ONE YEAR since Mumbai.

HEH: Biden Pardons Single Yam in Vice-Presidential Ritual.

THANKSGIVING DINNER aboard the U.S.S. Minnesota in 1907.

J.D. JOHANNES: Thanksgiving In Tikrit.

IN THE MAIL: Laugh Lines, from Ben Bova.

DANA LOESCH on thankfulness.

ED DRISCOLL: Which Time Magazine Journalist Is That On The Cover?

TORONTO SUN: ClimateGate: Follow The Money.

UPDATE: Related: Explosive — Climategate Files Were Leaked To BBC But They Refused To Cover The Story.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan Riehl thinks the BBC angle may be being overplayed.

SOME LAPTOP BUYING ADVICE.

FRANK J. FLEMING: Things I’m Thankful For.

STOPPING HURRICANES WITH COLD WATER.

BRITISH COLLEGES START MEN’S STUDENT GROUPS. But note the sneeringly insecure tone of this account from Jessica Wakeman. It’s amazing the extent to which people who count themselves “progressive” seem to still live in the 1950s.

I’m reminded of the scene in Evan Coyne Maloney’s Indoctrinate U. where he roams various campuses asking for directions to “the Men’s Center.”

More here.

MICHAEL YON: Afghan Ideas from Great Britain.

WELL, THAT WOULD BE SOMETHING TO BE THANKFUL FOR: Jesse Malkin: Housing Prices Have Bottomed.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO avoid the Top Ten Turkey Sins.

HOW PRIVATE PROPERTY SAVED THE PILGRIMS.

WHEN THE PUBLIC COFFERS run dry. “California could have dealt with its budget problems gradually–it’s not like you couldn’t see this mismatch coming, unless you thought that asset prices would always rise at 10% a year. But legislators wanted to give voters goodies now, and voters rewarded them for it. Now everyone’s getting what they asked for: disaster.”

KANSAS CITY STAR: ClimateGate: This Story Won’t Die.

MARY KATHARINE HAM OFFERS an Obama / NFL commercial remix.

LIST: Best science fiction movies and TV shows on DVD.

KENNETH GLADNEY BEATING UPDATE: Charges filed against SEIU members, Post-Dispatch reporter.

More from Dana Loesch and 24th State.

MORE CLIMATE DATA ISSUES? Uh, oh – raw data in New Zealand tells a different story than the “official” one.

JOHN HINDERAKER WONDERS why SEIU thugs enjoy more freedom of action than Navy SEALS. Because the SEIU thugs are advancing the goals of people in power?

READER MEGHAN HAMMOND sends this Thanksgiving message from Singapore:

I basted a 13 lb turkey in Guiness Stout in Singapore this Sunday and it was delicious. Included the before and after pictures from my friend’s mobile.

HMM: Climate change scandal deepens as BBC expert claims he was sent ‘cover-up’ emails a month before they went public.

GOURMET MAGAZINE’S last Thanksgiving. With recipes.

TEN THANKSGIVING RECIPES THE PUNDITS LOVE.

STILL PUSHING THE “Black Friday” deals in advance, at Amazon.

MARK STEYN: Eine Decliner Nachtmusik.

DOES SPACE EXPLORATION take too long for democracies?

INSTAVISION: Mobilizing The Midwest with the Cincinnati Tea Party.

JACOB SULLUM ON those disappearing “stimulus jobs.”

GERMANY:

The director Claude Lanzmann told Der Spiegel that he was “shocked” to hear that a violent left-wing mob had intervened to stop his film “Why Israel” from being shown in a Hamburg cinema on 25 October. Cinema-goers were prevented from entering the building, some were even beaten and spat at, amid shouts of “Jewish pigs”. The cinema was eventually forced to cancel the screening. “Claude Lanzmann is amazed that the scandal was not picked up by the media: ‘How can it be that the Germans essentially ignored a thing like this?”

It appears that Europe is returning to its traditional anti-semitism. Obviously, Jews should have been setting off truck bombs and sawing off heads, which induces an entirely different set of behaviors. At your throat or at your feet, indeed.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails. “I think most people–including me–missed the biggest part of the climate emails story. Sexing up a graph is at best a misdemeanor. But a Declan McCullough story suggests a more disturbing possibility: the CRU’s main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish. . . . That is a big problem. The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming. If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless. Obviously, this also casts their reluctance to conform with FOI requests in a slightly different light.”

JOYCE FOUNDATION-FUNDED SECOND AMENDMENT CENTER AT OHIO STATE EXPIRES:

his “scholarly” center was one of the initiatives funded by the Joyce Foundation to support writings that opposed the academic consensus that had previously arisen that the original meaning of the Second Amendment protected an individual right. Readers of this blog will remember the infamous Joyce Foundation funded symposium at Chicago Kent from which any dissenting scholars were excluded in the interest of “balancing” all the rest of Second Amendment scholarship. Apparently, its scholarly purpose having been exhausted by the decision in Heller, it has ceased its scholarly mission. It is no more.

I’m sure they’ll be missed by some. Background on the Joyce Foundation and gun control scholarship here.

MORE OBNOXIOUS BLOG COMMENTING from the New York Times IP address. Not a big deal (and it’s not like plenty of people don’t tell me to STFU), but in some sense revealing, I guess. I mean, aren’t these the people looking down their noses at bloggers for insufficient refinement? . . .

WHERE TO FIND BLACK FRIDAY DEALS.

THIS SATURDAY, they’ll be having a St. Louis Tea Party.

A VERY SPECIAL THANKSGIVING MESSAGE FROM REASON TV.

DANIEL DREZNER: When satire beats scholarship.

VIDEO: Knoxvillian Jessica Paxson Putnam — mentioned here before — in her latest Flex Magazine photoshoot.

RARE PHOTO: Inside a can of whoop-ass.

EMILY BAZELON reviews Joan Biskupic’s biography of Justice Scalia.

ANDREW BREITBART: Study: Has Editor & Publisher ‘Falsely Framed’ Peter Dreier as an Objective ACORN Critic?

BOB OWENS: Gun Control Advocates Trying to Capitalize on Fort Hood.

CHANGE: NY, NJ Dems Cut And Run On Gay Marriage.

NIELSEN: Consumers Rush The Web Early For Black Friday Deals.

PHOTOGRAPHY: India’s New Middle Class.

ROMAN POLANSKI to get out on bail?

IN THE MAIL: From Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around The Room.

STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT breasts and politics.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Candid-Camera Moments.

ILYA SOMIN: “Climategate” and the Social Validation of Knowledge.

BIG GOVERNMENT: Still hot on the ACORN trail.

ROGER VON OECH, best known to InstaPundit readers for his Ball of Whacks, now has a Creative Whack iPhone App.

IT’S A PJTV THANKSGIVING, with Steve Crowder, Bill Whittle, Sonja Schmidt, AlfonZo Rachel and more.

SOME PEOPLE WHO OWE APOLOGIES on their reactions to that Kentucky census worker’s death.

STILL MORE ON CLIMATEGATE, from Ian Pilmer and Tom Blumer.

Plus, The Climate E-mails And The Politics of Science.

And Rand Simberg says call it Climaquiddick. “In other words, expect the media to try to whitewash and minimize it.”

THINGS not looking so good for Saab.

A CABINET THAT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE AMERICA: Help Wanted: No Private Sector Experience Required. The graphic is stunning.

DECLINE UN-HIDDEN: ‘Cash for Clunkers’ Impact on GDP Half of What Was Originally Estimated.

ELIOT SPITZER’S TROOPERGATE DIRTY TRICKS SCANDAL was largely forgotten in the wake of the whole prostitution thing. But it’s back.

LOTS OF HEALTH-CARE NEWS FROM MICKEY KAUS. Including this sweeping delegation: “[I]n a little known provision, the bill authorizes the HHS Secretary to implement nationwide, without any congressional action, any reform that department actuaries certify will reduce long-term spending.” Kaus comments: “I smell a new Czar!”

You know the non-delegation doctrine isn’t actually dead, it just smells funny. This might bring it back to life. It should, anyway . . . .

ROGER SIMON on ClimateGate and Talk of “Transparency.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I now have a sense of what it was like living under Communism in Eastern Europe. The state-owned (in our case, establishment) press won’t report on reality so people had to turn to Samizdat to learn what’s actually happening in their world. It’s rather amazing. Also, having an Army of Davids go through these emails will pay dividends for years.” Well, Declan McCullagh at CBS has done a good job. But big-media folks seem to be slotting most of what coverage they do for the web, not for print or broadcast.

But word seems to be getting out.

HIDE THE DECLINE: This didn’t take long.

NEW YORK TIMES FOLKS telling InstaPundit to “STFU” — in blog comments? How are the mighty fallen . . . .

LOOKING AT the Democrats’ — and Obama’s — slumping poll numbers. This accounts for their eagerness to pass stuff now, since they’re likely to be even worse later.

It’s kind of a shame, since if they governed in the fiscally responsible fashion the campaign atmospherics promised, the poll numbers would be higher, and the country would be better off. Of course, you could say the same about the GOP in 2005. And I did . . . .

BUDGET NON SEQUITURS.

ANGELINA JOLIE HATES OBAMA? “She’s into education and rehabilitation and thinks Obama is all about welfare and handouts. She thinks Obama is really a socialist in disguise.” Maybe she’s just getting into character as Dagny Taggart. (Via Kuru Lounge).

READER PUSHBACK: “An hilariously bizarre situation is happening in the wake of the growing Climategate scandal. Many of the mainstream media stories about global warming are simply pretending it doesn’t exist. Perhaps they feel that by ignoring Climategate entirely that it will just go away. Unfortunately for them, the readers of these global warming stories keep bringing up the inconvenient truth of Climategate by mentioning the scandal in the comments section over and over and over again.”

KEY OFFICIAL ON GUANTANAMO CLOSING RESIGNS: That would be Phil Carter, one of Obama’s better appointments. Not a good sign, in my opinion, but who knows?

KENNETH GLADNEY speaks out.

50% OFF on end-of-season outdoor items.

MORE FROM THAT CBS Declan McCullagh ClimateGate story:

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU’s code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU’s climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: “I feel for this guy. He’s obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources.”

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

Read the whole thing. And Charlie Martin has much more on this.

CHANGE: Among independents, GOP leads by 24 points on the generic ballot.

MY DOCTOR SAID I WAS “SOUND AS THE DOLLAR.” THE FUNERAL IS NEXT WEEK.

Okay, that’s a joke from the 1970s, but now we’ve got this: Gold Jumps to Record as Slumping Dollar Spurs Investment Demand . So recycling 1970s dollar jokes looks like a good bet . . . .

IOWAHAWK GEOGRAPHIC: The Secret Life Of Climate Researchers.

CONSUMER REPORTS: Top Shopping Gripes. Makes me glad I’m doing most of my shopping online.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

CHANGE: Blacks hit hard by economy’s punch: 34.5 percent of young African American men are unemployed.

SHOCKER: Surprise: NYC ‘Homeless’ Group a Total Scam.

CLIMATEGATE:

If these were internal Exxon-Mobil e-mails, the trial lawyers would be racing out the door with only one pants-leg filled and every Green press flack would be demanding this lead the evening news and front every newspaper above the fold. If similar e-mails came from the RNC showing racism or homophobia, the New York Times would not demur in the name of privacy, it would call for the GOP to go into federal receivership.

Since there’s federal grant money involved, might there be False Claims Act suits? That’s not my area, but I’d be interested in hearing from someone who knows.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Please just identify me as a “government attorney” or something like that if you choose to post this.

In response to your question about whether the Climategate scandal could lead to a false claims case, the answer is probably no. A “false claim” generally means a false statement with a negative impact on the public fisc–a padded bill, an understated tax return, etc. Thus, it’s not enough to show that Research Institute X lied and received public money; the Institute’s lies must have caused the receipt of public money. Maybe that can be shown here (e.g., false statements in an accepted grant proposal), but I haven’t seen it yet.

However, if this does turn out to be a good false claims case, the judgment would likely dwarf the amount of grant money involved. Damages are automatically trebled, and defendants are also on the hook for penalties of $5 to $10 thousand for every false claim submitted. So, if Institute X filed semiannual grant applications for ten years and received a total of $5 million in government grants, their false claims liability would be $15.1 to $15.2 million.

If the case is brought by a private whistleblower, he/she would be in line for a qui tam share of up to 30% of the total award under the federal act (it’s 50% under California’s act). Using the hypothetical numbers above, that would mean a little over $4.5 million. Not a bad day’s work.

BTW, thanks for bringing up the False Claims Act! One of my personal pet peeves is that this nifty statute gets far too little attention. It is one of the most powerful fraud-fighting weapons in the government’s arsenal, but it is also one of the least known. Moreover, its power derives largely from its free market nature–it enables private individuals to fight large and politically-connected entities who might be able to quash or defang an official inquiry, and it promises lucrative rewards if they are successful. It creates an army of mercenary Davids, if you will.

Also BTW, there’s lots of info about false claims litigation at the Taxpayers Against Fraud website: http://www.taf.org/

Well, it’s too early to say, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that false information led to grants. And yes, though I’m not an expert on False Claims Act stuff, we wrote about it a bit in The Appearance of Impropriety, and I’m glad to hear that my impression that it’s underused is correct.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Leonard Pitts blows it on Nuremberg.

HEALTH CARE BILL bad for gun owners? And an easy fix.

THREATS WATCH: U.S. Embassy Denies Secret Eikenberry Talks With Taliban.

COOL: New Reactor Uses Sunlight to Turn Water and Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel.

WHAT? IT WASN’T HATE-CRAZED GLENN BECK LISTENERS? Police: Ky. census worker killed himself.

POLL NUMBERS CRASH. “Well, rational people would look at this and reassess, see what has gone wrong, fire those whose judgment was flawed, and try to get the presidency back on track.”

BREAKING: Competitive Enterprise Institute Sues NASA In Wake of ClimateGate Scandal.

UPDATE: CBS News: Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails.

Favorite sentence from the emails so far: “We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn’t make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.”

TREATING ANGINA PAIN WITH STEM CELLS: “Transplanting people’s own stem cells into heart lessens pain, improves ability to walk.” Faster, please.

EMBRACING THE OBVIOUS: Nuclear power is OK now.

TREATING ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION with shock waves.

WOMEN VERY UNHAPPY with new, more restrictive mammogram recommendations.

MIKE MCNALLY: Big Brother Is Watching — Should You Care?

SO FAR, THE WORLD HASN’T ENDED: Collisions start at Large Hadron Collider.

KENNETH ANDERSON on Robots, Law, and Society.

EVERYBODY’S ENTITLED TO A DEFENSE, and there’s nothing dishonorable about defending bad people. But this guy isn’t doing much for the reputation of the bar. . . .

NEW GDP REVISION: Has someone been hiding the decline?

IS THE AARP in trouble with its members?

THE HILL: Does The Rush Toward A Jobs Bill Mean The Stimulus Failed? In a word, yes.