July 21st, 2009
 I ran across this video on a right-wing Web site that posthumously condemned Walter Cronkite as a “traitor” for his advocacy of one-world government.
 The occasion was a dinner in 1999 at which Rockford native John B. Anderson, as president of the World Federalist Association, presented an award to Cronkite.
 Early on in his speech, Cronkite lamented Anderson’s failure to win the U.S. presidency in 1980.
 Hillary Clinton also appears in this video:
July 21st, 2009
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 Hardly a day goes by anymore that I don’t read something to the effect that the cool weather in various locales this summer puts the lie to all this stuff about global warming.
 For a random example, check THIS.
 The only problem with these anecdotal observations is that they don’t jibe with the science on the matter.
 As we see HERE, a study published earlier this year in a reputable publication “shows, both in recent records and projections using computer simulations, how utterly normal it is to have decade-long vagaries in temperature, up and down, on the way to a warmer world.”
 David R. Easterling of the National Climatic Data Center, a co-author of the study, says the purpose was:
To show, in a peer-reviewed scientifically defensible way that there is no reason to expect the climate to warm in a monotonic type fashion, that there is natural variability along with anthropogenic forced warming and we shouldn’t expect each year to be warmer than the next or even a run of 10 years always to show warming. That we can get a 10- or even 15-year period with no real change in globally averaged temperature even though in the end we have strong global warming.
July 21st, 2009
How cool (or not) is this?
July 21st, 2009
 A new ABC/Washington Post poll shows that President Obama’s approval rating has slipped a bit (as I’ve been predicting here for months), and public support for his efforts at health care reform has declined.
 Still, as these charts indicate, the poll also shows Obama and the Democrats in pretty good shape vis-a-vis the standing of Republicans:
(Hat-tip to ThinkProgress)
July 21st, 2009
 
Adele M. Stan EXAMINES the political stakes for the GOP in the congressional fight over health care reform:
If President Barack Obama succeeds in signing a major health care reform bill into law — one that provides a public plan for people currently priced out of the system — he will achieve what at least three presidents before him had hoped for, and failed to do. And he will likely deprive the Republican minority in Congress from anything approaching a comeback in the 2010 midterm elections.
