“She hasn’t managed anything as complex as this before; that’s the problem with senators,” said James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. “She wasn’t as decisive as she should have been. And it’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”  ...

Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise.

“I think it’s very unlikely that Florida and Michigan, given how close this race is, are going to be seated as is,” said Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “But everybody’s going to work very hard to find a compromise within the rules that’s fair to both campaigns that will allow Florida and Michigan in the end to be seated.”

The universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take 120 million years, astronomers said last week.  ...

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to combine into hydrogen atoms. That released a burst of light, which over the billions of years since has cooled to a bath of microwaves pervading the cosmos.

Yet there are slight variations in the background, which the NASA satellite has been measuring since 2001. Those variations have given evidence supporting an idea known as cosmic inflation, a rapid expansion of the universe in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its existence.

The new data also refine findings that the earliest stars switched on 400 million years after the Big Bang. The starlight started breaking up interstellar hydrogen atoms back into charged protons and electrons — creating a fog that deflected the cosmic microwaves — but took half a billion years to break apart all of the atoms.

The superdelegates are watching to see if Obama can stiffen his backbone. After seeing their candidates lose races they should have won in 2000 and 2004 because they flinched at Republican political waterboarding, Democrats do not want to watch the bully swipe their lollipop a third time.

Obama’s multiculturalism is a selling point with many Democrats. But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

Hillary successfully recast herself in Ohio as a beer-drinking former waitress. Only after last week’s reversals did the Obama camp raise a louder ruckus about her tax returns. Obviously, Ms. Night Shift does not want to reveal the details of the fortune that Bill Clinton has made, sometimes through dubious associations.

He’s now learned what Hillary learned in Iowa: You can’t cruise to victory on a coronation strategy.

If he thinks Hillary has cut him down to size lately, he’d better imagine what his life would be like as the Clintons’ vice president.

Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.  ...

Caldeira and Oregon State University professor Andreas Schmittner now argue that it makes more sense to focus on a temperature threshold as a better marker of when the planet will experience severe climate disruptions. The Earth has already warmed by 0.76 degrees Celsius (nearly 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Most scientists warn that a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) could have serious consequences.  ...

While natural cycles remove roughly half of human-emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere within a hundred years, a significant portion persists for thousands of years. Some of this carbon triggers deep-sea warming, which keeps raising the global average temperature even after emissions halt.  ...

Brian O'Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research emphasized that some uncertainties surround the strength of the natural carbon cycle and the dynamics of ocean warming, which in turn would affect the accuracy of Caldeira's modeling. "Neither of these are known precisely," he said.

"Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls."

"It is tempting to say that the Clinton campaign's plan is to burn the village in order to save it--that Hillary Clinton believes that Democrats, hypnotized by Obama, are making a historic mistake from which only she can rescue them. And it is tempting to add that this means the political destruction of the man who is still most likely to be the Democratic nominee . . ."

Senior Democrats in the Senate and at the Democratic National Committee are girding themselves for what they see as an inevitable appearance by Sen. Joseph Lieberman at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul this summer.

Lieberman endorsed Sen. John McCain and has campaigned with the GOP Presidential nominee several times. Lieberman caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, though he is an independent.

"If he were to appear at the Republican convention, it would essentially be over between him and the Democrats, though we pretty much did that to him when our leadership supported Ned Lamont during the primary back in 2006," says a senior Democrat leadership aide in the Senate. "It's too bad, because both Hillary and Barack could've used him in their campaigns."

Obama's efforts to shoo away the offenders did not settle the underlying dilemma -- is he being disingenuous with voters or does he not have command over his advisers? Suddenly there did seem to be a stature gap between him and Clinton, who can at least keep her advisers from publicly undermining her policy pronouncements.

If I were in the Obama campaign I would have him give a major speech this week and tell Pennsylvania and the nation that they now have a clear choice. That if they want attack-and-run politics as usual, then they should vote for Hillary Clinton. If they want to turn the page, the people of Pennsylvania can say no to the status quo and yes to real change.

JH: Speaking of Edwards, do you think he will endorse before the primaries are over? If not, do you think he's aiming to play some sort of honest-broker/party-elder role down the line?

JT: I really don't expect him to endorse, but he has surprised me before. But yes, I think he may well be one of the few in the party who can help the party come together at the convention if this isn't resolved by then. That in the end may be more important in November for the country than his endorsement might be today.

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.  ...

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year.

After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."

First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn't win the Physics Prize, for instance.

Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.

And just 52 people -- many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment -- wrote the IPCC's "Summary for Policy-makers." That's the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column that was provocatively titled, "Forget global warming: Welcome to the New Ice Age." In it, I explained that, far from being warming activists, some solar scientists see the recent downturn in solar activity as harbinger of a coming Ice Age.  ...

I don't believe we are headed for an ice age any more than we're hurtling towards a meltdown. But we are in the midst of overwhelming bias in favour of the meltdown side.

...any of several dates ranging over 400 years may indicate the beginning of the Little Ice Age:

1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow

1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe

1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317

1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion

1650 for the first climatic minimum

In contrast to its uncertain beginning, there is a consensus that the Little Ice Age ended in the mid-19th century.  ...

The Little Ice Age brought bitterly cold winters to many parts of the world, but is most thoroughly documented in Europe and North America. In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held frost fairs on the ice. The first Thames frost fair was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges and the addition of an embankment affected the river flow and depth, hence the possibility of freezes. The freeze of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. In 1658 a Swedish army marched across Øresund to Denmark and invaded Copenhagen. The winter of 1794/1795 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, whilst the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island's harbors to shipping.

The Viking colonies in Greenland died out (in the 15th century) because they could no longer grow enough food there. In North America, American Indians formed leagues in response to food shortages.[5]

Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of death and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315-1317, although this may have been before the LIA proper). Viticulture entirely disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused massive flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent losses of large tracts of land from the Danish, German, and Dutch coasts.[6]

In China, warm weather crops, such as oranges, were abandoned in Jiangxi Province, where they had been grown for centuries. In North America, the early European settlers also reported exceptionally severe winters. For example, in 1607-1608 ice persisted on Lake Superior until June.[6]

The Little Ice Age by anthropology professor Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara, tells of the plight of European peasants during the 1300 to 1850 chill: famines, hypothermia, bread riots, and the rise of despotic leaders brutalizing an increasingly dispirited peasantry. In the late 17th century, writes Fagan, agriculture had dropped off so dramatically that "Alpine villagers lived on bread made from ground nutshells mixed with barley and oat flour." Finland lost perhaps a third of its population to starvation and disease.[11]

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

State Democrats would be better to take the fight over the delegates selected on Jan. 15 to the convention in August, and dare the party to disregard them. Do you really think the Democratic National Committee won't seat delegates from a state they desperately need to win in November? Do you think party bosses want to see a floor fight make them look inept and disorganized in the middle of one of their best shots at the White House in a generation?

Democrats Need Elder Statesman to Save the Day

The Democratic Party in the U.S. needs a senior figure -- George Mitchell, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter -- to avoid a political train wreck.

Former Senate Majority Leader Mitchell would be the ideal choice. Every blue-ribbon panel he's headed, the most recent being over drug use in baseball, has been credible and contributed much. If he's not available...

Playing Favorites? Don’t Be So Sure.

Since January 2007, The Times has published more major articles about Obama’s background and record than about Clinton’s, 14 to 12. While most of the pieces about both candidates are so nuanced they defy description as positive or negative, several about Obama raised pointed questions about his credibility or political courage. The Times has yet to examine one of the most important parts of Clinton’s record, her seven years in the Senate.

Since Jan. 1, just before voters started participating in caucuses and primaries, Obama has enjoyed far more positive front-page play than Clinton. He has had 16 articles that could fairly be called positive to seven for her. Clinton has had much more negative front-page play, 12 articles, to seven for Obama.  ...

When you strip away those differences, The Times has arguably been tougher on Obama on the front page than on Clinton. It published an article about how he was benefiting from the spending of interest groups even as he denounced the influence of special-interest money in politics. Another article about his youthful drug use raised a suggestion that he may have exaggerated it.