Hennessy's View

Barack Obama’s poll lead over John McCain has plummeted from 51-35 to a statistical dead-heat in less than a month.

Obama’s downward spiral has Newsweek’s headline writers asking if his glow is fading. The polls finds that more than half of voters consider Obama lying opportunist who will take any position for votes.

Obama’s rapid drop comes at a strategically challenging moment for the Democratic candidate. Having vanquished Hillary Clinton in early June, Obama quickly went about repositioning himself for a general-election audience–an unpleasant task for any nominee emerging from the pander-heavy primary contests and particularly for a candidate who’d slogged through a vigorous primary challenge in most every contest from January until June. Obama’s reversal on FISA legislation, his support of faith-based initiatives and his decision to opt out of the campaign public-financing system left him open to charges he was a flip-flopper. In the new poll, 53 percent of voters (and 50 percent of former Hillary Clinton supporters) believe that Obama has changed his position on key issues in order to gain political advantage.

This is very bad news for a man who is afraid to debate his Republican rival, counts terrorists among his best friends, and has been caught in numerous lies throughout the campaign.

Congratulations, Democrats: you might have nominated the only person who can’t beat a Republican this fall.

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Technorati Tags: election, Newsweek, obama

According University of Illinois’s Cryosphere Today, Antarctic sea ice is at an all-time high. (Yeah, I know “all-time” is relative, since records go back only 30 years. But the alarmists have no issue with treating 30 years as the sum of recorded history; why should I?)

On the other hand, Arctic sea ice had a bad week. Mounting evidence points to underwater volcanoes pumping superheated water toward the bottom of the ice as the major problem, but the hysteriacs will blame my cigarette smoke.

Meanwhile, the great Anthony Watts links to this Texas Energy Analyst story reporting that a consortium of climate scientists meeting in New York recently claim cooling is now a more serious threat than global warming:

Noted presenters, such as William Gray, Harry van Loon, Rol Madden and Dave Melita, signaled in the strongest terms that huge climate changes are afoot. Each weather guru, from a different angle, suggested that global warming is part of a cycle that is nearing an end. All agreed the earth is in a warm cycle right now, and has been for a while, but that is about to change significantly.

Don’t expect to hear about these four on the news—unless Obama wins and the government begins criminal prosecution of global warming skeptics and oil executives, as the evil James Hansen recommends. In Canada, however, the government is free to arrest people whose opinions oppose those of liberal, idiot professors, such as the fascist David Suzuki (more on Marquette Warrior).

Believe it or not, even the leftist nut Alexander Cockburn has been threatened with prison for raising questions about the soundness of global warming science:

Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted [source].

BTW, for those of you born after 1980 and are thereby bereft of education: the First Amendment of the Constitution bars Congress from making laws that limit the freedom of speech. It contains no global warming exception.

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