ROGER VON OECH, best known to InstaPundit readers for his Ball of Whacks, now has a Creative Whack iPhone App.

IT’S A PJTV THANKSGIVING, with Steve Crowder, Bill Whittle, Sonja Schmidt, AlfonZo Rachel and more.

SOME PEOPLE WHO OWE APOLOGIES on their reactions to that Kentucky census worker’s death.

STILL MORE ON CLIMATEGATE, from Ian Pilmer and Tom Blumer.

Plus, The Climate E-mails And The Politics of Science.

And Rand Simberg says call it Climaquiddick. “In other words, expect the media to try to whitewash and minimize it.”

THINGS not looking so good for Saab.

A CABINET THAT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE AMERICA: Help Wanted: No Private Sector Experience Required. The graphic is stunning.

DECLINE UN-HIDDEN: ‘Cash for Clunkers’ Impact on GDP Half of What Was Originally Estimated.

ELIOT SPITZER’S TROOPERGATE DIRTY TRICKS SCANDAL was largely forgotten in the wake of the whole prostitution thing. But it’s back.

LOTS OF HEALTH-CARE NEWS FROM MICKEY KAUS. Including this sweeping delegation: “[I]n a little known provision, the bill authorizes the HHS Secretary to implement nationwide, without any congressional action, any reform that department actuaries certify will reduce long-term spending.” Kaus comments: “I smell a new Czar!”

You know the non-delegation doctrine isn’t actually dead, it just smells funny. This might bring it back to life. It should, anyway . . . .

ROGER SIMON on ClimateGate and Talk of “Transparency.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I now have a sense of what it was like living under Communism in Eastern Europe. The state-owned (in our case, establishment) press won’t report on reality so people had to turn to Samizdat to learn what’s actually happening in their world. It’s rather amazing. Also, having an Army of Davids go through these emails will pay dividends for years.” Well, Declan McCullagh at CBS has done a good job. But big-media folks seem to be slotting most of what coverage they do for the web, not for print or broadcast.

But word seems to be getting out.

HIDE THE DECLINE: This didn’t take long.

NEW YORK TIMES FOLKS telling InstaPundit to “STFU” — in blog comments? How are the mighty fallen . . . .

LOOKING AT the Democrats’ — and Obama’s — slumping poll numbers. This accounts for their eagerness to pass stuff now, since they’re likely to be even worse later.

It’s kind of a shame, since if they governed in the fiscally responsible fashion the campaign atmospherics promised, the poll numbers would be higher, and the country would be better off. Of course, you could say the same about the GOP in 2005. And I did . . . .

BUDGET NON SEQUITURS.

ANGELINA JOLIE HATES OBAMA? “She’s into education and rehabilitation and thinks Obama is all about welfare and handouts. She thinks Obama is really a socialist in disguise.” Maybe she’s just getting into character as Dagny Taggart. (Via Kuru Lounge).

READER PUSHBACK: “An hilariously bizarre situation is happening in the wake of the growing Climategate scandal. Many of the mainstream media stories about global warming are simply pretending it doesn’t exist. Perhaps they feel that by ignoring Climategate entirely that it will just go away. Unfortunately for them, the readers of these global warming stories keep bringing up the inconvenient truth of Climategate by mentioning the scandal in the comments section over and over and over again.”

KEY OFFICIAL ON GUANTANAMO CLOSING RESIGNS: That would be Phil Carter, one of Obama’s better appointments. Not a good sign, in my opinion, but who knows?

KENNETH GLADNEY speaks out.

50% OFF on end-of-season outdoor items.

MORE FROM THAT CBS Declan McCullagh ClimateGate story:

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU’s code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU’s climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: “I feel for this guy. He’s obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources.”

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

Read the whole thing. And Charlie Martin has much more on this.

CHANGE: Among independents, GOP leads by 24 points on the generic ballot.

MY DOCTOR SAID I WAS “SOUND AS THE DOLLAR.” THE FUNERAL IS NEXT WEEK.

Okay, that’s a joke from the 1970s, but now we’ve got this: Gold Jumps to Record as Slumping Dollar Spurs Investment Demand . So recycling 1970s dollar jokes looks like a good bet . . . .

IOWAHAWK GEOGRAPHIC: The Secret Life Of Climate Researchers.

CONSUMER REPORTS: Top Shopping Gripes. Makes me glad I’m doing most of my shopping online.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.