this survey shows why the MSM is so intent on hiding news it does not like: we can reasonably conclude that coverups still work. Even in this day of alternate news sources, if the MSM doesn’t report something, most people don’t hear about it.

…how the Democratic Party left them.

It’s another “change” story. The money quote:

The reason we feel this way is that we think Obama didn’t just let the Democrats’ mask slip, he yanked it off completely and revealed the true horrors that may have always lurked unbeknownst to us in this party.

Is this where Obama got the idea for a little strategic ass-kicking?

(By the way, the lead singer is Hugh Laurie, star of the TV show “House,” in his younger—and less curmudgeonly—days.)

[Hat tip: commenter “liamalpha.”]

…that no one will believe, continuing its long slide downwards from news organization to propagandist for the left.

They both feel the need to be sexually appealing to men. And this may give them something surprising in common.

But it’s not all rosy for heterosexual men, either. Women seem to prefer arrogant guys who engage in risky behavior.

Twas ever thus:

[NOTE: The above song has an odd history—was it by the Crystals or the Blossoms? Let’s blame Phil Spector.]

Yesterday was primary day in a great many states. It was widely billed as a challenge for incumbents, and as Michael Barone writes:

…[O]ne way to look at the results is that no incumbent member of Congress lost his or her bid for reelection.

But Barone says incumbents don’t have that much to rejoice about, either, because their margins of victory were far less than would be ordinarily expected, and their day of reckoning may merely have been postponed till November 2.

We’ve been anticipating that 2010 election for quite some time now, but in political terms it remains distant. There’s still a lot of money to be spent and name-calling to be done in the five loooong months between now and then.

As Barone points out, the selection of incumbent Blanche Lincoln is an especially interesting phenomenon. She was in big trouble after the passage of HCR, so one might imagine that her primary victory represents a triumph of sorts. Yes and no. She lives to fight another day. But her prospects in November are shaky, at least at the moment. She won yesterday, but not by much for an incumbent.

And conservatives have something to cheer about in her win, because it represents a defeat for the labor unions and especially their pet project card check. Unions put big money behind Lincoln’s Democrat opponent in the primary, Halter. Lincoln had ended up opposing card check, knowing it was very unpopular in her state of Arkansas and would impact negatively on businesses there. As Barone observes:

Big labor decided to teach her—and all Democratic members of Congress who were quailing at the prospect of voting for card check—a lesson. The lesson would be that, however much a vote for card check would reduce your chances of winning a general election, opposition to card check would result in your defeat in a Democratic primary. Their ready and willing instrument was Bill Halter, whose path to higher office seemed otherwise occluded. At the beginning of March he announced his candidacy and proclaimed himself the champion of the working man. Blanche Lincoln, in agonized response, proclaimed herself the target of outside interests. In a matter of weeks labor unions and moveon.org—originally formed to defend Bill Clinton against impeachment—sent millions to Bill Halter’s campaign.

To no avail. By winning her relatively narrow victory, Lincoln thwarted union plans to effectively threaten the primary victories of candidates around the country who oppose card check:

It’s a huge defeat for the unions. White House political operatives are already complaining, as Ben Smith notes in Politico, that “Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise,” [a senior White House] official said.

I couldn’t be happier about that loss of cash, although I have sympathy for the (sometimes involuntary) union members who have no say in how their dues money is used politically after it is extracted from their hands (see this for my opinion of card check). It is a special and delicious irony that the only reason unions were able to spend this sort of money to try to unseat Lincoln was the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, a ruling previously excoriated by the left as tending to help big business. Funny thing, that.

In other primary news, Harry Reid can heave a small sigh of relief at the Nevada Republicans’ selection of Sharron Angle, tea-party-backed candidate whose especially conservative views and associations will be fully exploited by the Reid camp in the months to come. It may not matter, however; Reid remains deeply unpopular. But Angle’s victory reminds us that party primaries don’t always lead to the strongest candidates the party might offer.

Here’s a blog that would like to remind you, in case it’s slipped your mind.

Criticized even (or perhaps especially) by supporters for not showing enough passion and anger about the Gulf oil spill, President Obama has set about rectifying that situation. But, like many such efforts, it appears to be an over-correction. And like many of Obama’s forays into his street-fighter persona, it appears to be both tone-deaf and classless:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Defensive, self-focused, and then shifting to the tough trash-talk, the statement sets a disturbing and awkward tone that ends up projecting false bravado.

Once a president has established a public persona he needs to mostly stick to it. He can fine-tune it here and there. But it doesn’t work to veer in a completely opposite direction. Obama as president has been the unemotional professor, not the ass-kicker—and, although in private he may kick ass with the best of them, he sounds a jarring note of trying too hard when he steps out of verbal character this way.

[NOTE: Just to show I’m not picking solely on Obama, I’d like to call your attention to this post of mine from 2005 in which I lament the decline of decorum and class in public statements (particularly interviews) from our elected officials on both sides of the aisle.]

[ADDENDUM: I was doing a little research on the phrase “kick ass,” and one of the things that came up was this song from a recent movie of that title. Seems oddly apropos:

[ADDENDUM: The whole thing reminds me somehow of John Kerry and the hunting license.]

…but Obama’s performance as president seems to be encouraging the ranks of the Republican Jewish Coalition to swell, making the term “Jewish Republican” seem a bit less of an oxymoron.