Arizona's Own Espresso Pundit

Carpe D.M.

It was exactly a year ago today that I predicted that Janet Napolitano would become Michael Brown. Today, if you put "heckuva job" and "Janet" into Google, you will get over 1,000 hits. 

Earlier this week, I pointed out that when Janet Napolitano gets fired, it won't be for her incompetence or her gaffes, it will be because Democratic political strategists will realize that she is going to damage Democratic Congressional candidates in the 2010 elections.

Today, that theory is starting to go national.  

The real and lasting damage, however, is not to Janet Napolitano's tenure in the Obama cabinet. Rather, it is to Democrats running in 2010.

Just as Michael Brown came to symbolize George Bush as detached and aloof, Janet has come to symbolize Obama as naive and weak.   She's an albatross even assuming that there are no other incidents.  If a plane goes down on her watch, the Democrats will lose the House and possibly the Senate. 

Napolitano will hurt Democratic candidates generally, but there is one Democratic golden child who is especially vulnerable to Napolitano's image problems. 

Gabby Giffords represents Arizona's 8th Congressional District--that's the one that was represented by Republican Jim Kolbe for 22 years.  It's also the Arizona District with the largest military presence.  Fort Huachuca is within the district and most of the men and women who serve at Davis Monthan Air force Base live in the district. 

In many ways the next election will be a fight over DM.  Davis Monthan voters are more likely to vote on national security issues and unlike the rest of the nation to whom Janet is simply a deer in the camera lights, DM voters know Janet.  They also know that Gabby knows Janet. 

Napolitano is going to hurt a lot of Democrats in the fall--30 seconds at a time.  But Giffords--who has a personal relationship with Janet, and represents a district with a heavy military presence of voters who also know Janet--is especially vulnerable. 

So the race is likely to come down to who can best seize the DM voter.  Gabby with Janet wrapped her neck, or the Republican challenger.  It looks to me like the two likely  Republican  Challengers  are pretty well positioned.

Update:  The Star is running a straw poll  asking whether or not Napolitano should be fired.  Polls like this aren't scientific and the poll should be taken with a grain of salt because it is paired with an article about Kyl and McCain's views on Napolitano's performance. However, it is also being conducted in her geographic base.  Pima county should be the number one county in the nation in which Napolitano's support is strongest.

 So far, the results are 2 to 1 in favor of letting her go.

Credits Where Credits are Due.

On Monday, the Editorial Board of the Arizona Republic continued its Jihad against school tax credits and--unable to make its case through mere persuasion--resorted to a  classic Mainstream Media tactic.

The premise of the editorial is that the practice of “recommending” which students benefit from scholarships is illegal, and that Arizona lawmakers are gambling that the IRS won’t notice.
 
In order to convince the reader that the practice of “recommending” is indeed illegal, the editorial writers refer to an article written by two Republic reporters.

Unethical is one thing. Illegal is another, far more serious matter.

Reporters Pat Kossan and Ronald J. Hansen have found no shortage of tax experts who believe the practice of "recommending" specific students transgresses federal tax law.

But that’s not what the article says.   In fact, the experts quoted in the Kossan/Hansen article say that while outright  swapping of charitable contributions is illegal, Arizona’s policy of allowing “recommendations” is in a gray area.
 
The absolutes begin to get gray over the practice of "recommending" that a donation go to a specific child, perhaps a grandchild or an employer's son.
 
Kossan and Hansen then go on to quote three tax preparers as well as a tax professor and the Director of a School Tuition Organization.  The professionals sound a common theme.  Openly earmarking a contribution to a specific child is illegal and earmarking a contribution to a specific child and disguising it as a recommendation is also illegal but making a legitimate recommendation is legal.
 
The entire point of the Editorial is that the practice of recommending is illegal and that the legislature is taking a huge risk by gambling that the IRS is too busy to investigate.   The editorial writer uses a Republic article as a source and resorts to  mischaracterizing the article in order justify the editorial.  Naturally, this approach only works if no one remembers the original article…or if no one is there to blog about it.

Journalists are shocked when they learn that the public distrusts the media, but shenanigans like Monday's editorial go a long way toward eroding public trust.  And readers who don't trust a source eventually stop reading the source.

That my friends is one reason why the newspapers are fading away. 

Looks Like Janet will be buying Another One way Ticket...

Janet Napolitano will be lucky to last another six months as DHS Secretary. 

Don't get me wrong; she's not going to be forced out because she's unqualified--after all, if qualifications mattered, she obviously wouldn't have been appointed in the first place. 

She's not going to be forced out because of her increasingly serious series of embarrassing gaffes--claiming that illegal immigration isn't actually illegal, claiming that 9/11 terrorists entered the US through Canada, issuing a report that returning military vets could be recruited as terrorists by right wing groups, or publishing the TSA Security Manuel online.

Frankly, she's not even going to be forced out for her disastrous handling of the Christmas Bomber story--although her laughable claim that "The system worked" will go down as a monumental gaffe.  (A guy on the watch list, reportedly without a passport and without luggage, pays cash for a one way ticket and gets on a plane to the US and the only reason he is unable to blow it up is that his bomb fails to detonate and a passenger overwhelms him--what part of that makes Janet think that "The system worked"?) (Update: Janet is now admitting that "the system failed miserably".)

No, she's going to be forced out because the entire world knows that she's incompetent and the President's team understands that they will be held politically responsible if there is a major incident on her watch.  My guess is that Rahm Emanuel called the President sometime in the last 24 hours and said that the Democrats will lose 100 seats in Congress if the President leaves Napolitano in office and someone takes down a plane within three months of the election.  Team Obama has to be considering the Madrid train bombings which were perfectly timedto topple the government of Jose Maria Aznar.

So in the next six months--probably much sooner--Janet will move on and the President will pick an obscure, non-political, retired General who is clearly qualified and above reproach. 

But how does Napolitano find a face saving exit?  Ah, here's where the story gets interesting. Janet obviously can't use the classic Washington excuse that she wants "to spend more time with her family." And she can't just Waltz over to K street...even Washington's revolving door doesn't revolve that quickly.  No. Janet has to make it look like she's leaving DHS for something bigger. 

So what could be bigger than being a Cabinet Secretary?  Being a Senator.  Janet needs a face saving way out of DHS that preserves her political capital and keeps Washington insiders wondering if she is coming back.  Her best move is to resign her position in March and immediately announce against John McCain. 

Can she actually beat McCain?  Of course not.  But that's not the point.  If she caps off her disastrous year at DHS by getting fired and then aimlessly searching for a place to land, her political career is over and she's a laughingstock.  However, if she resigns and immediately announces against McCain, she has managed to save face and regain political credibility. 

She's also betting on a Black Swan--those extremely rare game changing events that can't be predicted, but seem obvious in retrospect.  She's hoping that J.D. Hayworth--or in his absence Len Munsil--takes out McCain in the August 24th primary.  Frankly, in the current political climate--and after bankrupting the state and then bolting--it's unlikely that Janet could defeat Hayworth or Munsil, but it would be an interesting race. 

Am I wrong to predict that Janet will resign the DHS job in March and immediately announce that she's running against John McCain?  Probably.  After all, it's a pretty bold prediction--or course I have a pretty good record with bold predictions.  Like this one and this one, and this one, and of course, this one. In fact, the most likely scenario is that she leaves within the next six months and quietly sinks into the obscurity of a D.C. law firm.  But the McCain scenario is a distinct possibility and if someone were to give me decent odds, I think it would be an excellent bet.

Speaking of predictions, It's been a year since Janet accepted the job at  Homeland Security and you may recall that  I pointed out that the job would be a disaster for her. 

The Governor has just accepted the worst job in the United States Government.  If nothing happens, then she will go down in history as an obscure figure who is responsible for you having to take off your shoes at the airport.  Even if she manages to prevent a disaster, you will never hear about it.  The job has no up side.

But what about a Black Swan?  What if someone puts Anthrax in the Metro, a comet hits Houston, a 500 year flood wipes out a good chunk of the Midwest, or a ticked off engineer from Pakistan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan crosses the border from Canada with a nuclear bomb in the back of a VW Micro Bus?

What then?  Then Janet becomes Michael Brown after Katrina, Neville Chamberlain after Munich or Bill Buckner after the 1986 World Series. 

Her tenure at Homeland Security will either entail  year after year of career-ending obscurity, or sudden, total, unexpected and unmitigated disaster.

Since then, Janet has gone from gaffe to gaffe and she is well on her way to becoming Buckner.  One announcement would change all that. 

The Year in Books

Reading for pleasure was one of the things I missed most while in law school. Sure, I had time for occasional books, but most of my free time was spent reading cases.  My last final was December 15th of 2008, so I've had a year to catch up.  While I couldn't devote the full year to reading because I took the Arizona Bar in February and the California Bar in July, I did have time to eliminate some pent up demand.  I'm not posting until after Christmas, and I thought you might be interested in a quick look at some of my favorite books from the last year. 

I started the year with two books by Historian John Keegan.  Intelligence During Warfare and the History of Warfare.  This is a great pair of books.  There are really two lessons.  The first is that the guy with the best weapons, tactics and intelligence wins.  That means that a small team of archers with chariots will defeat 500 guys with bronze swords.  The next lesson is that every few hundred years hordes sweep down from the Asian Steps and wipe out civilization, so you had better make sure that you are the guy with the weapons, tactics and intelligence.  The books also provide a great history of some key battles and are a fun read.

Master of the Senate is the third in Robert Caro's series on Lyndon Johnson.  This book concentrates on Johnson's unbelievable ability to control the US Senate despite a thin majority and little seniority.  It also provides a lot of background on the major battles that the senate fought from the 1940s to the 1960s--with an emphasis on the civil rights movement and the attempts by Republicans to outlaw the Southern Democrat's techniques of preventing black Americans from voting. 

 Caro's first Johnson book--the Path to Power--is on the short list of books that have influenced me most.  Of course, there's little in Johnson to admire.  He was a chronic liar, womanizer and bad President. He botched Vietnam...and don't get me started on the War on Poverty.  But books about fatally flawed people can serve as a great example--sometimes more so than books about the honest men who live normal lives. 

Karnow's History of Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize and is a great companion to Master of the Senate.  Most Americans would start a history of the Vietnam conflict in the mid 1950s...Karnow starts with Marie Antoinette.  After all the story is French from Marie Antoinette until Dien Bien Phu.  The book provides a great narrative of the first part of the war--meaning the Westmorland years.  That's the "traditional" narrative, however in order to get a full understanding of the later half of the war, read Sorely's "A Better War." 

My favorite History book is Modern Times by Paul Johnson.  I read it in he early 1990s and re-read it this year.  The book closely tracks my world view and may have actually played a substantial roll in creating my world view.  The book is frankly pretty depressing--it covers the period from about 1918 to the mid 1990s--and it gives you a full understanding the carnage of the last century.  However, it makes you realize how much peace and prosperity we enjoy now.  I think the central thesis of the book is that if you take really smart people who are determined to make the world a better place and give them enough power...they will exterminate 120,000,000 people. 

If Modern Times--at nearly 1,000 pages--is too much for you, check out Paul Johnson's "Heroes: From Alexander the Great to Churchill and De Gaul."  This is a fun quick read. Johnson makes the book more interesting by discussing his Heroes in contemporaneous sets, so Elizabeth I is with Walter Raleigh, Mae West is with Marilyn Monroe, Thatcher and Reagan are with John Paul II.  The pairings are a great device to show how heroes interact with each other and provide a vehicle to delve more deeply into specific time periods. 

The great part about reading for pleasure is that you can read really light books and not worry about it.  Simon Winchester is a Geologist who wrote The Map that Changed the World and Krakatoa.  I recommend them both.  Sure they are light, but they are fun and provide interesting little vignettes of history.  I enjoy learning about geology, but Winchester also goes into the history of debtors prisons, the East India Company, the Pepper Trade, the history of coal mining and, of course plate tectonics, fossils and the essentials of geology--all while telling pretty compelling stories. 

A great lesson of the books is that during each period, the science of geology was long settled--and completely wrong.  Ours is not the first generation plagued by  Group think, Anchor Bias, Cognitive Dissonance, Confirmation Bias and the desire for conformity.  Be sure to read "Map" first. 

Cass Sunstien is probably the most influential law professor writing today.  He's done great work on regulatory theory and I relied on some of his work when I wrote my major paper--cost benefit analysis of Arsenic Remediation in drinking water--for law school.  His book "Nudge" provides a great discussion of a theory that is now being called "Libertarian Paternalism."  It's an interesting concept.  Sunstien argues that there are certain policy choices that--for most of the populace--are better than others, so policy makers should make those choices the default choices.  He provides an interesting analysis and examples.  If you are in a job in which you help set policy, or you work in a regulatory environment, the book is a must read.

The original political parties were the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Federalists.  Although most of what the Federalists believed was put into the Constitution, the Federalist party quickly faded away.  Federalist ideas would have faded away as well except for one man--Supreme Court Justice John Marshall.  Marshall's term on the court long outlived the party appointing him, however, his control of the court allowed him to flesh out many of the fundamental details of our government structure.  In What Kind of Nation, we get to see the epic battle between Jefferson--the first non-Federalist President--and Marshall.  Here's an example one fundamental question. What happens when Congress passes a law that conflicts with the Constitution? Jefferson believed that states could simply not enforce--or nullify--such a law.  Marshall took a round a bout way and decided that the Supreme Court should have that power.  Our nation is fundamentally different than it would have been if Jefferson had prevailed.

Most early History of the United States follows the Founding Fathers from the Declaration of Independence to somewhere in the Adams Administration.  That's a great period, but sometimes it's over covered.  Very few people read about the second American Revolution when Andrew Jackson became the first popularly elected President.  W. H. Brands' Life of Jackson is a great read because if covers a history that's both later and much further West than we usually read.  Every school child learns about the slaughter of the Indians at Wounded Knee, but few learn of the slaughter BY the Indians at Fort Mims.  Jackson was the Founders' worst fear--commonly born, popularly elected and not from Virginia.  His election was more than a turning point.  It was a fundamental transformation.

I enjoyed Brand's Jackson so much that I had to read the spin off.  Jackson was tangentially involved in creating Texas--Sam Houston was from Tennessee and fought with Jackson--and Brands chronicles the history of Texas in Lone Star Nation.  What a great story...and frankly, one that I didn't know.  Sure, we've all heard of the Alamo, but the history of Texas is much more than the Alamo.  The brutality of the 19th century is amazing (nothing compared to the 20th, of course, but amazing none the less.)  The History shows how one or two people can make a huge difference in the flow of History.  Yet the story seems so random.  It's an interesting combination.

If after reading Brand's history of Texas, you still don't understand what it means to be a Texan, read Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell.  This is an unbelievable story of a Navy SEAL team that gets dropped into what turns out to be a Taliban stronghold--four SEALs against 140 Taliban fighters and it isn't pretty.  Luttrell flashes back to his SEAL training and then flashes further back to a lifetime of training; he had always wanted to be a SEAL. The book will bring a few tears to your eyes.  It's also patriotic to the point of being jingoistic.  Luttrell doesn't hide the fact that he respects President Bush, fights for his country, would die for his friends and doesn't want to screw up and embarrass the great state of Texas.  Unlike Jarhead--which I also enjoyed--Luttrell's story is the John Wayne version of the Global War On Terror.  Jarhead was a good book, but a lousy movie; Lone Survivor was a great book and I believe it will be a great movie.

Huey Long was the closest thing to a dictator that our nation has produced and like most of the Dictators of the 20th century, he came from the left.  Kingfish tells the story of what happens when someone who is truly corrupt takes over a state.  It's really unbelievable.  The story also reveals some remarkable policy transformations.  Long wanted the federal government to pay college tuition for the poor--the idea was so outrageous that he couldn't even get a second in the US Senate--after all, taxing some people and spending the money on other people was pure redistribution, and obviously Constitutional.  How quaint. 

Goodbye Darkness--William Manchester's account of his service as Marine in the Pacific--was the book I most enjoyed this year.  All history buffs are familiar with Manchester's work and his biographies of MacArthur and Churchill are must reads. While he only managed to finish two of three volumes of his Churchill trilogy--The Last Lion and Alone--I think the series still stands as the definitive Churchill.  Manchester's account of his own experience in the Pacific is gripping.  I know that sounds trite (in fact, the word "gripping" is used in one of the blurbs on the back) but I can't think of a better term.  The book grabs you and doesn't let you go until you have finished it. 

I also enjoyed Manchester's "A World Lit Only by Fire."  This book is actually two books, in the first, Manchester provides an overview of European history from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance.  What's shocking is that there's nearly 1,000 years in which mankind makes no advances--life is truly nasty, brutish and short.  He then provides a great overview of the Renaissance followed by the second book which is an interesting account of the Magellan's circumnavigation of the Earth. 

I don’t read much fiction, but friends recommended a couple “mid life crisis books”   Replay by Grimwood is a great book for men in their 40s.  The first line is great:  “Jeff Winston was talking on the phone with his wife when he died…”  The protagonist then relives his life from age 18 to 43…at which point, he promptly dies a again.   The choices he makes and the consequences of those choices make for a great story. 

All the reviews so far have been positive.  That's because if I don't like a book, I don't finish it. One book that was disappointing but I did manage to finish was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The story was interesting, but the philosophy was really lame.  Maybe the new age philosophy was relevant in the early 1970s, but I think it only succeeds in showing how lame the 1970s really were.

One book that I really enjoyed was Theodore Rex--Edmund Morris's sequel to The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.  "Rise" was better and it won the Pulitzer Prize.  Unfortunately, Morris followed up "Rise" with "Dutch"which was a disastrous biography of Ronald Reagan.  Theodore Rex takes up where "Rise" ended--McKinley is pronounced dead and Teddy is President.  The book tracks Roosevelt's Presidency, but unfortunately ends when the term ends, so we don't learn about Roosevelt's disappointment with Taft, or the rise of Wilson.

In "The Tipping Point" Malcolm Gladwell uses the theory of how viruses spread to explain how social phenomena reach a critical mass and then explode onto the rest of society.  He uses the terms "connectors", "mavens" and "salesmen" to describe how it only takes a few people in clearly defined roles to ignite a firestorm.  The "connectors" are networkers.  They seem to know everyone.  The "Mavens" are information junkies who have an expertise in the area you want to promote; they serve as cue givers to those who don't follow the issue closely.  The salesmen have a talent for persuading others and work as transmitters of the "virus" that you are trying to spread.  If you want to affect public policy, fashion or opinion, you need to be aware of how this process works and be able to identify and motivate the connectors, mavens and salesmen who affect the issue.  Interestingly, blogging allows the connectors, mavens and salesmen to be the same person.  If you are an Espresso Pundit fan, you know that I'm already, you know, taking advantage of that fact.

Next year I'm switching gears.  I'm planning to build a law firm, so instead of focusing almost exclusively on history and biography, I'm going to get back to my Accounting roots and concentrate on some business and sales strategies.  I think it will be frefreshing change and I'm looking forward to it.  I'm getting a head start, so I just finished the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chel Holmes.  It's a practical guide to networking and sales that I found quite usefull.  Books like this are full of tips that in retrospect seem so obvious that we forget that we never would have figured them out on our own.  So I read it with highlighter in hand--I guess it's full circle to the law school days.

Still in the business mode, I'm currently reading "Ahead of the Curve" about a journalist who attends Harvard Business School.  So far it's a fun read I always enjoy stories about reporters who are introduced to so called "numbers."  In addition to being an interesting story, the book provides an inside peek at life in the Harvard MBA program.  That's a path I tried to take but didn't make it.  I was rejected by Harvard, Stanford and Wharton, that was in the mid 1980s and I was straight out of college, so my resume was pretty lite.  I thought I might be able to bluff them with my 99th percentile GMAT, but apparently the other applicants had better grades, comparable GMATs and had served as US Ambassador to France.

Well that's it.  Next year I'll shoot for 20 or 25 more books, this time with a business emphasis--and if you know any good lawyers who are looking for work, let me know.   

Hey Mom, Look, I'm in the Paper

Mike Sunnucks of the Business Journal interviewed me for an article on the media and fair use.  I'm sure that my opinions will be somewhat controversial since I reject the traditional notion that the Mainstream Media does all the original reporting and the bloggers and Google-type aggregators live off of their work.

Climate Gate is a great example.  The BBC had the story first and didn't run it.  Then when the whistle blower posted the files on a website, the blogs picked up the story and Eventually, the MSM was forced to acknowledge it.  Locally, I owned that story for nearly two weeks until the Star picked it up, after another week, the Republic ran an AP version of the story.   The Republic still hasn't reported on the Arizona connection. 

Mike's article is behind the subscription wall, so if you want to read the whole thing you should, you know, subscribe.  Or better yet, go buy a hard copy.  Thanks Mike.

Greg Patterson pens EspressoPundit.com, a news and commentary blog focusing on Arizona politics and the media landscape. He talked with the Phoenix Business Journal about some of the legal battles and marketplace challenges facing the Valley’s media market.

Patterson, a former state legislator with an accounting background, now is director of the Arizona Competitive Power Alliance, a group focused on energy issues. He also is a practicing attorney, having graduated recently from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

Where do you see the potential fight going between search engines such as Google and content producers such as News Corp.? Companies like News Corp. no longer have a monopoly on content. News Corp. needs Google much more than Google needs News Corp. If the traditional newspapers refuse to provide content to the search engines, then the search engines will automatically simply pick up the other sources, like blogs, newsletters, chat rooms and original sources, like meeting minutes.

Arizona's Upcoming Bankruptcy is starting to get some attention.

Here's the latest from the Wall Street Journal.

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer convened a special legislative session Thursday to consider about $200 million in spending cuts and fund transfers. Although the state made $452 million in budget cuts and other changes in November, slumping tax collections mean the legislature faces a $1.6 billion shortfall.

Arizona took out a $700 million credit line from Bank of America Corp. in November to pay bills, but that credit line was spent within days. State Treasurer Dean Martin said if the state wasn't able to raise an expected $737 million next month by selling several buildings, Arizona might have to issue IOUs.

Avatar...Ishtar...Whatever

I'm not a big fan of Hollywood culture, but I love the movie industry.  I think it's great that producers, directors, actors and investors work hard for a year and spend a couple hundred million dollars creating a product that faces an immediate--and often catastrophic--market test.  Just think what would happen if National Public Radio, the Morrison Institute or Al Sharpton had to actually survive in the market....

Since Hollywood culture is liberal while nearly half of the country is Republican--and the largest political blockin the United States is Conservative--Hollywood executives have to temper their liberal instincts and make movies that Americans actually want to see...kind of like me getting a seven figure job writing speeches for Nancy Pelosi. 

Since there's money involved, the grown ups who actually write the checks usually prevent the Director in a Che T shirt from inserting his world view in the final product.   So while I know that Tom Hanks is liberal, I can still enjoy his movies--even his political movies like Forrest Gump and the very enjoyable Charlie Wilson's War.

Sometimes, Hollywood ideals line up perfectly with American sentiment and liberal movies make money...who can forget the Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now--which was the Deer Hunter plus Wagner and Napalm. 

At other times, the country remains out of tune with Hollywood liberalism but Hollywood doesn't realize it and makes a series of expensive mistakes.  That's why Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Valley of Elah, Redacted, and The Kingdom were expensive flops.

Which brings me to Avatar.  Sure, I'm a big James Cameran fan; The Terminator movies were awesome, I loved True Lies, enjoyed Titanic and besides, he's left handed.  He's also a leftist, but he usually leaves his views out of the final products. 

That is Cameron left his views out of his final product until Avatar, which apparently about the Battle of Wounded Knee fought by Smurfs in 3D.

Sure, the buzz and novelty will bring Avatar $200 million but since the movie cost $500 million to produce and market it's going to have to actually have an enjoyable plot to move into the black.  Even at the height of the Bush-is-the-worst-President-ever frenzy, movies that depicted American Marines as imperialist tools crushing the indigenous peoples in order to steal their resources on behalf of major US corporations wasn't a money making formula.

Maybe I'm wrong and Avatar will make $2 billion, but I don't think so.  The mood of the country has gone decidedly to the right.  The One wasn't the Messiah that everyone thought he was, and while Bush may have walked funny and mispronounced basic words, he didn't bow to the King of Saudi Arabia.  So my guess is that American movie goers are looking for John Wayne not General Custer.  Sure, the opening buzz for Avatar will be hugh and the media will do its best to keep the momentum going, calling the movie "important" and "provocative" but then everyone will go back and see Blind Side again. 

But that's the beauty of the market. 

Howler of the Week.

University of Arizona President Robert Shelton has finally responded to the fact that two of the main characters in the Climategate Scandal are on his faculty.  His response shows that he either has no understanding of the controversy, or assumes that we have no understanding of the controversy.

As a matter of course our faculty adhere to the highest standards of research ethics. Their data, once published, are available to other scholars as required by the journals’ publishing work and in most cases are posted online and hence are freely available for download. Their research conclusions are cross-examined through vigorous rounds of peer review.

“Their Data, once published…”?  That's hilarious.  But that’s the way it’s supposed to work isn’t it?  Researchers publish their underlying data and other researchers try to replicate their results.  Of course, the Climate researchers don’t publish their underlying data.  And now we learn that they, like, you  know...destroyed it.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

Then Shelton, having just returned from an extended trip to Neptune, points out that"Their research conclusions are cross-examined through vigorous rounds of peer review."

Peer review?  Give me a break.   The Climate Scandal shows that the scientists were systematically undercutting the peer review process. 

One of the most striking revelations to immediately emerge from the “climategate” scandal has been references to efforts by scientists espousing the human-caused warming theory to exclude contrary viewpoints from important scientific publications.

One of the most striking revelations to immediately emerge from the “climategate” scandal has been references to efforts by scientists espousing the human-caused warming theory to exclude contrary viewpoints from important scientific publications.

Here's my favorite part of Shelton's apologia.  "...global climate change, is the subject of vigorous worldwide debate..."

Really?  I thought there was, like this big "consensus" and the issue was, you know "settled" and that septics are "deniers".  (A wonderful term so evocative of the Holocaust--not that they want to get into any ad hominem attacks or anything.)

It's possible that Robert Shelton and his narrow peer group of like-minded men really believe that Professors Hughes and Overpeck have explained away their actions.  However willful ignorance and confirmation bias  are inexcusable in the Internet Age.  So Dr. Shelton, before once more asserting full confidence in Hughes and Overpeck, do some research.  Perhaps you should start with this overview from The Weekly Standard--I guarantee that folks in the Legislature will be reading it--that way if you end up in front of a committee and someone asks you about the work of Professors Hughes and Overpeck, you won't humiliate yourself will assertions of "published data", "peer review" and "vigorous debate."

Here are a few highlights of the Weekly Standard article.

In 1998 three scientists from American universities--Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes--unveiled in Nature magazine what was regarded as a signal breakthrough in paleoclimatology--the now notorious "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction (picture a flat "handle" extending from the year 1000 to roughly 1900, and a sharply upsloping "blade" from 1900 to 2000). Their paper purported to prove that current global temperatures are the highest in the last thousand years by a large margin--far outside the range of natural variability. The medieval warm period and the little ice age both disappeared. The hockey stick chart was used prominently in the 2001 IPCC report as "smoking gun" proof of human-caused global warming. Mann and his coauthors concluded that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium."

Case closed? Hardly. The CRU emails reveal internal doubts about this entire enterprise both before and after the hockey stick made its debut. In a 1996 email to a large number of scientists in the CRU circle, Tom Wigley, a top climatologist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, cautioned: "I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product." Mann and his colleagues made use of some of the CRU data, but some of the CRU scientists weren't comfortable with the way Mann represented it and also seemed to find Mann more than a bit insufferable.

In yet another revealing email, Cook told Briffa: "Of course [Bradley] and other members of the MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective, i.e. the cup is not only 'half-empty'; it is demonstrably 'broken'. I come more from the 'cup half-full' camp when it comes to the MWP, maybe yes, maybe no, but it is too early to say what it is."

This email exchange is particularly troubling because it shows that Hughes himself was skeptical of his own report even while the UN was using it to argue that the issue of mad made global Climate Change was "settled."

Even as the IPCC was picking up Mann's hockey stick with enthusiasm, Briffa sent Mann a note of caution about "the possibility of expressing an impression of more consensus than might actually exist. I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not 'muddy the waters' by including contradictory evidence worried me. IPCC is supposed to represent consensus but also areas of uncertainty in the evidence." Briffa had previously dissented from the hockey stick reconstruction in a 1999 email to Mann and Phil Jones: "I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago." Even Malcolm Hughes, one of the original hockey stick coauthors, privately expressed reservations about overreliance on their invention, writing to Cook, Mann and others in 2002:

All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data. As Ed [Cook] wrote, in the tree-ring records that form the backbone of most of the published estimates, the problem of poor replication near the beginnings of records is particularly acute, and ubiquitous. .  .  . Therefore, I accept that everything we are doing is preliminary, and should be treated with considerable caution.

 

 

Malcolm Hughes Responds

The local media is starting to engage on the Climate Gate scandal.  Nearly three weeks ago, I pointed out that the UA’s Malcolm Hughes was one of a handful of recipients of the now infamous “Hide the Decline” memo.

Kudos to the Star's Tony Davis who followed up my post by talking directly to Hughes

After the hacked e-mail became public last month, Arizona-based "Espresso Pundit" blogger Greg Patterson lit into Hughes, writing, "One of the researchers who participated in this email exchange in which they discuss using a 'trick' to 'hide the decline' was Malcom (sic) Hughes."

So what was Hughes’ response?  He threw email author Phil Jones under the bus.

One problem with such criticism, according to Hughes, is that this "hide the decline" tactic was not used by Hughes and his partners in the controversial hockey-stick studies. It was used in separate research by Hughes' partner Mann and Keith Briffa, of the East Anglia university.

Read Hughes’ response carefully.  Does he try to pawn off the story that “hide the decline” is somehow “scientist” talk and it’s OK?  Nope.  Does he claim that the “trick” is an unfortunate choice of words, but actually represents an acceptable statistical adjustment.  Nope. Does he defend the author in any way?  Not at all. 

In fact, Hughes immediately distances himself from Jones, Mann, Briffa and the rest of those who participated in the email exchange.

Hughes says that it was Michael Mann and Keith Briffa who used the "tactic" to hide the decline. Hughes' is quick to point out that his research didn’t rely on "the tactic".

However, I wasn’t accusing Hughes of using "the trick".  I was pointing out that he knew about it.  He knew that data was being manipulated.  Sure, Hughes points out now that HE didn’t use the tactic.  But what did he do when he found out that his partners were using it?  Did he report them?  Chastise them?  Distance himself from them? No, No and No.  In fact, he continued to  work with them, continued to resist requests to release his data, continued to support Mann et al—despite his knowledge that their underlying data looked manipulated.  He also continued to maintain that there is a "consensus" and that the issue is "settled"--and now that Jones has stepped down and Mann is under investigation, Hughes throws them under the bus.

Let me put the issue in context.  Say you are an executive in the Finance Department of a large multinational firm and you are one of five people copied on an email in which other high ranking officials disclose that they are using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in Net Revenue.  Years later, after the company goes under, the stock collapses and the emails become public, you point out that YOU never used the trick in your own financial reporting.  Do you think that would fly?

It’s looking more and more like Hughes has been part of an extensive fraud.  Did he commit fraud?  He certainly doesn’t seem to think so.  But it looks to me like he’s an accomplice. 

Isn't That Ironic.

The New York Times has an interesting article about John McCain getting back to his roots.  I thought this was interesting section.

Mr. McCain, who did not respond to a request for an interview, told advisers the day after he lost to Barack Obama that he intended to seek a fifth term in the Senate. Yet he is facing a threatened primary challenge from J.D. Hayworth, a conservative talk show host and former Republican member of Congress, who said he was encouraged by polls that showed Mr. McCain was vulnerable.

“The question that people are asking is this,” Mr. Hayworth said in an interview. “Do we want to send John McCain back to the United States Senate again, or is it time to change to a clear, consistent, common-sense Republican?”

Notice that McCain doesn't return the NYT calls, buy Hayworth does?  Now that's a switch.  It's also clearly an indication that both camps think that McCain is vulnerable.