Given the recent Iranian tirade against the United States and President Obama, this should disturb us:

US President Barack Obama has already used experts within the last few months to hold high-level but discreet talks with both Iran and Syria, organizers of the meetings told AFP.

Officially, Obama’s overtures toward both Tehran and Damascus have remained limited.

In an interview broadcast Monday, Obama said the United States would offer arch-foe Iran an extended hand of diplomacy if the Islamic Republic’s leaders “unclenched their fist.”

If the response to “months” of high level, but discreet, contacts between Obama and Iran is hate-filled rant by the “President” of Iran directed against the United States and President Obama, then we’re seeing the Iranians having a perception of weakness on the part of the new US Administration. I hope President Obama is paying close attention here – be nice and show that you are willing to meet the Iranians on the level, and the response is to pour sh** all over the United States and demand we truckle to them. What the tyrants who run Iran are waiting for, now, is to see whether or not President Obama will show patience (which they’ll perceive as weakness, and thus become more outrageous in their behavior as they test to see how far they can go), or whether he’ll show some teeth to the Iranians.

Iran is in an extraordinarily difficult situation – oil prices in the tank, economy in shambles, surrounded by American power, under threat of severe attack by Israeli forces – and Obama can easily let the Iranians know that we won’t tolerate any nonsense from them. Or, Obama can try to be “big” about it and, like a string of liberals past, ignore the Iranian provocation…thus ensuring there will be more, and worse, to come…

I’d like to see the number higher, but at least there’s more smart than dumb in American views of global warming:

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity.

Seven percent (7%) attribute global warming to some other reason, and nine percent (9%) are unsure in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats. Voters not affiliated with either party by eight points put the blame on planetary trends.

What I’m surprised about is that it seems something like four in ten Democrats are smarter than Al Gore…this bodes well for our new RNC chairman to reach out to Democrats…if we get all smart Republicans and all smart Democrats on our side, then we’ll have an unbeatable majority…plus a minority which will be so dumb that our entertainment will come from playing transparent practical jokes on them…

On the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Where-Do-You-Republicans-Get-Off-Questioning-Us? “stimulus” bill:

Yet perhaps the clincher is the answer to a bigger question: how did the Great Depression end? It didn’t stop with the conservative suggestion: slashed spending, slashed debt and slashed government activity. It ended with precisely the opposite: the vast fiscal stimulus of the Second World War. The government sent debt soaring to its highest levels in US history (until today) in order to spend more than ever before. It set up the longest boom in US history.

Uh, no. It wasn’t the massive spending of WWII which got us out of the Depression, it was the fact that of the major industrial nations of the world (USA, USSR, Germany, Japan, UK and to a lesser extent France and Italy) only the United States emerged unscathed from WWII in a world in which there was massive war damage to be repaired. In 1945, if you wanted a manufactured item, the United States and Britain were the only fully operational economies, and Britain was flat broke. Couple this with the entirely unforeseen population boom resultant upon increased food supplies and vastly improved public health efforts and, voila!, you’ve got a post-WWII American economic boom. But it was a boom which was, from the start, living on borrowed time.

Absent a massive restructuring of the post-WWII American economy to return it to its pre-Depression free market model, it was only a matter of time before the rebuilt industrial nations – joined by other nations rapidly industrializing – began to eat into America’s market share. The pinch started in the 1960’s but only really began to be felt when the bill came due for Vietnam and the Great Society at the same time the Arabs pulled their first oil embargo, sending energy costs in America soaring. From then on until Reagan, the American economy sputtered along unable to cope … the high tax, high spend, high regulation economy built by FDR simply could not provide growth when this started to require rapid innovation – we were heading back into the Great Depression when we fortunately elected Reagan who lowered taxes and cut regulations…unfortunately, he was unable to bring spending under control, so the seeds of FDR were still there, waiting for the perfect liberal storm to have another go at wrecking the economy.

Here we now stand, poised at the same position we were at the start of the Great Depression with a choice to make – follow the myth of FDR, or understand that you cannot spend your way into wealth? Upon our decision here much depends. Obama and his Democrats are incapable of the decision because they are unaware that the FDR model even has an alternative, let alone a more successful one. Only we Republicans have the knowledge necessary to steer America out of our economic morass, and we are completely shut out of power until at least after the 2010 mid-terms. Rather a tricky situation.

Anyone who still claims that Obama is bringing a new way to doing business to DC is a fool:

“If a Bush appointee got rich off of Wall Street in this climate, had a chauffeur from one of his fat cat cronies, had unpaid taxes that amounted to more than what most people make in a year, and then the administration tried to fix it behind closed doors. Democrats would call for his head and would demand ‘accountability,’” said a top Senate GOP aide.

The person referred to is, of course, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice for HHS. This is what Democrats do – they cover for their corrupt members. Only the risk of electoral defeat makes Democrats move to punish a miscreant member of their party. Blagojevich is out because he risks not only the Governorship, but a Senate seat as well, in the 2010 elections. Daschle doesn’t risk any particular seat, so its ok and he gets a pass…now, if we GOPers could just figure a way to have Daschle put a Democrat seat at risk somewhere, Democrats would give him the boot in a heartbeat.

All of you liberals out there who were shouting for blood over the alleged crimes of the Bush Administration – where are you now? Demand Daschle withdraw or be known forever as hypocrites.

As more and more details of the fraudulently named “stimulus” bill come out it becomes ever more clear that Obama and his Democrats are viewing the financial crunch as a not-to-be-missed opportunity to just lard up the budget with items they could never get past a GOP Congress or a GOP President. Mark Steyn has the proper take on it:

“Stimulus” comes from the verb stimulare, which is Latin for “transfer massive sums of money from what remains of the dynamic sector of the economy to the special interests of the Democratic party.” No, hang on, my mistake. Stimulare means “to goad.” And, on that front, the Democrats are doing an excellent job. They’ve managed to goad 58 percent of the American people into opposing the “stimulus” package. They’ve managed to goad all 177 Republicans in the House into unpacking their mothballed cojones and voting against the bill. And they’ve managed to goad the rest of the world into ending the Obama honeymoon in nothing flat. Headline from the London Daily Telegraph: “US-EU Trade War Looms As Barack Obama Bill Urges ‘Buy American.’ ”

Its like Democrats realize that this window of opportunity might be short, so they’d better shove through everything they can in hopes of building constituencies in favor of the spending who will then opposed GOP efforts to reform the bloated budget in future years. For sheer cynicism this is astonishing – amazing that people who say they are there to serve the people would be so entirely self-serving that a crisis with millions suffering is viewed as a mere excuse for tax and spending like never before.

The key to defeating this bill – or, at least, having it greatly modified – is to delay it. Delay it to allow more details to emerge and thus build up popular opposition to varied elements of the bill. Delay to allow the bill to go closer and closer to 2010 before passage, and thus start scaring off those Democrats who have to face largely GOP electorates back home. If we can tie this thing up until June, we might be able to bury it for good.

It is now up to the Senate GOP to show the backbone the House GOP displayed – our Senators must, for the good of our country, tie this thing up in as many knots as possible…to at least have it greatly modified before passage so that there is at least some supply side, free market elements in there to counterbalance the Democrats’ waste.

This doesn’t bode well for Obama’s policy of engagement:

US President Barack Obama’s offer to talk to Iran shows that America’s policy of “domination” has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

“This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed,” Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

“Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change,” he added.

After nearly three decades of severed ties, Obama said shortly after taking office this month that he is willing to extend a diplomatic hand to Tehran if the Islamic republic is ready to “unclench its fist”.

In response, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fresh tirade against the United States, demanding an apology for its “crimes” against Iran and saying he expected “deep and fundamental” change from Obama.

The truth of the matter is that all tyrannical regimes view a willingness to talk as a confession of weakness – at least in the sense of an unwillingness to fight for something, in this case to fight to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and/or continue State-sponsorship of terrorism. This is because the sort of people who run tyrannical regimes are the sort of men who view all relations as power relations – with one side to dominate, one side to subordinate. This doesn’t mean you never engage tyrants, but it does mean that any engagement must be done with a clear eye to the sort of people you’re negotiating with.

The election of Obama does mean a change in US foreign and military policy – while Obama will maintain most of what President Bush has established because Bush had the correct general policy line, there will be changes, most notably in Obama’s willingness to send special envoys and in general open talks with regimes who bear the United States exceptional ill will. This has all been tried before and has uniformly failed – tyrants don’t keep agreements and are always working for their own advantage, not for a reasonable community of nations respecting each others needs. But we are going to try it, again, and if we are I hope that Obama at least pays heed to some core principles:

1. If we give, we must get – and we must get before we give. In other words, if Iran wants to open diplomatic ties with the United States, we must first insist upon some solid, verifiable act prior to the opening of relations…such as, for instance, a cessation of Iranian attempts to arm Hezbollah and Hamas with rockets.

2. Realize that any thing they do is designed for their personal advantage, not over concern for justice, truth, human rights, what have you. This can be worked to our advantage because tyrants are also rather greedy and we can purchase agreement – in other words, de-facto bribe them into following a certain, desired line.

3. Stay armed and vigilant – don’t worry about “breaking” an agreement with tyrants. The agreement was never going to be honored in the long haul with them and thus any indication that they are not keeping the agreement should be taken as rock-solid proof that the agreement is now null and void. It can be re-worked through a new round of negotiations, but we must not consider that a treaty with, say, Iran is a treaty such as we might make with Canada – a treaty, that is, where we can expect both sides to make a good faith effort to abide by the terms. Everything is temporary and for expediency with tyrants – and Churchill said, they ride to and fro on the backs of tigers and, at times, even if they’d like to keep a particular agreement with us, they may not be able to for reasons we’ll perhaps never understand.

We have the advantage right now – with Iraq becoming a solid democracy and the prestige and power of our military at a high pitch, we can negotiate from a position of strength and be rather insistent. If we must negotiate – and Obama, our Commander in Chief, says we must – then we must be entirely realistic about it and not carry any notions of the brotherhood of Man with people like the Iranian tyrants.

We’re going to have to ask the question: Do you Democrats realize that you have to pay taxes?

ABC News has learned that the nomination of former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., to be President Obama’s secretary of health and human services has hit a traffic snarl on its way through the Senate Finance Committee.

The controversy deals with a car and driver lent to Daschle by a wealthy Democratic friend — a chauffeur service the former senator used for years without declaring it on his taxes.

It remains an open question as to whether this is a “speed bump,” as a Democratic Senate ally of Daschle put it, or something more damaging.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, Democrats – so, when someone provides you a service it isn’t free just ’cause you’re an important Democrat and thus should have lots of free stuff. No, in the real world, we have to look in to who is giving what, and why, and whether it is applicable under the convoluted tax scheme you Democrats have saddled us with over the years.

Now, you could decide that a flat tax would be better as everyone would be clear on what they have to pay – but, if you decide that its better to have a screwball set of tax rules, then you’d darn well better obey each and every one of them right down to the smallest detail. Fair is fair, after all.

Congratulations Michael Steele!

The Republican Party chose the first black national chairman in its history Friday, just shy of three months after the nation elected a Democrat as the first African-American president. The choice marked no less than “the dawn of a new party,” declared the new GOP chairman, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele. Republicans chose Steele over four other candidates, including former President George W. Bush’s hand-picked GOP chief, who bowed out declaring, “Obviously the winds of change are blowing.”

Steele takes the helm of a beleaguered Republican Party that is trying to recover after crushing defeats in November’s national elections that gave Democrats control of Congress put Barack Obama in the White House.

GOP delegates erupted in cheers and applause when his victory was announced, but it took six ballots to get there. He’ll serve a two-year term.

A month ago, my co-hosts and I interviewed Michael Steele on The American Resolve to discuss his bid for chairman. We are working on having him an again soon to discuss his victory.

UPDATE: Here’s a profile of the Man of Steele:

He was born at Andrews Air Force base in Prince George’s County, Maryland on October 19, 1958 and subsequently adopted. This African American child was then raised in a family of Democrats. His political turn to the Republican Party did not come from his having attained success in almost every endeavor he has undertaken, which he has. Rather, according to this well spoken and inspiring man, it came from watching the lived example of his mother, Maebell and hearing the convincing positions of a man named Ronald Reagan.

Michael Steele’s mother suffered a tragedy in 1962 when her husband, Michael’s father, died of liver disease. She went to work and through her sacrifice raised him and his sister on a minimum wage job. Her ethic of hard work and deep dedication to her children were an inspiration to her young son. They have also been replicated in him, according to those who know him best. He is considered one of the hardest working and most ethical public servants in American political life.

This is the story of America, writ large in the life of one man…he’s gonna flatten you Democrats, you just wait and see.

From Alaska:

Monitoring earthquakes underneath the 10,200-foot Redoubt Volcano about 100 miles southwest of Anchorage, scientists from the Alaska Volcano Observatory warned that an eruption was imminent, sending experienced Alaskans shopping for protection against a dusty shower of volcanic ash that could descend on south-central Alaska.

Now, if this thing goes off as expected, it will send a gigantic amount of CO2 into the atmosphere…if over the next five years after such an eruption mean global temperatures stay the same or drop, will you global warming fanatics out there just drop the whole ridiculous hoax of global warming?

UPDATE: James Lewis over at Pajamas Media has 7 bad things to say about the corruption of science in the name of the anthropogenic global warming (you know, such as non-scientist Al Gore telling us that AGW is a settled issue, or calls to have global warming doubters brought up on charges), and concludes thusly:

Climate modeling is just a toddler science, barely able to waddle around the living room. It’s a nice idea to try modeling the earth’s atmosphere. But nature is inconceivably more complex than what we ever see in a laboratory jar. There are no proven “greenhouse gases” in the real atmosphere, just as there are no proven causes of alcoholism or obesity. Alcoholism is an incredibly complex mix of nutrients, heredity, epigenetics, exercise, lifestyle, early learning, puberty, social support, economics, food availability, optimism, toxins, sunshine, interactions, feedback loops, and all the unknown unknowns.

Try to build little computer models of alcoholism and you learn nothing new — because it’s the evidence that’s missing. Computer models of the atmosphere are just as premature. Climate modeling is a baby “science” just like the quack cures for alcoholism or obesity.

Most scientifically savvy people understand this perfectly well. It’s not news — except to the news media, who just don’t want to know. They will never ruin a good story with facts. Journalists don’t get fired for being wrong.

AGW therefore looks to be the biggest fraud in the history of science. The AGW hype machine may signal the worst breakdown ever in the normal, healthy process of open debate and endless testing that makes for good science. It’s pathological science — which is not science at all.

What’s happening today is very dangerous. It can infect other parts of the sciences, medicine, and technology. If honest scientists cannot stand up to the pressure we are in deep, deep trouble as a society. Bad science kills people.

That institutional breakdown could spread — perhaps it has already spread — to other fields that have been politicized. This is very bad.

Ultimately the only solution may be to cauterize the proliferating mass of corruption. That can only be done by the new media, which are not playing footsies with political frauds.

All we can do is keep telling the truth, and listen to honest debate. Keep on doing that, and this sickness may yet pass, without killing the patient.

When I’m driving around listening to the radio there is this commercial for some weight loss scam which talks about how the product will remove waste which “some experts” say is spackled to the colon like paste…which assertion is not just false, but stupidly false. But people believe it, and there are people – who have a vested interest in such scams – who have degrees and licenses who will assert stoutly what they must know to be untrue, is true.

Environmentalism has long been corrupted and all sciences related to the environment are corrupted by environmentalism. Ever since Carlson wrote her mendacious Silent Spring, the entire environmentalist movement has based itself on one lie after another…but as environmentalism gained political power and thus the ability to direct research funding, there has been an endless string of scientists all too willing to trim their work to fit environmentalist alarmism.

But you want to know the funniest part of this whole, sad spectacle? The fact that our liberals, who pride themselves on their alleged scepticism, buy this nonsense without thinking.

It will be astounding if this comes to pass – this news story details the possibility of the 400,000-strong Traditional Anglican Communion becoming part of the Catholic Church some time after Easter this year.

While there are many issues causing fissures not just in the Anglican Communion but throughout the old, “mainline” Protestant denominations, it still remains that the catalyst – the thing which drew a bright, red line forcing people to line up on one side or the other – was the ordination as a Bishop the openly gay Gene Robinson. While the open homosexuality was a bit of a problem, the thing which proved impossible for many to accept was the fact that Robinson had forsaken his marital vows and went off to live in sin with his male lover. To think that such a person could guide anyone on a Christ-like path was (and is) absurd – while we’re all sinners, we certainly can’t take correction and instruction from someone who is not only an unrepentant sinner, but also someone who claims his sin is not a sin.

The battle lines have been drawn and with all religion – not just Christianity – under attack from within and without, everyone who subscribes to doctrinally sound Christianity has to bury differences and come together. Not necessarily by joining the Catholic Church, but certainly by presenting a united front to the secularists who wish to destroy all religion. This means, by the way, that our Jewish and Moslem brothers and sisters must find room at our table – while the primary ire of the left is directed at Christianity (and especially the Evangelical and Catholic elements of it), the plain fact of the matter is that most leftists consider religion inherently dangerous, at least to the point where they demand it stay out of the public square.

They know what they are doing by having a Bishop like Robinson – heck, Robinson knows it, too – they are attempting to pour leftist content into religion so that while the outward form remains, the internal structure is entirely geared towards making people selfish about their desires and despairing about their future (selfish people who despair are easy pickings for leftist propaganda). The left wants a leftist world, considering it better than the world as shaped by Jews, Christians and Moslems – and that is fine and dandy; but if we don’t want a leftist world, then we’d better get together and get into the fight.