PJTV: Facing Defeat, Some Senators May Try To Sneak Health Care Reform Through. We’re Not Kidding.

MARK STEYN on Hollywood’s Moral Compass.

JOHN TIERNEY: Holdren’s Ice Age Tidal Wave:

As a long-time student of John P. Holdren’s gloomy visions of the future, like his warnings about global famines and resource shortages, I can’t resist passing along another one that has just been dug up. This one was made in 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama’s science adviser, in an essay just unearthed by zombietime (a blog that has been republishing excerpts of his past writings). In the 1971 essay, “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

They certainly weren’t the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can’t think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing.

I suppose Ehrlich must have been right about something, sometime or other, but nothing occurs to me offhand. . . .

OLYMPIC LOSS EXPOSES CHICAGO’S UGLY UNDERBELLY: “Chicago’s Daley is at 35% approval, in part because of opposition to his desire to host the Olympics. And the recent case of Honor Student Derrion Albert was only one of dozens of recent teen killings in the streets of Chicago. The Olympics are great but it isn’t as though both Daley and Obama didn’t have more pressing problems right at home.”

MAYBE DAVID LETTERMAN’S JUST A TRENDSETTER: Office Romance Is On The rise.

HMM: Criticality safety issues surface again at Y-12.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: Scientists discover clues to what makes human muscle age. “A study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has identified critical biochemical pathways linked to the aging of human muscle. By manipulating these pathways, the researchers were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself. The findings will be reported in the Sept. 30 issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, a peer-reviewed, scientific publication of the European Molecular Biology Organization.” Faster, please. (Via FuturePundit, who has more).

DANES EXPLAIN WHY OBAMA FAILED: “It comes down to respect. President Obama showed none. . . . He was ill-prepared and his staff failed to lay the foundation for his appearance. He came off as an ugly American who knew nothing about the territory and who felt the world somehow owed him something.”

TIME FOR HALLOWEEN COSTUMES ALREADY? Heck, I’m already getting Christmas promotions.

PJTV: Afghanistan In Peril: Will Obama Lose a War We Were Poised to Win? Analysis from Michael Yon.

JOHN ENSIGN’S tax problems. Maybe he’s just angling for a Cabinet slot . . . .

BLOG ARTISTRY: A single-sentence post that sums up Obama’s problems while obliquely referencing the Polanski scandal.

ERIC SCHEIE: “My biggest problem right now is that I can’t stand Obama, but that has not translated into loving conservatism.”

JENNIFER RUBIN: “Sen. John Kerry’s attempt to block Sen. Jim DeMint from going to Honduras to get a bird’s-eye view of the results of Obama pro-Zelaya policy (and to bully DeMint into lifting his hold on two State Department nominees) shows just how defensive the Democrats have become. Kerry’s scheme didn’t work (DeMint is going anyway) and DeMint made his point: the Obama policy is in utter disarray.”

JIM LINDGREN: “I have been surprised at some of the criticism of President Obama for going to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics. Few commentators bother noting that, had Obama NOT gone to Copenhagen, many would have been blamed him for Chicago’s losing its bid.”

UPDATE: For Larry Sabato, it’s not that he went, but that it was bungled:

Let me get this straight. The White House puts a new President’s prestige on the line, flies POTUS, the First Lady, and half of the administration to Europe to underline the importance of the gambit—and then Chicago finishes fourth—dead last—in the Olympics voting? Will anyone’s head roll for causing Obama this acute embarrassment on the international stage?

Political capital is a precious commodity. It is never to be wasted. That’s why many have been questioning whether Obama is making too many media appearances, lessening the importance of each one. And that’s why almost every observer will wonder how the White House got snookered into Olympics-gate—an unnecessary humiliation that will be on the permanent list of losses for this Presidency.

Yes, the White House political operation is supposed to protect a President from this sort of thing, but according to the New York Times they didn’t even understand the Olympic Committee’s “byzantine” politics.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Richard Fernandez. “Asking for freebies without showing the money is bad business etiquette and it ain’t funny. . . . And the world, strangely enough, expects America to act like America, not someone who aspires to be one of the boys. The lesson was cheap at the price.”

Meanwhile, Jim Treacher emails: “Obama just took the gold in the Men’s Political-Capital Toss.”

MORE: Inexperience:

There’s actually something worrisome about this whole Chicago fiasco, and it goes back to President Obama’s inexperience. Diplomacy 101 tells us that your head of state only shows up on the high-profile stage when a deal is complete. The lesson that most politicians learn well before they gain positions of power is that diplomacy is done by diplomats, professionals who work through all the negotiations and the hardball tactics and the carrot/stick combinations. The principals in the matter gather to discuss high-level topics and to smile for the cameras as the agreement is being signed. Heads of state do not conduct diplomacy, they ratify it, and surprises are entirely unwelcome at those summits and signing events (hence Reagan’s anger in Iceland.) . . . President Obama just got upstaged by an organization against whom no retaliation is acceptable, and he wants to meet with the Iranians next month? We are in deep, deep trouble.

Uh oh. And Ann Althouse goes to the video:

It’s all about failure, excusing failure, relishing failure, and pretending that it’s too mean to relish failure. (Like Dems wouldn’t have hooted with glee if Bush had gone all out trying to get the Olympics to come to Texas and gotten his comeuppance in the first round of voting.)

Here’s what I would like to talk about in all this: The First Lady and her husband made terrible presentations to the IOC! In retrospect, it makes complete sense that they got the boot in Round 1.

Video at the link.

SINGULARITY SUMMIT: Shaping The Intelligence Explosion. Plus, Whole Brain Emulation.

TOYOTA IN TROUBLE, “grasping for salvation.”

NASAL SPRAY for better memory.

AYN RAND IS READY FOR HER CLOSEUP.

IN THE MAIL: The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future.

PJTV: Blame it on Rio? Obama Discovers The World Doesn’t Love Him As Much As the MSM Does.

THINGS ARE TOUGH ALL OVER: ACORN planning massive layoffs? We’ll see what happens here.

HEH: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past. “Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.”

(Via Mark Steyn, who comments: “Next thing you know he’ll turn out to be one of those homosexuals he says Iran doesn’t have.”)

A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH: Pittsburgh-Area College Allows Student to Advocate for Concealed Carry on Campus, Abandons Repressive Policy.

Chalk another one up to F.I.R.E. — an institution worthy of your support.

MOE LANE explains the Olympic decision.

Related: Financial Times: Problems await Obama after Chicago defeat. It was an unwise allocation of resources.