links for 2009-12-01

California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Dem, issued the tersest statement of all the 2010 CA Senate candidates:

"I support the President's mission and exit strategy for Afghanistan, but I do not support adding more troops because there are now 200,000 American, NATO and Afghan forces fighting roughly 20,000 Taliban and less than 100 al Qaeda."

Boxer is in a tough spot, politically, on Afghanistan. She was one of few Democrats who voted against a resolution giving President Bush the authority to use military force against Iraq in 2002. She doesn't want to alienate the liberal, anti-war wing of the Democratic Party who adore her.

But she also doesn't want to push back too hard on Obama — she'll need him to make some California visits for her next year. Thus we have her supporting "the President's mission and exit strategy" but not a key element of it – the troop buildup.

Republican Carly Fiorina, ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, said "Defeating the terrorist threat in Afghanistan is an imperative. I agreed with President Obama when he said in March that this would require military commitment, economic development and diplomatic energy. I also agree that Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked.

"I support the President's decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan and am pleased that he is deploying them as quickly as prudently possible. I believe that any timeline for withdrawal must be sensitive to conditions on the ground, so that it does not pose a security risk for both Americans and Afghans. I also support our efforts to increase the capacity of Afghan military forces to protect their nation.

The number of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats fell by nearly two percentage points in November. Added to declines earlier in the year, the number of Democrats in the nation has fallen by five percentage points during 2009.

In November, 36.0% of American adults said they were Democrats. That’s down from 37.8% a month ago and the lowest number of Democrats since December 2005. See the History of Party Trends from January 2004 to the present.

Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists were posted to the Web following the security breach last month.

The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent.

President Obama is sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan but plans to conclude the war and withdraw most U.S. service members within three years, senior administration officials told CNN Tuesday.

The president is ordering military officials to get the reinforcements to Afghanistan within six months, White House officials said.

Obama will travel to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, later Tuesday to officially announce his plans. It would be his second escalation of U.S. forces in the war-torn Islamic country since he came to power in January.

The president also is seeking further troop commitments from NATO allies as part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at wiping out al Qaeda elements and stabilizing the country while training Afghan forces.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) on Tuesday called Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) health care reform bill “quite an accomplishment,” but he said he still opposes the $848 billion package in its current form.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase

OK, not really. Little Green Footballs on why he flipped from right to left. The explanation is a little thin. It’s more an illustration of how he’s flipped out, from right to left. But apparently it works like this: If you disagree with any element of half of the American body politic, you disagree with the whole thing. This makes you saner, more compassionate, more embracing of diversity. Probably smarter, too.

On the eve of the unveiling of the nation’s new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side with the Taliban if they think the United States is heading for the exits.

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”