What's New(s)?

What was the big news over the long holiday weekend? No brainer: The couple who crashed the State Dinner at the White House, and Tiger Woods' run-in with a fire hydrant, a tree, and possibly a niblick.

Let's deal with them quickly.

On the White House deal, the Secret Service will fall on its organizational sword, but the concept of having a social event with no one from the social, political, protocol, or First Lady's office at the gates checking names is unbelievable, and demonstrates a lack of professionalism in the operation of the White House at the most basic level.

Notwithstanding they had to go through a magnetometer to get into the actual structure, this was a State Dinner. If they wanted to do harm, they didn't have to sneak weapons in, the White House provided them. Forks and knives. At every seat at every table.

My brother-in-law pointed out that we now know it is harder to get onto an airplane than to get into the White House: "You don't have to take off your shoes at the White House."

Not much to say about Tiger. He is the first professional athlete to have booked $1 billion in appearance fees, purses, and endorsements. He is now paying the price for celebrity.

If it turns out his wife did come after him with a golf club, this goes from a accident investigation to a criminal inquiry into assault and battery … or worse.

Of somewhat more import was the news last week that a bunch of climate scientists - in fact THE bunch of climate scientists - who have been at the center of the global warming movement were found to have cooked the books to make the "Earth-is-warming" numbers work.

According to Mullfave, Dr. William Hamilton's weekly "Central View" column, emails which were hacked and released,

"reveal that climatologists at Penn State, Amherst, the University of Arizona and England's East Anglia University have been engaged in a conspiracy to:

hide data that the planet is cooling,

apply pressure to scientific journals to exclude studies casting doubt on their theories of global warming,

hide data being requested under the Freedom of Information Act that would discredit global warming, and,

delete any data in their files that would support the existence of global cooling."

Yikes.

The very people who 10 days ago were laughing and pointing at global warming skeptics for hanging on to their position notwithstanding the evidence in support of the man-induced effect on the Earth's climate, are now very quiet.

A lot of people have a lot invested in the business of global warming, and the concept of their scientific beards having cheated on the numbers, coerced their opponents, covered-up the data and shredded potential evidence is impossible for them to accept.

Notwithstanding the evidence.

Last week I told you that the Gallup tracking poll had President Obama's approval number at 49 percent. The latest number is +2 at 51 percent.

Gallup has a look inside the overall numbers on its webpage which shows Obama's approval among Blacks is 93 percent, about where it has been since the beginning of his Administration.

However, among Whites Obama's approval has dropped to 39 percent down from 61 percent during his first full week in office (the very week in which the President was deemed to have done enough to have warranted winning the Nobel Peace Prize), a loss of 22 percentage points.

Moreover, among Americans who self-identify as "Moderates" his approval has dropped from 73 percent in January to 55 percent last week a drop of 18 percentage points.

Obama's first year will go down as a failure. Domestically, he will probably not get a health care bill this year. He won't get a climate bill (see above), and he didn't even try for card-check. That, plus going into 2010 with unemployment over 10 percent and likely to stay there for months, is not a recipe for improving his support levels.

Internationally, the Iranians are thumbing their noses at us again, there is no progress in the Middle East, and it has become painfully clear that Barack Obama has been desperately searching for an Afghanistan strategy which is unlikely to fail, rather than a policy which is likely to succeed.

Another Mullfave, Peggy Noonan, writing in her Wall Street Journal column, distilled all this brilliantly:

"Americans demand baseline competence. If [President Obama] comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end."

I guess there was a lot of news

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to everything; the gate crashers, Tiger, the Bill Hamilton & Peggy Noonan columns, and the Gallup poll.

Also, another great cat Mullfoto and a Catchy Caption of the Day showing what happens when you try to get too cute with technology.