Right Wing Nut House

These pics of the dwarf planet Pluto are not only really, really kewl, but how they were created is pretty kewl too.

After more than four years of processing on 20 hand-built computers, the best views ever captured of Pluto are now available.

Working from 384 images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in which the image of Pluto itself was just a few pixels across, astronomer Marc Buie and his team at the Southwest Research Institute stitched together the maps of Pluto you see here.

“It also shows you what I consider to be my best guess for what the true color of Pluto would be if you were puttering around near it in a spacecraft,” Buie said in a NASA teleconference.

Pluto has mostly been in the news in recent years for its demotion from planet to dwarf planet and subsequent attempts to get it lumped back in with the bigger, round objects of the solar system.

But astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, aka @PlutoKiller on Twitter, said the question of the classification of the celestial body doesn’t merit the attention it’s gotten.

“That’s really not an interesting question to ask,” said Brown, who was not involved with the research. “It’s a great place to study.”

Specifically, what’s fascinating to Brown and Buie is the tremendous amount of change that has been observed on Pluto, particularly between images obtained in 1994 and 2003. Based on the new processing of the photos, there has been more change on Pluto than Earth or Mars.

“You’re looking at the surface in the solar system where there are the biggest changes we’ve ever seen,” Brown said.

First, the series of pictures:

They’ve already discovered one dwarf planet that is bigger than Pluto so it would seem the re-classification of the former 9th planet was a good idea.

But given the fact that even Hubble can only resolve the tiny body to what amounts to a faint smudge, these pictures are awesome. Also, given what scientist Mark Buie had to work with as far as funding to get this project done, I think some consideration for a Nobel might be in order:

The computing power necessary to turn the pixels of Pluto into the global map seen above is considerable. Buie hand-wrote all the code in a combination of IDL, a scientific programming language, and C. But when he finished and began to crunch the data, it appeared that it would take decades for the calculations to complete.

So, he took the funding he had and scraped together 20 computers to do the work in parallel.

“I bought these little shuttle boxes and a processor and memory. I got [the price] down to $450 per computer and I had enough to buy 20 computers and have them all grind,” he said. “That’s about the cheapest supercomputer you can manage.”

His team’s handiwork includes this little video of Pluto rotating:

It’s been a while since I wrote about the New Horizon’s spacecraft that recently passed the point where it is now closer to Pluto than it is to earth. It is the fastest moving object ever created by man, speeding toward a swing around Jupiter to get a gravity assist at more than 31,000 MPH. The previous record was held by Voyager I which is now approaching the outer reaches of the heliosphere.

I wrote of the mission back in 2005:

One of the most amazing things to me, a 51 year old amateur space nut, is that the missions NASA has launched to the planets over the last 40 years have been conducted largely under the radar of press coverage and interest by the American people. This state of affairs will probably be looked on 500 years from now by historians with some measure of astonishment. They will marvel at the fact that mankind’s initial attempts to explore their solar system neighborhood would have been met with a collective yawn by a media that routinely reports every pimple that breaks out on Brittany Spear’s face but can’t find the time or effort to describe the wondrous, almost magical efforts to answer questions that have been asked by humanity since our ancestors were loping effortlessly across the African savannah.

Who are we? Why are we here? Are we alone?

In a very real sense, NASA’s New Horizon’s mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond will close the first chapter in our quest to solve some of the most fundamental mysteries of the universe. And the fact that this effort has been given such short shrift by our celebrity-obsessed, trivia reporting media reveals much about our manic efforts to remain ignorant about matters so sublime in their implications for adding to the encyclopedia of human understanding that one could actually question the collective sanity of the human race if not for the fact that there are plenty of examples already.

Pluto is such a bizarre object, some of its characteristics are science fiction-like. Scientists are guessing that it’s so cold on Pluto, that the atmosphere actually freezes on its outward leg away from the sun so that it descends to the planet’s surface. This may spell trouble for New Horizons because if that is the case, it will almost certainly obscure any surface features we might be able to photograph.

But it is the last leg of the mission that promises to expand our understanding of the origins of the solar system tremendously. After the Pluto flyby, New Horizons is scheduled to continue onward to the mysterious Kuiper Belt. Objects in the Belt are thought to be left over from the very early days of the solar system’s existence. Studying them may make us revise our theories on how the planets formed.

The Pluto flyby is scheduled for July, 2015.

Ever wonder how secure our stash of nuclear weapons are at bases all over Europe?

I never did - before today.

Hans Kristensen writing at the Federation of American Scientists Security Blog:

A group of people last week managed to penetrate deep onto Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium where the U.S. Air Force currently deploys 10-20 nuclear bombs.

Fortunately, the people were not terrorists but peace activists from a group known as Vredesactie, who managed to climb the outer base fence, walk cross the runway, breach a double-fenced security perimeter, and walk into the very center of the air base alongside the aircraft shelters where the nuclear bombs are thought to be stored in underground vaults.

The activists penetrated nearly one kilometer onto the base over more than an hour before a single armed security guard appeared and asked what they were doing. Soon more arrived to arrest the activists, who later described: “The military blindfolded for hours, they forced us to kneel in the snow, arms outstretched at 90° and threatened us if we intend to return to the base in the months to come.”

The activists videotaped their entire walk across the base. The security personnel confiscated cameras, but the activists removed the memory card first and smuggled it out of the base. Ahem…

Here’s the video of their exploits:

Absolutely unbelievable. The video shows the activists strolling into the top secret area where the nukes are kept in bunkers. They deface one of the bunkers with some signage and then continue walking the length of the restricted area.

A child could have penetrated what passes for security at the site. And the fact that they actually had to wait in order to achieve the object of their little excursion - to be arrested - places what happened during this incident in the realm of black comedy.

Jeffrey Lewis of Arms Control Wonk has more:

It looks like the activists approached Kleine-Brogel from the farms to the south of the airbase. Indeed, another group hopped the fence in November 2009. Apparently, they planned to go out on the runway and get arrested just like the previous group in November 2009. But, according to the group’s website “to their surprise, they were able to walk for over an hour on the runway.” (One of the press reports suggests it was forty minutes.)

The base is surrounded by signs indicating that the area is patrolled by guard dogs, but Milou was nowhere to be found.

Eventually, they noticed an open gate to the area where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored. Belgian peace groups had previously identified the area based on a map handed out an airshow. (As you can see from their website, they had very good maps.)

It looks like this was a side gate — apparently it had been left open to keep from freezing shut — so the activists were able to enter the secure area and approach one of the hardened aircraft shelters from the rear. If you could get inside, it would look something like this.

Lewis adds, “They then walked the length of the plaza — having traversed both the width of the base, and now the width of the secure area for nuclear weapons — when security force finally showed up.”

The Belgium security guy was clueless. Evidently, his weapon was unloaded and he seemed annoyed that his routine had been disturbed.

Lewis:

The reality is that significant shortcomings exists in the security of European airbases where US nuclear weapons are stored. That was made absolutely clear to me on my visit to SHAPE — and it was reported in the 2008 Air Force Blue Ribbon Review. Host-nations are supposed to provide security but they often cut corners. This is basically confirmed by the Belgian commander of the base, who explained that he just doesn’t have enough security forces:

Onze luchtmachtbasis is in totaliteit 450 hectare groot. Een derde is bosgebied waarin ik me drie weken kan bevinden zonder te worden gezien. Vandaar dat we onze bewaking, gelet op onze getalsterkte, concentreren op enkele gevoelige zones.

That works out to, more or less, “Our airbase is 450 hectares in size. A third is wooded areas in which I could stay perfectly well for three weeks without being seen. That is why we concentrate our surveillance on a few sensitive zones where there are aircraft and equipment.” (The translation is by the Open Source Center.)

If the Belgian commander concentrates security on “a few sensitive zones where there are aircraft and equipment…” how in God’s name did these activists go undetected for an hour? Is this what the bloke considers “concentration” of his security forces?

God help us.

Lewis isn’t shy about telling us how to rectify the situation:

As excuses go “It’s a big, wooded base and I don’t have that many troops” doesn’t cut it. In fact, when we are talking about nuclear weapons, it frankly sucks. When it comes to securing nuclear weapons, the United States Air Force has standards for both denial and recapture. If the Belgians and other NATO members won’t provide the forces and equipment necessary to meet both standards, then it is time to put the weapons on a US airbase.

The most direct route to securing US nuclear weapons in Europe is to immediately - like yesterday - consolidate all remaining forward deployed nuclear weapons to just one or two US airbases in Europe. Take your pick from Aviano, Incirlik, Lakenheath and Ramstein. This would immediately improve the overall security of the weapons, while starting a dialogue about whether forward-deployed weapons are really essential to maintaining NATO’s nuclear character twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is a point that several of us made in a letter to the President

Our European allies have always been of two minds with regard to basing nuclear weapons on their soil. Privately, they wish the arrangement to continue while publicly, they assure their restive left wings that they want the nukes out. We’ve been dealing with this kind of two-faced policy for almost half a century so I suppose we should be used to it.

But unless our allies are going to get much more serious about securing these weapons, perhaps it would be safer to do as Lewis and his colleagues have suggested and move all the nukes currently stored on sites where there is local security responsibility to a couple of US Air Force bases. The price for a security breach involving terrorists or organized criminal elements would be just too high.

This is actually reminiscent of a US Air Force scandal from a couple of years ago where a shocking lapse in security occurred in this country:

A B-52 from the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot was supposed to transfer unarmed air-launched cruise missiles to Barksdale to be decommissioned, but munitions loaders accidentally attached nuclear-armed missiles to the pylons. The missiles were flown to Barksdale and sat unguarded on the tarmac for several hours before anyone realized what happened, some 30 hours after the mistake was made.

The 5th Bomb Wing commander, two group commanders and the 5th Munitions Squadron commander were relieved of their commands.

The Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff also eventually were canned as a result of this, and a couple of other nuclear screw-ups. Gates sent a message at that time that this kind of laxity with nuclear weapons would not be tolerated. The lesson apparently took because we’ve had no such lapses since then - at least, none of which we are aware.

Those weapons in Europe are being targeted by the START talks. Given the questionable need for nukes that are forward based in Europe today, perhaps, in the end, getting rid of them would be the best option.

It should be clear to all of us by now that the single driving factor in this economic downturn was the meltdown in home values. All the talk about how the big banks screwed us over is relevant only as it relates to the massive devaluation of our largest personal asset; our homes. If home values had stayed relatively stable, or come down at a reasonable rate, the bank crisis may have been manageable. It may have been seen as a bad couple of quarters rather than the catastrophe it became.

But that didn’t happen so here we are. And where we are may very well precipitate another huge devaluation of homes which would then lead to another round of bailouts and takeovers. This is because according to most experts, there is still slack in home values that has yet to be taken in; that our homes are still overvalued despite dropping 30-35-40%.

This has created a situation that is evidently not unprecedented except in scale; people with “underwater” mortgages - where they owe more than their house is worth - simply mailing the keys to their domicile to the bank and walking away from their mortgage obligations. Many simply stop payments and dare the bank to foreclose and evict them. Others find cheaper quarters by either renting, or taking advantage of cheaper mortgages.

There were a few of these walkaways during the housing bust of the early 1990’s. But today, nearly 5 million mortgages - about 10% of all residential mortgages in the country - are underwater (defined as a mortgage where the value of the house is 75% or less than the principle). And while no one is keeping track, one outfit has estimated that a half million people took the walkaway route last year.

Financial advisors are at the point of actually urging their clients to walkaway. Sure, their credit rating will take a hit. Better that than pouring money down a black hole where you will never realize any return on your investment.

There are a couple of ethical questions associated with walkaways that need to be addressed; one is personal, the other is an apparent double standard in the application of society’s disapproval.

Case in point; a New York developer walked away from paying the loan on 11,000 apartments in Manhattan:

The rules are different, though, for the walkaway of all walkaways.

That title is reserved for what happened to one of New York’s trophy properties, the 56-building Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex. Spanning 80 acres on Manhattan’s east side, it’s the largest single-owned residential area in the city. Its red brick buildings, built by Metropolitan Life in the 1940s for World War II veterans, are still a haven for the city’s middle class.

Commercial real-estate firm Tishman and its partner, investment firm BlackRock, paid $5.4 billion to buy the property from MetLife in late 2006 — right at the market’s peak. They hoped to make money by converting rent-regulated apartments into luxury condos and raising rents.

Then the housing crash hit. The value now: $1.8 billion.

And you thought you overpaid for your house.

“They made assumptions that things would grow to the moon, and things certainly did not,” said Len Blum, a managing partner at investment bank Westwood Capital.

Tishman said last week that it was turning the property back over to creditors to avoid filing for bankruptcy protection. In recent weeks, Tishman failed to restructure $4.4 billion in debt, and couldn’t find another buyer, according to a statement from the company.

Will Tishman come in for less disapprobation than a homeowner who walks away from a mortgage where he is paying 40% more than the house is worth? It’s a certainty that banks are treating Tishman differently than the ordinary homeowner:

Walking away isn’t risk-free. A foreclosure stays on a consumer’s credit record for seven years and can send a credit score (based on a scale of 300 to 850) plunging by as much as 160 points, according to Fair Isaac Corp., which provides tools for analyzing credit records. A lower credit score means auto and other loans are likely to come with much higher interest rates, and credit card issuers may charge more interest or refuse to issue a card.

In addition, many states give lenders varying degrees of scope to seize bank deposits, cars or other assets of people who default on mortgages.

Even so, in neighborhoods with high concentrations of foreclosures, “it’s going to be really difficult to prevent a cascade effect” as one strategic default emboldens others to take that drastic step, says Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern University. A study by researchers at Northwestern and the University of Chicago found that as many as one in four defaults may be strategic.

The double standard is easy to understand, less easy to justify. The fact is, a bank is less apt to severely penalize someone who owes them billions as opposed to someone who is into them for a few hundred thousand. The “sin” may be similar, but repentance is more complicated. It’s as if a rich man and a poor man both stole a loaf of bread; the poor man was forced to knee walk up a rocky mountain and say the rosary while the rich man got away with saying one our father, one hail mary, and a glory be (old line catholics will recognize that penance immediately).

Ideally, the same sin should engender the same penance or punishment regardless of wealth or social station. But in this case, we hold people and corporations to different standards of behavior and hence, different attitudes toward walkaways.

But it is the personal ethics of abandoning a promise to repay monies loaned in good faith by a lending institution based on your past history of good credit and timely repayment that is of most relevance for us. What happens when so many walk away from their obligations not because they can’t pay but because paying what they owe is a bad personal financial decision?

We can all sympathize with the walkaway and wonder if we’d do the same in their situation. But from an ethical standpoint, this is really rotten. By walking away, these homeowners are making it more difficult for the rest of us to get a homeloan or refinance our existing home. This is an inherently selfish act in that the walkaway fails to take into account the effect on the community and society.

And then there’s the prospect if there are enough walkaways, a tipping point will be reached and all that bad paper that is still on the balance books of major banks will cause another meltdown necessitating still more bailouts and takeovers when home values go into another death spiral.

What happens if five million Americans decide to stop overpaying their mortgages and mail the keys back to the bank? There would be a sharp decline in housing values. There would be another downward leg to the financial crisis, with a big hit to the capital of banks and other institutions holding large mortgage portfolios.

I think the housing decline would be a healthy thing, as this market is still overvalued. I don’t believe we would see a deflationary spiral, a widespread collapse of debt values, and a descent into a full-fledged Great Depression II. This was the great fear when the bubble first started popping in late 2006.

But since late 2008, the Bernanke Doctrine has showed that the modern Fed has the tools to keep this from happening. Administration officials can say whatever they want, but Too-Big-To-Fail is still reality.

What of the decline in individual purchasing power, the so-called adverse wealth effect, that would come with lower housing values? It would be muted because making mortgage payments on an overvalued house diminishes purchasing power just as badly.

But the net effect of the Great Walkaway would still be a strong downdraft in the overall economy.

I don’t for a moment believe that 5 million people will strategically default on their mortgages. But who can guess where the tipping point might be? Who can be sure that 1 million or 2 million such defaults wouldn’t crash the economy again?

All because people selfishly took stock of their personal financial situation and decided it was OK to saddle the rest of us with what is, after all, their problem. I say they have no ethical right to do it and that Congress should make it easier for banks to collect from these voluntary deadbeats.

Not surprisingly, Congress will treat these people as victims and no doubt either bail them out (one estimate is it would take about $750 billion to pay off the difference between what underwater borrowers owe and what their houses are worth), or make some accommodation with credit reporting services to give these strategic deadbeats a pass. Encouraging irresponsibility has been the hallmark of the Obama administration housing policies so why should we expect anything to be different here?

For the vast majority of us who have suffered a big hit on the value of our homes but continue to remain faithful to our obligations, this whole walkaway phenomenon is a slap in the face. We are being played for suckers. And it’s depressing to think that rewards will accrue to those ethically challenged scofflaws who don’t play by the rules but come out smelling like roses anyway.

My latest at PJ Media is up. It’s a recap of the Illinois primary races for governor and senator, with some analysis thrown in.

A sample:

Illinois held its primary on Tuesday and the usual run of rogues and rascals vied with each other for the opportunity to make their fame and fortune purloining the public purse. Since the opportunities for graft and corruption in the state are nearly endless, one wag suggested that instead of the winners posing for the traditional picture taken in victory, they should make things easy on the voter and get their mug shot picture taken at the same time.

The Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor is Scott Lee Cohen, a pawnbroker and cleaning supply distributor by trade who financed his campaign from his own personal fortune. Cohen was arrested in 2005 on domestic battery charges, which were thrown out when his accuser failed to show up in court. This upstanding citizen could be a heartbeat — or an impeachment inquiry — away from the governor’s office. Just ask current Governor Pat Quinn, who slipped into the top job from his lieutenant governor’s post when disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich was impeached for, among other things, trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

Perhaps it is symptomatic of the times that both the Republican and Democratic gubernatorial primaries ended the night too close to call. The fact is, there was not much excitement generated by any of the top-tier candidates for either governor or senator as evidenced by the paltry turnout of less than 30% of eligible voters. This compared to a usual primary turnout of more than 35%.

But if passions were at a low ebb, election night made up for it with some real nail-biters.

Another tidbit on Cohen; he apparently lied to everyone about the nature of the attack on his girlfriend - who was arrested and convicted of prostitution a few months prior to the attack. Cohen claims he never touched her.The police report says he held a knife to her throat.

Who ya gonna believe? The pawnbroker or the police? In this town, that’s a tough call.

The problem with being associated with a party made up of very large numbers of kooks, loons, paranoids, nitwits, and ignorant twits is that after a while, you begin to question your own sanity, your own grasp on reality. You begin to wonder if there isn’t, in fact, something wrong with you rather than the other way around.

Indeed, if a majority are nutzo and you aren’t, who’s to say what’s reasonable, or rational? Sounds like a Rod Serling script. If he didn’t write it, maybe I should give it a shot.

A new poll of more than 2,000 self-identified Republican voters illustrates the incredible paranoia enveloping the party and the intense pressure drawing lawmakers further and further away from political moderation.

The numbers speak for themselves — a large portion of GOP voters think that President Obama is racist, socialist or a non-US citizen — though, when considering them, it is important to note that a disproportionate percentage of respondents are from GOP strongholds in the South (42 percent) as opposed to the Northeast (11 percent). Also note that this is a poll of self-identified Republicans, which means that independent Tea Party types are not included.

Stein is being fair by excluding the tea party movement from this madness, although my guess would be that many if not a majority are at least nominal Republicans like myself. We just don’t know if they are more or less wacky than their erstwhile compatriots in the GOP.

At times, it’s like being in an inside out nightmare, where otherwise perfectly sane, rational people look at you as if you’re from another planet if you don’t agree that the president is deliberately trying to destroy the country, or wants the terrorists to win.

I want to believe it when many on the right tell me that the paranoid fringe is just that - a small subset of believers who are over-represented on the internet. This may even be true in some sections of the country like the northeast. But even if you believe that Research 2000, a reputable polling company, would collude with the Daily Kos in cooking the books on Republican attitudes toward the president, you can’t escape the uncomfortable feeling if you visit as many websites, and read as many comment threads as I do that it is a false hope to think this kind of deranged thinking is limited to a small number of outriders on the right:

# 39 percent of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached, 29 percent are not sure, 32 percent said he should not be voted out of office.

# 36 percent of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the United States, 22 percent are not sure, 42 percent think he is a natural citizen.

# 31 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a “Racist who hates White people” — the description once adopted by Fox News’s Glenn Beck. 33 percent were not sure, and 36 percent said he was not a racist.

# 63 percent of Republicans think Obama is a socialist, 16 percent are not sure, 21 percent say he is not

# 24 percent of Republicans believe Obama wants “the terrorists to win,” 33 percent aren’t sure, 43 percent said he did not want the terrorist to win.

# 21 percent of Republicans believe ACORN stole the 2008 election, 55 percent are not sure, 24 percent said the community organizing group did not steal the election.

# 23 percent of Republicans believe that their state should secede from the United States, 19 percent aren’t sure, 58 percent said no.

# 53 percent of Republicans said they believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Obama.

Majorities - sometimes vast majorities - of Republicans believe, or are not sure (too embarrassed to say so, knowing how ridiculous it makes them look?), that Obama wasn’t born here, that he’s a racist, that think he’s a socialist, that believe he wants the terrorists to win, that believe ACORN stole the 2008 election, and think that Sarah Palin is more qualified than Obama to be president.

One bring spot; Only 42% of Republicans believe, or aren’t sure, if their state should secede from the union. That’s a relief, although think of all the flag making companies who would experience a boom if we dropped a few states and had to order millions of new star spangled banners.

Republicans and conservatives will be angry at me for highlighting this poll. Methinks they are misdirecting their rage. Perhaps they should try being angry at themselves and their fellow lobotomized inmates for eschewing reality and allowing their worst impulses to take over their thought processes, sending them headlong into the dark without lamp or lantern where they lose themselves in their own paranoid imaginings.

To make things even more depressing, they will come here and defend their beliefs. Not so many birthers anymore (after all, they only want to see Obama’s real birth certificate). But they will write volumes about how Obama really is a racist, or a socialist, or how his policies are designed to destroy the country, or saddest of all, how his sympathies lie with the enemy in our War on Terror.

Hofstadter found this recurring theme of self justification for paranoid beliefs back in 1964:

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

Anyone who has spent 5 minutes reading a birther screed recognizes this instantly. The same can be said for many who write about Obama’s socialism (fascism), or his secret Muslim sympathies. They will lay out their irrational case as rationally as you please, using “evidence” of questionable provenance (usually some other fellow conspirator’s writings). The point is not so much to convince you they are right, but to reinforce their own beliefs, their own worldview. So armed, they will try to enter into discussion with those a little less beholden to their paranoid universe and either meet with laughter or a less than charitable dismissal of their cockeyed beliefs. Rather then deterring them, it reinforces their belief that they have a corner on wisdom; that only they can see through the smooth talking, seemingly normal enemy and peg him for the true villain he is.

Before I leave this subject, might I suggest that Kos and Research 2000 conduct a similar poll of self described Democrats asking questions about Bush; Did he perpetrate 9/11? Was he seeking dictatorial powers? Did he take us to war for oil? Did he want black people to die after Katrina? Or how about questions about the GOP: Are a majority of Republicans racists? Homophobes? Are they warmongers?

I could think of half dozen more questions that I have absolutely no doubt would reveal a large - perhaps as large as the percentage of Republicans who believe loony stuff - who would answer “yes” or “not sure” to those questions. And that presents us with a problem, doesn’t it? If a majority of both parties aren’t grounded in reality, how can we expect the people they elect to be any better at grasping the truth about the opposition? If a majority of both sides are paranoid about the other, there really is very little hope that we can ever come together to get anything vital done.

And that should cause the rational among us to fear the future.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Monica Showalter of IDB and technology writer Charles Martin to talk about the budget, and the latest on Climategate.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

Since I abhor easy answers, pat responses, and conventional wisdom, I will take a stab at examining this question from the flawed, but earnest perspective of a layman who respects the work of legitimate scientists and who still believes the possibility that global warming could be a big problem for mankind. (Note: What can be done about it is an entirely different question.)

I will not seek to summarize the shocking revelations of the past few months that have resulted in legitimate questions being raised about some of the cornerstones of the IPCC 2007 report that forms the basis of government actions to mitigate climate change. For that, I will point you to Climate Audit or Climate Depot. There you will find links to the major stories that describe the fraud, the blunders, the failure to properly vet and follow IPCC’s own procedures that have debunked, or otherwise called into question major and minor aspects of climate change science.

But let’s put this in perspective. Some of these revelations are more serious than others. Those trumpeting the Himalayan glacier story that showed as bogus the idea of those ice sheets disappearing by 2035 thus “proving” that global warming is a crock, fail to note that the glaciers are still retreating at an accelerated rate, although the Indian government report is unsure if climate change is the major cause.

Is that as important a piece of evidence as the data sets on temperatures that were apparently falsified or misapplied? Those temps were calculated into how many climate change models, how many scientific papers? That study by Jones is in the 2007 IPCC report.

Compared to one study of one small part of the world that has been laughably shown to be a politically motivated use of science, I daresay that screwing with temperature data is huge. But is it a climate change killer?

Not hardly. The science of climate change has been conducted for decades by hundreds of reputable scientists taking accurate measurements of tree rings, ice cores, ocean temperatures, and other observable and measurable phenomena that have not been debunked, or shown to be in error. There may indeed be misinterpretations of the data; that is a hazard of science and always will be. Skeptics have come up with alternate interpretations for most of the evidence of climate change which, of course, is what science is all about. In a perfect world, the politics that have captured the climate change argument would be absent and it would be scientist vs. scientist - man a mano , with both sides wielding their best arguments, fighting it out in the major scientific journals.

Obviously, we live in a world that has given a Nobel Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC - a mistake that should be rectified soonest. So we can now no more remove politics from the science of climate change as we could remove your beating heart from your chest and expect you to be upright for very long.

Aside from the regular political machinations from those seeking to benefit financially from decisions made by governments, as well as governments and institutions like the UN that are seeking to aggrandize power unto themselves, there is the very human desire for many scientists to protect their professional reputations from being destroyed. Hence, the actions of Jones and Mann that, as the investigations unfold, are becoming less and less defensible.

Given that some of these revelations are more important than others as far as calling into question the entire AGW theory, how is it possible to judge the real damage to the theory’s credibility and thus, the efficacy of the remedies being pushed by the climate change advocates?

There is a second aspect of climate change that hasn’t been touched - yet - by the climategate revelations; the notion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are rising. Again, skeptics have posited different interpretations of the data, predicting different outcomes as a result of this measured increase. But the increase is confirmed (although models have been wildly inaccurate in predicting how much CO2 makes it to the troposphere where the greenhouse effect is most damaging).

So where is climate change science today? The edifice is leaning as a result of several bricks being pulled away from the structure, and there is a definite possibility it can collapse unless it is shored up. That “shoring up” must be done by scientists themselves. If someone or some scientists aren’t already doing so, a thorough review of the literature with special emphasis placed on examining papers that used the Jones temperature model - with attention paid to the impact on that 2007 IPCC report - should be undertaken immediately. That would seem to be a minimum requirement to begin the process of regaining credibility.

Beyond that, a re-evaluation of at least some of the skeptical literature in light of the revelations would seem to be in order. And finally, a greater effort must be made by all to resist the political pressures placed on scientists to accede to outcome based science. In other words, tell Al Gore to take his carbon footprint and stuff it.

Rand Simberg made the point of using the “precautionary principle” when figuring out what to do about climate change. Seeing emissions reduction as a kind of “insurance” against catastrophe is all well and good. But Simberg quotes Bjorn Lomberg who cautions against the cure being worse than the disease. And Tom Friedman’s 1% chance of catastrophe being reason enough for such draconian measures drew this response from Simberg:

But I buy insurance that has a price commensurate with the expected value (i.e., the cost of the disaster times the probability that it will occur). For instance, I’ll pay a few hundred bucks for a million-dollar policy against the small chance that I’ll kick off tomorrow. Presumably, Friedman assumes that the proposed palliatives of cap’n’tax or carbon taxes meet that criterion, but he doesn’t do the calculations for us, because he can’t. Warm mongers like him propose to spend trillions of dollars now to prevent an unknown amount of cost later, in defiance of the basic economic principle of discounting the value of future expenditures.

There is a variation on this fallacy, in fact. It goes: There is a crisis; something must be done! What we propose to do is something. Therefore, it must be done!

Put another way; should a man buy insurance for uterine cancer? Or a woman buy a policy for prostrate cancer? Broadly drawn examples but I hope the point is rammed home. There is the notion of buying insurance intelligently or not. As I’ve written before, I think that it is perfectly acceptable to take measures that would reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. But it makes no sense given what we know about climate change at this point to literally bankrupt our economy, placing monumental restrictions on industrial activity while entire swaths of our energy sector are taken over by government. The threat has never justified such action and this is true even more now.

Develop alternatives to fossil fuels? Absolutely - and quickly. This is a national security issue as much as it is an environmental one. Try to make everyone aware of their “carbon footprint” so that we can each do our part to lessen emissions? Sure, just don’t stuff it down my throat with draconian regulations and liberty-destroying legislation.

Climategate and its ancillary revelations have not killed the AGW theory or permanently damaged climate science. But if climate change proponents refuse to do the things necessary to regain credibility, and allow for a full fledged, real debate on every aspect of the science, they will be guilty of pandering to politicians and global bureaucrats who could care less about legitimate science while seeking to use their flawed conclusions to gain power and wealth at our expense.

NASA’s new budget is out and the howls from congressmen, space buffs, and conservative pundits will begin in earnest.

No moon mission - or at least one with a timetable. Scrap the Ares I rocket and Constellation program that were sucking up space dollars, leaching support away from other vital programs while running fantastically over budget and behind schedule.

I heard it from a few of you the last time this subject came up. Jeffrey Anderson sums up the pro-NASA moon mission boondoggle position:

As Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D., Fla.) puts it, “The president’s proposal would leave NASA with essentially no program and no timeline for exploration beyond Earth’s orbit.”

Furthermore, at a time when the president claims his focus is on jobs, scrapping these programs — on which we’ve already spent nearly $10 billion — would cut public spending in one area that actually creates jobs.

You know those great pictures of Earth from outer space, showing our planet suspended against the blackness, a beautiful blue ball? No one has seen that view since the Apollo program ended 38 years ago. No astronaut has seen that view since then. We’ve all just seen the pictures.

Now, unless Congress rejects the president’s recommendations, the next people to see that view will likely be the Chinese.

Whether it’s tax cuts or defense spending; or whether it’s the courage, ambition, and sense of wonder that combine to lead great souls to great feats of exploration and discovery; one can surely say this much about Barack Obama: Mr. President, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

First, once the Chinese get there (and they have no heavy lift rockets, workable landers, or any experience with rendezvous in outer space), just what is it they will find that we didn’t discover 38 years ago? Anderson complains that we’ve only seen that wonderful picture of the earth from the moon since Apollo ended - no astronauts taking any more pictures since then. Well thank God for that. It seems a helluva waste of money to spend $100 billion to get some more pretty pictures from lunar orbit (if we’re really hard up, let’s send an unmanned orbiter) or even to simply maintain some kind of official USA government presence in our manned space program.

The Chinese have put a couple of men in space. They are about where we were in 1963. Only a crash effort on our part allowed us to make it to the moon by 1969. More likely, the Chinese and any other country, including Russia, is 10-15 years from any moon mission. I say let them spend themselves into penury to be able to plant their flag on the moon.

Meanwhile, perhaps Marriott or Holiday Inn will beat them to it. It is entirely possible that the next footprints on the moon will be sponsored by a company that wishes to commercially exploit it, and not gather up a few pounds of rocks while taking spectacular pictures. Space tourism is poised to take off this year and by decades’ end, there will be several companies ferrying people to low earth orbit hotels.

And you’ll have Barack Obama to thank for it:

Obama’s budget, according to a background briefing by an administration official on Sunday, will call for spending $6 billion over five years to develop a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts into low Earth orbit. Going commercial with a human crew would represent a dramatic change in the way NASA does business. Instead of NASA owning the spacecraft and overseeing every nut and bolt of its design and construction, a private company would design and build the spacecraft with NASA looking over its shoulder.

The development of these launch systems will not be confined to taxiing astronauts to and from the space station. Reliable commercial rockets will open space travel to a lot more people. Tourism will be the initiator but commercial space stations that would exploit zero gravity conditions to make exotic metals, pharma products, and other commercially useful applications won’t be far behind.

The fact is, as Rand Simberg points out, the entire model for government-sponsored manned spaceflight has been wrong all along:

Part of the mindset that grew out of that era was that Space = NASA, and that “Progress in Space” = “Funding NASA” and that not funding NASA, or adequately funding NASA, or changing NASA’s goals, is a step backwards. But as I noted at Popular Mechanics yesterday on the 24th anniversary of the Challenger loss, that event had a good outcome, in that it allowed private industry to start to become more involved, a trend that continues (and that the Bush/Griffin administration did support, albeit with paltry funding, in the form of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to pick up slack in delivering cargo to the space station after Shuttle is retired this year or next). We have been in fact developing, though far too slowly, the sort of private-enterprise (and more intrinsically American than Soviet in nature) space program that might have evolved more naturally had we not been side tracked by Apollo in the sixties.

What the administration is doing is to finally end the model that the government will have a state socialist design bureau to build a monopoly transportation system for its own use, at tremendous cost, but politically supportable because of all the pork it provides to Alabama, Florida and Texas. It proposes to expand the COTS program to provision of crew changeout in addition to cargo delivery, encouraging competition, and providing a robust capability that won’t put us out of business when the government rocket fails (as has happened twice with the Shuttle in the past quarter century, for almost three years each time). Instead of a program projected to cost many tens of billions over the next decade for a NASA-owned-and-operated new rocket (Ares I) that will cost billions per flight of four astronauts, it is going to invest six billion dollars in developing private capability, with multiple competitors, and do it on a fixed-price, pay-for-performance basis, rather than the wasteful cost-plus model that inevitably results in overruns due to the perverse incentives.

The commercial space ventures today are maturing rapidly. No longer are they shoestring operations headed up by pie-in-the-sky dreamers and fantasists. Heavy duty capital is behind many of these public companies and their plans for space travel have moved off the drawing boards and are well along in the testing phase.

While there could have been more allowances made for the commercial space sector in the budget, the monies that are earmarked for commercial rocket development and, more importantly, a change in attitude by the government toward the commercial space sector, promises more rapid progress in realizing the goal of developing a robust, practical, commercial space industry that will be able to launch man into space at far less cost than NASA’s current $3000 per pound. New rockets will be developed faster and more cheaply than NASA. Manned space flight will become much more routine and rather than having all of our eggs in one basket with Shuttle, the government will have several companies to choose from to ferry our astronauts to and from the ISS.

The era of big government manned space spectaculars that were politically popular - both for the jobs they created and the nationalistic impulses they fed - is drawing to a close. Let the socialist space programs ossify into NASA-like timidity and bureaucratic red tape. Our commercial space sector will fly rings around them.

Simberg again, writing in PJ Media:

If the shuttle is extended at all, it will be only into 2011 to allow final completion of the ISS. As for ventures beyond low earth orbit, Constellation will be replaced with a technology development program for things such as propellant depots, landers, and other capabilities needed for such future missions. These are technologies that had been defunded by the previous administrator to provide funds for the troubled Constellation program, and will now be restored to their proper priority, with billions available for them once the shuttle is retired.

The agency will also be redirected, to no one’s surprise, to more monitoring of the earth and its environment, something badly needed, given what a mess the current “science” of climate change has turned out to be, though whether it’s a job for NASA (as opposed to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency) is a debate that the nation should have.

Those technology development programs are the kinds of things NASA should be doing - basic research that can be exploited by the private sector. It may delay a moon and Mars mission but after all, neither heavenly body is going anywhere. There is no compelling national interest in rushing to develop the new technologies and perfect the engineering required to take those kinds of trips.

By decade’s end, those who are wailing about the end of US dominance in space are probably going to forget they ever thought that way. A revolution is coming in manned space flight and thankfully, NASA is finally getting out of the way so that it can happen.

The idea that the American people are stupid sheep, fooled by Republicans into voting people into office who will do them harm really took off after the 2004 elections.

This contempt of the left for ordinary Americans may have reached its zenith with the victory of George Bush over John Kerry. The hue and cry from liberals was so bad, there was talk of secession from “Jesusland,” as well as serious discussions about leaving the country. There was even a popular website “Sorry Everybody” where angry liberals could apologize to the rest of the world for the actions of the majority in electing Bush. Many of the comments from that website blamed stupid Americans for being tricked into voting for the incumbent.

Of course, we didn’t hear much of this following the election of 2008. Apparently, Americans can be smart and vote for their interests sometimes - only when they elect Democrats.

The arrogant stupidity of this mindset among many on the left shows they don’t have a clue why people vote the way they do, nor do they have a clue about the psychology that motivates the majority of Americans.

Psephologists and psychologists have been examining this question since these scientific disciplines came into being. The answer, not surprisingly, is much more individualistic than is usually reported. Broadly speaking, It depends on class, race, ethnicity, religion, regional factors, and surprisingly, how your daddy and mommy voted.

But the book illuminates current politics and reveals some changes. For both the 2000 and 2004 elections, the analysis showed that negative perceptions of Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry were more pivotal in putting a Republican in the White House than were positive perceptions of George Bush. Social groupings long identified with the two main political parties—such as labor with Democrats and business with Republicans—still exist, but are not as pronounced or clear-cut as they were. There are more independents than in the 1950s and more of them are politically active and informed. In addition, while the number of citizens who hold consistent ideological views is still small, it has increased from about 10 percent to almost 20 percent, chiefly due, Jacoby says, to “an unusually polarized period of American politics.”

Jacoby is eagerly anticipating the ANES data for the 2008 election. He predicts that the trend of ideological differentiation between the two parties will continue, showing up in stronger-than-usual policy orientations among voters. As for that voter in the booth and whether he or she will be capable of making an informed decision, Jacoby is quick to stress that “The American Voter” never said that voters are fools, and that both the original and the latest round of analysis allow for some optimism in that regard.

“Voters are not capricious,” he said. “Using the limited tools that voters employ, they vote correctly most of the time and make the vote that is relatively consistent with their interests.

There are a lot of false assumptions made about how people decide to vote for one candidate or another - not the least of which is that they make a decision based on which party or candidate promises them more goodies, or fewer for that matter. Especially when voting for president, the decision is really quite personal and making a statement like people elect Republicans by “voting against their interests” is, scientifically speaking, a crock.

That doesn’t stop the BBC from printing a story so laughably biased that it is a caricature of analysis:

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?

It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called “the paranoid style” of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.

But that would be a mistake.

Gee…that’s a relief. For a minute there I thought the Beeb was going to going to start with liberal talking points about Republicans.

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.

First, you have to believe that people who oppose Obamacare also oppose health care reform. This simply isn’t the case. Poll after poll shows Americans know there is something seriously wrong with the health care system and it needs fixing. There have even been recent polls showing that some elements of Obamacare enjoy majority support.

But what the Beeb says is resentment that the elites are trying to tell us what’s good for us leaves out a critical piece of evidence; the belief that Obamacare won’t do what the president and the liberals say it will do. It’s not resentment; it’s credibility. For the 90% of conservatives who oppose the bill, it is also an issue of individual liberty and questionable constitutionality. But it is the independents who are making Obamacare unsellable, not Republicans or conservatives. It is they who oppose the individual mandate, the Medicare cuts, and the price tag while resenting the deal making, the exemptions for special interests, and the general non-transparency of the process. It is independents that Blue Dogs are terrified of alienating and that’s why the bill is currently stalled.

But what about the ballot box? Does opposition to Obamacare really translate into people “voting against their interests” come election time?

Here’s the Beeb’s summary of the arguments in “What’s the Matter with Kansas” by Thomas Franks:

He believes that the voters’ preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

It is evident that Frank never looked at the exit polls from 2004 or 2008. The poorest Americans support Democrats, the Middle Class is nominally Republican, while the richest Americans lean GOP. Obama’s victory was fueled by a shift in those making $30-50 thousand of about 6% from Republican to Democrat. The “poor” - those making less than %30,000 - vote Democrat by large majorities. It was those Americans who basically live paycheck to paycheck who switched to the Democratic side in 2008.

Did they “vote their interest?” If so, what gave them such clarity of mind to do so in 2008 while voting stupidly in 2004 when they gave Bush a bare majority?

Writing at Protein Wisdom, Sanity Inspector:

As someone said recently, in other countries, people demonstrate for the government to do more things for them. Only Americans would turn out in the streets for huge demos, demanding that the government leave them the hell alone.

Playing elitists off against ordinary voters is indeed, a political club the Republicans use to good effect. And why not when the elitists can’t fathom the above statement? It is as alien a language as Farsi to them, this idea that people actually enjoy individual liberty and won’t trade it for what the liberals believe to be “economic security.”

The whole idea that Americans aren’t smart enough to vote their interests, or even more insulting, are hoodwinked by evil Republicans into voting incorrectly reveals a state of mind among lefties that shows them to be out of touch with the vast majority of Americans who live in “fly-over country” (a term of derisiveness they invented). The fact that the majority of people aren’t motivated to vote the same way and for the same reasons as their supposed betters - and the subsequent puzzlement by many liberals that flows from this reality - will always give the GOP a chance no matter how bad their candidates or how loopy their ideas may be.

This is a fascinating analysis by Daniel Larison, comparing a poll in 2006 that showed a fierce, anti-Bush feeling among voters, and a similar poll taken earlier this week that showed a sizable, but less widespread anti-Obama feeling.

The NBC/WSJ poll that came out earlier this week has some interesting results. The midterms are just over nine months away, so it seemed worth checking the questions related to the elections. The generic ballot shows a Democratic edge of 2 points, 44-42, but we should bear in mind that the RCP average for the generic ballot continues to show the GOP ahead by 3. More interesting, only 27% of respondents said that they would be casting their votes to send a signal of opposition to Obama. 37% said they will be signalling support for him, and 38% said they will not be sending any signal about Obama. That does not exactly fit the picture of a public recoiling in horror from Obama.

Contrast this with a comparable question about Bush in ‘06. Throughout 2006, anti-Bush voters had the edge over pro-Bush voters by 15-18 points. Prior to the 2002 and 1998 midterms, when the presidential party gained seats in the House, pro-Bush and pro-Clinton voters edged out the opposition voters by 12 points in ‘02 and 5 points in ‘98. What distinguishes the ‘02 and ‘98 results from ‘06 and this year is that in the earlier elections there were far more neutral voters for whom the President was not a direct factor. Nonetheless, as the ‘02 and ‘98 results suggest, when there are more pro-presidential voters than anti-presidential voters the presidential party tends to have better-than-average midterm elections. Interestingly, Obama’s numbers here are almost a reverse of Bush’s ‘06 numbers: where 37% wanted to show opposition to Bush and just 22% wanted to express support, 37% want to show support for Obama and 27% want to express opposition. While this is just one result, it wouldn’t seem to herald the collapse of Democratic majorities caused by massive anti-Obama sentiment sweeping the land.

Larison points out that this doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t lose lots of seats. But it does suggest that the wellspring of support for Obama probably means a flip of the House and Senate are out of the question.

Now that the euphoria surrounding Scot Brown’s senate upset win is dying down, time for a little realism to be injected into our discussions of mid-terms. There is little doubt that the prospect for huge gains by Republicans is still on the table - Obama or no Obama. With an approval rating in the low 20’s, the Democratic Congress can lose dozens of seats all on their own, thank you. Their base is discouraged, while the enthusiasm among Republicans nationwide is huge by contrast.

The GOP is emulating the Democratic success in 2006-08 by recruiting high quality, known commodities in competitive districts. Many of these candidates are self-funding, which is a definite plus in any race:

Republicans have suggested they already have about 80 quality candidates, and they continue to expand their scope. They said they plan to have a candidate in all 435 races, including in Illinois, where the filing period has passed and the party will have to maneuver to fill out the ballot.

Sessions wasn’t the only one talking but about recruiting.

Chairman of the moderate House Republican Tuesday Group caucus, Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.), told The Hill that candidates are going to “come out of the woodwork, across America, even in the Northeast and New England.”

“It’s a clarion call to everyone in Washington that the electorate is dissatisfied with this alarming agenda coming out of Washington,” Dent said.

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), vice-chairman of the NRCC, went one step further: “Recruitment has not only gone well up until this point, but I think it will go on steroids, henceforth.”

Of course, it helps when it is perceived to be a GOP year. Some of these same folks who have thrown their hat in the ring, politely declined in 2008 when confronted with the prospect of a Democratic sweep.

And there are at least 20 former GOP members of Congress who lost their seats to Democrats who are trying to make a comeback:

The heavy dose of the past for Republicans was capped in recent days with the announced candidacies of former Reps. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Mike Sodrel (R-Ind.), Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) and J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.).

The four of them give the Republicans’ 2010 recall effort a notable 2006 flavor.

All four lost their seats in 2006, and they join former Reps. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), John Hostettler (R-Ind.) and Charlie Bass (R-N.H.) from that class in trying to revive their party. That means seven of 22 GOP incumbents who lost four years ago are seeking some kind of comeback.

For Simmons, Hostettler and Hayworth (who announced a bid against Sen. John McCain this weekend), they will run for the Senate. The others are eyeing a return to the House, including Bass, who has an exploratory committee, and Pombo, who is running in a district neighboring his old one.

Six members of the 2008 losing class are either running again or are considering it, but the size of that class is still up in the air. Former Reps. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.), Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) and Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) are already in, and former Reps. David Davis (R-Tenn.), Bill Sali (R-Idaho) and Virgil Goode (R-Va.) may run for their old seats.

They start out with a huge advantage in that they don’t have to spend a million dollars on building name recognition. That, and the fact that many of them lost by less than landslide margins to the Democratic incumbent and you have the makings for some real barnburners in November.

It takes more than attractive, well known, and well funded candidates to win a lot of seats. It takes an coherent platform for the candidates to run on. Brian Faughnan of RedState attended the GOP retreat yesterday and reports:

I’m also told to count on an updated version of the Contract With America (no surprise there). But I’m told to expect it later, rather than sooner. One staffer pointed out that a Contract which comes early will be forgotten by voters by election day. One that comes late is more likely to be remembered, and to feed some excitement about the coming agenda. Former Speaker Gingrich (I was told) had made this point in his comments.

I suppose there’s logic in that but an alternative take on this is that Republicans can’t come up with a positive agenda at the moment and have deferred work on it until they can come up with a something. Recycling the Ryan health care bill is probably not a good idea if Obamacare fails, but getting together on some deficit cutting measures is almost certainly in the offing as is some sort of tax cutting jobs measure.

As bad as it is for Democrats right now, the fact that Obama does not appear to be a game changing stone tied around their necks along with a singular lack of GOP policy alternatives at the moment, means that even their House majority seems safe for now, with the senate clearly out of reach.

Faughnan again:

While a session with pollsters Kellyanne Conway and David Livingston was not open to the press, Republican Members were delighted after the presentation. One told me that the pollsters stressed the importance of winning independent voters, rather than turning out the base. They said that a critical reason for the GOP landslide in 1994 was that independents favored the GOP by a 14 point margin. The latest polling - the GOP was told - puts Republicans ahead by 15 points.

Livingston and Conway also stressed that voters are not personally rejecting Barack Obama, and they cautioned against being seen as opposing the president personally. They said that it is his policies which are unpopular, and candidates should be careful to draw the distinction. They told the conference that simply opposing the Democrats will net 20 House seats or so; proposing a positive agenda of their own would net 20 more.

That sounds about right, although I think it is a little optimistic to expect another 20 seats will fall if the GOP can ever get their act together and come up with an agenda that will gain the support of indies without turning off the enthusiasm of the base. Other political pros are not as sanguine. Rothenberg gives the GOP a 28 seat pick up scenario. Cook has a possible 25-35 seat swing for the Republicans. Both gentlemen are saying that it could get worse for the Dems if the economy doesn’t improve.

It’s hard to be the opposition for two years and then turn around and try to be positive in proposing what should be done to make things better in the country. I think this will be the greatest challenge the GOP will face as they are forced to pivot from standing athwart history screaming “stop” to the Democrat’s far left agenda, to trying to address the concerns of ordinary Americans. Simply presenting themselves as an alternative to the Democrats will get them only so far. The test of leadership - and the resulting electoral popularity - comes in articulating a vision of how you would govern.

I was encouraged with what I saw at the televised retreat yesterday. For the first time in a long time, the Republicans actually presented viable alternatives to many of Obama’s prescriptions for the country. This is not to say they didn’t have them (the Ryan health care bill was introduced last May), it’s just that they didn’t promote these alternatives in a consistent, articulate manner.

Imagine rather than screaming “socialist” every day since Obamacare has been an issue, the GOP had calmly and repeatedly countered with Ryan’s common sense health care reforms. Every day getting in front of the cameras and daring the president to call them the “party of no” while exposing his lies about working toward a bi-partisan solution. I daresay if the American people had become as familiar with the Republican alternative as with Obamacare, they may very well have preferred the GOP’s solutions.

Or what would have been the result if, last February, the GOP had actually come up with a counter-stimulus - one without all the bells, whistles, political payoffs, and wasteful spending in Porkulus - and gone in front of the cameras every day touting it?

If they had, they wouldn’t have the credibility problem they have today. The GOP may very well come up with “Contract for America II” but how will voters respond to it if all the Republicans have been doing for two years is trying to get people to believe that the president is destroying America? Most people do not believe that, or anything close to it, and wonder about a political party that tries to make that case.

Thankfully, the Democrats have screwed up so badly that a couple of dozen seats are likely to fall into the GOP’s laps no matter what they propose. I just wonder that if the Republicans fall short of overturning Congress, they will recognize too late that a marvelous opportunity has passed them by thanks to their near-nihilistic antipathy to using government rationally, and conservatively, to make a difference in the lives of America’s citizens.