NEWSWEEK Michael Hirsh — At this juncture in his presidency, Barack Obama might think about taking his political cue from the title of Richard Fariña's 1960s novel: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. In the race to the bottom that American politics has become—the only question is which party will be less popular going into the November election—Obama's been written off so completely that the Democrats' electoral prospects may be starting to look up simply because they can't drop much lower.

True, with the congressional elections still eight months away, it's impossible to say whether this is some kind of a bottom or a turning point. Many unknowns could still turn November into the rout against the Democrats that everyone now expects: soaring gas prices, double-dip recession, a terrorist setback. But consider: after months of failures and embarrassing White House miscalculations, some very serious downward trend lines are starting to stabilize or even poke upward. The jobless rate, at 9.7 percent, seems to be settling in below the politically radioactive 10 percent level.

SOURCE: http://www.newsweek.com/id/234653/page/1

BOSTON — Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state senator, rode an old pickup truck and a growing sense of unease among independent voters to an extraordinary upset Tuesday night when he was elected to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts.

By a decisive margin, Mr. Brown defeated Martha Coakley, the state’s Democratic attorney general, who had been considered a prohibitive favorite to win just over a month ago after she easily won the Democratic primary. With 93 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Brown had 52 percent of the vote to Ms. Coakley’s 47 percent.

Senate Republicans moved quickly on Tuesday night to cast the election results in Massachusetts as a referendum on the Democrats’ health care legislation and to urge the Democrats to abandon the bill.

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, issued a statement calling on Democrats to go back to the drawing board.

“With the election results in a state like Massachusetts, I hope my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will be convinced to go back to the drawing board on the issue of health care reform,” Mr. Corker said. “If the president wants to take a truly bipartisan approach on health care, he would go a long way by reforming Medicare to ensure it remains solvent instead of taking money from it to create a new entitlement as the current bill does. Doing so would have a positive effect on our economy by reducing our long-term debt and strengthening the dollar.”

SOURCE: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/20/analysis.massachusetts.election/

SOURCE: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31693.html

The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush's administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national controls were better.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as long as the negotiating forum, the so-called Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, "operates under the rules of consensus decision-making."

"Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the Treaty and to avoid loopholes in the Treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly," Clinton said in a written statement.

While praising the Obama administration's decision to overturn the Bush-era policy and to proceed with negotiations to regulate conventional arms sales, some groups criticized the U.S. insistence that decisions on the treaty be unanimous. Arms exporters China, Russia and Israel abstained last year in a U.N. vote on the issue.

SOURCE: http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE59E0Q920091015

Global Climate Center Scam

 Apparently a "Global Climate Center" was hacked and the contents have been posted to the Internet.  A ZIP file exceeding 60MB and containing a huge number of emails and other documents has been posted worldwide. Original speculation as to whether the files posted were legitimate or some sort of spoof appears to now be confirmed as legitimate:

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

I have not had time to read all of the material yet (there are over a thousand files involved!) but what I have skimmed looks VERY damning.  Contained within the documents are what appear to be admissions of intentional tampering with data as well as intentional falsification of results to "show" man-made global warming. One of the emails says:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

That is, to hide a decline in global temperatures. It gets better. Another message, this one allegedly from 2000: Click below to read more...

SOURCE: http://market-ticker.org/

Why would the government be scared of just a question?

White House advisers pledged on Sunday to book administration officials on Fox News despite claims by the president's inner circle that the cable network is a GOP mouthpiece whose programming "is geared toward making money."