HALF-FULL REPORT 04/05/13

North Korean threats to start a nuclear war are becoming more shrill.  The regime is making provocative moves. China is building up military forces on its border with North Korea.  South Koreans are jittery. I explained in a column yesterday why I’m not.

The next step in this annual kabuki dance will be the "urgent talks" UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is calling for.  North Korea will feign reluctance to come to the conference table.  But after China pretends to pressure them, the Norks will agree to negotiate – which is what they’ve wanted all along.  That’s when we’ll offer the bribes they seek, in exchange for promises they don’t intend to keep.

It would of course be insane for the Norks to start a nuclear war with the United States, because it would result in the total incineration of North Korea.  This is why there is so much speculation about the sanity of the Supreme Leader, senior generals, or both.  But Nork behavior is perfectly rational.  They make these threats year after year, because year after year we give in to them.

What’s irrational is our insistence this annual "crisis" can be settled by negotiation. We should know by now the word of the Norks is worthless, because they make – and break – the same promises year after year.  (Make a guess about how many times the Nyongbyong plant has been started and stopped.)

To avoid acknowledging the glaringly obvious, our leaders fantasize.  If China wants to be "a responsible member of the family of nations," it will put pressure on North Korea. But China likes having North Korea stick its finger in our eye.  That’s why China subsidizes North Korea. It could be different this time, we’re told, because China doesn’t want a war.  Well, duh.  Neither do the Norks.  They’re evil mean nasty and rotten, but neither stupid, nor insane.  Robert Farley explains here why fears a war might start by accident are greatly overblown.  There are real foreign policy crises in Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Libya/Mali.  This is theater. Or misdirection.

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The two female Marines who tried failed the USMC’s infantry officer’s course.  Jim Webb’s son explains here why women in the infantry is not a good idea.

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Either the president doesn’t know what caused the subprime mortgage crisis, or he doesn’t care. The Ulsterman thinks he’s trying to administer "the kill shot" to the economy.

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Washington Post lib blogger Greg Sargent notes with alarm that "the percentage of Americans who don’t believe the sequester cuts are hurting the economy has actually jumped 13 points over the last month, while the percentage who think they are damaging the economy is going down."

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Congratulations to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex.  He’s only been in the Senate since January, but already he is the most hated man there, say the libs at Foreign Policy magazine.

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The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly approved an Arms Trade Treaty Tuesday which the NRA says infringes on the 2nd Amendment. Obama will submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification, where it will complicate life for Dingy Harry Reid.  It’ll be a cold day in Hell before it gets the two thirds vote required for ratification, said the most hated man in the Senate.

President Obama was in Denver Wednesday to praise Colorado’s new gun control laws.  Some Denver cops were unhappy he used them as a backdrop. To get new federal gun control legislation, Zero is telling ever more and bigger whoppers. He’s "tilting at windmills, and he’s going to lose," said Charles Krauthammer.  Lib journalists Eleanor Clift and NBC’s Chuck Todd agree.  Dems think they can do better in the states.  But more states have passed laws to strengthen gun rights than to restrict them.

Rep. Diana DiGette is the lead sponsor in the House of federal legislation to ban "high capacity" magazines.  Evidently, she doesn’t know magazines are sold separately from bullets, and can be reloaded. You have to see this video to believe how stupid she is:

Ms. DiGette is a boor as well as an idiot.  At the Denver Post forum Tuesday where she made a fool of herself, she told a senior citizen who asked how he could protect himself under Colorado’s new gun laws:

"You’d probably be dead anyway." 

A second Colorado firm announced this week it will leave the state because of those laws.  A shooting competition that would have brought about 300 people from out of state to Montrose in July has been cancelled.  The Outdoor Channel is pulling out of Colorado, too.  Beretta is leaving Maryland for the same reason.

Connecticut’s new gun control law has sent sales there soaring.   California Dems are contemplating putting such a heavy tax on ammo that gun owners won’t be able to afford it.

Gun owners are morally deficient human beings who don’t deserve to live, said actor Jim Carrey. Hiring armed guards to protect himself doesn’t make him a hypocrite, he said, because "no one in my employ is allowed to carry a large magazine."

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Obamacare either will hurt them personally, or have no effect on their lives, say two thirds of Democrats.  HHS is delaying a provision to provide low cost health insurance to small businesses.  To lib journalist Joe Klein, this smacks of incompetence. Maybe the fastest way to kill Obamacare dead is to let the administration try to implement it.

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Here in Pittsburgh, it snowed almost every day in March. In Britain, this was the coldest March since 1962. It could get colder. Habibullo Abdusamatov of the Russian Academy of Sciences predicts a new ice age will start next year.

There’s been no "statistically significant" warming since 1997, Britain’s Met Office grudgingly acknowledged. 

"Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar," acknowledged The Economist magazine this week.  The editors are puzzled, because if the theory of anthropogenic (mad-made) global warming – which The Economist has assiduously promoted – is correct, this can’t happen. 

Just because warming has "paused" doesn’t mean the problem has gone away, they say. In fact, global warming exists only in computer models.  Ken Haapala and Vincent Gray explain here where those climate models went wrong. 

Haapala and Gray assume warmist scientists made honest mistakes, which ain’t necessarily so.  Warmist hearts were warmed last month when Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University published a paper which said "global temperatures are warmer than at any time in at least 4,000 years."  Accompanying it was a graph which showed a gradual decline in global temperatures, with a sharp uptick in the 20^th Century. 

It was the hockey stick redux.  But their data show no such thing, Marcott et al  admitted last Sunday. The deviation is "truly irksome", said UN IPCC lead author Richard Tol. Ross McKitrick, who with fellow Canadian Steve McIntyre exposed the original hockey stick fraud, deconstructs this one here.

In a Pew poll this week, only 33 percent of respondents said global warming was a "serious problem," down from 39 percent six months ago.  In another poll, 37 percent said global warming is a hoax.  The gang on NBC’s Today show are thunderstruck that so many are catching on.

If you’re sweating (I guess that isn’t the right word) Dr. Abdusamatov’s prediction of a new ice age, what he has in mind is another little ice age, like that between between 1300 and 1850, not the tons of ice covering Chicago kind.

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A report issued yesterday by the Government Accountability Office sheds some more light on the corrupt relationship between Wall Street and Congress.

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Liberals want Dr. Ben Carson removed as the commencement speaker at the Johns Hopkins Medical School for his allegedly "homophobic" remarks.  He’s willing to step aside, but isn’t going to take any crap from white liberals who, he said, are "the most racist out there." The university is standing by him.

"I represent an existential threat to them," Carson told radio talk show host Mark Levin. "They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me, they can’t find anything else to delegitimize me, so they take my words, misinterpret them, and try to make it seem that I’m a bigot."

Black Dem Leo Terrell seems to agree about the existential threat thing.  "You created Ben Carson," he screamed at Sean Hannity before stalking off the set Monday.  "You created a monster."

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To the dismay of many prominent conservatives, disgraced former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford won big Tuesday in the GOP runoff for the House seat vacated when Rep. Tim Scott was appointed to the U.S. Senate. The district is heavily Republican.  But in a poll before the runoff, Sanford trailed the Democrat candidate, Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, sister of comedian Stephen Colbert. 

This is yet another illustration of conservative politicians with oversized egos putting themselves ahead of the cause.  We saw it in spades in 2012.  Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann had no business running for president, but did anyway, to the detriment of GOP prospects.  Santorum apparently is planning to run again.

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Big Labor took it on the chin in Wisconsin Tuesday when conservative state Supreme Court judge Patience Roggensack was re-elected handily.  A judge who signed a petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker got turfed out in a landslide.

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No immigration reform bill can pass without the support of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, which means he has more clout on the issue than any other senator.  This week, he used it.  Democrats want to ram something thru, a la Obamacare.  Absolutely not, Rubio said.

Whether a "comprehensive" immigration reform bill should pass depends, of course, on what’s in it.  Here’s what Rubio wants.  Here’s what focus groups of Republican primary voters in Iowa and South Carolina said they’d back. 

Two thirds of 500 Republicans they polled support a "path to citizenship" for otherwise law abiding illegals, provided the border were made more secure first, the illegals had to wait several years before applying for citizenship, learned English, and paid back taxes and fines, said John McLaughlin & Associates.  When Republicans were told what Sen. Rubio wants in a reform bill, support rose to 75-17, the polling firm said. 

In a Pew poll last week, 71 percent of respondents said otherwise law abiding illegals should be permitted to remain in the country, but only 43 percent (38 percent of Republicans) say they should be permitted to apply for citizenship.  Interestingly, only 49 percent of Hispanics supported citizenship for illegals.

If the "path to citizenship" is sufficiently long and hard, the disparity between the Pew and McLaughlin polls shrinks.  Republicans "don’t like amnesty, but when you read them the conditions of a pathway to citizenship, they don’t consider that amnesty," McLaughlin said.

"The genius of the Rubio plan is that the formerly illegal immigrants have to go to the back of the line, figuratively, and wait until those currently waiting for legal entry into the United States have had their turn," said Dick Morris.

He’ll stand firm on his conditions, Rubio told the New York Times.  His resolve doubtless will be stiffened by criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz.  Making illegals eligible for welfare could cost trillions, says the GOP staff on the Senate Budget Committee.

So whether a bill passes depends (essentially) on whether Democrats want one badly enough to meet Rubio’s conditions. Obama doesn’t, Sen. Cruz told the Dallas Morning News, because he wants to keep using immigration as a wedge issue. Charles Krauthammer agrees. So does Hispanic journalist Chris Salcedo, who thinks Latinos are catching on to the game Zero is playing.

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The Associated Press no longer will call illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants" because it doesn’t want to hurt their feelings.  Michelle Malkin mocks the AP here.

So what should we call people from other countries who are here in violation of our laws?  "Undocumented Democrats," suggested Jay Leno.  No wonder the suits at NBC want him off the air.

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This has been a week of bluster.  That from the Norks has yet to be exposed, but Democrat blustering on gun control and the sequester took big hits, as did bluster from the global warmists.  So for me, the glass is more than half full.