VOTER ANGER IS BUILDING OVER DEFICITS: “The generic poll shows a 16-point swing to the GOP over last year.”
Plus this: “When Mr. Obama was sworn into office the federal deficit for this year stood at $422 billion. At the end of October, it stood at $1.42 trillion. The total national debt also soared to $7.5 trillion at the end of last month, up from $6.3 trillion shortly after Inauguration Day.”
HMM: Tiger Woods: Injuries Caused by Wife, Not SUV.
UPDATE: A reader wonders how his Dubai deal is holding up. (Via FreeRepublic).
ANOTHER UPDATE: If this report is true, will Tiger get the full-blown Rihanna sympathy treatment? Or will it be treated as a joke?
EUGENE VOLOKH ON DATA SHARING AND CLIMATE RESEARCH: “My inclination would be to say that data should nearly always be shared. If you share your data, this lets others check the conclusions you draw from the data, as well as verifying the accuracy of the data against other available sources. They might disprove your arguments, or lead you to improve your arguments, or, if they reproduce your results, they might help prove the validity of your arguments. But in either case, science progresses better, and the decisions made based on the science are more reliable, than if you keep the data secret.”
OLD STORY: Bloggers stealing from Old Media. New Story: bloggers reporting actual news while Old Media covers up.
Then there’s this assist for the CBC.
CHANGE! “Who says the Democrats haven’t moved public opinion in the health care debate? According to a new Rasmussen poll out today, they have steadily persuaded more and more Americans that the health care system we have is a good one.”
RUSSIAN TRAIN CRASH “caused by bomb.”
IN BRITAIN, talk of privatizing the NHS?
THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION takes on the Black Panther voter-intimidation case. “Attorney General Eric Holder has so far ignored requests for relevant documents despite a statutory mandate to cooperate.” Now they’re subpoenaing Justice Department people.
AT THE NEW YORK TIMES DOT-EARTH BLOG, a climate scientist talks about how ClimateGate is discouraging young researchers, and how to respond. “If climate science is to uphold core research values and be credible to public, we need to respond to any critique of data or methodology that emerges from analysis by other scientists. Ignoring skeptics coming from outside the field is inappropriate; Einstein did not start his research career at Princeton, but rather at a post office. I’m not implying that climate researchers need to keep defending against the same arguments over and over again. Scientists claim that they would never get any research done if they had to continuously respond to skeptics. The counter to that argument is to make all of your data, metadata, and code openly available. Doing this will minimize the time spent responding to skeptics; try it! If anyone identifies an actual error in your data or methodology, acknowledge it and fix the problem. Doing this would keep molehills from growing into mountains that involve congressional hearings, lawyers, etc.”
Excellent advice, though perhaps a bit late now. Plus, another comment: “It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”
Read the whole thing.
TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Punking the White House.
It’s funny, but I remain concerned about security. My guess is that White House security isn’t frequently tested, and hence doesn’t stay as sharp as it should. (On the other hand, a convenience market has people trying to buy beer with fake ID every day.)
PEGGY NOONAN: A White House That Is Coming To Seem Amateurish. “When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.”
MORE AMAZON Black Friday Sales.
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: Jerry Brown Needs To Get Serious About Investigating ACORN.
COMPUTERWORLD: Data-Leak Lessons Learned From The Climategate Hack.
CONGRATULATING the prescient Joe Biden.
Plus this: “The Times also ignores their own reporting of two weeks back by retelling the story of Biden and the Kurds with no mention of Biden adviser Peter Galbraith, who made millions advising the Kurds.”
IT’S THE FRIDAY SALE at Amazon.
MORE ON CLIMATEGATE, in the Financial Times: Secrecy In Science Is A Corrosive Force.
TEST-DRIVING the world’s fastest personal submarine.
With good reason, the prevailing economic concern of most Americans is jobs.
With this in mind, two Democratic congressmen have cooked up a plan to help us out. The strategy entails sucking another $150 billion of capital investment out of the market each year and handing it to an organization that can’t balance a budget, borrows money with abandon, runs massive deficits and excels at creating fairy tale jobs.
What could go wrong?