Wish they’d done it for better reasons, but the Republicans did block a Congressional pay hike this week.

On the other hand, to be fair, at $165,000/yr., Congressmen and Senators really aren’t paid all that much when you consider they have to maintain homes in both Washington, D.C. and their home states; and that this makes running for Congress a rich man’s game, cutting out the little guy who might really represent real Americans.

So maybe the Republicans did this for the right reason after all, namely, paying back the Dems for breaking their word on the deal described in the linked story.  And I gotta say, it’s about time our guys exacted a price for leftist duplicity, even if it won’t cost millionaires like Kennedy and Pelosi squat.

The whole global warming debate comes down to one thing, and it’s not whether global warming is real (a question which really doesn’t matter one way or the other): the question is whether people are causing it.

Why is that the question?  Because if global warming either isn’t happening or isn’t caused by people (i.e., it’s a natural phenomenon), there’s nothing we can do about it.  But if it’s real and if people are causing it, there might be a whole lot we can do.

And what the global warming crowd wants to do is simple:  socialize everything.

It’s no accident that, after stepping down as the mass-murdering dictator of the Evil Empire, Mikhail Gorbachev’s first “job” was as head of an environomental group.  The eco gang is a bunch of watermelons:  green on the outside and red all the way through.  This doesn’t mean they’re never right, just as Communists were sometimes right about this or that as well.  It just means that all their solutions boil down to taking from you and giving to the state.

So it’s a very big deal whether global warming is human-caused.  All the debates about whether temperatures  are rising or falling mean nothing if man isn’t doing it.

And increasingly, lots of scientists think we aren’t.

Read this flash from Drudge:

Two New Books Confirm Global Warming is Natural; Not Caused By Human Activity
Tue Jan 30 2007 10:02:32 ET

Two powerful new books say today’s global warming is due not to human activity but primarily to a long, moderate solar-linked cycle. Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, by physicist Fred Singer and economist Dennis Avery was released just before Christmas. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and former BBC science writer Nigel Calder (Icon Books), is due out in March.

Singer and Avery note that most of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, and thus before much human-emitted CO2. Moreover, physical evidence shows 600 moderate warmings in the earth’s last million years. The evidence ranges from ancient Nile flood records, Chinese court documents and Roman wine grapes to modern spectral analysis of polar ice cores, deep seabed sediments, and layered cave stalagmites.

Unstoppable Global Warming shows the earth’s temperatures following variations in solar intensity through centuries of sunspot records, and finds cycles of sun-linked isotopes in ice and tree rings. The book cites the work of Svensmark, who says cosmic rays vary the earth’s temperatures by creating more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cool the earth. It notes that global climate models can’t accurately register cloud effects.

The Chilling Stars relates how Svensmark’s team mimicked the chemistry of earth’s atmosphere, by putting realistic mixtures of atmospheric gases into a large reaction chamber, with ultraviolet light as a stand-in for the sun. When they turned on the UV, microscopic droplets—cloud seeds—started floating through the chamber.

“We were amazed by the speed and efficiency with which the electrons [generated by cosmic rays] do their work of creating the building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei,” says Svensmark.

The Chilling Stars documents how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun’s irradiance fourfold, creating 1-2 degree C cycles in earth’s temperatures: Cosmic rays continually slam into the earth’s atmosphere from outer space, creating ion clusters that become seeds for small droplets of water and sulfuric acid. The droplets then form the low, wet clouds that reflect solar energy back into space. When the sun is more active, it shields the earth from some of the rays, clouds wane, and the planet warms.

Unstoppable Global Warming documents the reality of a moderate, natural, 1500-year climate cycle on the earth. The Chilling Stars explains the why and how.

Powerful stuff.  Very consistent with the research recently reported by Russian scientists who are convinced that any current warming is caused by the sunspot cycle, and will reverse toward global cooling in the middle of the next decade (as we all had the “joy” of experiencing in the late 1970s, when the hippie crowd was warning us of the coming Ice Age and the need for socialism to prevent it).

But more than that, it’s a lot of very legitimate questions raised by very legitimate scientists who deserve a hearing.  And they’re not getting one:  in fact, the latest is that The Weather Channel wants to fire anyone who disagrees with the official orthodoxy on the subject!  Tolerant?  Devoted to the scientific method?  Or just garden-variety communism?
The left wants to railroad the world into statist “solutions” because it couldn’t accomplish the same ends through its beloved proletarian revolution; and it wants to censor anyone who stands in its way.  They have gone so far in this last regard that many scientists who believe in global warming now fear they’ve oversold their case.  Their motives are clear, and there’s no way of getting around that.

Does this mean there’s no global warming?  Who knows?  But there’s precious little proof man has any ability to have caused it, and nothing like the supposed unanimity among climate scientists the left claims.

So maybe what we need to do is demand a moratorium on Kyoto-like laws until 2020.  That will give the sunspot cycle time to play out, and technology time to catch up:  if we need to do something, we’ll be far better able; and if we don’t, then we’ll out the eco-nuts once and for all.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve had a little going on around here, and I’m definitely looking forward to the arrival of a few more writers on the team.

Part of the busyness is thanks to you:  site traffic continues to rise (despite our still being in beta), thanks no doubt to the Human Events feature, the Jerry Corsi announcement, and then this Sunday, the Bob Novak piece, which ran in papers across the nation (scroll down to the part about “Undermining Hillary”).  That piece also announced the coming on board of Richard Poe, who is about to join us as Editorial and Creative Director.  We’re very proud to have him.

And then there are the blogs.  Boy have we had buzz out there.  And we’re very grateful.  Because without the conservative netroots, TheVanguard.Org can never be.  And whether it’s the glowing report of a CaliforniaConservative.com, the violent hostility of Daily Kos, or the fair-but-liberal take of Preemptive Karma, all of it is rallying the troops.

Good.  We’re in the fight of our lives, all of us.  And we mean to win.

You want to know how crazy a day it’s been?  So crazy I haven’t blogged this.

Effective immediately, my friend Jerry Corsi — co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry — has come on our staff as Senior Political Strategist.  Jerry will be spearheading an effort designed to produce victory in 2008.

You can read all about it here in our news release; and here in Jerry’s Human Events front page news story.  And get ready, ’cause we ain’t playin’.

It has been my intention all along that Blog.TheVanguard.Org be not the Rod Martin show, but rather an official site blog for our new and growing organization. Among other things, this means that I ought not be the only person blogging here; and while we have some very big things planned in that regard which go far beyond what I’m announcing tonight, nevertheless this is certainly a key part of my wicked master plan. [twisting my virtual mustache, or making the Dr. Evil sign, or whatever]

So tonight, I’m announcing the first of several hand-picked bloggers who will be the voice of our official blog. Charles Gordon is an extraordinary man, with a great deal of experience at the highest levels of government, a real love for the Lord, and a deep and personal understanding of the needs of our poorest Americans. I could never say enough to do justice by my friend Charles, and I won’t try. His participation here will more than speak for itself.

He will begin contributing here shortly. Watch for it.

New Virginia Senator Jim Webb just demonstrated at length why we must not allow his party to hold power for any length of time (and why it’s all too likely that they won’t).  The economic portion of his speech was just one long laundry list of class warfare tripe.  His statistics are wrong, his populism is misplaced, and his philosophy is not shared by the vast majority of Americans.

His foreign policy section was hardly better.  Using his father — who flew planes in the Berlin Airlift — as a prop, supposedly demonstrating his patriotism and commitment and blah blah blah, he joins a long list of Democrats who drape themselves in the flag only to burn it.  Someday, even the asbestos suit of the media won’t be able to protect them from their flames.

It’s hard to know where to begin on the fallacies (read: lies) in Webb’s speech, other than the obvious: his script was not written in 2007 in Washington but rather in 1967 in Berkeley.  There wasn’t a single assertion Webb made — other than the increased unpopularity of the war — which wasn’t false; moreover he contradicted himself flat out in pretending at first not to call for a precipitous withdrawal and then demanding that very thing.  Especially egregious was his unsupported, unsourced lie that the majority of the military is now against the war:  expect this to be the oft-repeated lie of the year on the Democrat side.

And of course, his conclusory sentence was as plain as day:  George Bush can surrender now, or we’ll make him do it.

As Rudy Giuliani said moments later on Fox News, the war on terror will not end because these idiots happen to hold another Woodstock.  The war was declared and prosecuted by our enemies for a decade (by some counts two) before we even noticed on 9/11.  Leaving Iraq will just embolden them.  It will not stop them:  it will bring them here in force.

But that’s the opposing party.  Patriotic and full of desire to defend America, or deceitful hippie fifth column, selling us out to whichever enemy happens along from decade to decade?  You decide.

Shorter than many, it was a good speech, even if it was less thematic than originally billed.  The response was polite, but not especially enthusiastic.  Even so, the degree to which the Democrats were at least polite certainly beat years past.

Once again, it’s very hard to see how the Democrats can spin the health plan as a tax increase — it is anything but.  Nevertheless they will, and conservatives need to fight this.  The reforms George Bush just outlined could have a transformative effect on health care in this country, all for the staggering good. And if they fail (or rather, if we allow them to be defeated), the pressure for socialized medicine will grow much, much stronger.

Fiscal discipline and a balanced budget are right on, but economic growth must not be impeded to achieve either.  A tax hike would be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  Democrats are salivating over the prospect of raising taxes and smearing the President with this.  We must not let them, for all our sakes.

Finally the defense and foreign policy stuff is right on.  It is good for this President to own up to the problems in Iraq:  it would be better to own up to the fact that his State Department — not his Defense Department — created most of them.  The troop surge is good, the call to first principles — of securing the blessings of liberty for our friends in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as for ourselves and our  children — is exactly right.  But time is indeed running short, not militarily abroad but politically at home (it is shameful to have to right such words).

One last point:  most of the President’s difficulties in Iraq could have been avoided had he just chosen to go to Congress in 2003 and, following the Constitution, declare war.  Many seem to this of this as archaic, and I’ll admit that I get the legal argument as to why it was not strictly necessary in this one case.  But weaseling through on a technicality was, especially in pragmatic retrospect, stupid as hell.  Had there been a declaration of war, everything would now be different:  we wouldn’t be talking about “losing” because our total, absolute, three-week victory would be enshrined now in an unconditional surrender signed in April 2003 by a senior Iraqi official.  We would now be in the formal post-surrender occupation phase, and that could not be spun as ‘losing’ the war.  And the way we end our obligation in an occupied country with which we’ve signed a peace treaty is well understood, well laid out ground.  No one could say they “don’t know why we’re there”.

This was, in retrospect, the single biggest missed opportunity in Iraq.  It’s a lesson we better learn for the future.

1. The President’s noting of our fight against AIDS in Africa is no small thing:  Bono recently said that America is spending fully half of all the money spent in the whole world on this effort.  Another thing this President has done for which he gets zero credit, and for which America gets no credit abroad.  But it’s important nonetheless.

2. It is amazing to me that Pelosi stands to applaud the line about Darfur — where we can do relatively little without launching another war — but is steadfastly against doing what is needed to keep free the 25 million liberated souls in Iraq, where we already have boots on the ground.  This is a pretty good indication of her true position:  if the President isn’t doing something big and bold, attack him for inaction; if the President IS doing something big and bold, attack him for that.  The specifics of the issue do not matter.  The only thing that matters is attacking.

3. This applies too to the degree of foreign coalition support the President just cited in our war on terror.  We are in Iraq under UN mandate, we are in Afghanistan with NATO in the lead, we are in six-party talks over nuclear disarmament in Korea, etc. etc.  Throughout the war, the left has attacked the President for “going it alone”, and yet that’s obviously not true.  And of course, in Korea, when Bush abandoned the failed Clinton approach of one-on-one talks with Kim’s regime and instead brought the other interested parties to the table, the Dems attacked him for that and demanded to “go it alone”.  The mind boggles.

The President:  “We entered this struggle together, and whatever you voted for, you didn’t vote for failure.”

If only the Dems could remember this!

The President just said it best:  “we did not drive the terrorists out of their safe-havens in Afghanistan just to let them take over and establish themselves in a new free Iraq.”

Exactly.

He also just got another essential point right.  The troop surge MUST be about hunting down the terrorists and killing them.  The defensive posture of so much of our force in Iraq has greatly prolonged our fight, and for no good reason I can see.  My friends in the Pentagon unanimously agree that in the sectors where our guys hunt the bad guys down proactively, we clear them out and keep them gone.  If this is what the troop surge is all about, we should support it with all our might.

If it isn’t, it will fail.  And so will America.