Lawmakers are weighing a pared-back approach that would be less ambitious and less contentious than earlier bills passed by Congress.

A task force concluded that nearly 50 detainees at Guantánamo Bay are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said.

The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005.

"When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability," said Dr. Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists...

The NASA data released Thursday showed an upward temperature trend of about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) per decade over the past 30 years. Average global temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since 1880.

"That’s the important number to keep in mind," said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Goddard. "The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years."

Policy makers at the United Nations climate change summit conference in Copenhagen last month agreed on a goal of trying to keep the rise in average global temperatures to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, to try to forestall the worst effects of global warming.

Average global temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since 1880.

The problem with budget reconciliation is that it would require considerable intestinal fortitude on the part of nervous Democratic senators following the Massachusetts result, even though it left them with an 18-vote majority. I don't know if that courage can be summoned. I'm certain that it won't be if the message from President Obama is: "Whatever."

The president can surrender and blame Republicans for killing health-care reform yet again, or he can fight tooth and nail on behalf of the 46 million Americans who remain uninsured. But he has to do one or the other. He can't do both.

On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi flatly declared that for now, at least, she cannot find the 218 votes needed to pass the Senate bill.

But Obama's main limitation as a class warrior is this: He is the least convincing populist I have ever seen. His manner is cold and cerebral. He loves to analyze and transcend ideological controversies. When he engages a debate on one side, he can be brittle, humorless and nasty. And he has a remarkable tin ear. What could possess a Harvard-trained lawyer to express scorn for Scott Brown's pickup truck? Obama is skilled at intellectual scorn; it is not a populist talent.

Finally, Obama could try to blunt public anger by parting ways with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and moving toward the ideological middle. "Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the . . . party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country," says Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "that's not going to work too well." This argument is incomprehensible to many in the media and political class because they already view Obama as a pragmatic centrist.

I find it extremely hard to believe that politics or democratic participation will be improved by allowing corporations to flood the system with money. This gives them potential influence over the system that no individual citizen (other than, perhaps, Bill Gates or Mike Bloomberg) can possibly match. Maybe senators can become like stadiums and sell naming rights. We could have "The QualCom Senator from the State of ….." By the way, will individual shareholders be able to do much about how a corporation spends its political money? Why should those of us who buy a company’s products be forced involuntarily to finance its political spending, just because we need a tube of toothpaste or a tire for our car?

Andrew Sullivan begs skeptical readers not to give up on the man:

"This is the GOP's high water-mark. They have abdicated any responsibility to tackle the problems we all acknowledge, while indulging in extremist rhetoric. They live for the spin and the rage. So this is the moment they have been waiting for. Most Americans don't think this way."

The reason both wings of American liberalism -- congressional and mainstream media -- were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they'd spent Obama's first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer. With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.

The evidence was unmistakable. Independents, who in 2008 had elected Obama, swung massively against the Democrats: dropping 16 points in Virginia, 21 in New Jersey. On Tuesday, it was even worse: Independents, who had gone 2-to-1 Republican in Virginia and New Jersey, now went 3-to-1 Republican in hyper-blue Massachusetts. Nor was this an expression of the more agitated elements who vote in obscure low-turnout elections. The turnout on Tuesday was the highest for any nonpresidential Massachusetts election in 20 years.

Spenser knows food and music and reads. He has a regular sweetie-pie (named Susan, who, it must be said in all fairness, can be irritating and way too precious sometimes)...

Parker was an academic, sort of. At least he finished a Ph.D. in literature when he was almost 40 for the express purpose of getting a job as a college professor and therefore having plenty of time to write. Parker is scathing in his treatment of academe in his novels, several of which have university connections. His professors are conspicuous in their pomposity, shallowness, and affectation, curiously unhappy in their soft touch of a job.

Parker commented in the nineties that while carrying a "full load" of nine class hours plus preparation time, his academic job at Northeastern University in Boston had only kept him busy for nine and a half hours a week. For the rest, he locked himself in his faculty office where he worked on the early Spenser novels. After five novels were published he said goodbye to academe and never looked back.

Parker's success gave birth to many imitators but no equals. Spenser-esque lines can be encountered in the work of many contemporary crime writers. Dennis LeHane, author of Mystic River and other Boston-based novels, gives Parker credit for teaching him to be concise and funny on the page. Uber-successful crime writer Harlan Coben said that 90 percent of current writers of detective novels admit Parker has had an influence on their work while "the rest of us lie about it." (Full disclosure: after re-reading several chapters I'd put together in one of my unsuccessful attempts to write fiction, I discarded them on discovering they were just Spenser with palm trees.)

There are a few things in Parker's work that red-meat conservatives will likely find uncongenial. He thinks rather more highly of psychotherapy and psychotherapists than is called for. His wife, Joan, has a doctorate in some branch of the head trade, probably accounting for the excess talkiness in this area in Parker's work. Many readers of the Jesse Stone series wish Stone would just make up his damn mind whether he wants to be with his ex-wife or not. And the scenes where Stone himself talks with a psychologist about all of this can be skipped over.

Another lesson is the mainstream medias utter lack of interest in covering legitimate scandals involving Democratic politicians. Edwards' fall from grace was a slow-motion implosion that lasted much longer than it should have, had the press functioned in its watchdog capacity. Instead, a trashy tabloid using unnamed sources out-scooped them all.

As if to spit once more in the eye of the mainstream press, the National Enquirer plans to submit its coverage of the Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer. The scary thing, at least for mainstream media outlets in their death throes, is that the tabloid deserves it.

So that means that 101 of the 256 House Democrats represent 64%+ Obama districts and that 155 House Democrats represent districts which might, according to the Massachusetts metric, be vulnerable in some circumstances to Republican capture. No wonder so many House Democrats refused to vote for the Senate health care bill—enough to prompt Speaker Nancy Pelosi to say publicly that "unease would be a gentle word"　to describe their attitude toward doing that.

Mike Huckabee has a 45-44 advantage over Obama, aided largely by a 44-38 lead with independents. There continues to be no evidence of any negative fallout for Huckabee after murders of police officers committed by an ex-Arkansas inmate whose sentence he had commuted. His 35/29 favorability breakdown is actually slightly better than it was in November before that incident.

Mitt Romney does the next best, trailing Obama 44-42. His favorability is 36/32, and he’s the most popular Republican among independents (41/32). Romney actually matches Huckabee with GOP voters this month and gets over 50%, ending a trend in his numbers that had seemed to spell difficulty for snagging a Republican nomination.

President Obama will appear with politically embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in Las Vegas next month, according to a White House official.

While it is not clear whether the appearance will be overtly political, any appearance by the president in Reid’s home state is likely to be seen as an effort to buck up Reid’s re-election effort.

In other words, we had best be damned careful in our efforts to "cure" global warming.

"One thing I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done　.　.　.　that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people.　.　.　.　I think the assumption was, if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on the, you know, this provision, or that law, or are we making a good, rational decision here, that people will get it."

...

In his first year as president, Obama has broken all records for talking directly to the American people. According to CBS News, he has delivered 411 public "speeches, comments, and remarks" and 158 interviews — more than one public statement per day and roughly an interview every other day. ...

Obama is a near-permanent fixture not just of news-magazine covers but all magazine covers, including Men’s Fitness and American Dog — which, admittedly, he shared with a three-legged pooch named Baby. He’s schmoozed with Oprah and given plenty of in-depth interviews on 60 Minutes.

Next week, the president will give his first State of the Union address. If that seems strange, it’s because it will be his third nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress.

Since a suicide bombing that killed seven Americans in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency has employed an intensive series of strikes against militants in Pakistan.

As they look to make gains this year, Republicans are trying to harness the Tea Party energy that helped make an unknown the senator-elect from Massachusetts.

Specter, you will remember, switched parties last year. Democrats must be asking themselves why they wanted him. Oh, yes, the 60th vote. Well, that’s all over. The good news is that Joseph Lieberman is only about one-tenth as important as he was on Monday. The bad news is the remaining 59 includes a self-important 79-year-old who makes wildly patronizing remarks about his female opponent during a radio debate. ...

He has to run for re-election this year. If the Democrats are looking for a wake-up call from Massachusetts, the big rooster in the room is the plethora of underwhelming candidates they are fielding.

In Illinois, where Barack Obama’s former Senate seat is on the line, the leading Democratic contender is a 33-year-old who spent almost all of his adult life working for the bank that his family owns. Perhaps the president forgot that last week when he told Massachusetts voters that "bankers don’t need another vote in the Senate."

Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats who ought to be preparing to take the field in November seem to be running for shelter. In Illinois and Connecticut, the best candidates available have announced that they’re running to be the state attorney general. These days, everybody wants to be an attorney general and cuddle up and sue dairies that sell curdled milk until the political weather improves. It is very hard to be unpopular when you’re an attorney general. Even Martha Coakley was a popular attorney general.

This would not have happened if Senator Charles Schumer of New York was still in charge of recruiting candidates. Schumer was completely manic. Promising Democrats would open the door to get the newspaper in the morning and they’d find him curled up on the front porch with a dead squirrel he had brought them as a token of love.

Bring back Schumer. Maybe he could get Conan O’Brien to run in North Dakota.

The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.

What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.

And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.

The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation’s biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it’s not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.

What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.

In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people — more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population — fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

The question for Democrats is whether there is anything that will wake them up to their obligation to extend a powerful hand to ordinary Americans and help them take the government, including the Supreme Court, back from the big banks, the giant corporations and the myriad other predatory interests that put the value of a dollar high above the value of human beings.

Jean Simmons, 80, a beguiling actress of quiet emotional power, notably as Ophelia opposite Laurence Olivier in "Hamlet" (1948) and a revivalist preacher in "Elmer Gantry" (1960), died Jan. 22 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She had lung cancer.

Over the next several years, she continued appearing in big-budget productions with major stars: a war widow romanced by Marine Paul Newman in "Until They Sail" (1957); a schoolteacher in the western "The Big Country" (1958), with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston; and a former slave in "Spartacus" (1960), in which she found love with Kirk Douglas as the famed gladiator.

"Elmer Gantry," based on the Sinclair Lewis novel, proved one of her most enduring films. Film critic Pauline Kael called her "quietly commanding" as an itinerant 1920s evangelist who is torn between her devotion to the Bible and her love of a con man portrayed by Burt Lancaster.

Ray Vivier had been an adventurer, an ex-Marine who explored the country from South Carolina to Alaska, the father of five children.

The 61-year-old also was a man starting to get his life back together after living for years in a shanty beneath a Cleveland bridge. He had struggled with alcoholism, but by November he had a welding job, friends and a place to stay at a boarding house.

He rescued five people from that house when arsonists set it ablaze -- but Vivier couldn't save himself. He and three others died, and two people have been charged in their deaths. Vivier's body, unclaimed and unidentified for weeks, seemed destined for an anonymous, modest burial.

A soup kitchen volunteer, though, remembered Vivier and heard about his heroism. Jody Fesco and her husband Ernie traveled back to Cleveland from their new home in Pennsylvania to make sure Vivier wasn't forgotten. They identified his body, found his family and arranged a proper funeral.

On Friday, Vivier's ashes were inurned at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

The election of Bill Clinton, the New Democrat who turned out to be only the Nude Democrat, buried the Republicans once more. The party corpses were getting a little weary of the trip to the graveyard and back when Barack Obama finally plowed them under once and for all. "Conservatism is Dead," headlined Daily Kos, the voice of Democrats who never learn anything, "And It's Not Coming Back." Many conservatives, as uninterested as the liberals in learning from history, glumly agreed.

And then came the Massachusetts miracle, sometimes called the Massachusetts massacre. Only it's neither miracle nor massacre, but the way politics works in an electorate that's about evenly divided, consistently conservative with a big and compassionate heart, but ever ready to enjoy taking down a politician who grows a little too big for his britches even when the britches are tailored by Armani.

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. "That I do think is a mistake of mine," the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. "I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it."

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start "speaking directly to the American people."

Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That’s more than any previous president — and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn’t get its exclusive Obama interview — I believe the top-rated Grain & Livestock Prices Report — 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction’s Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.

"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," said Obama. "People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years."

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can’t wait for that 159th interview.

Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.

The most striking aspect of his performance was how unhappy he looked, as if he doesn’t enjoy the job. You can understand why. He ran as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer. That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d actually run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin. At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Governor Palin was "unqualified" then surely he was too, Obama pointed out as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.

Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop but a very particular kind: "In some places, there are codes, there are images," he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. "You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another."

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts. ...

America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B and those who think a pickup is coded racism.

NEW DELHI -- For many Indians, the most powerful and urgent reason to battle global warming arose from a report warning that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035.

But that prediction was an error, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which authored the report, said Wednesday.

Speaking publicly on the issue for the first time Saturday, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning panel, said the mistake occurred because rigorous procedures for scientific review were not followed. He promised a more robust research system in the future.

Facing a bevy of hostile questions, Pachauri conceded that the mistake might embolden groups that do not believe in global warming. But he dismissed them as advocates of vested interests that benefit from the use of heat-trapping fossil fuels.

"There will always be a body of people who will deny it till they are blue in the face," Pachauri said. "These people are only concerned about continuing with their wasteful and terribly profligate lifestyles."

The mistake was brought to light last week by a Canadian professor of geography and glaciers, Graham Cogley, who pointed out the lack of scientific data backing the glacier melt claim.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a report last week that says there is no conclusive evidence that climate change has caused the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. The report says that not all of the glaciers are receding at alarming rates and that a few are even advancing.

Many Indians have expressed shock at the developments.

"In my work, we do not second-guess assessments made by a panel of 2,500 scientists," said Lavanya Rajamani, a lawyer who works on climate change treaties with the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. "This has somewhat damaged the cause in popular imagination, but I hope this does not make people question the credibility of the entire science of climate change."

The IPCC’s problem is that it wasn’t the last issue. One of the effects of the Climategate files has been that a lot of complaints that had been dismissed by the scientific world and the world at large as unbelievable and perhaps even a little paranoid turned out to be true. Some of those complaints had to be taken seriously, and the IPCC’s reports had to be re-evaluated.

[T]he systematic misrepresentation of the science of disasters and climate change in major science assessments. … [T]here is a pattern of behavior taking place in this community that should be of concern to anyone who cares about the integrity of science, regardless of their position on climate policies and politics.

The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

All in all, not a good week for the IPCC. Two major errors, both of them integrating inflammatory, un-reviewed results into what had been advertised as the most authoritative peer-reviewed summary of the state of climate science. This follows the collapse of Copenhagen, and the Climategate emails’ evidence of pressure to influence the results of climate science. All of them working in the same direction: to slant the evidence presented to the world toward the conclusion that AGW is a current crisis, a world cataclysm.

Now, suddenly, those conclusions are hard to credit.The wheels have begun to come off.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action." ...

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was "grey literature" [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

...an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.

In his speech on Wednesday, the president will focus on struggling families squeezed between sending their children to college and caring for elderly parents.

Republicans are luring new candidates into House and Senate races, and the number of seats up for grabs in November appears to be growing, setting up a midterm election likely to be harder fought than anyone anticipated before the party’s big victory in Massachusetts last week.

Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden will not run for his father's former Senate seat, he announced via email to supporters this morning.

If he represents all the people, Obama should remember that for 85 percent of Americans, the great health-care crisis is about cost. For about 15 percent, it is about extending coverage. Yet his plan does little about the first and focuses mostly on the second.

Watching the legislative process, Bismarck allegedly observed, is like watching the making of sausages. The health-care bill is particularly sausage-like. It has special exemptions on future costs for five states, exemptions for unions, concessions to almost every special interest in the industry and of course no reform at all of the crazy legal system because the trial-lawyers bar remains untouchable for the Democratic Party. ...

The Republican Party has decided to be utterly uncooperative (although on health care Obama never really reached out to them with serious compromises).

On health care, energy, taxes, immigration, deficits and everything else, Obama should get away from the politics of legislating and go back to being president. He should put forward the best proposals to help solve America's problems. He may or may not get much support from Republicans, but he will earn political capital and power, which in the long run is the only way to enact a big, transforming agenda. This approach is exactly what Obama campaigned on. He promised that he would reach out to all sections of the country, listen to the best ideas and appeal to the nation as a whole. "I don't see a blue America and a red America, I see only the United States of America," he said. Obama needs to shift course and govern as the president he promised to become. That's change I could believe in.

1. If I.P.C.C. is to be the most credible scientific body then it needs to have the highest standards for dealing with conflicts of interest and bias — presently it has none.

2. The I.P.C.C. needs to clarify its role in providing advice (what advice? to whom?) and to whom it is accountable. Right now there is an "anything goes" impression. ... Right now it operates as a "stealth issue advocate" — that is, hiding advocacy in the cloth of science.

Who is Barack Obama?

Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park. ...

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.

Mr. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says. Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.

They want to know who their president really is.

Six appointed senators are serving in the chamber -- five Democrats and Florida Republican George S. LeMieux. Of the Democratic seats, the one in Massachusetts has already been lost. Delaware leans heavily toward the GOP, and most political handicappers regard Colorado and Illinois as tossups.

"Adding seats in play and taking away the incumbent advantage in others doesn't look as great in hindsight as it did last year," said one senior Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.

Democratic observers say appointed senators are particularly vulnerable because of three factors: a White House that was perhaps overconfident after Obama's big victory in 2008; the faulty or odd decisionmaking of several governors in filling the seats; and a national political climate that has turned strongly anti-incumbent in recent months.

It's ironic that President Obama could never be convincing as populist in chief. He had a modest upbringing -- his family was on food stamps for a time -- and he needed scholarships and loans to pay for his fancy education. He is no stranger to the struggles of everyday Americans.

By contrast, George W. Bush was born to Old Money and raised amid great wealth, privilege and power. Yet Bush was able to project an Everyman folksiness that made people forget his patrician heritage. Obama just doesn't give off that guy-next-door vibe. Even if he were to roll up his sleeves, loosen his tie and start talkin' like his predecessor, droppin' his final g's left and right, nobody would buy the act.

On health care, Obama told us for months how crucial a comprehensive reform package is to the nation's well-being. If that were true when Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate, it's still true now that they will have a mere 59.

With Congress at an impasse, what is Obama's next move? Acquiesce to starting over by holding "negotiations" with Republicans who have made clear their implacable opposition to reform? Or push forward with the Democratic congressional leadership, using every parliamentary maneuver in the book, even if it means suffering near-term political damage in the name of what is -- according to the president -- both necessary and right?

Similarly, the president can talk about jobs and the middle class all he wants, but the message won't get through unless people believe his actions are commensurate with his words. He needs to do a better job explaining the impact that last year's massive stimulus bill has had in keeping people employed.

Obama's promise to change how Washington works was a major reason he got elected. He has tried to stick to this pledge religiously -- heedless of the fact that hereabouts, no good deed goes unpunished. On the stimulus, for example, Obama included a huge package of tax cuts as a gesture to Republicans, who turned up their noses and still voted no. Obama's bipartisan tango can't work if one party won't dance.

It doesn't matter whether Obama speaks in a loud voice. What's important is that he speak in a clear voice, a definitive voice. When he draws a line in the sand -- about health care, jobs, energy, whatever -- he should do everything in his power to defend that line, even if it means bruised feelings and ruffled feathers.

The out-of-nowhere rise of Palin and Edwards in less than a decade is warning enough that something is wrong. I will also throw Barack Obama into the mix, not because I know something nefarious about him but because I realize more and more that I know so little about him.

When, for instance, the call goes out to let Obama be Obama, I'm not sure what that is. For the moment, it's a tendentious populism, but the sound of it is tinny and inauthentic, a campaign tactic, nothing more.

It is characteristic of our times that the moment Scott Brown won the special election for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat, he was asked about presidential ambitions. He had the good sense to demur, but surely when his head hits the pillow at night he hears a lullabyish "Hail to the Chief." If Obama could go from Springfield to Washington in a flash, if Palin could go from Juneau to her own campaign plane, if Edwards could go from courtroom to the vice presidential nomination in a wink, why not Brown? Never mind that we know next to nothing about him.

We have substituted the camera -- fame, celebrity -- for both achievement and the studied judgment of colleagues. The political machine, the organization, even the parties themselves are gone, severely atrophied or discredited as (ugh) mainstream. They once served as filters, admission committees, but they have been replaced by a sham familiarity -- fame at its most beguiling and dangerous. This was John Edwards. He's not a scandal. He's a lesson.

My early impressions of Edwards faded to disillusion as his colleagues and friends described him as oddly incurious, averse to homework, often unprepared. When he launched his second presidential campaign, we met again -- and I was dumbfounded by what he did not seem to know about poverty, his proclaimed field of expertise. The man was mostly smile.

Certain of his friends argue that it's time to give up on health care, and, like Bill Clinton, move on to something else. "Climate change" (which is what we're supposed to call global warming now) has been nominated as the topic to make everyone forget about health care "reform." The president himself is trying to rally Democrats ready to bail. Hang on, help is coming.

One Democratic congressman who bailed on Monday, Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas, says enough already. He says he and certain of his colleagues tried to tell the White House that they were making the same mistake Bill Clinton made, of forcing unpopular legislation on voters who wouldn't take it any more, leading to the Big Blow-Out of '94. "They just kept telling us how good it was going to be," says the retiring Mr. Berry. "The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, 'Well, the big difference here and in '94 was you've got me.' We're going to see how much difference that makes now."

...nothing illustrates how dramatically a scam can collapse like the "consensus" that the globe is about to go on the boil and only earthly governments can do something about it. The "consensus" has melted over a fire crackling with fakery and wild exaggeration. The admonition, credited to the late Daniel Moynihan, that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but no one is entitled to his own facts, never got through to the global warming fanatics.

Last year's scandal, that certain learned professors got caught making up stuff to support their theories of rising global temperatures, was followed last week by the revelation that the United Nations agency on climate science had made up the story that the glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by the year 2035, flooding vast areas of India and the Asian subcontinent.

The report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose work we were encouraged by Al Gore and his collaborators to treat as revealed Gospel, was not peer-reviewed science, but a newspaper interview with a climate scientist with a bridge to sell. The chairman of the U.N. panel, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, now concedes that the tale of the melting glaciers had "no scientific basis." This is quite a comedown for Dr. Pachauri, who earlier dismissed as "voodoo science" the assertion by India's leading scholar on glaciers that the glaciers would not in fact melt by 2035.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the U.N. panel, said the revelations of lies and frauds in the panel's work did nothing to undermine the research that the climate is warming and humans are responsible. "I don't see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the report."

Yet for all his undeniable weaknesses, Mr. Clinton does seem to understand something that eludes Mr. Obama: In a center-right nation, a liberal doesn't want to get too far ahead of the voters. At times (and HillaryCare was one) Mr. Clinton got himself too far out in front—but when he had, he'd generally been careful to respond by scurrying back to the center and appropriating his opponents' most appealing messages.

That's exactly what he did in 1995, deploying humor and humility with equal effect in his State of the Union. "I know we bit off more than we can chew," he told Congress.

The following year he declared "the era of big government is over." He also reached out to Republicans on policy, embracing everything from welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act.

In the process, he learned one thing: In a nation where roughly 20% describe themselves as liberal, 40% as conservative, and 40% as moderate, there's not a high price for shutting out the left. As for history, Mr. Clinton went on to become the only Democrat since FDR to win and serve two full terms as president.

There's no sign that Mr. Obama buys any of this. His team argues, apparently oblivious to the inherent condescension, that no intelligent American could possibly oppose his health-care agenda on substance.

For his part, Mr. Obama is clear. He says he'd rather be a one-termer than give up on his agenda. But this State of the Union, with the president's approval ratings sinking, Democrats have to be asking themselves: Do Mr. Obama's chances of getting his agenda through really go up if the congressmen and senators listening to his words come to the conclusion he's a short-timer?

Update: This show just went on hiatus.

With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Obama’s top domestic priority on Tuesday, saying that they no longer felt pressure to move quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing them.

Unless they get GOP support to make it a very stripped-down bipartisan bill, the Blue Dogs’ appetite for revisiting this subject any closer to the midterms will be zero. The bill’s in a coma now. The only two questions: Will McConnell and Boehner agree to reshape it, a la Gingrich’s suggestion? And why did the Dems pull the plug on the eve of the SOTU, knowing that it’s going to cast a pall over The One’s big moment?

Charles Krauthammer jumps onto Barack Obama’s one-term, two-term choice like a backsliding vegetarian on a filet mignon — but that’s just the appetizer.　 Noting that Obama left out a third option in his "I’d rather be a good one-term President than a mediocre two-term President" quip to Diane Sawyer, Krauthammer says that thus far, Obama’s mediocrity would mean not getting that second term:

Krauthammer then goes after Obama’s excuse-making from last week (also on ABC), in which he claimed that his sliding poll numbers came from a lack of explaining himself to the voters.　 Obama only had 21 days of his Presidency in 2009 in which he didn’t give a speech, make a public appearance, or offer televised or recorded comments on political issues, and most of those were during his Christmas vacation.

The final minute is a good analysis of where Obama and the Democrats will go on ObamaCare.　 They’ve been boxed into a corner, and right now the only sure play is to throw in the towel and try fighting on jobs instead.

At first sight, the reference looks kosher enough but, following it through, one sees:

This, then appears to be another WWF report, carried out in conjunction with the IUCN – The International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Thanks to recently filed Congressional expense reports there’s new light shed on the Copenhagen Climate Summit in Denmark and how much it cost taxpayers.

Attkisson plunges the dagger when she reports Nancy Pelosi’s official response to the story (emphasis mine):

In the event, they didn’t, of course.

When the travel expenses get added, the bill comes up to over $1.1 million. Commercial flights cost $5000 each, and the three military jets cost even more, around $168,000 for the flight time. This begs the question as to why Congress sent a delegation at all, and certainly one that large. After all, Congress does not negotiate treaties. The Constitution specifically assigns that task to the executive branch. Barack Obama had a legitimate reason for attending, although the premise of the conference is highly questionable. If he wanted to take a couple of Congressional leaders for advisers, that would have been his choice.

But we’re not talking about a couple of Congressional leaders. Among the attendees were:

Nancy Pelosi’s husband

James Sensenbrenner’s wife

Ed Markey’s wife

Charlie Rangel (Ways and Means??)

Joe Barton’s daughter

Jay Inslee’s wife

Shelley Moore Capito’s husband

Gabrielle Giffords’ husband

31 "unnamed Senate staff" on top of dozens of named staffers

Why did the Ways and Means chair need to go to Copenhagen?　 For that matter, why did most of these Senators and Representatives need to go on the public dime?

And most gallingly, why were spouses and family given a trip to Copenhagen on the public dime?　 When people travel on business in the private sector, they pay for their spouses and family on the rare occasions they accompany the employee.　 Those expenses are not tax deductible, either.　 We do not need to pay for family vacations, especially at a time when most Americans have to curtail their own vacation spending because of the economic hardship in the US at the moment.

Aides said President Obama would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame, in his State of the Union address on Wednesday night.

Appearing on network morning news shows to preview Obama's address, Gibbs said the president will talk about some of the factors that led to Republican Scott Brown's upset victory over a Democrat in the special Senate election in Massachusetts.

''The president is going to explain why he thinks the American people are angry and frustrated,'' his spokesman said. ...

Gibbs said ''every president makes mistakes, including Barack Obama'' and said Obama has ''not been shy'' about admitting that. At the same time, his spokesman said that Obama will ''outline the fact that we've lived through one of the most challenging years in our country's history'' and that Obama is ''more hopeful about our future than ever.''

As Mr. Obama navigates a crossroads of his presidency, a moment when he signals what lessons he has drawn from his first year in office, the public posture of the White House is that any shortcomings are the result of failing to explain effectively what they were doing — and why. He will acknowledge making mistakes in pursuit of his agenda, aides said, but will not toss the agenda overboard in search of a more popular one.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who is close to Mr. Obama and many of his advisers, said in an interview. "He needs to stay the course and not all of the sudden become something that he isn’t. The country was very inspired by Barack Obama — all kinds of voters. He needs to reconnect on that basis."

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in a speech on Tuesday to top party contributors in Washington, dismissed the political worrying among Democrats. He said the loss of the party’s 60-vote supermajority in the Senate could actually have an up side and raise the burden for Republicans "to be accountable as well."

"The reports of our demise are premature. It’s time that everybody takes a deep breath," Mr. Biden said. He added, "When we had 60 votes, there was the expectation left, right and center that we could do everything we wanted to do, which was never realistic. Never."

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve found the last few weeks in American politics particularly unnerving.

House Republicans are in preliminary talks to craft a broad agenda, similar to their 1994 Contract With America. And Senate Republicans are seeking to unite around smaller legislative proposals on key issues, to serve as contrasts to the massive bills Democrats advanced last year on health-care reform and energy.

"We've now conclusively concluded the Senate doesn't do 'comprehensive' very well," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), the No. 3 GOP leader. "Smaller steps in the right direction often add up to a big result." He is urging an energy policy based on four ideas endorsed by all the Republican senators: building 100 new nuclear power plants; a dramatic increase in the number of electric cars; increased offshore oil and gas drilling; and a doubling of federal investments in research and development of alternative energy.

Republicans have a similar six-point plan on health care that includes tort reform and allowing small businesses to pool resources to buy insurance plans. "Our approach is to set a goal and take steps toward achieving that goal," Alexander said.

After the party's recent loss in a Senate special election in Massachusetts, polls show that Americans think Democrats have lost touch with the middle class. Leaders of the Democratic National Committee converged on Washington on Tuesday to discuss this problem -- at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel ($495 to $1,900 a night) near the Tidal Basin. The DNC leaders gathered in a ballroom one floor beneath CityZen ($110 for the chef's tasting menu, with a $40 supplement for risotto with shaved white truffle from Alba)...

"The reports of our demise are premature," Biden told the assembled members of the Democrats' national finance committee and national advisory board. "Take a deep breath. Let's put this in perspective."

Okay, let's. After the Democrats' loss of a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, their health-care legislation is in tatters and Democratic lawmakers in Congress are openly defying President Obama. Vulnerable Democrats continue to retire rather than face reelection, and Beau Biden, the vice president's own son, decided he'd rather not lend his good name to the Democratic ballot in November as a Senate candidate from Delaware.

"Yeah, we took a hit," Biden went on.

The vice president's office didn't allow any TV cameras to tape Biden's speech Tuesday. It didn't allow Associated Press or Reuters journalists to attend. In fact, Biden aides included only one reporter, from the left-leaning Talking Points Memo news Web site.

Though the ballroom had a capacity of 400 and there were only 100 mandarins on hand, a Biden spokesman said he was following the prior practice of admitting one "pool" reporter to fundraising events -- an argument that would have worked better if the event had been a fundraiser. White House stenographers transcribed the speech, but as of late Tuesday night, the White House hadn't released a transcript. ...

"I'm not so sure what a blessing 60 votes was." The audience laughed at this apparent humor. "Not a joke," he responded. "I mean it sincerely."

"So, folks," Biden told the mandarins, "I ask you only one thing: Keep the faith, keep the faith. There is no reason -- there is no reason -- for us to be down."

Well, maybe one reason. Biden told the DNC officials that he plans to be "on the air a lot this week." Uh-oh. For Biden aides trying to keep the boss out of trouble, it may be time to take a deep breath.

If I had the slightest doubt how the left would react to President Obama's pitch for a three-year spending freeze, it vanished when I clicked on Salon.

"So who do they think they're fooling?"

"Yes, the Democrats have a base problem. And no, it's not because of Ed Schultz, me, Jane Hamsher, or anyone else. Let's be real, we're just not that powerful."

"Daily Kos gets about 2 million unique visitors per month, plus maybe a couple more million reading other progressive blogs. Ed (and Olbermann and Maddow) probably get that many watching their shows every month. There's overlap, so let's say 3-5 million progressives reading blogs and watching MSNBC's prime time lineup -- a pittance compared to the 16 million or so that listen to Limbaugh every week, and the 2-4 million that watch Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck every night. Huffington Post is getting about 16 million unique monthly visitors these days, but 80 percent of that is entertainment, and the other 20 percent is split among business, sports, living, style, green, technology and finally politics.

"Point is, our media machine is tiny. We don't have the power to move our base around.

"And heck, we don't even reach much of our base. 18-29 year-olds, a key component of the Democratic base, don't read blogs or watch MSNBC. Neither do African Americans or Latinos, at least in significant numbers.

"African Americans, Latinos, and young voters aren't tuning out because we failed to build bipartisan concensus with Olympia Snowe, or because MSNBC or the blogs made them angry. Making such claims is patently absurd. They're tuning out because we wasted 2009 "negotiating" with bad faith actors like Snowe and Mike Enzi. The tools were available to quickly pass a health care bill, yet Democrats were too incompetent to do so. And on issue after issue, they've proven completely ineffective.

"THAT's why the base is sitting things out. They don't need blogs or MSNBC to tell them that Democrats can't govern. They already knew that Republicans don't want to govern, but the Democrats were supposed to be different."